The Popular Magazine/Volume 31/Number 2/The Reata

by Roy Norton

 

The Reata

By Roy Norton
Author of “Arroyo Jones,” “Threads,” Etc.

A cow-puncher in a corral of canvas. The story of “Beauty” Jones, plainsman and reata artist, who broke away from the range and joined the all-star aggregation of performers in Bigger's Biggest—a circus whose fame was world-wide.

(A Complete Novel)

He had nothing in his personal appearance to recommend him, as he stood, disconsolate and broken in purse, in the grateful shadow cast by the overhanging eaves of the dingy little railway station in Wyoming, and saw the long, rattling train come to a halt. His sinewy neck, with its huge lump of an Adam's apple, his red and freckled ears, his suntanned face, his gaunt, muscular, angular frame, and his wiry, tousled, dun-colored hair, had earned for him the facetious sobriquet of “Beauty Jones,” something that he accepted as he did everything else, with a wide grin.

It was told of him that once, when caught by a Diaz band of rurales in Mexico, and condemned to be shot at sunrise as a modest importer of arms, the local judge had been entranced by that same broad-mouthed grin, the soldiers had come to love him for it, and, at the last moment, he had grinned his way into the good graces of the firing squad, who had merely leaded the wall behind him and assisted him to escape when night shadows had gathered over the old adobe structure at whose feet he rested for a full eighteen hours, motionless, supine, and through veiled eyelids watching the buzzards that circled and swirled above him.

With an almost boyish interest, he stared at the train, for it was one of the sort that he had never seen—a dingy, battered string of cars flaming announcements for Bigger's Biggest Show on Earth, some of them strangely shaped to make room for strange animals, some mere flats with canvas-covered lumps that would disclose gaudy chariots at the next stop and street parade. From frowsy coaches at the back, frowsy heads protruded, gasping for air; and, last of all, a coach somewhat better than those that had preceded it and a little “doghouse” caboose, from which a perspiring conductor swung off as the train came to a halt. Out of the coach tumbled a man with a derby hat jammed to a decisive angle over his head, and an angry look in his eyes. He joined the conductor, who ran forward, and the language that he panted forth in his haste caused Beauty Jones to cast an appreciative grin in his direction.

“He sure does show signs of a fine trainin',” observed Beauty admiringly. “Never know'd but one man that could do a job of cussin' like that, and he was hanged down in Sonora for triflin' with another man's live stock! Gee! Wish I could use language that way—because there's been a heap of times I'd like to have said all them things!”

He saw the man with the derby and the trainmen collect around a stock car, get on their knees, make a long inspection, and again the man with the derby indulged in a flight of language that was little less than pyrotechnical. The station agent had joined them, and now Beauty heard him say: 'Well, there's a good stock car down there on the siding. Better pull down onto the switch so's to clear the main line for the Flyer, and I'll get the glad news in to the dispatcher.”

Beauty wondered what the fuss could be about, and was more than happy that some accident had given him this rare privilege for inspection. Doubtless there were animals, strange ones, and Beauty loved all animals he had ever met. He saw the train maneuver to get to the switch, and then, his curiosity getting the better of his usual phlegm, he sauntered slowly down to the stock car beneath which the train men were working. The cause of their annoyance was plain; for a drawhead had been pulled out at one end, and the forward trucks seemed about to part company. The wreck of a brake beam was dragging, and he heard the conductor explaining to the agent that a dislodged rock had caused the damage; but what interested Beauty the most was the occupant of the car, a particularly magnificent bull buffalo, which was sniffing deep, hungry inhalations from the sweeping plains, in an agony of homesickness. Beauty understood.

“Poor old cuss!” he said sympathetically, «addressing the bull through the nearest opening. “Want to git out, don't you, bo?”

The bull snorted by way of answer, and Beauty gave him advice:

“Say! It's a heap better for you to stick to your job! You wouldn't be loose more'n a couple of days now before some feller'd fill you full of slugs. Times has changed right smart since you been away from us, I reckon. The old home ain't what she used to was.”

Any reply the buffalo might have made was interrupted by a sudden movement of the train that mysteriously parted from the point where a brakeman had unfastened the chains that served as a temporary drawhead, and the crippled car lurched and wabbled ahead. The Flyer occupied Beauty's attention for a few swift, excited moments, as it tore past like a blurred, rapidly thrown film with a hot wave for a background, and then he saw that the buffalo car had been “cut out,” and the train brought to rest on the main line. He bethought him of Baldy, his pet cayuse, with a start, and hastily angled back to the shaded side of the little red station, communing to himself: “Psho! 'Most forgot Baldy. Mebbe he's got a sniff of this menagerie, and just gone plum loco and hit for the hills!” But Baldy was still sleeping peacefully, and as securely anchored by the reins dropped to the ground, as if they had been tied to a pier. Beauty said: “Hello! Sun comin' this way, ain't it, pardner! Let's move up to the far end where she's cooler. Reckon I'll be detained here quite some time. You see, I got quite a lot of business to attend to,” he concluded apologetically, and the scarred, tough-looking Baldy seemed to leer at him out of the corner of his eye. “Well, I have,” insisted Beauty, “and don't you gimme no back talk. Yes, you did! I heard you call me a red-headed liar! And don't you do it no more, or I'll just naturally lam you one! That's what I'll do!”

His anger must have been assumed, however, for he stopped long enough to pat the pony's neck, and playfully pull an ear before returning to the delightful mysteries of “Bigger's Biggest.” He gawped at a window in a coach through which he could see all sorts of garments swinging, like a Chinese laundry on a busy day, and by standing on a pile of ties and stretching his neck, turkey fashion, to its utmost, discovered that three very surly-looking men, in undershirts, and with huge muscles exposed, were deeply involved in a game of cards with a sinewy-looking lady whose hair was a trifle more golden than that of the regulation angel.

“You're shy a cent. You didn't ante. You know you didn't!” the lady exclaimed, and Beauty grinned pleasantly as he recognized the game being played. He tried to get high enough on his pile of ties to see the table between them, and unfortunately attracted her attention. She poked her head through the window and remarked pleasantly: “Say, you gutta-percha-necked son of a turkey buzzard! What're you hangin' around here for? Ain't you never saw a lady before?”

Beauty Jones got red beneath his tan, and nearly fell from his perch, much to the delight of others looking from the coach windows, and under a volley of scathing remarks retreated rather precipitously to the scene of the buffalo transfer. Roustabouts and trainmen were building a miniature stockyard of the movable sections of fence that stood round, and had slipped a cattle runway against the door of the crippled car, this being the only method of loading and unloading available in a station that had no stockyard, and consisted of a water tank, one saloon, post office, and general store combined. Beauty cast an appraising eye at the captive, who was still sniffing the free air, and, forgetting his late humiliation, grinned softly to himself, and thought: “By Gosh! If that were my bison, I wouldn't take no chances on turnin' him loose in that flimsy. Might do to hold a lot of fence-busted steers, but I sort of reckon that when Old Man Buffalo gits out of that car there'll be a heap of things doin'—all at once!”

And then his face sobered, and a new eagerness spread over it, when he remembered some of the weird tales of the veteran cow-punchers whom he had admired by many and varied camp fires. In particular he remembered how he had always sustained a sneaking envy for “Old Rodeo” Smith for one of his oft-repeated and quite prodigious exploits, impossible to duplicate. With a sudden gleeful determination, Beauty turned and tramped back toward Baldy, the rowels of his spurs clinking as they emerged from the sand at each step, and the quirt that he carried at his wrist wriggling its thongs like an excited snake. He surprised Baldy by bringing the double girths up to a full cinch, and overlooking his saddle gear, after which he flipped a leg over the saddle and drew a deep sigh of relief, as of a man returning home to rest; for Beauty was never graceful nor quite at ease when standing on his own high-heeled feet. He sometimes thought that a saddle must have been his father, due, perhaps, to the fact that he could not remember the time when life had not been made up of saddles, merely attached to different animals that humped, side-jumped, buck-jumped, somersaulted backward, or tried to roll over on him:

A very hopeful-looking man he was, as he galloped with a rocking horse gait back to the edge of the scene of activities, and then casually twisted himself sidewise until he was almost resting on one stirrup with an elbow on the big pommel, a hand supporting his chin as if his head needed rest, and the stump of a cigarette drooping from one corner of his lean, roughly cut, sun-tanned face.

“Throw that door open, you razorback!” he heard the commanding voice of the man with the derby, who did not seem in a very good temper. “Get a hustle on you! We're goin' to be late for the next stand unless some of you fellers wake up. Lively, now, you!”

A man with a short crowbar was wrenching at the door behind which stood the captive; and suddenly it slid open. Long vistas of delight were exposed to the eager little eyes behind the open space. Always, until now, the bars had restrained him, and for tiresome years he had not seen the long, rolling sand dunes, and felt the long sweep of air from wide, familiar spaces. It was out there, the land of dimming memories, just beyond the horizon, where others of his kind fought, and mated, wallowed and grazed in countless numbers, until their backs, in flight, were like the rolling, billowing seas over which he, the captive, had been conveyed in his trying journeys; but it was too good to be true! It was impossible! Suddenly he lifted his massive head, snorted madly, eyed the runway at his feet, and charged down at a gallop, his rounded, diminutive hips thrusting him forward in an ecstasy of movement. At the bottom he descried the puny barrier, and waving, shouting men behind it. It angered him. He dropped the big head lower, shut his eyes, and charged straight across the inclosure, reckless of any contact, knowing only that away out there beyond was an open space he had seen from his prison, and that, could he but reach it, and run, and run, there was some place left for freedom.

Beauty Jones heard the shouts and curses, and straightened back into the saddle. Old Rodeo Smith should have nothing on him! Rodeo had sworn that he had “roped” a buffalo. So would Beauty Jones!

Down around the makeshift corral, men were waving frantic hands, and yelling like a band of Indians on the warpath. Suddenly, at the side nearest Beauty, they scattered wildly, and fled, tumbling over one another in their anxiety to reach safety, and the barrier resounded with a terrific blow. Splinters and broken pieces of boards flew into the air. Whole sections of the fencing wove tremulously and fell, and straight through the open path charged the great bull, with head down and ponderous shoulders gathering to their stride.

“Stop him! Stop him!” shrieked the man with the derby hat, and his storm of oaths was drowned and lost in the babel of excited, helpless voices.

Beauty saw the big buffalo charging toward him, and Baldy gathered himself in surprise and went up into the air. Beauty did not “touch leather,” although at the moment he was pretending a great calmness and rolling a cigarette. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the platforms of the sleeping cars were crowded with performers who had rushed out to discover the cause of the excitement, and among them the cow-puncher observed the woman with the brilliant hair, and took a grim satisfaction in the knowledge that now he could at least appear unembarrassed and at home. There was a fine twinkle in his humorous eyes, and something approaching a swagger in his attitude as he deliberately finished lighting his cigarette, and stared at the escaping “Monarch of the Plains.”

He suddenly swung Baldy round on his heels, stooped over the pommel saddle, and unloosened a reata, and bent forward in his seat. Baldy appeared to shoot through the air, then to spread himself low over the ground, with outstretched neck and tail, and ears laid flat against his head. Man, horse, and rope were all a part of each other, and the excitement around the shattered corral and on the steps of the coaches grew apace.

Some of the performers climbed hastily to the hot tin roofs of the cars, and shaded their eyes with their hands. They voiced their approval of the race in enthusiastic shouts that followed Beauty in a diminuendo as he approached the bull, who was madly lumbering toward the open range. Almost languidly the reata opened up a big coil that flew snakelike through the air. It fell cleanly, and open, over the massive head and shoulders, slipped back, and then downward, and Baldy suddenly planted himself with his forefeet braced. There was a desperate swirl of sand that lifted itself slowly upward into the air, and the menagerie men in pursuit, led by the man with the derby, came up to find the prize exhibit wallowing, and bellowing, and struggling to rise, while a very tow-headed cowpuncher carelessly smoked his cigarette and directed his pony with his knees.

An enthusiastic cheer went up from the spectators at the coaches, and Beauty waved his hat in response; but it was not until the disappointed bull had been hauled back to the car with numerous ropes, against which he dragged and strained in desperation, that Beauty received any word of commendation from the man with the derby. After the monarch had been installed in his new car, and stood subdued and disappointed, the man turned to where Beauty sat crosswise in his saddle, and said: “Good for you, young fellow! Maybe this'd square it?'

Beauty looked down, and saw a new ten-dollar greenback in the upheld hand, and shook his head.

“Not for a little thing like that,” he said. “That's nothin'.”

“Looked like something to me,” said the man with the derby. “Do that kind of stunt very often?”

“Reckon you ain't seen much ropin',” said Beauty, trying to appear modest, and seeing at the same time that the golden-headed woman was among those who had crowded round admiringly. Also, there was a little dark-eyed girl, who looked different from the others, who clung to the arm of a grizzled veteran, and for her Beauty had a quick embarrassment. “Ropin'! Humph!” he said to the man with the derby. “Why, say, boss, I was born with a reata in my hands. I could rope a cat if I had a good-enough lariat.”

“Suppose you hand us out something,” said the man with the derby, with a thoughtful look on his face. “I'm the manager of this show. I'd like to see some of what you call real good work.”

Nothing loath, now that the dark-eyed girl was looking at him so respectfully, Beauty laughed softly, and swung Baldy out toward an open space. Up went the rope in long swirls, and now the big loop flew and Baldy danced through it at a short canter.

“Been done before,” said the golden-haired one, in a weary voice that reached Beauty's ears.

He twisted from his saddle until his outer foot was sustained by the stirrup, his back was against Baldy's side, his left hand flung up behind to clutch the pommel, and then his right began throwing the loop backward and over them as surely as if it were a hoop through which man and horse again did a hurdle while going at an easy lope. This time the spectators were for an instant too much amazed to applaud, and then their recognition of an artist in his line was loud and free. It spurred Beauty to a further endeavor, and this time he dropped to the ground, clung to the pommel with one hand, and, running with long leaps beside the cantering Baldy, again did a loop over both without pausing, after which he leaped to the saddle, stood erect, and still kept the big loop lazily working like a jumping rope. He suddenly brought his mount to a halt, dismounted, and now sent the rope upward in great spirals, never falling, in the center of which he danced on the sand, the jingling of his rowels accenting the time. He ended his performance by so throwing the reata that when it fell it appeared to coil itself in his outstretched hand, after which he tossed it carelessly over the pommel, and grinned at the manager of Bigger's Biggest Show.

“Can't all of 'em pull that stuff!” Beauty exulted, proud of the sensation he had created. “Not even with a ten-spot in sight.”

“But would a ten-spot a day fetch it?” abruptly asked the man with the derby. “Just think of it, man! Ten bucks a day, every day, Sundays and all. Seventy dollars a week for just that sort of work.”

It was Beauty's turn to gasp. This man must be crazy! Ten a day when the biggest salary he had ever received was forty dollars a month.

“Didn't know there was that much money,” he said, grinning.

“There's that much in it for you,” declared the man with the derby, “if you'll come along with us.”

“And chuck?” asked Beauty, almost in a whisper, and doubting his senses.

“Sure!” said the manager, and Beauty failed to notice that as they talked, the man with the derby had walked him away from the “circus people,” and did not know that an angry scowl he had bestowed on them had driven them back toward the coaches. Beauty was thinking of that wondrous sum of money and also of the dark-eyed girl. It-was really the latter fascination that decided him.

“How long does this job last?” he demanded, facing the manager.

“Five years,” said the latter.

The cow-puncher shook his head sorrowfully. “Nope,” he said. “Cain't see it. I ain't never stayed in one job that long, and somehow I don't want to. Now, if you said you was hiring me by the month, I reckon I'd have fallen for it; but——”

“Then say three months—till the end of this season,” insisted the manager. “I'd have to get your paper out, and——” He rattled off a lot of stuff that was all Greek to Beauty Jones, who was slowly becoming intoxicated with the thought of adventure. “And we can put your horse aboard right now, and—let me see—yes, I'll give you a berth in Number Fifty car, where you can have a section all to yourself, and— say—I'll treat you like a king, and all for the two shows a day that you and me'll rig up to get your act straight.”

“Done!” said Beauty. “Get that runway up to the car. I'm on.”

He rode across to the store, and reappeared in a few minutes with a roll of blankets and a canvas bag that contained all he had acquired in his thirty years of life, and shouted a hurried “So long!” to the storekeeper who followed him to the door, disbelieving.

And when the train with its queer cars pulled out, rattling and bumping hurriedly, as if to make up for lost time, the storekeeper watched it from sight, and scratched his stubbly chin and said: “Lord all Hemlock! They's a fool borned every minute, they say; but who'd 'a' thought they was ever such a sucker as the circus feller that'd take Beauty Jones with him, and pay him for nothin' at all but makin' a plain, cussed fool.of hisself and old Baldy!”

Chapter II.

Beauty Jones found it difficult to sleep, for there were strange noises around him, and whirling sounds under him, and an occasional stop that disturbed him, and once in a while he awoke when the car lurched.

