One morning two weeks after the summer season at Jollyland had ended Jimmy found himself in a state of moody dejection in the club car of a fast express train en route from Washington to Baltimore. He dropped into a chair in the rear end of the car and let himself slowly slide forward until his shoulder blades nearly touched the seat. He swung one leg over the other, wedged both hands into his trousers pockets and puffed viciously at the somewhat frayed cigarette which hung from one corner of his mouth. Somehow or other his brain wasn’t functioning properly. His imagination wasn’t yielding up the customary assortment of bizarre ideas and freak suggestions from which he always was able to select one particular inspiration to serve the need of the moment. To make the situation more exasperating the last words of Meyerfield kept bobbing up in his train of thought. He could see and hear the manager of the famous “Meyerfield Frolics” as he had stood in the lobby of the New National Theatre in Washington the night before, smoking the inevitable cigar and talking in a loud booming voice. “Remember,” Meyerfield had announced with great impressiveness, “I want you to smear us all over the front page of every paper in Baltimore. We’ve never played the ‘Frolics’ there and we’ve got to have ’em properly introduced. I’m depending upon you to plant something that will stir that town up like an earthquake. Get the girls into it some way. They’re the best card we have.” As Jimmy slouched in his seat the memory of a hundred spectacular exploits which he had engineered swam through his mind, but he couldn’t fasten on a new idea or on anything that hadn’t been worked and re-worked. He was just beginning his first season with Meyerfield and that worthy was a showman who expected results.