[The Miracle Mongers an Expos by Harry Houdini]@TWC D-Link bookThe Miracle Mongers an Expos CHAPTER TWELVE 11/18
When my opening added a third sensational surprise, one of the London dailies asked, "Is this going to be another Georgia Magnet fiasco ?" That they were gunning for me is proved by the fact that the same newspaper investigator who exposed the Magnet, came upon the stage of the Alhambra at my press performance--the same stage where the unhappy Dixie lode-stone had collapsed--and though he brought along an antique slave iron, which he seemed to think would put an end to my public career on the spot, I managed to escape in less than three minutes. When I passed back his irons, he grinned at me and said, "I don't know how you did it, but you did!" and he shook me cordially by the hand. Some twenty-six years ago I was on the bill with Mattie Lee Price, who, though less well known, was in many ways superior to either Miss Hurst or Miss Abbott.
For a time she was a sensation of the highest order, for which thanks were largely due to the management of her husband, a wonderful lecturer and a thorough showman.
I think his name was White. He "sold" the act as no other man has sold an act before or since. We worked together at Kohl and Middleton's, Chicago, and the following week at Burton's Museum, Milwaukee; but when we made the next jump I found that White was not along.
They had had a family squabble, the other apex of the triangle being a circus grafter who "shibbolethed" at some of the "brace games," which at that time had police protection, so far as that could be given.
He had interfered between the couple, and was, I am sorry to say, quite successful as an interferer; but he was a diabolical failure when he attempted to duplicate White's work as lecturer, and the act, after playing a date or two, sank out of sight and I have heard nothing more of her professionally.
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