There was a stone quarry in the play, and some papier-maché rocks, probably carried by the company. At the climax of the third act, the villain—there was always a villain—places the child at the bottom of the stone quarry, then lights a fuse to explode a charge of dynamite which will hurl rocks, and the poor innocent child, into the air. Is the child killed? Dear, no! In the nick of time, the hero swings out upon a rope, swoops down into the pit, seizes the child and swings himself and his precious charge to safety, just as the dynamite explodes.
Inasmuch as a delicate, real flesh-and-blood, child might not stand the wear of being handled in that reckless way, a neatly made dummy-duplicate of Lillian was placed in the pit for the hero to grab. Lillian had been carefully taught to creep to safe hiding behind some of the papier-mâché rocks before the explosion, and knew just how to do it. They practiced now on the barn stage, and it went off perfectly. They forgot one thing, however: They forgot to tell the “lovely and gifted Florence Niles” that the explosion would make a sudden and very big noise. In the rehearsals, somebody had merely said “BOOM,” which wasn’t at all the same thing.
Evening came, and the big barn was filled with farmers and townspeople, a breathless audience. Florence Niles, aged six, lay safely behind a stout papier-mâché rock, waiting for somebody to say “Boom!” But then, just at the instant when the villain or somebody _should_ have said “Boom!” something else, something very terrific and awful, happened: a real _BOOM_ in fact—one that fairly shook the barn, and made the audience jump and say something. The gifted Florence Niles did not stop to see what became of her double, but with a shriek, shot out from behind the rock and across the stage as fast as her legs could carry her, while the audience shouted for joy.
Never again would the climax go off as well as that. When the curtain fell, and Lillian—that is to say, Florence Niles—on the hero’s shoulder, passed in the procession before it, they received a great ovation.
And this was not so far from that modest house in Springfield, Ohio, where just six years earlier Mary Gish had waited for her first-born.