The producer, Mel Grabinett (Mr. Blinky to his enemies; he has no friends) takes $3,000 which he cuts up with Jake Lennox and Ned Bacon who developed "Who He?" with him. Jake and Ned get two and a half bills each. That's $250. Borden, Olson and Mardine, the advertising agency representing the client, adds 15% of the gross cost of the show for agency fee, and that plus prize money and incidentals comes to $50,000 a week to demonstrate the superior quality of Mode Shoes. Some forty hard-working, variously talented people put together "Who He?" every week ... artists, technicians and business men. Each of them is walking his own private tightrope, but all of them must walk the communal tightrope of the show on Sunday night at nine o'clock before 37 million viewers. The individual pressures added to the common tension of the show make it seem inevitable that the program will blow up during rehearsal and never get on the air. Yet "Who He?" has appeared 39 weeks in succession without mishap. Without mishap, that is, until the performance on New Year's night. It was one of those nightmares. Everyone who saw the show knew something was wrong. Mig Mason performed so badly that you could see his mouth twitch and his neck muscles jerk during the ventriloquist routines with the dummy. Oliver Stacy handed out the wrong prizes. Johnny Plummer missed his cues. Floor managers and stagehands wandered dazedly before the cameras. The dancers went through the production numbers as though they expected the roof to collapse at any moment. _Variety_ happened to catch the show that night and murdered it. _Variety_ was unfair. Their reviewer should have checked first. He would have learned that the show went out the window because one man fell off his private tightrope with such a disastrous jar that everyone else was shaken. He would have discovered that less than five feet of sight-line saved the theater audience and the TV viewers from the spectacle of a dead man hanging by the neck from the iron grid above the stage. For twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds, stars, actors, dancers and technicians went through the motions of playing "Who He?" under a corpse with starting eyes and swollen tongue ... a victim of the savage, merciless warfare in our frontier town, murdered by the ferment in a man's mind. I knew the corpse. I know what killed him. I'm still friendly with most of the cut-throats who watched him die. I've spoken to them, questioned them, and heard what they couldn't say as well as what they said. I've pieced out all the strands that wove themselves into a rope around a man's neck. This is the story of what happened.... CHAPTER II