Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/298

286 Redney alone, lounging against the wall, saw something in the reckless promise of the speech which the others did not appreciate.

The Professor rarely joked. He had always been a conservative liar on the platform and magnified the past of his "exhibits" without promising too much for the future. And Redney, thoughtfully scratching in the red thatch of his head, was aware that there was, as he would have said, "somethin' doin'."

The Musée had seen its busiest days in the early eighties, when its Civil War relics were still fresh from the factory and there were enough English-speaking immigrants on the East Side to give the Professor a profitable audience. In the nineties, when "Madame Carlotta" joined its staff, it was just beginning to feel the competition of the Yiddish theaters and the penny arcades. A decade later, when Redney came to it, it was already in its hopeless decline. What he called "movin'-pictur' joints" and "nickelodeons" had changed the public taste in amusement. Civil War relics were no longer of interest—even though they had been imperfectly converted into relics of the campaign in Cuba. The living curiosities had outlived curiosity. Even the Musée's "Amateurs' Night"—of the Professor's own origination—had been stolen by its rivals, and the glory of its Friday night contests had departed. A three-story building, with a theater on its ground floor and two large amusement halls above, cannot pay rent and salaries on a feeble trickle of dimes that took a whole evening to fill one of the wooden pools