WHEN the people in the audience gasp during the duel in the last act of "The Barrier," and listen breathlessly to the dramatic death-scene of the villain, I frequently think of the difference between such scenes on the stage and in real life. On the stage they are always dramatic; either the villain or hero or heroine must die dramatically if death is necessary. In real life there is nearly always a certain grim humor that occasionally is grotesquely ludicrous, under such conditions.

      It has been my experience, while knocking about the country, especially through the Far West, to see several men killed suddenly, either by other men, or accidentally, and I do not recall a single instance when they died dramatically, or when their death did not arouse a momentary desire to laugh. Nor do I consider that my sensibilities are dulled and that this is the reason why I have seen something funny about the sudden death of a man. Others who were present were affected the same way, among them men who were kind and tender-hearted, and who did everything they could for the victims as quickly as they realized the seriousness of the situation.

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      Years ago, when I was only a boy, I traveled through the Southwest and along the Pacific Coast, as the leading man in a theatrical company. I was the pet of Tombstone, Arizona, in the days when Tombstone was known all over the world as one of the toughest, roughest places on earth. We gave performances in strange places, the most usual one being the dining-room of the hotel, on the second floor, the ground-floor being occupied by the bar and gambling room. I remember we gave one performance on the trunk of a tree in Calaveras County, California. It was one of the giant redwoods and was about thirty feet in diameter. It had been smoothed off, and inclosed with branches of neighboring trees, and vines, and was quite a picturesque stage.

      Before these days I had been a sailor for two years, being captain of a freight schooner that plied along the Pacific Coast.

      In those years I saw many fights and brawls, some of which resulted fatally. I was mixed up in a few of them, and have a scar on the palm of my right hand made when I grabbed the blade of a knife a man was trying to stick into my stomach.

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      The saloon and gambling room of the hotels in those places in the early days, back in the '80's, was the general meeting ground for the town, where all congregated to hear the news, to see their friends, etc. One night, after our performance, I was talking with some friends in one of these places when our attention was attracted by a quarrel between two men not far away. It seemed an ordinary quarrel, but one of the men suddenly grabbed up a three-legged stool and with an oath sprang at the other man.

      "I'll kill you, you —"

      As he raised the stool to strike, the other man drew his gun and fired. The man with the stool seemed dazed, stopped, looked about as if hunting for something, slowly replaced the stool on the floor, and then, in a stooping position, as if about to sit down, turned slowly around three times; he seemed to be looking for something to sit upon — the stool, perhaps. After the third turn he squatted down on the floor. During this performance the rest of us had been laughing. It was a ludicrous sight. But when the man touched the floor, he fell over immediately on his side; we ran to him.

      He had been shot through the neck and evidently the bullet had either struck or passed very near to the spinal cord, the shock causing him to lose control of himself, although it did not render him unconscious immediately. The wound was fatal, the man dying in a week.

      We could not play a death-scene that way on the stage. It wouldn't be dramatic enough.

      When I was still living at home in San Francisco, in the days when the Chinese tongs were waging furious war against one another, I saw a Chinaman killed almost instantly, and I thought it was funny until I realized what had happened. I was walking through a part of Chinatown — it was a tough place, too — and heard two Chinks quarreling in the entrance to a basement room. I paused to see if they would fight, and as I did so I saw one of them strike the other with his fist at the spot where I have since learned the solar plexus is located.

      The man grunted, dropped to his knees and fell forward, scraping his face in the sand, his arms hanging limp at his sides. As I watched him I thought,

      "Gee, but he must have hurt his nose."

      The other man, dashing up the steps, struck my shoulder as he ran by, and I saw a knife in his hand. A crowd collected as if by magic, and a policeman who arrived in a few moments found that the Chinaman was dead. He had been stabbed by the other and death had ensued almost instantly. Yet my first impulse was to laugh when I saw him fall with his death wound.

