"'Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!'" "The mad scene from King Lear," said Offutt. "Sure--Shakspere!" agreed Verba. "Old Scudder was a bug on that Bard stuff. So was Bateman. He used to know it from cover to cover--Othello, Hamlet, Lear--the whole string. ... Anyhow, Offutt, I've found the only man to do the grandfather's part in that show of yours, haven't I?" "I'm sorry to say it, Verba, but you're wrong," stated Offutt. "How do you mean--I'm wrong?" demanded Verba irritably. Out of the corner of his mouth he aimed the protest at his companion; but his eyes, through the gap of the first entrance, were fixed on Bateman as he strode back and forth, and his ears drank in the splendid full-lunged volume and thrill of Bateman's voice as the player spoke snatches from the play. "He's not too old--if that's what you mean; he's just about old enough. And he's all there, even if he is old. Didn't you see the strength he had when he hoisted up that heavy curtain?" "I think I know where that strength came from," said Offutt. "Just a minute, Verba--did you ever hear of the Great Auk?" "He was in vaudeville, wasn't he?" asked Verba, still staring at Bateman. "A trick juggler or something?" Offutt forgot to smile. "The Great Auk was a bird," he said. "Oh, I see; and I've been calling Bateman Old Bird," said Verba. "I get you." "No, you don't get me," went on Offutt. "The Great Auk was a rare creature. It got rarer and rarer until they thought it had vanished. They sent an expedition to the Arctic Circle, or wherever it was the thing bred, to get one specimen for the museums; but they came back without it. And now the Great Auk is an extinct species." "What the devil are you driving at?" snapped Verba, swinging on him. "Listen yonder!" bade the dramatist. "That old man out yonder is telling you, himself, in better words than I could tell you." He pointed a finger through the wings. Craning their necks, they heard the deep voice speak the lines: "'Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.'" Verba hearkened and he understood. After a little he nodded in gloomy affirmation of the younger man's belief. "I guess you're right, Offutt," he said disappointedly. "I guess I'd have seen it, too, only I was so sort of carried away. Real acting does me that way--when I see it, which ain't often." He paused a minute in uncertainty. Then resolution came to him. "Well," he said, "come on; there's no use of our hanging round here any longer. I'll give Blinky his quarter--he certainly earned it ten times over--and then we'll go back uptown, and I'll telephone Grainger he can have his seventy-five more a week." "But what are we going to do about--him?" Offutt indicated who he meant with a wave of his arm toward the stage.