“Gee, Crackey!” he muttered once, when nearly pitched from his berth. “That engineer is certainly runnin' like a scared wolf!”

And he wondered at such recklessness, not knowing that worried dispatchers were marking off the miles as Bigger's Biggest whirled westward for its next opening, and that a circus knows no such event as delay. When he did finally fall asleep, it was to sink into such profound repose that he was not even aware when the train stopped. He slid the window shade upward, and a shaft of early sunlight smote him in the face, and he blinked at his surroundings. Number Fifty car was on a siding in a railway yard, and from somewhere, off in another car, Beauty heard the rattle of a typewriter, furiously beating out something that he did not in the least suspect was press stuff conjured from the elastic brain of the press agent.

Beauty was pleased to find a wash-room in the end of the car, and a porter to bring him clean towels, and him Beauty addressed as to the whereabouts of the manager.

“Him? De ole man? Oh, he's dun out on de lot 'most an houah, Ah reckons,” was the reply.

“Lot? What lot?” demanded Beauty, perplexed, and the porter grinned at such ignorance.

“Dat's whah dey had de show—de groun'—de place whah dey fusses up de rings, an' tents, an' such,” explained the porter. “De ol' man dun tuk a pow'ful fancy to you, boss, Ah reckon. Said you-all was to eat in dis cyah, with him and Marse Williams, till you get uster it.”

“Good!” said Beauty, unabashed by this great honor that he accepted as a matter of course, and not in the least understanding that the manager of a circus and the press agent are persons of rank, a sort of king and royal prince assistant, who seldom unbend with their subjects. “Good! I can eat ham and eggs. Lots of 'em. Ain't had no ham for a month of Sundays. And coffee! Lots of it! Black and strong!”

By the time he was shaved and dressed, his order was waiting for him, and he ate silently, trying to accustom himself to the idea that he was now a plutocrat. He looked through the plate window over the switch yards, and wished that some of the men with whom he had worked on various ranges could see him, and know that he, Beauty Jones, was having a negro to wait on him, was dining aboard a private car, and was actually drawing seventy dollars a week salary. Why, that was more than most foremen of cow outfits got for a whole month's work! Beauty was afraid that he dreamed, and grimaced at himself in the mirror that confronted him to be certain that he was awake. Surely that was the homely face of Beauty Jones that twisted, and grinned, and winked back at him!

After he had finished his breakfast, he went from the car, cautiously passing the one adjoining, whence issued the sounds of the typewriter, but craning his neck to inspect the place through a crack.

“I'd sorter like to see in there,” he said to himself. “I seen one of them machines once, but didn't get a right good look at it. Gee! But that young woman I see in there can whack it some!”

He loitered a moment, long enough to be amazed at the storehouse beneath Number Fifty, and made friends with the cook, who was arranging some stores on the ice. He paused to see a switchman make a deft coupling between two box cars in the yard, and when they came together with a bang, was certain that the man had been killed. He sustained a great wave of admiration for the switchman, and thought that not for worlds would he, Beauty, do anything so daring, little appreciating that the switchman would have considered the clinging to a running horse's side as the pinnacle of recklessness; but all the wonders of this experience were to be outdone when, like a boy, he came in sight of the lot.

Never in his life had he seen such a spread as this. True, he had seen dog. and pony shows, and once, when very small, he had visited and stared, entranced, at the marvels of a show that had one ring, and a half dozen animal cages; but here, before him, were tents that would have held a good-sized “round-up” from the range; tents that would hold more people than he had ever seen gathered together; tents inside of which the whole Ninth Cavalry might have paraded, while all the cowpunchers that Beauty had ever known could have had ample room in one cornet to exhibit their skill.

High peaks of dingy canvas, surmounted by gay bunting, and flags that Beauty could not identify; smaller tents at the sides with real “hand-painted” pictures of enormous size depicting ladies with snakes, ladies dancing on bottles, ladies who were inordinately fat, and ladies with exaggerated whiskers, held him spellbound. Surely paradise had come to earth, and he, plain Beauty Jones, was one of the angels that belonged to it!

Beauty was seized with a panic, lest “the old man” forget him, and cast him out, even as a certain bad angel was cast from that other paradise in the beginning of things; but on the way to find his employer, for whom he had conceived a sudden awe and respect, as due the master magician who was boss of such a magnificent, splendid creation, he heard the shrill whistle and whine of a peanut roaster, and peanuts were something that Beauty could not resist.

He stopped in front of the vehicle of delight, and bought a bag with the sole piece of change in his pocket, and was vastly aggrieved at the quantity contained therein. Surely the man had dropped a few peanuts into that paper receptacle, then carefully blown the bag up to a vast plumpness, as if in preparation for bursting it in a palm. Beauty suddenly remembered that he had a lonely five-dollar bill carefully sequestered in the worn leather wallet in his hip pocket, and that, being a millionaire with an income of seventy dollars a week, he could afford to buy several bags. He ordered a dozen, and put his hand around to the rear, and then paused, as if transfixed.

Something was wrong with that pocket. He twisted his hips and his neck, and took a look at it, to discover that it had been neatly slit down one side, and that, although the flap was still buttoned, he had been robbed.

Forgetful of his high estate, he let out a yell that brought a crowd around him, and proceeded, to the limit of his vocabulary, to express his indignation. Some one laughed at his distress, and jostled him. Beauty promptly tipped himself to his toes, and lunged forward with a hard fist and a finely developed punch that knocked the insolent one back against those in the rear; then, suddenly bethinking himself of jails he had involuntarily graced for disturbing the peace, and that his new job probably depended upon his good behavior, dropped to his knees, toppled a Mormon farmer over in surprise, thrust another man into the group to add to the confusion, and tore through the crowd until he was safe from pursuit. He was quite sorry that he had been compelled to upset the peanut roaster, even though the man had filled the bags by lung power, and hoped the proprietor would not suffer much loss.

Over in the rear of the lots, Beauty discovered a particular commotion, and decided to investigate. Chariots were drawn up in some sort of formation, bandmen were climbing to their seats, a muchly painted woman that he afterward learned was a ten-thousand-dollar beauty was arranging her skirts on a gilded throne, a stable boss was roaring commands to his assistants, a parade master was giving a driver instructions, and Beauty was dazzled by the glory of it all. He decided that the best vantage point would be up at the head of the forming procession, and excitedly made his way thither to discover the manager, his friend, standing with a watchful air, as if to inspect the parade.

Beauty edged around to the rear of the great man, and looked at him with a new-born respect. The derby hat was at the same angle, the stub of a cigar was held between close-shut teeth, and, now and then, heads of departments came up to report or ask for orders.

The parade master appeared and took his seat in an automobile, and a “barker” crawled in beside him. A chauffeur in a Roman helmet-and brass armor cranked up his machine, and the parade master turned in his seat and blew a shrill blast on a whistle. The machine started forward, a chariot with a band swung in behind, from somewhere under that misty cloud of canvas huge, ungainly elephants came sedately forth, there were shouts, the cracking snap of whips, the hollow trundling of wheels, and the clattering of accouterments as dazzling knights and ladies appeared, curbing restive mounts. Beauty was still further entranced.

The chariot conveying the haughty ten-thousand-dollar beauty came trundling forward, with six fine white horses pulling it, and the driver was having trouble with a restive leader. He flicked out a long lash, and the manager, standing stockily, heard an exclamation of disgust behind him, and turned to recognize his latest find.

“What's matter?” he asked, staring at the cow-puncher.

“Matter? Didn't you see that mucker try to touch a lead horse with a whip? Humph! He welted everything from the wheel horse up!”

“Well?” demanded the manager curiously.

“Why, say,” declared Beauty, “if he did that where I've handled six, he'd of got his time and been yanked down off that gold wagon so fast his head would have struck first! A man's no driver until he can touch up the horse he wants to without hittin' the rest.”

“So you think you can handle a whip, eh?” demanded the manager half absently, and keeping his eye on the parade that was filing past.

“Sure!” declared Beauty. “I've driven ore wagons in places where such a mutt as that sheep-herder would have——”

He paused abruptly and in disgust, for the manager had dashed forward to shout something to one of the petty bosses, and did not return. Beauty caught a plaintive little smile from a girl on a beautiful black horse, and recognized her as the one in whose eyes he had discovered friendliness and sympathy on the day before. There passed his friend of the gilded hair, now attired as a Roman lady, and driving a chariot. Behind the chariot, walking haughtily, was a black-haired, swarthy-skinned man, twisting up his foreign-looking mustache, and adjusting a leopard skin thrown across his prodigious shoulders and breast. Beauty gave a soft whistle of admiration. Never had he seen such terrific arm muscles, such pillarlike legs, such breadth of shoulder.

“That's Margovin, the strongest man in the world,” he heard a boy behind him shout ecstatically.

The men who had played poker in the car on the previous day were now gallant-appearing knights, with waving plumes, and a sad-faced man the adventurer had observed at the time the manager was offering to hire him was barely recognizable in the mask of a merry clown who was perched on a high seat behind the smallest burro Beauty had ever seen. A calliope broke into a shrill diapason of sound, and Beauty, enraptured, fell in with the small boys behind it, and sedately marched with them, staring up at the wonderful operator of so noisy an instrument.

“By Jiminy!” he exclaimed to himself. “If they pay me seventy for just chuckin' a rope, I guess they must give that feller four or five hundred. Wish I could play a tune on that thing.”

There was no stranger that lined the streets of the parade that day who was more interested than Beauty Jones, a member of the vast aggregation. He bubbled over with it when he succeeded in finding his way back to the car after the parade was over and hunger warned him that it was time to hunt what he called “the chuck wagon.” The manager was there, eating as calmly as if nothing unusual had taken place, an attitude that filled his new employee with profound admiration. And by deft questions he led Beauty on and appeared to enjoy his comments. The press agent seated himself with them, and now and then laughed, much to Beauty's embarrassment, until he decided that Williams meant no harm.

“Suppose, Williams,” said the manager, “that you get Jones out into the ring with his horse before the wagon opens, and see if you can't think of something to help his act.”

“Glad to,” replied the press man, whose imagination leaped far faster than that of the doughty manager.

And so it was that after the meal was finished, Williams conducted Beauty to the huge “big top,” and said: “There's your pony. Now let's see what you can do.”

Over in one of the rings, a family of acrobats, looking very commonplace in their undershirts, trousers, or plain short dresses and old gymnasium shoes, were practicing a new act. In the ring at the extreme end of the vast canvas-roofed place, he saw the soft-eyed girl attempting a daring double somersault from a springboard beside the ring with the object of alighting on the back of a broad-hipped, patient horse, driven by the man with the gray hair. Around her body was a belt with swivels at the sides, to which were attached flexible ropes, running up through pulleys. The ends of these were held by two men, whose duty was, it seemed, to prevent her from falling heavily to the ground in case of failure. Here and there, roustabouts were clearing up the litter of final preparation for the performance, and canvas men were making some adjustments.

Beauty enjoyed having the broad outer ring to himself, and performed miracles of riding and handling a rope. He did his final ground work on the platform between the rings, and succeeded in executing a very creditable “hoedown” as his reata twisted and writhed above him. He was fairly astonished, when he concluded, to discover that he had a considerable audience, all the performers and some others having stopped their work to see the “new find” rehearse. There was a burst of applause, and shouts of “Good work! Bully boy!” and he was rather abashed for a moment, until he discovered the manager in the group, with a pleased smile on his grim lips.

“How's that, boss?” demanded Beauty, grinning at him.

“Good! But how about that whip?” asked the big man. “Here, you, Bryant! Where's the whip I told you to bring?”

A man respectfully handed over a whip that Beauty thought was the identical one he had seen the clumsy driver use. He caught and balanced it in his hand, and then, as the performers opened out, let the whiplash into the air two or three times with a snapping report and looked back at the manager, who was smoking a fresh cigar, and from the corner of his mouth talking in a low tone to Williams. A spirit of deviltry seized Beauty, and he walked backward, snapping and whirling the long lash as if gauging an exact distance. Every one waited to see what new surprise he had for display, and then suddenly the manager started back with a startled oath, and looked at the cowman with an expression that was plainly a struggle between bewilderment and indignation. The manager took the cigar from his mouth, and inspected its end, as if still uncertain.

“Took the ash clean off the end of your cigar without knocking it from your mouth! How's that? I saw him do it!” exulted Williams.

“Humph! That's nothin',” asserted Beauty. “If I could find any one that had nerve enough to take a chance, I could do that off'n Baldy's back.”

There was a moment's silence, in which he saw one of the acrobats wink at another, his whole attitude expressing the belief that the cowboy was, after all, a boaster.

“Well, it's so,” declared Beauty, earnestly defending himself. “Here, boss, lend me that cigar after that ash grows out again. I'll show you.”

He watched the manager as the latter puffed vigorously and blew clouds of smoke outward like an engine, and then when the ash again appeared, Beauty took the cigar and stuck it in a hole in the side of a piece of convenient paraphernalia, mounted Baldy, and rode rapidly around the ring. He made one attempt that failed, and then, with Baldy loping steadily beneath him, sent the lash out with a snap, and for the second time proved himself the master of the whip.

He leaped to the ground, and the well-trained pony planted his hoofs and came to an abrupt stop.

“Stand still, Williams!” shouted Beauty, and, before the press agent could realize what was coming, the long lash neatly coiled itself around the crown of his derby hat, and it was jerked into the air, deftly caught by the frontiersman, and politely handed back. Almost without stopping, Beauty twisted round, saw a white paper-filled hoop through which some rider had intended to leap, and now, with sharp reports, rapid and true, he used the hoop as a target, and deftly cut hole after hole in its surface, forming the letters “B. B.”

“Now,” said Beauty, coiling his whip and advancing to Williams, “if you're tired of lookin' at this monkey business, maybe you'll be good enough to tell me what I'm to do in this bunch to earn my money. I ain't much of a tumbler, but I suppose I could learn to ride. I don't think I want to learn none of them things up there by the roof. They're too high.”

And no man was ever more astonished than Beauty Jones when told that all he had to do to earn his money was to just keep on doing what he had already done. Nor did he know that while he was watching the afternoon performance the manager of Bigger's Biggest was holding a consultation with the press agent, as to how it would be possible to delude the most novel find in years into signing a contract for life at a salary far less than he could command within a month after the news of his marvelous skill had reached the booking agents.

Chapter III.

The first week of his life with Bigger's Biggest passed like a delirium of delight for the adventurer. It was not until the novelty began to wear off that he was even able to comprehend the significance of the splendid organization by which he was surrounded. Moreover, he found himself in a peculiar position before the week was over, inasmuch as every one connected with the circus recognized his exceptional talent, and also that he was a hand-in-glove favorite with the Napoleonic manager and the powerful press agent. That he lived in Number Fifty in itself proved that he “stood in,” and for a week there was more respect given him than he liked; after which time nearly all connected with the great caravan, finding him so intensely democratic and unassuming, began to like him and to admit him into their confidence.

From razor backs to star performers, and from canvas men to animal trainers, he was a favorite. But, with singular perversity, he chose from all the hundreds of men connected with the show none other than the clown, Jim Paxton, for his particular crony. Perhaps the beginning of this intimacy was due to Paxton's air of hopeless melancholy and his apparent loneliness; but later, the instinct of the frontiersman led him to recognize something of breeding and erudition in this strange wreck of a man who, through lack of initiative and ill fortune, had drifted from higher callings to the mere motley of a clown.

Imperceptibly, Beauty began to come to Paxton for advice, and to accept him as a mentor in many ways. His respect and liking for the big man of the show—“the boss”—grew apace; but the big man was too busy to waste time on amicable conversation save in those brief intervals when he paused to take his meals.

It was Jim Paxton who did more to whip Beauty's act into shape than any one else connected with the show.

“The trouble with you is,” said the clown thoughtfully, on the second evening, when Jim was rehearsing rather foolishly, “that you don't string it out enough. What you need is system. Fiddle around a while when you first come in, boy, and do the easiest stunts until you work up to where you hang to the horse's side and throw the loop. Then dismount and do your ground work, and stretch that out a little longer, and have the whip in reach. You must have one made with a white lash, so that the audience can see it as it goes. Make one thing follow another faster, and faster, up to the stunt with the target. Have the target papered with black, and have two of them, so that people on both ends can see it done. Before doing it, have the spieler come out with his silk hat to tell what you will do. Probably he will stop all bands and all other acts. He surely will when you do that mounted-cigar stunt.”

“But most of it doesn't amount to nothin',” insisted Beauty.

“It doesn't matter whether it does or not, so long as you can make people believe it does,” sagely retorted Paxton. “I should say that to flick the ash from a cigar in a man's mouth, while riding a horse at a gallop, did amount to something.”

“Man's mouth!” exclaimed the cowboy. “There's ain't goin' to be no man! That'd be too risky.”

“But it could be done, couldn't it?” asked the clown quietly.

“Yes—but—well, it's too dangerous.”

