deemed himself one of the cleverest
managers in the business; that his narrow, blue-shaven face was
continually chiseled in smiles of complacent self-congratulation. He
was rapidly becoming rich, and there were bright prospects of even
greater triumphs, with proportionately greater reward. He had made
Gideon a national character, a headliner, a star of the first
magnitude in the firmament of the vaudeville theater, and all in six
short months. Or, at any rate, he had helped to make him all this; he
had booked him well and given him his opportunity. To be sure, Gideon
had done the rest; Stuhk was as ready as any one to do credit to
Gideon's ability. Still, after all, he, Stuhk, was the discoverer, the
theatrical Columbus who had had the courage and the vision.

A now-hallowed attack of tonsilitis had driven him to Florida, where
presently Gideon had been employed to beguile his convalescence, and
guide him over the intricate shallows of that long lagoon known as the
Indian River in search of various fish. On days when fish had been
reluctant Gideon had been lured into conversation, and gradually into
narrative and the relation of what had appeared to Gideon as humorous
and entertaining; and finally Felix, the vague idea growing big within
him, had one day persuaded his boatman to dance upon the boards of a
long pier where they had made fast for lunch. There, with all the
sudden glory of crystallization, the vague idea took definite form and
became the great inspiration of Stuhk's career.

Gideon had grown to be to vaudeville much what _Uncle Remus_ is to
literature: there was virtue in his very simplicity. His artistry
itself was native and natural. He loved a good story, and he told it
from his own sense of the gleeful morsel upon his tongue as no
training could have made him. He always enjoyed his story and himself
in the telling. Tales never lost their savor, no matter how often
repeated; age was powerless to dim the humor of the thing, and as he
had shouted and gurgled and laughed over the fun of things when all
alone, or holding forth among the men and women and little children of
his color, so he shouted and gurgled and broke from sonorous chuckles
to musical, falsetto mirth when he fronted the sweeping tiers of faces
across the intoxicating glare of the footlights. He had that rare
power of transmitting something of his own enjoyments. When Gideon was
on the stage, Stuhk used to enjoy peeping out at the intent, s