Bratton's Idea

Synopsis

Old Bratton, janitor at the studios of Station XCV in Hollywood, was as gaunt as Karloff, as saturnine as Rathbone, as enigmatic as Lugosi. He was unique among Californians in professing absolutely no motion picture ambitions. Once, it is true, a director had stopped him on the street and offered to test him for a featured role, but old Bratton had refused with loud indignation when he heard that the role would be that of a mad scientist. Old Bratton was touchy about mad scientists, because he was one.

For a time he had been a studio electrician, competent though touchy; but then it developed that he had lied about his age—he was really eighty years old, and he had been fooling with electricity ever since Edison put apparatus of various sorts within the reach of everyone. Studio rules imposed pretty strict age limits on the various jobs, and so he was demoted to a janitorship.

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