Casey looked at the show lady, found her gazing at his face with eyes that said please in four languages, and hesitated.

“You could git up a benefit for the Methodist church, mebby,” he temporized.  “There’s a church of some kind here—­I guess it’s a Methodist.  They most generally are.”

“We’d have to split with them if we did,” the show lady objected practically.  “Oh, we’re stuck worse than when we was back there in the mud!  We’d only have to pay five dollars for a six-months’ theater license, which would let us give all the shows we wanted to.  It’s a new law that I guess you didn’t know anything about,” she added kindly.  “You certainly wouldn’t have insisted on us coming if you’d knew about the license.”

“It’s a year, almost, since I was here,” Casey admitted; “I been out prospecting.”

“Well, we can just work it fine!  Can’t we go somewhere and talk it over?  I’ve got a swell idea, Mister, if you’ll just listen to it a minute, and it’ll certainly be a godsend to us to be able to give our show.  We’ve got some crutches amongst our stage props, and some scar patches, Mister, that would certainly make you up fine as a cripple.  Wouldn’t they believe it, Mister, if it was told that you had been in an accident and got crippled for life?”

In spite of his embarrassment, Casey grinned.  “Yeah, I guess they’d believe it, all right,” he admitted.  “They’d likely be tickled to death to see me goin’ around on crutches.”  He cast a hasty thought back into his past, when he had driven a careening stage between Pinnacle and Lund, strewing the steep trail with wreckage not his own.  “Yeah, it’d tickle ’em to death.  Them that’s rode with me,” he concluded.

“Oh, you certainly are a godsend!  Duck outa sight somewhere while I go tell Jack dear that we’ve found a way open for us to show, after all!” While Casey was pulling the sag out of his jaw so that he could protest, could offer her money, do anything save what she wanted, the show lady disappeared.  Casey turned and went back into The Club, remained five minutes perhaps and then walked very circumspectly across the street to Bill’s garage.  It was there that the Barrymores found him when they came seeking with their dilapidated old car, their crutches, their grease paint and scar patches, to make a cripple of Casey whether he would or no.

Bill fell uproariously in with the plan, and Dwyer, stopping at the garage on his way home to dinner, thought it a great joke on Lund and promised to help the benefit along.  Casey, with three drinks under his belt and his stomach otherwise empty, wanted to sing,

  “Hey, ok Bill!  Can-n yuh play the fiddle-o? 
  Yes, by—­”

and stuck there because of the show lady.  Casey wouldn’t have recognized Trouble if it had walked up and banged him in the eye.  He said sure, he’d be a cripple for the lady.  He’d be anything once, and some things several times if they asked him in the right way.  And then he gave himself into the hands of Jack dear.