glittering through the air to Heaven only knew where!
“Ends it, eh?” snapped Keene. “Then I’m blamed glad of it! So-long!”
Lola fainted as he vanished, and immediately the dressing-corridor was filled with figures answering her final dramatic shriek. Reever Keene went outside and climbed into his plain green-black car and drove down the street to his lodgings.
Once there, he wiped the paint from his face, with a curse, and began to pack up his things. He paid his landlady. He burned Mrs. Bleeker’s letter over the oil- stove. Then he threw his stuff together in the rear of the car, and drove down to the bank, where he drew what money he kept deposited there.
This finished, he went to the central gasoline station and turned over his car to be filled with gas and oil, and to be loaded with sundry extra five-gallon cases of the same.
While he was watching these affairs being brought to conclusion he heard a wild hail and saw the president’s car stopping at the curb, and the president himself descending, red and perspiring of face.
“Hey, Keene!” demanded the magnate heatedly. “ What the devil’s struck you? They said you blew out o’ the studio like a wild man and quit work! Get on back there—”
“Go to hell!” snapped the star. “I’ve quit being Keene. I’m Aloysius Larrigan, see? And don’t get fresh, you!”
“What! Where you going?”
“I’m going to Kansas, where I got business,” retorted Larrigan. “Hurry up with them two cans of oil, over there! And blow up the extry tires while you’re about it, partner.”
The president seized him by the arm.
“Look here, you!” he exploded violently. “Are you quittin’ on the job—quittin’?”
“I am,” said Larrigan coldly.
“By Heaven, if you bust this contract I’ll see to it that you never get another job in front of any damned camera in the world!” raved the other. “I’ll—”
“You,” said Larrigan, “and your contract, and your seventeen companies, and your directors, and your money, and your whole damn camera battery, and your entire double-dashed motion-picture industry—go to hell! I’m done! Mustered out!”
He shoved a greenback at the gasoline, dealer, climbed into his car, and went. The president gazed after him with eyes of dulled, glazed despair.
“Bein’ in the army—that’s what done it for him—ruined the best star in the whole damned works!” he murmured dismally. “Damn the Kaiser!”
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