“That is just what people come and pay a dollar for,” said Paxton. “Difficulty and danger are what they demand. They want thrills. They want the spectacular. This act depends on convincing those who watch that it is difficult, and that it is perilous to the man who holds the cigar. There is nothing dangerous or spectacular if the cigar is fastened to something inanimate that can't be hurt. Circus audiences like to shudder. Your act certainly requires this feature for a finish.”

The plainsman shook his head doubtfully, and the little man came closer to him and added: “I want to see you make a success. You're young and I'm old. I know what it means to fail. You don't. It's a pretty hard world, boy, in its judgments. It's all very pleasant and smooth as long as you're a success, but when you fail, it's hell! Nobody can say yet, even with the most dangerous trick of all included, how the public will take this act of yours. You're living in the manager's car now for two reasons: One, that he is amused, and has taken a hard liking to you, which I can understand, and the other because he thinks you're a big winner; but if you come out in front of a crowd and fall down two or three times in succession, you'll be dropped off at some tank town with as little ceremony as if you were a can of garbage being dumped overboard. Circuses are like everything else in the world; they have no use for anything which has been proved useless.”

Beauty suddenly looked grave, and began to learn the lesson that this strange life into which he had entered was not entirely a traveling rose carnival. He looked so palpably distressed that Jim Paxton smiled softly, but not without pity.

“Lordy!” exclaimed Beauty. “I sure am in bad, and it looks to me like it's gettin' worse every minute. Got to have a man hold the cigar! It's only about two inches from the end of that cigar to the man's face, and the least bit of a mistake might let that lash go too far. Do you know what would happen then? Well, I'll tell you. The tip of that lash, laid that way on a steer's back, would lift a piece out of his tough hide just about the size of a silver dollar—slick and clean—as if cut with a sharp knife. It would take a man's eye out, or amputate his nose, a heap quicker than any doctor could do it.”

He waited, but Paxton appeared unimpressed.

“I suspected that,” he said patiently.

“There's somethin' else,” Beauty went on desperately; “I might get rattled, and that whip stunt ain't a job for a man who is the least bit shaky.”

“But you must not,” replied his inexorable mentor.

“Maybe I can't help it,” objected the plainsman. “I've been sort of ashamed to speak about it, but I'm goin' to tell you. I ain't ever been afraid of anything in my life, but it's kind of come over me, the last day or two, that I'm goin' to feel mighty queer when I get out there with everybody lookin' at me. Now you tell me to have the band and all other acts stop while I try to do the hardest thing of all! Jim, I'm afraid. I think I'll go and tell the Old Man to fire me, because I don't dare do it.”

Paxton looked at him anxiously, and laid a hand on Beauty's arm.

“Jones,” he said earnestly, “that will never do. You can't afford to be a quitter. You've got to go through with it. You've got to keep your nerve, and do the biggest feature that you can put into an act. I'll tell you what you do: You go and tell the boss that you want me to work with you. I'll hold the cigar.”

“Good Lord, man! Ain't I made it plain to you?” expostulated the cowpuncher. “It's dangerous if I happen to lose my nerve. If I've got to hurt anybody round here, I'd rather it'd be somebody besides you.'

“And, on the other hand,” retorted the clown, in his kindly voice, “if anybody here's to be hurt, I'd rather it were me.”

Beauty still looked doubtful and distressed.

“Moreover,” continued Jim, “I've got an idea that you wouldn't be in quite such danger of getting what we might call 'stage fright' if I were there in the ring with you. You must do it, young fellow. You've got to go through with it. Why, you'll get used to it in no time at all, and after that, it'll be easy. We'll take the chance! Go ahead now and arrange it.”

He turned and walked quietly away, a mere drooping little figure of a kindly, broken man, a failure himself, but striving to his utmost to assist another to success.

Beauty Jones shook his head in a puzzled way, then shut his lips, banged one fist into the other palm, and, remarked aloud: “Now, that's what I call game. By Crackey! I'll put this thing over now if I have to get the 'Old Man' by the throat and choke him to let me have what I want!”

Already familiar with the habits of the manager of Bigger's Biggest, he knew that this was the most propitious time to interview him, so plunged directly out toward Number Fifty car which, at this stand, happened to be quite close to the lot. All his doubts had vanished when he blundered into the door of the great man's moving office, and, to that gentleman's amazement, slapped his worn white hat on the floor, and declared: “Well, boss, we've got it! I'm goin' to make it the biggest act that anybody ever saw. I'm goin' to stand them on their heads!”

The manager, quite accustomed to hearing performers boast of what they were going to do, tolerated his strange find, smiled, and suggested: “Well, suppose you tell us what it is!”

Beauty Jones had never been famed for convincing or overflowing speech; on this occasion he outdid himself. He expatiated in the most unusual manner on what he proposed to do, quite evidently to the manager's approval; and then, almost as unexpectedly to himself as to the manager, became crafty. He sat down and assumed an air of intense gravity.

“The only trouble,” he said, “is this: I'm afraid we'll have to cut the whip trick out—that one with the cigar.”

The manager of Bigger's Biggest sat up and roared an expostulation, whereupon Beauty not only explained but exaggerated the dangers of that performance; until he had the manager shivering at thought of his own narrow escape. Beauty frowned thoughtfully at the floor of the car, and then, as if suddenly thinking of an emergency, asked: “By the way, what pay does Jim Paxton, the clown, get?”

“Paxton! Jim Paxton!” demanded the master of a little army of men. “What do you want to know for?”

“He's the only man I've seen in all this outfit that I'd trust to stand up there in front of me, day after day, to do that trick,” asserted Beauty. “He's got nerve, boss, that feller has. Say, I'll bet that little man would tackle the fires of hell with a waterin' can! Never saw anything like it!” And then, to the manager's amazement, Beauty blundered through an entirely fictitious recountal of what Jim. Paxton, the melancholy little clown, was said to have done.

The manager pressed a button, and sent the porter bearing a note to the wagon, where the treasurer was supreme, after which he kept the plainsman in doubt for several minutes. The porter reappeared with a reply, at which the big man glanced, then said: “He gets thirty dollars a month.”

“Well,” remarked Beauty pleasantly, “we'll just double that salary of his and put him in this act.”

For an instant, the manager sat in utter amazement at such temerity.

“Well, you've got a gall, I must remark, young fellow!” he blurted. “Who do you think you're talking» to? Since when did you start to help me run this show?”

“Just this minute,” cheerfully responded Beauty. “You need somebody around, looks to me, and I'm the man. You know, if you don't like it, I can quit 'most any time.” He grinned with that frank, entrancing smile of his, until the man who directed the destinies of the huge undertaking had to succumb, and, in mock anger, shouted: “You get out of here. The first thing I know, you'll be raising the pay of every man on the job and taking my place!”

“But about Paxton?” insisted Beauty, as he started toward the door, confident, however, that he had carried his point. “Does that sixty a month go?”

“Yes, it does if you make good,” replied the manager.

“Then,” said Jim, as he slammed the door, “I'll make good or bust a leg tryin',” and carelessly whistled his way toward the huge dressing tent where he thought he would probably find his melancholy friend patching tattered raiment.

Now he began his work in earnest, and, three days later, following Paxton's advice, suggested to his amused employer that he would like to appear at the next performance; but it was with a fearful mind that he made his entry. For a moment, as he rode Baldy round the outer ring, his heart was in his mouth, and he felt terribly conspicuous; but, feeling the play of the distended muscles beneath him, and the touch of the familiar saddle between his legs, he gained courage to begin the course of evolutions that Jim and he had so carefully mapped out. Considering them child's play, he worked almost automatically. He wondered, when he came to the climax of his act, whether any one would be fool enough to be interested in seeing Beauty Jones out there on Baldy doing a lot of stunts that, to him, were very simple, and merely the results of continued practice on broad, open plains when alone and with nothing save a lot of entirely disinterested steers to watch him. Indeed, he was quite surprised when that vast crowd of spectators applauded wildly, and rose from their seats to voice their approval. He did not even know that over by an entrance the Old Man and Williams, the press agent, were bubbling over with joy at this latest addition to the marvels of Bigger's Biggest.

He was happily aware, when he dismounted and began doing his dance on the resounding boards of the central platform, that Jim Paxton, in a new make-up, a grotesque caricature of a cowboy, was there to assist him. He was glad when some of Jim's antics drew a burst of merriment, and openly laughed with the rest of the spectators.

Out at the entrance, Williams turned excitedly to the manager and exulted: “By Jove! This looks like a double find! That fellow Paxton can be made into another Slivers. Must add him to the billing; for of course you'll tie him up with a contract.”

Suddenly everything came to a pause, and Beauty, looking around, saw the announcer with his hat doffed and a hand raised for silence. All other acts abruptly came to a halt, the band ceased playing, and the huge megaphone roared a message to the four quarters of the tented world that Bigger's Biggest, ever striving for the most sensational acts, was about to offer a feature that did not appear on the bills. The announcer magnified its difficulties, expatiated upon the possibilities of a gruesome accident, and ended by requesting the spectators, in any emergency, to retain their seats.

He bowed deferentially, and turned toward Beauty with a gesture of introduction, and the latter was painfully aware that he stood there with every eye watching him expectantly. For an instant, he looked at the heavily loaded whip, longer by several feet than was customarily used, and his eyes followed its long white lash as it rested like a slender serpent on the ground. It looked unaccountably strange and cruel. He felt himself trembling, and his knees rattling, and almost staggered to Baldy's side, where, mechanically, he climbed into the saddle, but did not urge the nervous, but obedient pony forward.

He lifted his eyes miserably and saw Jim Paxton standing alone in the center of the ring and puffing vigorously at a very black cigar that he had drawn from a capacious pocket. At a distance, the clown's face appeared a comical mask of rouge and paint; but to Beauty, less than twenty feet away, the illusion was lost, and he could observe nothing but the melancholy, encouraging smile and the dark eyes that watched him attentively.

It all came to him suddenly that Jim Paxton, out of all the hundreds that he had met in this outlandish world into which he had stumbled, was the only one for whom he had conceived an affection. Jim Paxton, the unheeded clown, the wreck of perversity, and yet a man who had thought and tediously worked the way for his, Beauty's, success. The peril, the danger of inflicting pain, of possibly blinding a friend for life, came to him appallingly. Suppose he made an error of judgment in the distance! What if Baldy, usually so steady, were to swerve!

His face grew white, and he gasped for breath, abruptly realizing, as if for the first time, that he was surrounded by curious and terrifying faces, little white dots in a motionless distance, and all intent on what he was about to do. He tried to voice his fear, but nothing save a queer, gurgling sound came from his throat, and he was almost overwhelmed with a desire to escape—to ride madly from this place of terror and out into the open. He looked down at Baldy beneath him, patiently awaiting the touch of spurs.

For an instant everything in Bigger's Biggest wavered, and the crowd of performers, watching from the entrance, looked at one another in sympathy, recognizing the signs of stage fright.

“Steady! Steady, old man! For God's sake, steady!” he heard the clown exclaim; and then, as he did not move, heard the voice change to one of appeal.

“Brace up! Think what it means to you now!”

But it was not a selfish thought that made Beauty Jones tighten his hold on the whip and start Baldy forward; it was the recollection that Jim Paxton wanted him to “make good.” A queer and confident but grim and desperate determination invaded him as he urged the pony to an easy lope and swung the long, heavy lash overhead with measured, rhythmical whirls.

He saw nothing of the crowd; it was shut out of existence. He saw nothing of the performers who were now nodding with approval, nor the manager and his press agent who had grasped the situation and were relieved. All that he saw was the attitude of the little man constantly facing him, and who, with fingers in the armholes of his vest, was pretending to enjoy the cigar, half burned, and puffing the smoke from the corner of his mouth.

Three times Baldy galloped around the ring and the swift twirling overhead increased; then, from across the ring, the lash, appearing to the spectators a long, white thread, snapped viciously through the air. Beauty was astounded, and felt like a man coming from a dream when the band shrilled into a heavy boom of sound, mingled with the wild cheers of the crowd, and he saw other performers, in response to a shrill whistle, rushing forward to take their parts.

With an immense relief and exultation, he turned toward the exit, when, suddenly remembering Jim Paxton, his friend, he swerved and seized the astonished little man round the waist as he rode past him, jerked him over the pommel of the saddle, and made an exit so unexpectedly daring, and so unique, that even the manager and the press agent outside clapped their hands. The act was a success.

As they dismounted and the noise of the applause behind was dying away, the performers in the trapping room crowded round Jim to voice their congratulations, and again he was embarrassed.

“I owe it all to Jim, here,” he asserted, over and over again. “Why, do you folks know that for about a whole year in there I'd sure have run away if it hadn't been for him!”

Paxton slipped hastily away to the segment of the tent constituting the men's dressing room, and when Beauty looked for him, to pat him on the back, was nowhere in sight. The blond-headed woman was there, in the silken tights and spangles of the flying gymnast, a dressing gown thrown over her shoulders.

She looked speculatively at the modest man who had achieved a triumph, and, as she shook hands with him, whispered: “You're handin' it all to Paxton; but he nearly spoiled your act. What you need to make it a sure-enough go is a woman with you. I want to talk to you about something when we get a chance.” And then, observing that one of her fellow aërialists was looking at her, she hastened away.

The little, dark-eyed girl came next almost timidly, and put up a small, firm hand, which he took, and unintentionally held.

“You're splendid!” she said. “You've no idea how I wish that I might ride like you, because I have had to work so hard, all the time, to do what I do.”

Beauty found himself tongue-tied, and strangely seeking for words. It was the first time she had ever addressed him directly, and he had been too bashful in all that wonderful week, now past, to make any overtures, although each day he had found a place where he might stand alone and watch “Mademoiselle Zoe,” the “world's greatest rider,” as she did her turn. That she was one of the lead performers of Bigger's Biggest had had nothing whatever to do with his temerity; only that she seemed too dainty, and too sweet, for a mere cow-puncher to approach.

“That's mighty good of you!” he blurted, and then turned a wholesome red beneath his tan, and fled incontinently, fearing that he would say too much.

Her few words of praise were, for some reason that he could not in the least explain, the most appreciated of any that he received in that hour of victory.

When the Old Man and Williams met him at the table that night, with a quite new look of respect and flattery in their attitude, he received their praise in a diffident manner. All he said to the mighty man was: “Humph! I knowed I could do it!. That's nothin'. But I want to tell you something: Ive decided that sixty dollars a month ain't enough pay for Jim, and I'm goin' to think it over before I decide how much he really ought to get.” Whereupon the doughty manager, in his turn, said “Humph!”

Chapter IV.

“That Mademoiselle Zoe is a mighty pretty little girl,” ventured Beauty to Jim, as he watched the latter putting the finishing touches to his make-up on the following afternoon.

The clown glanced around to make certain that none of those near were listening, and said: “That girl is as fine a one as there is with Bigger's. Poor little thing! What a pity that she can't have a chance!”

“Why, I thought she was one of the stars—the ones that get the biggest pay, I mean,” Beauty said, as if salaries were the only consideration.

“She is,” assented the clown, dabbing a long, straggling mustache to his upper lip; “but that father of hers is a holy terror. The old man's all right when he's sober, but once about every three months he breaks loose and—well, I'm afraid he abuses little Marie. That's her real name—Marie Barber. Once, while Dick was on a bender, she appeared with a black eye that was pitiable.”

Beauty swore softly, and asked: “Why don't she shake him? She's of age, ain't she?”

“You don't understand these people,” replied Jim, in his gentle, tired voice. “Loyalty is not a virtue with most of them. It's inherent. They never think of any other course. Now, here is Marie. She is no more than an adopted child of Dick Barber's, and he does nothing more than act as her manager, and draw her wages, and all that; but he is all she has. She's a good girl. From babyhood, when Dick was not too old and heavy to ride, he taught her. And he did a good job, too, as you can see, for she's the very best in the business. Most all of them admit it. She's not afraid of anything in the world. If he told her to jump from a flying trapeze to a horse's back, she'd leap. She does the most daring and the most dangerous stunts that any human being has ever tried with horses.”

Beauty remembered his amazement when first he saw her handling her six white horses in a hippodrome act, riding sometimes one, then two, and catching the reins of the others as they passed beneath her until they were stretched out in a long tandem line. That did not seem so difficult; but only yesterday he had seen her do those flying somersaults from the springboard without anything to save her in case of a fall, and so nodded an understanding head.

“She's got other things, too, besides that dad of hers to annoy her, I think,” added Jim, still talking in the same even tone. “A fellow living the way I do notices a good many little occurrences that are none of his business. I've an idea that Margovin, the Austrian, is bothering around her. He's entirely too chummy with old Dick for any good purpose.”

Beauty scowled savagely upward at the ridge of the tent, started to speak, then said nothing; but even when doing his own turn that afternoon, he thought of the little Marie, and was glad that she was there on the border and to see him work. There was scarcely any doubt of it now that he was destined to become the feature of the show, and, by way of an extemporaneous surprise, he “roped” a dog that blundered across the ring, and then good-naturedly applauded when Jim promptly seized the occasion to lead the dog back and deliver it to its owner. For the first time, he studied the act of the strong man, when the famous Margovin permitted an automobile to run over a bridge he supported on his back, and swung a dozen men on a plank across his shoulders.

