Business began to pick up with the new year. The first, and what afterward proved to be the most profitable, clients of the booking-office were the Baldwin and California theaters in San Francisco. They were dominated by Al Hayman, brother of Alf, a man who now came intimately into Charles Frohman's life and remained so until the end. He was a Philadelphian who had conducted various traveling theatrical enterprises in Australia and had met Frohman for the first time in London when the latter went over with the Haverly Mastodons. Hayman admired Frohman very much and soon made him general Eastern representative of all his extensive Pacific coast interests. Hayman was developing into a magnate of importance. With his assistance Charles was able to book a company all the way from New York to San Francisco. Charles made himself responsible for the time between New York and Kansas City, while Hayman would guarantee the company's time from Kansas City or Omaha to the coast. Frohman and Randall made a good team, and they soon acquired a chain of more than three hundred theaters, ranging from music-halls in small towns that booked the ten-twenty-thirty-cent dramas up to the palatial houses like Hooley's in Chicago, the Hollis in Boston, and the Baldwin in San Francisco. It was a happy-go-lucky time. If Frohman had ten dollars in his pocket to spare he considered himself rich. Money then, as always, meant very little to him. It came and went easily. * * * While the booking business waxed in volume the production end of the establishment did not fare so well. Charles had this activity of the office as his particular domain, and with the instinct of the plunger now began to put on plays right and left. Just before the association with Randall, Frohman had become manager of Neil Burgess, the actor, and had booked him for a tour in a play called "Vim." A disagreement followed, and Frohman turned him over to George W. Lederer, who took the play out to the coast. A year after this episode came the first of the many opportunities for fortune that Charles Frohman turned down in the course of his eventful life. This is the way it happened: Burgess, who was quite an inventive person, had patented the treadmill mechanism to represent horse-racing on the stage, a device which was afterward used with such great effect in "Ben-Hur." He was so much impressed with it that he had a play written around it called "The County Fair." Burgess, who liked Frohman immensely, tried to get him to take charge of this piece, but Frohman would not listen to the proposition about the mechanical device. He was unhappy over his experience about "Vim," and whenever Burgess tried to talk "The County Fair" and its machine Frohman would put him off.