After his employment at Gray’s Opera House Belasco obtained an engagement with John Piper and joined the theatrical company maintained by that manager at Piper’s Opera House, Virginia City, Nevada, at that time one of the most disorderly, dissolute, and disreputable towns in the United States. This “Opera House” was built by Maguire, in 1863, and did not become known as “Piper’s” till several years later. It was utilized for all kinds of public meetings, social and political, as well as for theatrical performances, and, judging from the history of Nevada, was, in early days, most noted as the scene of prize pugilistic combats. Piper, who was not only a speculative manager, but also a hotel-keeper, seems likewise to have been a shrewd, hard, unscrupulous person, not, however, devoid of rough kindness. By way of keeping his theatrical company well in hand he pursued the ingenious method of permitting its members to run into debt to him, to the amount of $1,500, and then withholding their salaries, thus, practically, making them prisoners till they had worked off the debt. Charges for everything were extortionate in Virginia City in that period, and Piper readily succeeded in entangling his actors, and he made it exceedingly difficult for them to extricate themselves. “I tried to run away from him,” said Belasco, telling me this story, “but got no further than Reno, where the sheriff, a ’pal’ of his, took me in charge and ’returned’ me for the debt!” In Virginia City he saw much more of that lawlessness, recklessness, and savagery which had already colored his thoughts and served to direct his mind into the lurid realm of sensation melodrama. There, also, he renewed acquaintance with various actors of prominence whom he had previously met in the course of his wanderings, and there he became associated with other performers, then or afterward distinguished. He acted many parts under Piper’s management, among them Buddicombe, in “Our American Cousin,” when Edward A. Sothern, as Lord Dundreary, was the star, and Don CÆsar, in John Westland Marston’s “Donna Diana” (published 1863), a drama based on a Spanish original by Augustin Moreto (1618-1661), which was presented by the once famous Mrs. David P—— Bowers (1830-1895), an actress of great ability and charm, whom persons who saw her in her best days do not forget. Belasco remembers having acted with her, either at Virginia City or elsewhere in the West, as Maffeo Orsini, in “Lucretia Borgia”; Charles Oakley, in “The Jealous Wife”; Richard Hare, in “East Lynne,” and a Page, in “Mary Stuart,” and I have heard him speak of her with an ardor of admiration which I can well understand, and with deep gratitude for kindness shown him in the time of his necessitous youth.