The plainsman did something unusual for him after the performance was over—loitered around, eagerly looking for Marie. Almost by accident, he found her in her street garb, hurrying away from the lot. She smiled a recognition, and he made bold to walk beside her.

“I was just hurrying up to the shops to buy some things I need,” she said almost timidly, and Beauty promptly assured her that was just what he wanted to do.

She glanced at him doubtfully, but seemed reassured by his frank, honest eyes, and permitted him to accompany her without protest. He was intensely disturbed when some small boys recognized him, and followed after, pointing him out to others, and he also discovered that every now and then some man or another turned to look at him. He had not realized until then that he had the picturesqueness of the real cowboy in his everyday clothes. Before he knew it, he had made his promised intention good by buying a less conspicuous hat and a suit of clothes.

“I'm goin' to dude it a little,” he explained to the dark-eyed girl who went with him, and laughed with the shopkeepers at his quaint remarks. Already they were on easy terms of friendship, and on their return they loitered like a pair of children in front of display windows, and ignored the curious ones who saw them.

Their enjoyment of the little release was disturbed by the blond woman, who sighted them from across the street, and promptly intercepted and accompanied them back toward the city of tents. She fairly crowded Marie into the background with her conversation, and gave him no further chance to talk to the dark-eyed girl until they were back on the lot, so that he was rather disappointed when he started to walk toward Number Fifty for his dinner. On the way, he met Jim hurrying in from the fields, where he spent every spare moment in what Beauty considered the quite unmanly occupation of studying plants and beetles through a microscope.

“Jim,” said the rider abruptly, “Whats that yellow-headed girls name? The one that does the trapeze stuff along with three other women?”

“Oh, you mean Cora Butts!” answered the melancholy little clown. “Why?” he asked, with a little twinkle in the corners of his grave eyes.

“Nothin'. Only she does!” savagely remarked Beauty, as he continued his way

To the surprise of the manager who had witnessed his quickness in turning the dog to account in the afternoon's performance, and wished to tell him that he considered it “good business,” Beauty ate his supper almost in silence, and left the car immediately after to loiter around alone. Usually, at this hour, it was his chief delight to visit the animals in the menagerie, carrying to the bear, for whom he felt a vast sympathy, a frame of honey, and pausing to explain to the big buffalo that no injury had been done by returning him to the big show, where he was sure of three square meals a day without danger. The lions also fascinated him, and, despite the jeers of Jim, Beauty was convinced that Mike Burns, their trainer, billed as Signor Frateni, was certainly the bravest man on earth.

In the trapping room, that night, he came in contact with the first sign of ill will that had manifested itself since he joined the show. Margovin was standing there, moodily awaiting his turn, with a bath towel thrown over his immense shoulders, and scowling at every one who came near. He seemed to have added an extra curl to his black hair, that, parted in the middle, was brushed carefully into hornlike peaks behind his temples. As he came hurrying into the tent, Beauty heard the giant say to one of his assistants, in a sneering tone: “There goes the what you call cowpuncher, eh? Is it not?”

The foreign intonation did not strike Beauty at the moment so much as the sneering tone. He walked slower, and caught another remark:

“Pouf! What is he to make the such a fuss over? Nothings! He is not, as I, a big performer. I could snap his neck—so!”

And Beauty, hurt and angry, caught the sound of a finger snapped across a thumb; but he had no time to spare just then, having learned that the gravest crime in circusdom is lack of punctuality, so hurried onward to make his change.

The tent in which performers changed for circus work was an oblong, across the center of which was a canvas partition dividing it in half. The rear half was again divided by canvas, leaving thus a quarter of the tent for the men's dressing section, and the adjoining quarter for the women. The quarter apportioned to the women was again divided so that principals were allotted their own private places, where they might open the trunks, each of which contained a mirror, a chair, and smaller belongings. The male performers had no such privacy. The undivided half of the tent was called the trapping room, and it was there that the riders, garbed, received their mounts and waited, preparatory to the call that was to send them out through the big swinging curtains into view of the spectators.

At the entrance to the women's side, sat the wardrobe mistress, “The Circus Mother,” so called, like a dragon, protecting her flock from intrusion, and, when Beauty returned, she nodded to him in a friendly way, and made a gesture of contempt at the back of the strong man who was just passing out. The cowboy grinned appreciatively as he walked across to where stood Baldy, held by a groom.

As Beauty waited, with an arm thrown carelessly over the horse's neck, watching performers come hurrying back through the swinging curtains, and others hastening out, the bizarre scene had lost its glamour. Yesterday he had gone his way, happy and careless, feeling that he had accidentally fallen into a splendid and joyous life; but now he discovered other things: That it was possible for one man to hate another, though no injury had been inflicted or meditated. Moreover, fearless as he was, the cowboy knew that he was on strange ground, and was consequently afraid of conflict with this abnormally developed cave man who could bend iron bars, break chains, and play with cannon balls so enormous that Beauty, who had surreptitiously tried, could not lift them.

Back there in the hills that he had known from boyhood, or on some of that long and wild stretch of the world that he had bravely adventured over, a gun would have been an arbiter for insult that would place them on equal terms; but here, in a city of the Pacific coast, he was as helpless as a child. He was suffering the queer and brutal side of the law, that failed to make all men equal in physical ability, yet debarred them from finding means to place themselves on equality. He was learning the lesson that so many had learned before, that the so-called barbarous codes of the so-called barbarous West had their merits. Here he was, “hog-tied,” as he would have expressed it, because he dared not say anything to a hairy brute who could murder him with bare hands, even though he had done nothing to merit injury, and the law would compel him to act the part of a poltroon and submit to insults and sneers such as he had just heard.

Beauty's performance that evening was lacking in zest, though he saw his new friend Marie watching him, and back of her the insistent Cora, who strove to attract his attention and smirked when he came through the curtains with the fantastic Jimmy sprawling and kicking in front of his saddle.

Down the coast they went, in the following days, playing inland towns, where the heat was so intense that the animals, whose native habitat was in the far Northern climes, sweltered in their cages, and those from tropical regions reveled in the warmth.

At times, the sleeping cars, into which the tired performers wearily crawled at the close of the evening's show, were insufferably hot, despite the movement of the trains, and in the daytime, as they stood on the sidings, their metal roofs glowing with heat, those who dwelt in them avoided them as much as possible, and sought the shade wherever it might be obtained.

Down in the orange belt, the new performer, for the first time, saw himself depicted in bills. He had not in the least expected such honor; but there he stood, in a big poster, sufficiently lifelike to surprise himself and cause him to wonder where the likeness could have been obtained until he learned that Williams had snapshotted him on that day when he recaptured the buffalo.

He was not nearly so delighted with his own fame as he was with that which had been accorded to Paxton, who, in his grotesque garb, appeared on the other side with a small likeness of himself as he really was in the corner.

Beauty was depicted in the very act of hanging to Baldy's side, whereupon, to the amusement of some of the other members of Bigger's Biggest he promptly went around to the horses' tent and brought the pony to the front of the first big bill, firmly convinced that Baldy, too, would appreciate himself portrayed in such magnificent color. In Beauty's mind, no masterpiece ever painted could have compared with that lurid piece of lithography, and he straightway begged Williams to secure one for him, which he folded up and put in the bottom of a suit case purchased especially for this purpose. That veteran performers laughed at him made not the slightest difference to Beauty, who openly admitted that he was very proud of the picture and regarded it as the finest one he had ever seen.

Margovin's increasing sneers, however, were so open that he could not ignore them, and there were times when his whistle was not so free and careless as he wandered around through the menagerie, or seized small opportunities to ride beyond the borders of dusty towns to get what he called a “snootful of fresh air.” He had begun to suspect that the Austrian's dislike was not entirely for professional reasons, but was possibly stimulated by the fact that the plainsman lost no chance to talk to Marie Barber, for whom his admiration steadily increased.

Cora, the aërialist, had begun a more open campaign, and at times assumed an intimate air that he could not escape. She occasionally spoke to him in front of the others, calling him “dear boy,” and a few other pet appellations in a manner intended to be highly coy and captivating. She even attempted to caress Baldy, hoping thus to win her way into Beauty's good graces; but that wise animal, resenting a touch from anybody save Beauty, who insistently took care of him, or the little clown, who fed him with lumps of sugar, snapped so viciously at the gilded lady's face that she fled in terror.

By the time the show had reached Los Angeles, where it was to make its last long stand on the coast, Jim had become so thoroughly inured to his new life that he felt completely at home; and Los Angeles was destined to stand out in his memory, for it was there that he had his first day alone with the little Marie.

Sunday in that city was a day off; but few of the performers had exercised their privilege of lodging in hotels, and inasmuch as old Dick Barber had mysteriously disappeared on the night before, Beauty found the girl in a receptive mood when he called her to one side and begged her to accompany him to Santa Monica for the day. He could not understand why she made her acceptance provisional upon his meeting her at a rendezvous up in the city and quite distant from the lot; for he would have been proud to have let the other members of Bigger's Biggest see them as they departed. And this was more than ever so when he met her at the appointed place, clad in her finest, and instantly decided that she was the most beautiful girl he had ever talked to or been seen with.

Down along the lovely beach he walked with her, glancing from the corners of his eyes at passers-by, and surprised that everybody did not stop and look at a being so beautiful as Mademoiselle Zoe.

For a long time he had decided that she had the ten-thousand-dollar beauty of the show “backed off the boards,” and now, at this seaside resort, he added the conclusion that, despite the boasting and well-deserved fame of the Los Angeles beauties, Marie was far finer than any of them. To those who watched them, she was simply a sweet-faced young woman, with eyes rendered unusually attractive by a touch of sorrow, and a lithe, well-rounded young figure that betrayed the perfection of health, while the man beside her was particularly noticeable for his well-set figure, and the sunburned, good-natured face under a shock of hair that was ridiculously tow-colored. His lack of self-consciousness and disregard for formalities made him appear more ridiculous to those accustomed to seaside resorts, for he entered into every enjoyment with the zest of a boy making his first big trip to Coney Island.

With Marie by his side, he tried everything from flying swings to shooting galleries, and in the latter won the disapproval of the proprietors by such remarkable marksmanship that the places were wrecked. In a fit of boyish exuberance, almost amounting to intoxication, he even shot a hole through two mirrors, and was sobered by the price he had to pay. They went swimming together, where he found himself sadly outclassed, having passed all his life in places where rivers and lakes were scarce; yet consoled himself by admiring the excellence of Marie's art.

They had planned to return on a late-afternoon train, but succumbed to the night glories of the place, and dined together in the balcony of a restaurant whence they could look upon the sunset and the sea. The Pacific was justifying its name, and only the light swells racing languidly up the exquisite beach kept them aware that they were facing an ocean instead of a great lake. The glory of the sunset died away from dull red into deep purple, and here and there a star appeared, seemingly quite close, and unduly bright. The moon was rising as if she had crept up over the sea for their benefit when they reluctantly turned away, purposing their return.

“Well,” said Beauty despondently, “I suppose we've got to go now; but somehow or another it seems like a clean waste of all the good Lord's given us to go back.”

“I wish we never had to,” said the girl at his side, with a slight shiver, as if loathing to return to her hard and humdrum life.

Beauty suddenly caught her arm through his, turned resolutely away, and led her back to the white, firm sand of the beach.

“We'll not go back until the last train,” he declared, “and if anybody says anything, they'll have to talk to me.”

Something of the mood of the night seemed to have involved them, and all the gayety of the day gave place to an earnest thoughtfulness as they trudged on and on over the moonlit sands, until they were beyond the crowd, the noise of voices, and the sounds of the resort. They found a huge rock, back on a dune above the highest reach of the tide, and for a long time sat there, speechless, watching the never-ending curl of the waves that raced toward them with their brilliant silver crests and then receded, as if apologetically leaving them to their solitude.

“Do you realize,” she said suddenly, as if she had been thinking of him, “you are the strangest man I've ever known. It may be because I've met so few who are not performers. Sometimes it seems to me that you're the first one I've ever known from that big, outside world, where people do things that amount to something. And sometimes, too, I feel something else: That you are too big and fine to be in this business. It's poison, Beauty.”

He looked at her curiously, as if striving to comprehend what she meant by her condemnation of the life that to him appeared so alluring.

“I don't see why you say that,” he rejoined; “it looks mighty fine to me. Maybe it's because it's all so new; but, you see, it's the biggest chance I ever had in my life. I'm what the boys call 'a rope neck,' I never saw a real big circus till I saw this one. I never had an idea that I could make as much money as I'm makin' now. Why! Do you know, little girl, that the biggest month's wages I ever drew before the Old Man picked me up was a whole lot less than I'm getting now every week! Why, I didn't know what money was!”

“But there's no money that can make up for home,” she said wistfully.

He laughed a little bitterly.

“I don't know about that,” he said gravely. “You see, I never had one. My father and mother were what we used to call movers. Lucky thing, I suppose, that I was the only kid, because they died within a week of each other, of typhoid, in a little bit of a camp over in Montana. Some neighbors came around and got me because they couldn't very well see a seven-year-old starve to death, and they loaded me off to the nearest poorhouse. Then a rancher and his wife came along in a couple or three years and took me. I thought it was mighty kind of them, at first, until I found out that this rancher was lookin' for cheap labor, and from that time on, until I was about seventeen, I didn't know anything except get up in the mornin' at four o'clock, work till seven, and then get a mighty mean breakfast, then work some more till noon, then get a little lunch, and work till dark, then do some more chores, milking cows till my arms ached, and bedding down horses, and splitting kindling, and by that time it was usually about nine o'clock. And by that time, too, I was always so doggoned tired I'd be falling asleep. If I left anything undone, the old man's pet method of reminding me of it was to start the next morning with a hame strap. I've got scars on my back now where the buckle walloped over and cut through the flesh. No, I don't go much on this home business.”

He turned and smiled at her, as if time had obliterated all the hardness of his boyhood save the memory, and her eyes were big with sympathy, and her face quite grave.

“Go on,” she said softly, “tell me the rest of it.”

“There's nothin' more to tell,” he said carelessly, “because when I got seventeen I was a heap huskier than the old man thought. I'd been waitin' then for several years, sayin' to myself all the time: 'I'll stay here until I'm big enough to lick you, and then I'm goin'.' Maybe one thing that delayed it was my hand.”

He stretched his left hand out toward her, and, in the moonlight, she discovered for the first time that it was knotted and distorted.

“That,” he said grimly, “happened in the year of the big blizzard. I used to have to pull up water for the stock with a windlass, and the thermometer was somewhere away below zero when that happened. My fingers ached so from the cold that I was cryin', and couldn't hold the handle any longer, and it flew loose and broke all those knuckles. I went up to the house, grittin? my teeth with the pain, and you can't guess what the old brute did! It was sixteen miles to the nearest doctor, and this foster father of mine said I'd have to wait until the blizzard was over, and maybe if they put a bandage round my hand I could finish watering the stock!

“That's the only time I ever knew the old lady to say anything to him, because he used to beat her about as often as he did me. She cried, and begged him to do something, and to hitch up a team and take me to town, until he finally gave in enough to say: 'Well, if the fool has to go, I'll lend him a horse and he can ride in; but I'm not goin' to hitch up any team for a poorhouse runt that don't earn his salt nohow.' So I got on the horse, with her helpin' me, and rode away sixteen miles with the snow and ice cuttin' me in the face, sometimes hangin' to the reins with my teeth when my hands got so cold and hurt so bad I couldn't hold up any longer, and most of the time cryin' with pain and reelin' around in the saddle until I thought I'd fall off.

“The old man had to treat me better after that, though, because this doctor—God bless him!—took me back in his own sleigh, and told this fine foster daddy of mine that if ever he heard of my bein' abused again he'd organize a vigilance committee and hang him to the first thing big enough to hold his weight; and the last thing he said when he went out of the shack we called home—which wasn't one-tenth as good as the barn the old man kept his stock in—was to tell me that if ever the old man laid a hand on me again I was to come and tell him, the doctor.”

Beauty laughed a little, as if at some pleasant recollection, glanced at Marie, then looked back over the side sweep of the moonlit ocean.

“Well,” he said, with an under note of enjoyment, “at seventeen, I was a pretty big kid; ganglin', maybe, and almost as awkward as I am now, but, my goodness, I was strong! The old man gave me a cussin' one night out by the barn, and I thought it all over durin' the night; so the next mornin', when he came out, I called him inside and shut the door, and maybe you think I didn't tell him of all that had been boilin' up in me for all those years!

“'You'd better get off your coat,' said I, 'because I think I'm 'most big enough now to give you all that's comin' to you.'

“He didn't wait to peel down, but just went for me, and I was right about it, because when I got through with him, that old cuss was snivelin' and beggin' for mercy, and yellin' for help like a Piute Indian who's fallen into a hornets' nest, and got tangled in a barbed-wire fence at the same time. I had to take him out and duck him in the cattle trough to bring him to, and, after that, I just walked up to the house and kissed the old lady good-by, and trudged away. I was goin' out to drift, and I've drifted ever since.