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      One time, in a gambling-house in Oregon, a man was killed literally before my eyes, the shot going so close to me that my eyes were bloodshot for days from the shock of the explosion. I was sitting at the faro table. The man who was shot was playing, keeping cases; the man who shot him was the lookout. They had some words, and almost before the rest of us realized what was going on the lookout fired, the bullet striking the other man squarely between the eyes.

      The man did not utter a sound. He rested his hands on the table and pushed, as if to shove back from the table. The chair tilted backwards, the man with it, and he lay on the floor, with his feet sticking up in the air, held up by the chair-seat.

      We didn't wait to watch him. The city wasn't quite the same sort of a place as Tombstone had been, and none of us cared to be mixed up in the scrape; so we began diving through the windows and back doors.

      For two years after that I dodged a "John Doe" subpoena to appear as a witness in the gambler's trial. He didn't know my name, but he wanted me to testify that he had shot the other fellow in self-defense. He was acquitted, and some time later, when I was in a billiard room in Texas, a man came up and spoke to me.

      "Your name Roberts?" he asked.

      I told him it was.

      "I knew your face, but I didn't know your name," he said. "I looked for you for two years."

      "What for?"

      I hadn't recognized him and I was beginning to get a little bit uneasy.

      "Why, I'm the faro dealer that shot a man in Portland two years ago."

      "Oh, yes, I recognize you," I said. "But you got free."

      "Yes," he said, "but it broke me. I had a deuce of a time without your evidence."

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      The most humorous death I ever saw was that of an old dock laborer out on the Pacific Coast. It was during my sailor days. We were loading big timbers on my schooner, and he was one of the loaders. The timbers were tremendous pieces, ship lumber, ten and twelve inches square and fifty and sixty feet long. About twenty men were needed at each end to lift them onto rollers.

      This old fellow was on one end when the men at the other end let their holds slip. The timber dropped, and the end bounced up and hit the old man in the pit of the stomach. He clapped his hands to the spot, made a grimace that was half grin and half pain, doubled over, and cried out in quite a matter-of-fact tone,

      "I got it! I got it! I got it! Belly-ache! O-o-o-oh!"

      Then he crumpled up and we stopped laughing when we realized he was seriously hurt. He died in the hospital a few days later.

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      A very funny thing happened in Tehama, a little station in California. I don't know whether it is a city now or whether it has gone out of existence. When our show struck it it was just a rough frontier town.

      We gave our performance in the dining-room of the hotel, making a stage of the tables in one end. That night a "bad man" came down from Napa to clean out the town of Tehama. He went to the bar — just below the dining-room — and got himself drunk enough to start on the warpath. He heard there was a show going on upstairs and decided he'd see it first. He tried to push in without paying, but when he found he would have to fight half a dozen men at once, he decided to wait. He went back to the bar and announced that he would lick the biggest man in the show before the night was over. I was the biggest man in the show, and I was informed of the treat that was awaiting me.

      I wasn't looking for a fight, and so I didn't hurry when the performance was over, but the only way I could get out of the dining-room was to go down the stairs and pass through the bar, and I didn't care to be locked up there for the rest of the night. So after a while I went down and hung around the edge of the crowd, watching the Bad Man make the bartender and the others stand around, and listening to his tales of what he was going to do to me.

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      About this time a young, stocky Englishman, who was a brakeman on the railroad, bustled into the saloon and called out,

      "Where's this tyke that wants to fight? I'll fight him."

      The city marshal, the sheriff, the mayor, and all the town officials were present, and a ring was quickly formed for the fighters, the marshal acting as the Bad Man's second. They went at it, but the little Englishman was the better boxer and he was getting the best of it when they clinched. Then it was a rough and tumble, roll and grumble, a regular cat and dog fight for a while. They bumped into the bar and knocked off about fifty glasses, knocked over the chairs and tables, etc. Finally the big fellow got his finger in the Englishman's mouth and tried to tear his cheek out. The referee told him to stop, but he wouldn't. Then they pounded the back of his hand with the butts of their revolvers and made him let go. When the fighters got to their feet again the Bad Man said he had had enough and left.

