“All right,” Jimmy replied with a chuckle, “but there’s no tellin’ when I may make another raid on the enemy trenches. I’ve got ’em goin’. That one was as easy as getting a drink on Broadway since the U.S.A. went dry.”
“In plain, everyday English,” went on Bartlett, “that’s just about the best plant I’ve seen pulled off in the twenty years that I’ve been in the theatrical business. I noticed that your little Cedar Rapids friend was one of the ring-leaders. How you managed to get them all to play up as well as they did is what I can’t understand. How did you work it?”
Jimmy paused for a moment or two before replying and coughed uneasily.
“I’ve got ’em trained,” he finally replied. “They’ll—they’ll do anything I ask ’em to do—anything.”
It was characteristic of Jimmy to have decided, after considerable speculation, that no motive other than an unselfish desire to please himself and to assist in adding to the greater glory of the occasion had prompted Lolita and her associates to profess conversion on the night before. He had tried to reach her on the telephone several times with the idea of thanking her for her unexpected co-operation in furthering the success of his publicity scheme, but had been always met with the response that she was not in. He finally decided to defer the expression of his gratitude until that evening at the theatre. As a slight token of his good-will and heart-felt thankfulness he ordered a bouquet of roses delivered to her dressing-room and he personally wrote out a little card to be affixed to it.
“To the best little press agent ever,” it ran, “from a cheap piker at the game—Yours with love—Jimmy.”
He tried to preserve a slight semblance of becoming modesty throughout the day, but the congratulations which poured in upon him from all sides were of such a fulsome nature and coincided so perfectly with his own opinion of himself that when evening came he was as expansive as the leading man of a small town stock company and just about as reticent and self-effacing as an auctioneer. He dined alone with a fine inner glow of self-satisfaction and strolled into the lobby of the Colonial Theatre about half an hour before curtain time at peace with the world.