“Sometimes the hills called to me, and sometimes it was the prairie. I don't suppose you'll understand that; but they did. Why, I've heard the trees up on the slopes, miles away, whisper to me in the night, and I've heard little brooks talk. I've heard the wind on the grass come whisperin' toward me to say that there was some place away over beyond the edge of things where I could find somethin' fine and interestin'. I've had birds perch around my camp fire and tell me all kinds of things, that sort of made me happy and glad because I was alive. I've seen them fly away when the winter came, and heard them sing 'Good-by, Beauty Jones! We like you because you're clean, and decent, and you ain't done no one any wrong.' It's all I've got to brag about, that is, that no one can say, unless he lies, that, aside from that old man who abused me, I never did any one, or any livin' thing any harm, unless forced to it. I've fought, and I've gambled, and I've taken my chance, but I reckon the good Lord isn't goin' to hold any grudge against a feller for them things, so long as He knows that he always tried to do the square thing.”

He could not understand, when he turned and looked at her, why she clapped both her hands over those maimed knuckles and faced him with eyes that were luminous and glistening with unshed tears of sympathy.

Chapter V.

Beauty was not accustomed to sympathy. It rendered him helpless and awkward. He fought against sentiment of any sort, his life being a perpetual struggle against impulse; so he arose abruptly, and said: “Seems to me, little girl, that I'll be gettin' you into an awful row if we don't turn back. Let's go and forget all about this foolish story of mine.”

The star equestrienne of Bigger's Biggest got to her feet reluctantly, and took his arm of her own volition as they started to retrace their steps down the course of the long white beach; but the spell of his hard youth was still in her imagination.

“Didn't you ever see them any more?” she asked, as if loath to leave the subject.

“Yes,” he said. “That is, I saw her once more. That was when I got hold of quite a little fortune for such as me—three thousand dollars—and went back. The old man was gone to where he couldn't beat boys any more. The ranch was rented out, and she was livin' in that same old house that wasn't fit for Baldy to stay in. So I blew the money in fixin' her a place that was decent. Every once in a while I write to her. She was right grateful, and always calls me her boy. I write to her about once a month. I suppose I'll go back and see her again. She's gettin' old, and, somehow, as one goes along, things look different. I see now that she did the best she could for me. Another time I sent her a little money I had, thinkin' she might need it, but she sent it back and said all she wanted was for me to come and see her. So I suppose I'll go sooner or later, now that I'm just like a millionaire and got all I want.

“There's a whole lot happened since I left there. There's a town sprung up right on the ranch I used to work on, and where I was beaten and abused. I'd be sorry to hear that, if the old man was alive, but somehow it does me good to know that the only person that was ever very kind to me when I was a boy don't need to worry any more over money, and I'm glad of it.”

They were back to where they were meeting scattered promenaders of the night crowd. Either in pairs, or laughing groups, they passed them, strangers all, living apart from those who traveled in tents and made their livelihood by their skill.

The girl's words came back to Beauty until, he, too, felt almost a man apart from all those who lived in that other world

Down in front of one of the shooting galleries, as they passed, they heard a commotion, and turned curiously to see the cause, only to discover Margovin blustering his way out of the place. The girl caught Dick's arm, much to the plainsman's surprise, and drew him hurriedly away. He heard a coarse shout in that unmistakable foreign accent following after them, like something evil from an evil mind.

“What was that?” the girl demanded, suddenly pausing; but the man at her side suddenly lost his attitude of comradeship, shut his jaws grimly, and hurried her along.

“Oh, nothin' much!” he replied; but in his mind Margovin's words were not forgotten, and his companion wondered, as they returned to the city, why he was so silent and preoccupied. He bade her good night as he assisted her up the steps of the sleeping coach, where all was silent and still, and she, with a whispered return, vanished through the open door with a wave of her hand that appeared white and childlike in the gloom of the overhanging eaves.

He walked slowly away in the direction of Number Fifty, and then paused irresolutely. That portion of the broad yards was silent. Off in the distance, the intermittent puffing of a switch engine told that labor had not come to rest, and that the demands of traffic were being fulfilled, pausing neither for night nor the Sabbath. Away beyond, showing dimly under the moonlight, like a misty painting of an Oriental encampment, the tops of the tents loomed up against the purple background. Only the chattering of the laughing hyena, and the occasional rumble of a discontented lion told him that those animals of the South lands wandered restlessly, crying for freedom in the open fields. To the right of him, towering up against the sky line, tier on tier, were the dark shapes of the skyscrapers of this “city of the Angels,” where the show had paused. Back of him lay Pasadena, embowered in palms and orange trees, and he knew that still back of that slumbered the mountains for which, of a sudden, he yearned.

For a few minutes, his mind was filled with the artist's and poet's appreciation, inherited from some unknown ancestor, perhaps, unfostered and undeveloped, but refusing to die despite all the hardness of Beauty's rough and perilous past.

His memory, swept back over the vast, bleak spaces of his life, some of them filled with a profound misery by comparison with which his present surroundings seemed perfection; yet, somehow, he hungered spiritually for other places he had known, and was filled with a vague unrest. He was not quite certain that being a star performer in one of the biggest shows on earth was his ideal; but one thing he knew: That between him and the strong man there could be no friendship. For more than an hour, he wandered aimlessly up and down the beaten cinders of the yards, making a decision, and it led him to wait for Margovin to appear.

The strong man came, at last, looming huge and gigantic in the night, as he made his way toward one of the coaches. His strong hands were already on the polished rails, preparatory to mounting the steps, when he was arrested by a voice from behind, and turned.

The plainsman was standing but a short distance from him, having come unobserved around the end of the car.

“Margovin, or whatever your real name is,” drawled the quiet voice, “before you get up in that coach, I've got something to say to you.”

The Goliath released his hold on the rails, and turned with an air of surprise.

“Oh, it's the little what-you-call cow-puncher,” he said disdainfully, “and what does the little man want with me?”

Beauty refused to be angered by the tone of contempt or the strong man's attitude.

“What I want to say,” he said, “is this: When Miss Barber and I walked past you down there this evening, there on the beach, you know, you yelled something after us that I didn't exactly like; and, when I got to thinkin' it over, I made up my mind that I'd got a few remarks to make to you before I could go to sleep.”

He took four or five steps, covering the intervening space, and suddenly looked up at the giant with a face that appeared very determined in the light, and out of which glared two level, unflinching eyes that to the Austrian seemed baleful.

The big man, fearless as he was, and a bully by instinct, drew back, and clenched his fists, as if anticipating an attack.

“No need to do that,” said Beauty, in the same quiet, restrained drawl, “because I'm not goin' to fight you for two reasons: One is that fightin' with fists would give me no chance, and the second is that it is not my way. Margovin, when I fight a man, one of us dies. The thing I wanted to say to you was this: That the very next time that you ever yell anything at me when I'm out on the street, or on the beach, either alone or with any woman, you want to begin to make a will and order your coffin. You understand me, don't you? That goes!”

Before the astonished Austrian could grasp the full meaning of this or sputter a reply, the frontiersman had turned on his heels, walked around the end of the sleeping car, and vanished.

Margovin hesitated for an instant, then started as if to run after him; but something in the swing of the shoulders and an air of preparedness in that moving shape checked him. He mounted the car steps with a derisive oath, and when Beauty looked back from the side of Number Fifty, the strong man had disappeared.

For a moment the plainsman stood in a thoughtful pose, and was preparing to ascend when he sighted another figure hastening along between the rails. Something unusual in the man's gait made him pause. The oncomer advanced at a more rapid gait, and now Beauty identified him as Jim Paxton, staggering a trifle, as if under the influence of liquor, and sustained an alternating moment of disgust, surprise, and anger that changed to pity.

“Never thought it of Jimmy!” he said to himself, and started to meet his assistant.

It was not until Beauty was almost against him that the clown recognized his friend, and said brokenly: “Jones! Beauty! Help me!”

There was nothing of intoxication in the voice, and Beauty hastened to Paxton's side, then started back in surprise. The face that was lifted toward his was smeared with blood, and the nose was pitifully battered and swollen. The little man threw a hand up on the cowboy's arm, as if to prevent himself from falling.

“For—for the Lord's sake! Who did that?” Beauty shouted, his voice hoarse with impetuous anger. “I'll get even with the man that did that, if you can't!”

Jim seemed to pull himself together, and tightened the hold on his friend's arm.

“Then,” he said quietly, “I'll not tell you. I'll not let you make a fool of yourself on my account. Help me to get a surgeon out to fix this nose up. It's broken.”

The necessity for attending to one in pain calmed the Westerner more than any command to keep the peace, and he almost carried the smaller man back out across the rails that lay glistening beneath them, and, following the directions of a patrolman, found a surgeon's house, and aroused him.

Something in the smaller man's silence and patience, some refinement in the battered face and grave eyes, appealed to the surgeon as he ministerd to his patient.

“Who did this?” he asked. “Who are you, anyway?”

“A clown! Just that, doctor,” was all the reply that Jim made; and Beauty, who had been straining forward in the hope of learning the particulars of the injury, drew back, disappointed.

On their return to the cars, Beauty insisted on knowing the particulars of the assault; but Paxton refused to talk.

“Maybe I'll tell you, some time,” he said. '“And maybe I shan't.”

And Beauty had to be content with that, but went to sleep wondering who could have been so heartless as to strike such a kindly, retiring, unobtrusive man as his friend.

There were still certain points of circus business with which Beauty was not familiar, and with one of these he was to come into conflict on the day after Jimmy's injury. Early in the morning, he visited the clown, whose bandaged face was now discolored, swollen, and painful, and was certain that for at least a day or two the little man would be unable to work, despite the concealment afforded by his make-up. Paxton was still reticent, refusing any information whatever as to the assault, or his assailant.

Beauty knew enough of the conduct of a circus, however, to understand the necessity of informing the ringmaster of the clown's plight, and of notifying him that the most startling feature of the whip act would have to be cut out.

“What is it?” demanded the. ringmaster. “A case of being drunk and falling down? Or did he just naturally go out looking for trouble and find it?”

Beauty attempted to shield his friend, but had no information to give, and this truth was so speedily wormed from him that his effort to protect his friend was a failure. All he could say was: “I have told you all I know about it,” and then turn away, lest he make matters worse by saying either too much or too little.

He had barely passed out when the blondined Cora appeared before the ringmaster, and, with an apparent attempt to be of service, volunteered to take the clown's part in holding the cigar.

“It would make a bigger hit, anyway,” she asserted, “to have a good-looking woman do that stunt, and I told Beauty Jones so one time; but he couldn't see it because he wanted that drunken little reprobate, Paxton, to work with him.”

“What's that?” demanded the voice of the ringmaster. “Drunken reprobate, you say! Does he drink?”

“Sure he does!” she answered brazenly. “They all do.”

With a grunt of anger, the ringmaster turned on his heel. “I'll teach him something,” he growled, “that'll sober him for a while. I'll send him to the wagon. A fine of a week's salary would do that guy some good. Yes, you go on if you don't mind, and take on that part of the act. We can't lose that. I'll tell Jones to expect you.”

Cora disappeared with a highly satisfied smile, but the ringmaster failed to notify Beauty of the substitution, with the result that when the cowboy appeared in the ring to do his turn he was surprised to find the sprightly aërialist present with what was intended to be a very winning smirk, and doing her best to gain some recognition from the spectators.

For the first time since he had known her, Beauty had a friendly feeling toward the gymnast, and smiled in return, whereupon she doubled her efforts. So accustomed was he by this time to the crowd and its clamor he had no fear of an accident, and did his famous lash trick without accident or tremor, pausing only to reassure her in words so lowly uttered that the sound could not reach the spectators.

“Don't 'be afraid,” he said quietly, “because I'll be mighty careful. Why, I'd rather cut my right hand off than mark you after your bein' so kind to poor old Jim and takin' his place!”

The act went off without a failure, although, much to the aërialist's disappointment, the applause was weak and scattered compared with that usually accorded the performance when the little clown was present. It was beyond her intellect to understand that there is a vast incongruity between the smoking of a big, long, black cigar by a woman clad in silk tights, and a clown made up with special reference to the act.

Beauty's gratitude, always overflowing and exaggerating trivial kindnesses, led him to seek his substituted assistant immediately after the performance to thank her. He found her in the trapping room, and regarded it merely as her way when she succeeded in getting him to a corner where, with his back toward the other waiting performers, she looked up at him, and gave the greeting the appearance of an extremely confidential tête-à-tête.

Margovin was behind them, scowling blackly at the cowboy's back, and still brooding over the speech of the night before. A group of acrobats were over on the other side watching them curiously, and at this very inauspicious moment Marie came past the mistress of the wardrobe, prepared for her turn, Margovin, as if by accident, got in her way, and muttered in a hoarse rumble: “What do you think of that? This cowboy man is what you. call the 'lady-killer,' is it not? But all the time it's different women. Pouf! Well, others shall know of the kind they are.”

The astute Cora Butts, discovering that the little equestrienne was looking in her direction with a strangely troubled face, suddenly put her arm up on Beauty's shoulder, and, to his utter astonishment, elevated herself on her tiptoes and gave him a playful peck on the cheek with her lips.

The little Marie did not wait long enough to see the plainsman suddenly whirl round with a look of surprise and annoyance, and back away from the aërialist as if she were poison; nor did she hear the remark that suddenly subdued the effervescent Cora.

“You cut that out! None of that stuff goes with me! I'm thankful to you for helpin' out poor Jimmy Paxton; but if you want to kiss anybody, you'd better hunt round for your daddy, or your sweetheart!”

Rebuffed and angered, the gymnast stepped back from him.

“Better men than you,” she said, “would have been glad to have had me done that!”

“Well, go to them, then!” said Beauty, “because, you see, I don't like it, and they do!”

He was suddenly aware that he had been rude to one who had done him a favor, and so attempted to palliate his offense with a good-natured grin; but he gave her no further opportunity for speech, and sauntered carelessly away and out toward the horse tent, as was his custom, to make certain that Baldy had been properly cared for.

The hour of relaxation between the afternoon and evening performances dealt him a strange blow, for, seek as he might, he could not find the dark-eyed girl for whom he had conceived such a warm liking. He utilized the time, therefore, by visiting his friend Jimmy, and sympathizing with him over his injury; but when he fold the little clown of the kindliness of the aërialist, the latter merely smiled.

At the evening performance, Beauty waited in the entrance to watch Mademoiselle Zoe in her act, and to meet her, as usual, coming out; for this had become one of his never-failing delights, and he was troubled and surprised when, instead of speaking to him gayly as was her wont, she merely nodded with a set face and hurried past him. Hurt and distressed, he watched her as she passed through to the trapping room and disappeared. He turned to discover the strong man grinning at him malevolently, and his sentiments changed to anger. He started toward the latter impetuously, but was interrupted by another friend of his—an acrobat—who stopped him with a whisper.

“Did you hear the news?” the acrobat asked, scarcely above a whisper. “Old man Barber's gone off on a bust again! Ain't it a cussed shame what that poor little girl has to put up with!”

Beauty stopped suddenly, and all of his anger melted into sympathy.

“When did it begin?” he asked.

“Oh, two or three days ago, I think,” answered the acrobat. “Old Barber has to have them about so often, and when he goes on a toot, he's about as rotten a subject as anybody ever saw. If it was not for the girl, the boss would have left him in jail a dozen times. Why, back in Chicago, he had the snakes; but the only way they could keep Marie—that's Mademoiselle Zoe, you understand—from leaving the show was to take the old man along. Why she sticks up, for him the way she does I don't know. No other woman in this world would stand for it! He ought to be in a drunkard's home,” he concluded, with the true acrobat's contempt for any man in the business who drank.

A call abruptly terminated the interview, and the acrobat hastily ran toward the curtains to enter with his fellows, while Beauty was left alone.

“Poor little girl! Poor little girl!” he said to himself.. “No wonder she acted that way! I wonder if I could do anything to help her? No, I reckon she don't want a big, awkward, homely slob like me stickin' his nose into her affairs in anything like this; but, Lord Almighty! How I wish I could help her!”

Rather aimlessly, he wandered outside. The spread of the canvas was rapidly disappearing, with that marvelous system which characterizes such a vast moving caravan. Gasoline flares here and there, where the rays of the arc lamp did not reach, showed the roustabouts and canvas men hastily dismantling the traveling city. Trodden grass and gaping holes exposed the work of demolition. Within a few hours, Bigger's Biggest would have vanished as mysteriously as it came, and snorting locomotives would be pulling it away to the next scene of ephemeral existence. The clank of chains, the trundling of wheels, and the clink of harness resounded through the air.

Out in the distance, the elephants, with their heavy head pads, were being led away by the mahouts toward the tracks on which stood the waiting cars. Already Beauty could see one of them bunting the chariot of the ten-thousand-dollar beauty forward, while, from the opposite side, the shouts of a driver urged horses to their work. Everything was being utilized. Everything to the uninitiated appeared an aimless rush; but those familiar with the big show knew that every man and every animal was doing exactly what he had done throughout the season. Order and haste, traveling like twins, worked everywhere.