      For the next few minutes the little Englishman was a hero; everybody wanted him to drink with them, and he soon began to think he was the greatest fighter that ever lived. While he was boastfully telling of his deeds, a brick crashed through the window, hitting the fat marshal in the small of the back. The Bad Man had thrown it. We caught a glimpse of him as he ran towards the alley. I never saw so many guns come out so quickly in my life. The brick hadn't struck the marshal until fifty revolvers were flashing, and a couple of the men fired at the fleeing Bad Man, but didn't get him.

      We rushed to the door, but the man had disappeared, and when I looked back into the bar-room I thought I would split my sides laughing. The marshal, holding the brick in his open right hand, was waddling about, blubbering like a fat baby, and whining between cries, as he showed the brick to the spectators,

      "There it is," he whimpered. "There's the brick that hit me — hit me in the back" — a fresh whimper — "and I was his friend. I was his second. What do you think of that?"

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      My father wanted me to be a sailor. My mother didn't want me to be an actor. Father had been a sailor, and had earned his living from the sea always, though at that time he did not go on the water, as he was operating a line of freight vessels. Mother sent me to an elocution teacher when I was about sixteen, telling me that she did not want me to think it meant her approval of the stage, and telling the teacher not to suggest the stage to me.

      But he did, not long after I began studying under him. He said he would organize a company, with me as the star, and send it out on the road. When mother heard of it she promptly put her foot down and sent me to another teacher. The second man's class got too large for him to handle, and he divided it and put me in charge of part. That soon resulted in my becoming a teacher of elocution.

      I was doing this when I met James O'Neill. He let me read a few things to him from Shakespeare and "Richelieu" — I knew them all — and then told my mother I ought to go on the stage. "He'll be at the top in a year or two," he told mother, "and you ought to let him go." He was wrong in his prediction, but mother gave her consent.

      After I had been bumping about the country for a few years I got tired of the life, and went to my father — he never had approved — and told him I'd try the sea just to please him. Father bought a freighting schooner for me, sent me to the marine school for a few weeks until I could get my master's certificate — I knew all about the sailing of a ship already — and started out as a sea captain.

      Two years was enough to convince me that I didn't want any more of it. I didn't know enough of the business end to make expenses, so I gave it up and came back to the stage. It was during these two years that I had an experience that bordered on the tragic and yet was filled with ludicrous situations. We were coming up the coast to San Francisco with a load of unslacked lime, when we ran into a big southeaster. As we neared San Francisco my mainsail blew out of the bolt-ropes. The sea was running heavy, and breaking on Frisco bar, and I took one look at the water and decided that I wouldn't try to take a load of lime over the bar in such weather. It was bad enough in good weather, but it was almost a certainty that we would wet everything — and it wasn't pleasant to speculate on the consequences with that unslacked lime.

      At any rate, we kept straight on up the coast trying to ride out the storm, with only a close reefed foresail and unbonnetted jib. We kept going for three hundred miles before we could stop and beat back under a makeshift of a mainsail made from the foresail and the jib.

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      I may be a little "queer" in thinking that real life tragedy is grotesque and grimly humorous, but I believe the Japanese drama handles it properly. I have seen some Japanese plays, and the death scenes are always played as comedy. There may be a terrific, melodramatic battle between the hero and the villain, ending in a death-thrust for the villain, but then the scene immediately changes. The hero will kick the dying villain and the villain will stick his foot up in the air and wriggle it, or his hand, or both feet. And they will continue this performance until the audience ceases to laugh.

      All of us think the antics of a beheaded chicken are ludicrous. Perhaps custom and education prevents many of us from admitting — even to ourselves — that there can be anything ludicrous in a sudden death scene. At any event, custom forbids this on the English-speaking stage.