For a few minutes, Beauty idly watched them and thought of Baldy, by this time safely ensconced in his little stall in a car, an object of special attention inasmuch as his master had most liberally tipped one of the stablemen to give him extra care.

It was the acrobat who interrupted Beauty's reverie and joined him, now appearing a stocky man in a badly fitted suit of clothes, and wearing a cheap derby hat.

“Well,” he said cheerily, “we're jumpin' back home ag'in, aren't we? Goin' through Texas now.”

“Yes,” answered Beauty absently, “home for you fellers, I suppose. Texas wouldn't be exactly home for me.”

His attitude was so absent-minded and self-centered that the athlete sought a new topic of conversation.

“Too bad about Jim Paxton, ain't it?” continued the acrobat. “The ringmaster sure did soak him good. A whole week's salary's a pretty big fine!”

“Fine? A whole week's salary? What do you mean?” demanded Beauty, suddenly interested. “I don't quite get you!”

“Why, they fined him a week's salary on account of that row he got into for not showing up. You know—in your act. What happened to him?”

Beauty stood gaping with surprise, his wide mouth open, and frowning.

“Why, I didn't know they ever did such things!” he said.

“Sure they do; they always fine us if we're not on time, and when you don't show up at all you get it in the neck good and plenty.”

It was the custom of the manager on leaving one stand for another to have a midnight supper served on board the car, and Beauty, knowing this habit, left the acrobat and indignantly made his way back to Number Fifty, whose steps he climbed without a pause. Apparently, the big man was in high good humor, for Bigger's Biggest had been doing an exceptionally profitable business throughout the entire route, having come in contact with prosperous people who seemed eager to spend their money.

“Well, Jones,” he said, looking over his plate with humorous eyes, “what in the deuce is the matter? Big top fallen down, or has somebody picked your pockets again?”

“It's about Jim,” said the cowboy gloomily. “Jim Paxton. Somebody beat him up the night before last—caved his face in, and you can't guess what the ringmaster's done. Went to work and fined Jim a whole week's salary! What do you think of that?”

The big man laid his knife and fork beside his plate, and lost his air of good humor.

“Well?” he asked.

“Why, don't you see,” patiently explained Beauty, “they're goin' to make poor little Jimmy pay for somethin' that wasn't his fault.”

“How do you know it wasn't?” snapped the big man. “They're always fighting, and I want to say this: That if it had been me, I'd have fined him a month's wages!”

He banged his fist on the table in front of him. “I'll put a stop to all this rowing if I have to can every man who gets in a mix-up. We hadn't been out a week before they began it, and now after a couple of months it seems they've begun again. It's got to stop!” As the cowboy said nothing, he added: “Here is this Paxton that you got into the best job he's ever had in his life, and whose pay you got me to boost from thirty a month to thirty a week, who is the first one to go out and raise the devil!”

Beauty did not move, and still stood just inside the door with a dogged air of patience.

“I'm right sorry about that,” he said. “It's too bad the way men act; but Jim don't drink, and he's too measly small to fight, so I think we'd better cancel that fine.”

For an instant the manager of the show looked at him coldly, aghast at the mere thought of any one attempting to override his will.

“Look here, Jones,” he said icily. “Don't you think you've interfered about enough in my business?”

Most of the big man's employees would have shivered at that tone, and promptly abandoned any desire for further argument; but this strange man from the West was of a different type than those others, and was one of those who decline to accept any one as master.

For the first time since that day he had come aboard the car, a delightfully frank and independent character, unusually patient and good-humored, there flashed in his look something that the manager of Bigger's Biggest had not seen. There was a perceptible stiffening of his neck, a little higher lift to his chin, and the gray-blue eyes suddenly became cold and determined. He stepped forward until he rested his knuckles on the table in front of the manager, put his hat on his head, and said, in a quiet but incisive tone: “Mister, you've been right good to me. I've got no kick comin', and I like you first rate; but this ain't a case for any palaver. I'd stick to you till hell froze over, but I'll be hanged if we ain't come to a turn in the trail where I'm either goin' to have my way, or else take my little grip in one hand, and my horse Baldy in the other, and ride away from the shebang.”

There was a tense silence while the manager studied this peculiar type of man leaning toward him, only to be convinced that the threat would be kept, and that the star performer of Bigger's Biggest, the man for whom he had conceived a warm liking, would keep his word.

“But your contract,” he protested.

“Forget it!” was the quick response. “There's neither contracts nor money can hold me when it comes to makin' good for a friend.”

And the manager believed that, too.

The steward of the car offered him relief by suddenly opening the door, and he seized this occasion as a means of letting himself gracefully out of his predicament.

“Go out,” he said, “at once, and find the ringmaster and bring him here right away.”

“He's outside here now, sir, waiting to give you his reports,” replied the steward.

“Then bring him in!” growled the manager, and when the ringmaster appeared, he looked up at him and said abruptly: “Do you know anything about this Paxton business?”

“Paxton, the clown, working in the Number Eight act? Yes. I fined him a week for getting drunk and failing to show up.”

“That's a lie!” roared Beauty, suddenly swinging round on the astonished man, who drew back and said: “Well, I was told that he got drunk.”

“Who told you that?” demanded the frontiersman, doubling his fists as if to force the truth from the ringmaster.

“Yes, who told you that he was drunk?” asked the manager, still groping for a way to accede to Beauty's request without lowering his own authority.

“Cora Butts, the aërialist, who works in Number Eleven turn,” was the reply, and Beauty, as if some one had slapped him in the face, took a step or two backward, started to speak, shut his lips, then faced the manager, who was watching him.

“Boss,” he said, hoarse with repression and earnestness, “I can't call a woman a liar; but I can say this: She was mighty badly mistaken. Why, little Jim never takes a drink! I know that. I'd swear to it! I didn't see him before he got smashed up, but the surgeon that fixed him up told me himself that there was no liquor on Jim. It's true, of course, that Jim wouldn't tell me how it happened, so I don't know; but, boss, can't you fix it up so's his feelin's won't be hurt, by just charging this fine to me? I won't let Jim know nothin' about it. You see, he wouldn't let me give him the money if he knew that I was doin' this; but that thirty a week means an awful lot to the poor little cuss, because he's been havin' a mighty hard row of it, I reckon, and the boost of pay just means everything in the world to him. Put it on me, can't you?”

The manager of Bigger's Biggest looked at the cowboy with a queer expression in his eyes, and said to the ringmaster: “Just tell the wagon to cut that fine out. I'll attend to this thing myself. Now go! You can give me your reports to-morrow morning.”

Beauty watched until the door closed, then reached in his pocket and took out a greasy, worn wallet, from which he extracted three ten-dollar bills, and laid them on the table. But the manager of Bigger's Biggest shoved them back at him, and growled: “You put them back in your pocket. Let's forget all about it.” And then almost aimlessly blurted out: “Jones, you're just about as near impossible as any man I ever had work for me, but, by the Lord Harry! I want to say this: That I wish I could get together a hundred like you, because, if you are nothing else, you're a good, true friend! And I want to keep you as such.”

Chapter VI.

At the next stand of the show, Beauty appeared in the trapping room before he was due for a call, and stood as if waiting for some one, his face grave and unsmiling. Cora, the aërialist, came at last from the woman's dressing tent, and walked rapidly toward him, with an air of possession, but lost her smile as she approached and discerned his looks.

“I've been waitin' for you,” said Beauty quietly. “And I hate to say what I've got to, but I must. I've just left the ringmaster and told him that you weren't goin' to do anything with me, now or never. I didn't tell him why. Just left him thinkin' you was tired of it, and that I couldn't get you to go on.”

“What do you mean by that?” she asked, growing red and white with anger, and seeing her hopes of becoming a partner in a big act vanish so surely.

“I had sort of hoped that you wouldn't ask,” replied Beauty patiently, “because I thought you ought to know. But you it was that got that poor, harmless little Jimmy, that never said an unkind thing about any one in his life nor ever did an unkind thing, so far as I know or suspect, fined a week's salary because you said he was drunk.”

Out of the dressing tent, and looking straight at them, the aërialist saw Marie, looking plaintive and dejected, and the sight of the girl angered Cora beyond caution.

“Well,” she asked, in a harsh tone, “what of that?”

“Just this,” came the candid reply, “no one, man or woman, could ever work with me who—well, who handles the truth that carelessly. I didn't want to have to tell you that, either, but you've made me, and——”

The aërialist saw that the little equestrienne had come closer and was staring at them in astonishment, and, beside herself, swept into a fury of words.

“So you've decided that I ain't good enough for you, eh?” she screamed. “You greasy cow-puncher, who never knew what a square meal or a dollar was in your life till you blundered into the business by luck! Can't work with you, eh? Why, you big farmer! You boob! Both you and your little pet Paxton can go to the devil for all I care!”

“Thats kind of you, anyhow,” drawled Beauty, with a grin.

Speechless with rage, she made one more attempt to speak and failed, then turned and ran back to the dressing room, almost brushing Marie Barber out of her way; but Jim had no opportunity of speaking to the latter, for when she saw him approaching, she, too, hurried away, leaving him standing there, deserted and disconsolate.

“It's a mighty funny old world,” said Beauty to himself. “And, somehow or another, I never did understand women.”

For the first time he began to fear that he had done something to anger the girl who had walked so confidently with him on the beach, and he was perturbed and heartsore, remembering no fault of his own that could have caused a breach. The new life was losing its charm, and he felt decidedly alone as he met the groom leading Baldy, and stood stroking the faithful muzzle that was held out toward him for a caress.

“Old man,” he whispered, “maybe it's all a mistake. You and me don't seem to belong here, nohow. We're sort of lonesome for each other and the days when we was together all the time, back there on the range, or up in the hills where there wasn't much of anything to bother us at all, and nobody dared treat us mean, or lie about us or our friends. We're in a mean little world, with a corral of canvas all around us, and we don't want to stick around too long, or we'll never get out.”

He entered the ring, wondering how the act would go without any one to assist him, and was well into it when he saw, made up so that the bandage appeared a part of his mask, a small man with a crutch, and bandages around a leg, an arm, his head, and his face, and pulled Baldy to a stop, only to discover that some one had conveyed the news to Jimmy, the faithful, who had risen to the necessity, and was there to do his best.

Beauty gave a loud shout of recognition, heedless of who might hear, and outdid all previous efforts at trick riding and roping, feeling that such fidelity merited a reward; but immediately after the performance he insisted on Paxton's return to bed, and good-naturedly scolded him for coming at all.

“Who told you?” he asked, referring to news having been sent the clown that the act was likely to fall somewhat flat without an assistant.

“Marie—little Marie sent me word,” mumbled the clown, and Beauty felt a great glow of gratitude.

“By Jingoes! I might have known it!” enthused the plainsman, and straightway hurried off to thank her; but she was nowhere to be found, and another stand passed before Beauty could speak to her. And then it was under sorrowful circumstances.

Word passed around the moving city that one of its inhabitants would not be seen again, and it was in an old border town, where Mexican adobes strove to hold their own against encroachments of modern buildings, that it was told throughout the cars that old Dick Barber was dead. It had whipped him, at last, as it whips all those who dare fight it, the unbeaten king—Liquor. It had ruined him as a performer, and robbed him of finer sense, and driven him to live from the earnings of his daughter, and hurried him out in a delirium that his wasted frame could not resist.

Up on the knoll where the spare grass grew and fought for existence, and where many were buried and forgotten, they buried him, with the strange crowd of circus men, and the gaping crowd of townsmen standing around; the latter in their frontier garb and the former in their clothes that bulged where overdeveloped muscles displayed themselves, an odd intermingling of the wanderers of the civilized parts of the world, and the wanderers of the wide and uninhabited frontiers. Almost without volition of his own, Beauty Jones found himself standing by Marie's side, with hat doffed, and yearning to comfort her. It was his friend, the manager of Bigger's Biggest, who stood on the opposite side, escorted her back to the carriage, the only one available, climbed in beside her, and with her rode down the hill.

The great show moved on that night, but it was the plainsman who tapped on a car window sill before the train started, drew himself up with his sinewy hands, and whispered: “Marie! Marie! Little girl! Don't feel alone. It's tough luck, but there's lots of us here, all around you, that are mighty sorry. And there's some of us, Marie, that'd give their lives for you—to make you happy, and make you feel that what has to happen has got to go through. I wish I could help you. It's me. Me, Beauty Jones, hangin' here to the window sill, and tellin' you not to cry!”

A white hand crept from the shadow and rested on his maimed knuckles, and, as his strength gave way and he dropped back to the ground, something hot dropped on the other hand, and a voice murmured: “Oh, Beauty, Beauty! I can't thank you—I am—I am——”

And that was all; but as he walked away the cowboy kissed again and again the spot where that single tear had fallen, and knew, as if by a flash of understanding that had come in a blaze, that he loved her, and wanted to shield her from all roughness and all harm.

A sense of delicacy kept him from intruding during the next few days, and Bigger's Biggest had entered Texas, playing the single dates. Jim Paxton was back in the act, plaintive as ever, melancholy, scarred, and joyfully occupying himself with his microscope and ever-increasing entomological collection. Jim avoided Margovin, and quietly bore the sneers and side remarks of Cora Butts, whom he did not permit to annoy him. It was on the day of his greatest triumph that he suffered other tortures than those anticipated.

Biggers had come to a place where, once, in his wandering career, Beauty had been at home, and all the forenoon and before the afternoon performance he had met old friends and acquaintances. Williams, understanding, had slipped him a handful of passes for the emergency, which Beauty passed out with profligate generosity, well knowing what a dollar meant to those men of the ranges between round-ups.

An unexpected feature nearly disrupted Bigger's that afternoon, when, at the conclusion of the plainsman's act, there was a wild salvo of guns discharged in the air, and from the reserved seats with their uncomfortable, red-bound backs, full two score men rushed down, broke into the ring, and with a grand flourish presented to their erstwhile comrade a gorgeously cut Mexican saddle, silver bound, engraved, carved, and a bridle and set of spurs to match. Their spokesman's speech lacked nothing in vigor, as he faced the crowded benches.

“Ladies and gents,” he said, “this here Beauty Jones, which ain't so much for lookin's, after all, sort of belongs to us. You-all has seen some ridin' and ropin' here to-day, and they ain't nobody can hold a candle to him; but you ain't seen nothing about that we-all knows—and that is that he's a game buck, clean through and through, the kind that never goes back on his word nor his friends. He is the sort that——” He floundered in his speech that had been most carefully prepared in the back end of Joe Brewster's saloon, and abruptly ended with: “Well, he's a regular hell tooter, Beauty is!”

And owing to the interruption, Bigger's performance was just twenty minutes behind schedule that afternoon, while Beauty grinned and held the saddle, excited performers broke rules and crowded out to a vantage point, and Williams shouted himself hoarse and said to the gratified manager: “Biggest press stuff yet! He's a find! I'll send telegrams ahead that the show was disrupted by cowboy demonstration acknowledging Beauty king of the lariat. Special press stuff East. Newspapers quoting speech. Prophet that gets honor in his own country and busts all rules! Great!”

As Beauty bowed himself out, and his friends resumed their seats, he saw that Marie had reappeared to resume her turn in the performance, and was glad. Now she would forget.

The evening performance passed less riotously, although many of his friends with whom Beauty had passed the afternoon interim were still there, and he had bidden them all good-by and turned toward Number Fifty when he found Jim waiting for him.

“Come take a little stroll,” the clown said, “before you tumble in. Got something to tell you.”

And Beauty, wondering, walked with him to the shadow of an outlying adobe, against which they leaned.

“It's about that big brute Margovin,” said the little man quietly. “And I wouldn't tell you about it, only that it worries me a little. He's been after Marie.”

Beauty started angrily, and said: “Been botherin' her, has he? I'm mighty sorry to hear that! What did he do?”

“This afternoon,” replied Paxton gloomily, “I came back from the fields out there, and, as you know, it had been pretty hot; so I sat down in the shade of an old ruin—a big adobe, it was—that had fallen and left a patio that was full of wild flowers and stuff that was rather promising. Pretty soon I heard some one walking toward me; but before the person turned the corner he stopped. I wasn't quite certain it might not be a greaser snooping round to steal something, so stood up quietly and looked through a crack in the wall. It was the Austrian, and I surmised at once he was waiting for some one.

“Before I could get away or let him know I was there, she came along—Marie, I mean—and she was carrying two or three pieces of beadwork that she had evidently bought at one of the curio stores. She didn't see Margovin until she was almost in front of him, and started to pass, after saying 'Good day; interesting town, isn't it?'

“The Austrian stopped her by reaching over and taking some of the beaded purchases she had made, pretended to be interested in them for a few minutes, and then the big, ignorant chump had the nerve to refer to Dick Barber's death; something that nobody with any decency would have done, considering that we buried poor Dick less than a week ago.

“He told her that she had nobody to team with, and said that she had better hook up with him. I think that at first Marie was merely startled, because she flushed up a little bit, and then stepped back a little way in the shade, and said: 'What do you mean by that? I don't believe I understand you.'

“I couldn't quite get what Margovin mumbled; but all of a sudden she backed away from him, and started to leave.

“'What I meant,' he said hurriedly, 'was that we should be married. You have no one now, neither have I. We are in the same business, Miss Barber, and you need a manager.'

“And then he swelled that big chest of his out, and said to her: 'Who is there like the great Margovin? Ah, miss, I'm the strongest man in the world, me; I break chains to pieces. I throw cannon balls that weigh two hundred pounds. Pouf! Just like that! It would be very good for the little Mademoiselle Zoe to be able to marry so great and strong a man as Margovin!'

“It tickled her so that she fairly bent over and laughed, and it took Margovin a full half minute to comprehend that she didn't quite set such a valuation on him as he placed on himself. You know what he is. Animals of that kind have nothing but strength and ill temper. 'You laugh at me, miss,' he said, trying to appear dignified; but I could see by his very back that he was bristling with anger, and I could also see by her face that, realizing the situation had become ugly, she developed some temper of her own.

“'Certainly, I do!' she said to him. 'Why not? What in the world makes you think I'd want to marry you? Who ever put it into your head that I needed a manager? Don't you think I've been managed about long enough, and had every dollar I earned squandered over bars?”

“And then she tried to be friendly with him, because I suppose she didn't want this big stiff bothering her with mean tricks, and held out her hand toward him, saying: 'Oh, Margovin! You don't understand at all how funny you are! There is one very great reason why I would never marry you, and that is that I don't love you. That should be sufficient. Don't be angry! Let's be friends.'

“I was sorry that she went that far, but I was something more than sorry—in fact, I was angry—when he refused to take her hand, and turned himself loose. He shook one of his big fingers under her nose, and in English that was pretty badly spattered, and broken, accused her of loving some one else who had cut him out. Had the nerve to assert that he could have married her if some one else hadn't come between them, and then promised to get hold of this some one else at the very first opportunity, and tear him limb from limb until there wouldn't be enough of him left to bury.

“She drew back from him, but kept her temper admirably, still hoping, I suppose, to avoid his enmity; but when he had gone this far she asked: 'Who do you mean?' and he yelled a foul name, coupled with yours.

“I wish you could have seen her! Why, say! That little woman wouldn't be afraid of the devil! She went right up in the air. She crowded up toward that big Austrian, and her eyes were blazing. She dropped the beaded bags on the ground, and, clenching both hands, held them at her sides, as if she was about to strike him. Foot by foot, she just backed him up against the wall on the other side of which I stood.

“'What of it?' she said. 'Beauty Jones is worth an army of such as you. You keep your ugly tongue away from him, because, if you don't, I'll tell him, and you can be sure of one thing, that if ever I do, all your big muscle and your bullying won't be worth that!' She snapped her fingers under his nose.

“He started in on some more blasphemy, and swore by high heaven he'd get her yet.

“'Marry you—you great, cowardly beast!' she said. And then she turned loose; and never in my life have I heard a man ripped and torn to pieces by a woman as she did him. By Jove! It was well done!

“I was afraid he would lay hands on her; so I stooped down and tore one of those big adobe bricks from the ruins at my feet, and climbed up on top of the wall with the intention of smashing his head in. I had an idea that if I could hit him right, I could kill him at the first smash; but when I got to the top she was going down the street, and he had got so far away that I couldn't reach him. He was pouring epithets and abuse on her, and that's why I decided to tell you about it; because he swore that he would get even with her if he had to do something to her while she was in the ring. 'It's easy enough,' he shouted after her. 'Just a little slip in that act of yours, and it'll be all up with you. You call me a beast and say I have no brains. I'll get you!'

“Right up by the corner where she turned out of sight she stopped long enough to look around for an instant and frown at him, and from where I was, in that bright sunlight, I could get every line of her face. It may have been imagination, but it seemed to me that in spite of her scorn of this big hulking animal, mere beast that he is, she was afraid of him. I made up my mind that you ought to know about it, so the pair of us could keep an eye on him. What do you think about it?”

He looked up at the frontiersman, who was leaning against the wall as rigid and motionless as if stricken to bronze; but he did not know that the latter had assumed an attitude which men who had known him longer would have dreaded as portending something far more deadly than the swift, venomous stroke of the rattlesnake.

For a moment, the little man was disappointed, inasmuch as he had apprehended an outburst of anger, and the possibility of having to check the younger man's impetuosity. Instead of a picture of a flaming indignation, he saw but a face that appeared suddenly to have become graven into immobility, with close-shut lips, an inert attitude, and an air of waiting. It was not until the younger man slowly turned his eyes upon him that he drew back involuntarily. There in the moonlit night, so luminous and brilliant that the shadows of the old adobe walls were defined as if with an artist's pencil, he read for the first time the soul of Beauty Jones. The eyes betrayed an inflexible determination of which there was no mistaking.

“Jones! You mustn't kill him!” almost pleaded the clown, more grotesque, if possible, as he stood there, small and insignificant, than in the motley garb which created shouts of laughter around the ring.

“Kill him? Oh, you needn't worry about that!” was the other man's reply, but in a voice so quiet and self-contained that it deceived even his friend. “No,” he added grimly, “there won't be any trouble, Jim, only—only—we'll watch, you and me will. You did quite right to come and tell me about all this. We'll—we'll not do anything, will we, Jim? Only—only we'll just keep an eye on Margovin, won't we?”

And to the little man's surprise, he suddenly burst into a loud, harsh laugh that resounded hollowly from the deserted street in which they stood, and slapped him on the back. “You just quit thinkin' about it now,” he said. “I'll 'tend to Margovin. I'll just watch.” He turned on his heels and walked rapidly toward the waiting cars that appeared as immovable as if planted there in the moonlight, and then paused to call over his shoulder: “We'll go to bed now. Been a big day, hasn't it? Good night.”

Chapter VII.

In the days that followed the memorable conversation in the Texas border town, Paxton could discover no change in his friend, save that he and Marie appeared to find more opportunities of being together, and that seldom did she enter for her turn when the plainsman was not to be seen somewhere in the proximity. Jim decided that the Austrian's threats had been merely the result of temper and a boastful mind, so gradually lost anxiety as the big show by steady stages progressed eastward. It may have been, too, that Beauty's vigilance relaxed, or that he underestimated the strong man's animosity. For himself, he cared not at all, his intrepid spirit and career of vicissitude having made him impervious to fear of any man who did not act first and do his talking afterward. It was the West and the East confronting each other, and neither comprehending the other.

A strange bashfulness had overcome the cowboy, as the show swung eastward like a pendulum returning over its arc, and he bore in mind the rebuff the girl had given that other suitor, and dreaded lest he, too, make a blunder. His discernment was blunted by love. He did not in the least presume to believe that Marie Barber had come to lean upon him for protection. He did not know that she was happier than she had ever been, in all her sordid life, passed in sordid, fictitious surroundings intended to englamour and deceive a crowd, and that, with her harsh foster father's death, all obligations, save to herself, had ceased.

Wise in the life of those who dwelt in canvasdom, she was ignorant as a babe of all who lived outside. Vaguely she knew that they did something, and that by some mysterious means they accumulated enough to buy tickets for a show; for what reason she could not understand. Why any one should be so foolish as to part with money, merely to sit on a hard bench and see a few trained persons do their stunts, evening and afternoon, seemed quite incomprehensible.

Old Dick Barber, unfortunate victim to appetite, and yet wise, had done more for her than she then appreciated, for he had insisted on her studying at all odd times, and when his own limit had been reached had employed a broken-down school-teacher to trail along with the show to carry her farther.

After that unfortunate's departure, her developing, groping mind had traveled ahead irresistibly, until, had she but known it, she was erudite in many lines, though deficient in others. Thus books had told her something of the lives of those who dwelt outside, and there had been awakened in her some sense of longing for that other existence of which she read. Childhood had passed, and judgment had come with its cold reasoning and truth, to tell her that from the canvased fields to the hearthstone where woman is happiest was a far cry.

Neither Beauty nor the faithful little clown knew it, but twice on that Eastern journey the Austrian threatened her, and always he terrified her with his malevolent attitude. It was in Philadelphia that he seized an occasion when she was alone to say to her: “The time is near, Miss Lady, when you come to the end! Just one leetle slip! Just one! And—there you are! Maybe in the ring—flat-smashed! Then the hospeetals, and the herr doctors, and—ah! Such flowers Margovin shall send! But they will on a coffin be!”

It was beginning to wear on her nerves, this incessant suggestion, and the little equestrienne was glad that she did not have to ride that night, and that Bigger's Biggest would make its next stand at Madison Square Garden, the acme of all places in America for a performance, rivaled only by the great Coliseum in Chicago.

For weeks the people of the show had been quietly discussing this stand as an event. Williams had disappeared, and gone ahead to make his arrangements. The famous Kiralfy was working up a spectacle where hundreds and hundreds of women would form a grand ballet. Biggers had prospered, and the Old Man had “turned things loose” to make this New York production the most notable that had ever been known in the circus world. Money was being poured out to the press like water, and the billboards of the great American entrepôt were to scream the attraction, while electric signs were to blink a message into the night.

The tired performers, however, knew but one thing: That they were to have an opportunity of seeing old sights, and a few weeks of comparatively easy life, without parades, and domiciled in places they regarded as homelike. There would be dressing rooms worth while that beat tents in many ways. Then would come a swift Westward jump, for Biggger's Biggest, daring in its prosperity, had chosen to invade the Orient and work thence down to Australia. It would turn northward after passing Chicago, and strike those cities of the northern boundary line of the United States, so frequently overlooked by the great shows, until again it arrived at the Pacific coast, where it would find transportation. But all of that was far in the future, as these heedless children of Bigger's world regarded it, living as they did from day to day. There would be no winter quarters for this season, but fifty-two weeks of steady salary in one straight year. So they rejoiced.

Beauty had passed a wonderful day in that dreamland of New York of which he had always heard but had scarcely hoped to ever see, and particularly under such auspicious circumstances. He had wandered up Broadway, spent an hour or two at the Aquarium, looked “across at the Statue of Liberty, and held long conversations with the animals in the Bronx Zoo before it was time for him to seek Baldy and appear at the performance.

He was almost dazzled with the spectacular opening, and confided to Jimmy, the faithful Achates, that he had never dreamed there was anything so beautiful, nor that there were so many beautiful women in the world. Helen of Troy and Achilles paraded before his eyes, and, later, the wonderful Achilles, a famous stock actor, passed a low lying island on the stage at the east end of the garden from which mermaids recruited from the East Side of New York disported themselves, and chorused a waltz-time song. Greek galleys with papier-mâché oars swept over canvas waves in company with papier-mâché ships that worked on well-oiled wheels. The steam calliope that had been Beauty's delight gave way to a compressed-air organ that shrieked and tooted ragtime songs.

Down in the basement, long rows of animal cages were arrayed against the wall, and a herd of elephants swayed to and fro in a great apartment of their own. The freaks were in a room to themselves, so large that they were almost lost in the open spaces. The giraffes, particular pets of Beauty's, leaned across high network cages, and stared with inquisitive, sorrowful eyes at those who passed beneath them. The baby lions, quite American, having been born in Philadelphia, were, with their mother, accorded a special cage before which animal lovers might congregate and express their interest in subdued tones. There were palm trees clustered here and there, refreshment gardens, and concessionaires, and men who sold knickknacks to the unwary. In that mammoth building was housed not only Bigger's Biggest, but a horde of others, gathered from where Williams, the press agent, only knew.

There was but one thing to distress Beauty, which was that in the necessity for finding room for so many additional performers in the ballet, he and Jim were allotted to dress in a separate room with Margovin. Beauty received this order quietly, and said nothing, although Paxton assumed a grumpy silence, and wondered why the Fates should have been so unkind as to arrange such quarters.

Number Fifty car was lost somewhere over in that distant land called Hoboken. Beauty and Jim, as befitted star performers, found lodgings in a near-by hotel, and were to behave like gentlemen, dressing themselves after the performance and languidly strolling toward their abode.

Beauty saw the show from the front that day until it was his turn to take a part, and was duly impressed, and wondered what had become of the Old Man whose stature had suddenly increased to magnificent proportions. He almost envied those days when they had dwelt together in the Number Fifty, and could not understand why it was that he had not more fully appreciated the standing of one so great.

The new bills were out, the bills conceived by the press agent, in which Beauty was hailed as the Monarch of the Lariat, and the very speech made by his friends in that far distant town of Texas was quoted there in a crude handwriting, as if it had been written. He was described as the wonder of the age, and another picture had been added, in which there were so many sheets that his rope appeared to be hundreds of yards long, and the end of it was carelessly snapping the ashes from a half-burned cigarette, held by Jim's grotesque lips, while Baldy had become a fiery Arabian steed. Accustomed to fiction in paper as he was, Beauty was driven to laugh at this exaggeration. He wondered, as it came time for his turn, how the people of New York would accept it!

That afternoon passed in a daze. All Beauty knew was that he was given satisfactory applause. He tried to induce Marie, who for a reason he could not understand appeared distressed and nervous, to accompany him in an expedition farther up the island; but she declined on the ground that she had to meet a friend, and he had no further opportunity of seeing her until the evening performance. The turns had been shifted to meet the exigencies of the Garden and the additional performances, so that he was compelled to leave the wonderland of the front at an early hour and seek his dressing room.

Margovin had preceded them, for which both the cowboy and the clown were thankful. Beauty came up to the entranceway at the east end of the Garden just as Marie was starting her horses out for the hippodrome act, which preceded her single horse vaults; but was not in time to speak to her as she passed.

He was suddenly aware that Margovin was there ahead of him in a particularly ugly mood and waiting beside the curtains at a point where he could look out into the ring. Beauty heard the giant speak as the equestrienne rode by him, but could not understand the significance of his words, being ignorant of those other occasions when the Austrian had threatened her.

“You must be careful to-night, Miss Marie,” said the strong man meaningly, “for I have a dream had that to-night you finish.”

All that Beauty saw was that the girl looked back with a swift, terrified glance, almost dropped her reins, and appeared nervous as she swept into the arena driving the six white horses tandem in front of her. For a moment, he was so angry with the giant that he could scarcely contain himself; then, exercising the prerogative of a privileged character, he hastened out until he was at the border of the nearest ring.

The girl had made a complete turn of the huge circle, and was now bringing her horses back in a swift trot preparatory to that portion of her act in which she stood upon the lead horse, caught the one following, drew him abreast, did a spread, and caught the reins of the others as they came running beneath her. Beauty gave a gasp, for he saw that she was taking the most spectacular part of the performance at the extreme east end of the garden and was probably excited, otherwise she would have waited until well up the side and in front of the stalls before doing this piece of work. He had no time to think of more; for at that very instant a panorama of horror flashed before his eyes, incredibly swift, entirely unexpected, and with many participating characters.

The white horses, shining like battle chargers, and highly strung, sensed the nervousness of the master hand, and broke into an excited gallop, at which critical moment the questrienne turned her head with a frightened start.

Beauty saw it all! Saw that Margovin had stepped from behind the curtains in that crucial instant and attracted her attention with a gesture that conveyed malevolent triumph; saw her struggle to check the second horse, and attempt to plant her foot on its smooth, rippling back; saw her failure and desperate struggle to regain equilibrium! And then she plunged downward, still clutching the reins of the lead horse and dragging it, resisting, into that maddened confusion beneath which she lay, trampled by bewildered, random hoofs as the frenzied horses charged one another and strove to extricate themselves.

Above the thudding turmoil, there arose, in sharp crescendo, the screams of women, the shouts of men, and the cries of performers who rushed in as the great white horses broke loose and tore wildly around the arena.

The band stopped playing, the huge organ lost a note, and Beauty ran forward with an oath, half prayer, half agony, on his lips, and stooped above the piteously wounded girl that lay in the tanbark, a shapeless, motionless little thing, ensanguined from wounds through which the blood streamed, her brillant garb torn and disarrayed, and her long hair tangled across her face.

Quite slowly he picked her up in his arms and held her to his breast. Dim-eyed, yet stalwart, and muttering incoherent words, he carried her from the ring. He scarcely knew that behind him other performers and ring men were capturing the running horses and bringing them to a halt, that the band had suddenly come to its senses, and in fear of a panic had swung into a popular march, and that Jim Paxton, clown and seasoned performer, appreciating the danger, had gayly rushed onto the central platform, where he was doing a grotesque jig—dancing a jig with a broken heart! All Beauty knew was that in his arms he carried, with feverish tenderness, the little Marie. Down through the tunnel-like entrance he ran, crowding his way between the excited performers and brushing aside those who interfered.

“A doctor!” he called. “A doctor! For God's sake, get some one quick!” And there was that in his voice that drove those horrified ones to action and sent them scurrying, sometimes aimlessly, on the quest.

In his bewilderment, he carried her to his own dressing room and laid her gently on a blanket. He threw a brawny arm outward and shoved back those who followed, whispering: “Air; give her air, can't you? In God's name, where's the doctor? Isn't there one left in the world? Why, she may be dying even now! Go, all of you, get one quick! Can't you understand? She's dying! Marie, little Marie!'

When the surgeon came, her head was resting on the plainsman's knees, and he was attempting to straighten the hair from her forehead with one hand and with the other wiping the blood from a cut in her temple with his handkerchief. He relinquished her reluctantly to the surgeon's ministrations, and, obedient to the latter's command, called for women and with dragging steps passed through the door. He shut it carefully behind him, as if vainly fearing the noise of its latch might disturb the unconscious girl on the floor.

Up and down the narrow corridor outside he walked, with his maimed fingers clutching those of the other hand, and big drops of sweat, cold as if cast from an icy heart, dripping from his forehead over his eyes. Out in the far distance, the band came to a flourish as another act concluded, and the unheeding crowd, convinced that nothing serious had happened, applauded gayly. He turned and shook his fist in the direction of the sound, and muttered to himself: “How can you? How can you be happy when she's in there?”

The seconds were minutes, and the minutes hours, piling upon each other pell-mell, as he tramped to and fro in his agony, and then his finely attuned ear caught a strange note. It was that of an ambulance bell that had hastily come to a halt outside the entrance of the Garden. Uniformed attendants were coming, strangers whom he did not know and had never seen in the circus before.

Bewildered, but feeling that they meant something, he stepped aside and saw them pass through the entrance from where he was barred. Two of them ran out, and speedily returned, carrying something in a roll, and it was but a moment until again they passed; only, this time, there was a vast difference, for between them they supported on a stretcher a quiet figure enshrouded in a white sheet.

It seemed to Beauty that it took ages for him to comprehend that the burden was Marie, and that the man who walked behind her, grave-faced, quiet, and wiping his hands on a handkerchief, was the surgeon who had been called from the audience.

With a hoarse cry, he started to follow them, but was checked by the ambulance surgeon in white, who put a hand against him at the rear door of the Garden, and said: “Steady, old man! Steady! Get hold of yourself!”

Beauty brushed a hand across his eyes, as if trying to wipe away a film of unreality.

“Doctor Matthewson says that she's not dangerously hurt so far as he can see, and that's the way it looks to me. I'm the ambulance surgeon. But you mustn't bother us now. We're going to take her to the Postgraduate Hospital. If you wish to, you can call me up there in an hour or two and I'll tell you how she's getting along.”

He whipped a card from his pocket and thrust it at Beauty, who held it in his hands and watched the attendants as they carefully slid the white figure into the black depths of the big, heavily springed car, saw the surgeon swing himself up by the brass rails behind, heard the swift, accelerated pur of the motor, and saw it speed down the street with a clamorous gong calling loudly for right of way.

She was gone, and all at once he knew that everything in life that he held dear had been carried away—cruelly thrown into the scales of fate—passed to the Great Arbiter of life and death.

“Doctor Matthewson says that she's not dangerously hurt so far as he can see!” The words seemed to ring back to him as if burdened with a message of hope. Who was Doctor Matthewson? Had he understood correctly? Not dangerously hurt? Maybe they lied? They have taken her away. Marie! His mind groped in review.

For another age he leaned against a partition, dimly striving to coördinate his faculties. Men passed him, callously indifferent to his tragedy; others came, whispering of the event, and still more stopped to look at him and then hastened onward, terrified or saddened by the look in his eyes that saw nothing save the piteous wreck of the hippodrome. It was a hand and a voice that roused him from his stupor.

“Beauty! Beauty! It's our turn,” some one said, and he looked down at Jim Paxton as if never before in all his life had he seen that little man in the motley garb.

Quite obediently, and almost mechanically, the cowboy permitted himself to be led away toward the entrance. Long afterward he wondered what had become of that night. They told him that never in all his connection with Bigger's had he performed so well, and yet he, the performer, could remember nothing of it, save that he mounted the running pony, ran around the ring at breakneck speed, reckless of falls or appearance, whirling his reata, and doing perilous feats of horsemanship. Everything was unreal, untrue, and dreamlike, a phantasmagoria of faces in swirling lines and a clash of sound in which he, a stricken man, found relief from agony by excess of physical exertion. The old skill could not leave him, the old habit held true. He was a maddened man performing miracles in a world of his own, striving by attention to unheard-of feats, to drive from sight and mind the recollection of the narrow stretcher on which lay something white and still.

“Come on back! Come on back, man! They want you!” he heard a voice, and saw that it was the ringmaster clutching him by the arm.

Again he obeyed as a bewildered child obeys a master, and stepped back into the glare of light and blur of sound, and stood quietly, an undeferential figure that gave neither bow or recognition. Twice and three times they led him back, and each time he did the same; and then as if remembering something, and thinking that hours instead of minutes had passed, he broke away from them and ran like a madman, inquiring of every one he met where a telephone might be found.

He was not aware until then that, through all those long ages, there had clung to his arm the diminutive figure of the little clown, whose make-up was streaked with tears, and whose voice was filled with an infinite sorrow when he spoke.

“Jimmy! Jimmy!” Beauty said, as if recognizing him for the first time. “Call them up for me! You know who I mean! He said in an hour or two they'd know. You know what I mean! Here, take this!”

Paxton took from the plainsman's hand a crumpled card and sprang to the phone. “The Postgraduate Hospital,” he called. “No! I don't know the number! I forgot to look it up! That's it!”

And for an instant his words piled over one another in a conversation that was meaningless to the man who heard, but didn't understand.

All of a sudden, the clown hung the receiver on the hook, leaned back against the wall of the telephone booth in which he stood, and muttered: “Thank God!” And then, in a louder voice, as if speaking to some one bereft of hearing, shouted his words: “The doctor tells me she'll live. She's got a lot of little wounds, some broken ribs, and a bad scalp wound. One of the horses trampled her thigh, and another mangled her arm, but she'll live, Beauty! She'll live!”

He bent forward with an exclamation, for the frontiersman, who had waited in the open doorway, had suddenly crumpled to the floor and lay inert.

Chapter VIII.

On the day following the accident, it became certain that the equestrienne would recover within a comparatively short time, and, with his highly developed publicity instinct, Williams made the most of it in press notices. Beauty tried to avoid the clown on that morning, and the latter came upon him seated in Madison Square Park, absently staring across at the big tower, and heedless of those who passed. There was something strange and grim in the plainsman's attitude, some peculiar intensity and gravity that caused the little man distress.

“Are you all right, Beauty?” he inquired solicitously.

“Yes,” replied the latter. “Only I'm thinkin' of somethin' I'm goin' to do. Maybe I'll let you know about it this evenin', Jimmy.”

There was that in his voice that told the clown that Beauty wanted to be alone to work over some problem, so for a time they sat without saying anything, the one abstracted, the other quietly watching the crowds in the streets or the birds in the trees.

“Jimmy,” said Beauty, at last, without looking at his companion, “I'm a tenderfoot. I'm a stranger in a strange land. I've come against a proposition that has got to be worked out so I can get away with it. It's been with me for quite a long time now, and I'm sort of hatin' myself for not attendin' to it sooner. It's about what I'm to do with that——”

A shadow paused in front of them and interrupted. They looked up to see the acrobat who had been one of Beauty's first friends, and he started in to tell them some of the circus gossip. Beauty made no replies; but the clown, thinking it wise to keep the cowboy from brooding, talked cheerily to distract his attention. The ruse failed, for the plainsman got up and sauntered away, declaring that he had something to do and must leave them.

When it came time for him to change his garb for the afternoon, he appeared in his dressing room barely in time. The clown was there waiting; but Margovin was not present, nor did Beauty see him when changing back to street clothes at the conclusion of his turn. If he noticed the strong man's absence, he said nothing, but busied himself for a minute tumbling over the contents of his suit case, as if seeking something; then hurried away, leaving the perturbed Jimmy to his own devices.

Evening came, but this time Beauty loitered somberly out at the rear of the big building, staring moodily across the street and at the cars that slipped backward and forward like looms on a shuttle weaving a web the length of Fourth Avenue. He surprised Paxton in the dressing room by asking in a quiet tone of voice, almost devoid of curiosity, where Margovin was.

“They've changed him on the program,” answered Jim, turning toward the cowboy. “He is almost the last number.”

“That's good!” said Beauty.

“Why?” curiously asked his companion.

“Oh, nothing! Maybe I'll tell you later.”

The clown looked at him thoughtfully as if apprehending something; but, sensing Beauty's disinclination to converse, said nothing, and finished his preparations. Their act met with the same approval that had distinguished its opening, and again Beauty departed the moment his change was effected; but Jim, emerging from the building a few minutes later, discovered him outside the door, quietly smoking.

“Oh, Jim,” Beauty said. “I've been waitin' for you.”

“Well, here I am,” responded the clown, hopeful that his partner was in a happier mood.

“I wish you'd go back inside there and find somethin' out for me,” the cowboy said, in a low tone of voice, as if fearing that some one might overhear him. “I want to know the time Margovin's act runs, and the time it quits. Also, if any of the dressing rooms near us are likely to have any one in them.”

“What for?” asked Paxton mildly, and suspecting the plainsman of some ulterior motive.

“Never mind. You find out and come back here and let me know. Then I'll tell you,” Beauty insisted.

Jim, palpably fearful and distressed, yet smiling a little harshly, did as bid, hoping that affairs between his friend and the strong man had not come to an open fight, and trusting to his own influence over the younger man to restrain him.

“Gets off the last act,” he said, when he returned. “Nothing follows him but the chariot and pony races.”

“But about the other thing?” Beauty asked.

“Well, of course that means that there will be no one near our dressing room that late; but—Beauty! What are you thinking of doing? You surely don't intend to fight that giant, do you? Why, boy, he'd kill you as easily as he would a bird!”

Beauty slipped his arm through Jim's and led him around toward the Twenty-Sixth Street side of the building where there were but few pedestrians before he answered. `

“No, Jimmy,” he said, “it hasn't come to that yet; but it's come to a place where I'm goin' to give that cur a talk. Now, when I get through, you'll understand why I didn't want any one around to overhear; because I want to 'tend to Margovin myself. Do you know why Marie happened to fall last night?”

The clown, beginning to surmise the truth, looked up at Beauty with astonished eyes.

“No!” he exclaimed. “You don't mean—it can't be possible that—that Margovin——”

“Yes,” replied Beauty angrily. “Just that! I can see now how it was worked. He has been annoyin' her and threatenin' her, I have an idea, ever since that time down on the border. She was afraid to tell us because she thought there might be an open row. She just went ahead and stood for it, gettin' a little more afraid of him every day. Last night, as she went on, I heard him tell her to be careful because he had had a dream that she would be hurt. Don't you see, if any one else had heard him say that, they would have thought it just a caution to her; but that wasn't what Margovin meant it to be, and that's just what it wasn't! It had just exactly the effect he wanted it to have. It rattled her. I saw her face and ran out, hoping to brace her up by showing her that she had a friend there, and by saying somethin' to her if I could, but I was too late.”

The little clown went into a burst of rage that rendered him almost inarticulate.

“I'll tell the other boys in the show!” he declared wildly. “They'd tear him to pieces if they knew! I'll——”

“You'll do nothin', Jimmy!” growled the cow-puncher, seizing his arm. “I told you in the first place that this was my funeral. You've just got to do as I tell you and keep your mouth shut! Do you hear me?”

The little man poured forth a torrent of epithets, and then turned and shook two trembling, excited hands up at Beauty's face.

“Do you know how I got smashed that night?” he demanded. “Well, Margovin hit me!”

Beauty gritted his teeth and relieved himself by the strongest word he could think of.

“I was down there on the beach at Santa Monica that night the big brute yelled at you and Marie. I saw you pass, and was not very far from him. I thought it all over on the way home and waited for him to come along. I thought you two hadn't heard it, and didn't want you to. I was angry, so decided to call him down myself. I knew he could lick me, but I didn't care. All I wanted to do was to let him know what I thought, anyhow. All the weapon I could find was a rock. He came along the track and I stopped him, and told him what I had to say. I shook the rock in his face and told him that I'd get him, some way, if I ever heard him yell at you or ever say anything about Marie again. He's quick for a big man. He grabbed my wrist and twisted it until I had to drop the rock, and just grinned at me all the time and said: 'Ho! Ho! So the little clown thinks he can scare Margovin! Bah!' Then he hauled off and hit me, just once. When I came to my senses, he had gone, and I staggered up toward you to get help.”

As he talked, there flashed through Beauty's imagination that valiant defense of a friend, the reckless bravery that prompted this little, inoffensive man to defy a giant who tossed two-hundred-pound cannon balls and was undoubtedly the strongest man in the world. It was like a pet kitten challenging a tiger. For a moment he stood dumb with admiration.

“Jim,” he said, with a strange huskiness in his usually clear voice, “somehow I can't exactly find words to thank you. It was mighty fine of you. There ain't any use in my thankin' you, because—well—because—— Oh, hang it! You know what I'm tryin' to say!”

Back of and above them, seeming to leap from the heavens, came the booming of the clock in the Metropolitan tower. Beauty started hastily, as if he had forgotten something, and seized the clown's arm.

“Come,” he said. “Its time. Margovin will be there in the dressin' room, alone, just about now, and I've got to tell him a few things. What I want you to do is to keep outside the doorway so we won't be disturbed. Just walk up and down the hall, and if you see any one comin' our way, head 'em for a minute—talk to 'em—anything to let me be alone with that big hulk for five or ten minutes. No, no! Don't worry! I shan't kill him, unless he tries to jump me—and he won't do that. Don't fear. Hurry!”

They almost ran back through the entrance, and plunged toward their quarters. There was no one in the immediate vicinity when Beauty softly opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it after him. Margovin was there, and had already removed his tights, slipped on his trousers and undershirt, and was bent over tying a shoe lace, when Beauty crossed to the side apportioned to his own belongings and turned his back to the wall.

The giant had not looked up as he entered, and for an instant Beauty saw the tremendous back, and huge, bare arms, the bull-like neck, and the small head.

“Margovin!” he said sharply, and the Austrian straightened up in his seat, and looked at him with a scowl.

The Westerner's face was white and set, his eyebrows were drawn into a straight, harsh line, and his eyes gleamed dangerously; but he still leaned against the wail in an attitude that was almost careless.

“You've gone just one step too far. Last night you made Marie Barber fall. I heard what you said, and saw it. You're the biggest coward and the least of a man of anything that I ever knew that walked on either two or four legs. You're so rotten and contemptible that it seems a pity I've got to waste time on you; but I've thought it over, and am goin' to put a finish to it.”

When he began to speak, the strong man rose to his feet, with his head thrust forward defiantly, and his fists doubled up as if for attack. But it was not until Beauty's speech was nearly finished that he suddenly leaped forward with his huge hands outstretched, and heavy fingers clutching as if to seize the smaller man and rend him to pieces. He shouted inarticulate phrases in his mother tongue as he charged, and then met with a surprise; for the plainsman's air of indifference to physical attack suddenly gave way to an almost catlike activity.

On the wall behind where he stood, hung the reata that was used in the performance, and, with a swishing, whistling sound, it snapped through the air, and its hard, rawhide folds struck the Austrian squarely in the face. The blood seemed to gush from a dozen superficial wounds before the rope had come back to its owner's hands; and then, before Margovin could clear his eyes from that shock, a long, snakelike loop flashed through the air, descended over his head and shoulders, and he was almost jerked to his feet by the violence with which it was tightened. Other dexterous loops followed in half hitches, one falling upon another, in which the giant was bound by band after band as he struggled desperately to release himself from the entanglement. Even his legs were helpless, and all the strength of his gigantic muscles, as they twisted and tensed themselves, the muscles that, unimpeded, could break chains, failed to do more than imbed the rawhide into his flesh. Worst of all, still clinging to the rope and dancing round him to keep it taught, but steadily approaching, came that vengeful, flaming-eyed man, whose prey the giant was.

The plainsman seemed gauging a distance, and, when it was reached, appeared to leap from his toes, with his right arm stiffened. His fist, hard as steel, shot outward with his whole weight behind it, struck Margovin fairly on the chin, and knocked him crashing into the corner. The floor beneath seemed to shake with the impact of the all.

The plainsman lifted the inert legs contemptuously, and roughly threw the end of the reata beneath them. He tied a knot, then caught the loose end that he had held in his hands, carried it farther upward, and made a noose which he brought round the strong man's neck, and put a foot between the shoulders of his fallen adversary. For an instant, it seemed as if he contemplated strangling the Austrian to death as remorselessly as he would have hanged a mad dog; then, thinking better of it, he loosened the slipknot, rolled the giant over on his back, and, seizing a water pitcher that rested on a washstand, carelessly dumped its contents over Margovin's face.

He stepped toward the door, opened it cautiously, and looked out. Jim was pacing up and down the deserted reaches, and the adjoining dressing rooms were still. The cowboy beckoned to the clown, and when the latter hurried to him, stepped aside, and said: “Come in and lock the door. There'll be no more noise now,” and his tone was so quiet that Paxton, for an instant, seemed not to appreciate the fact that any conflict had taken place.

“Jimmy, come over here!” the Westerner said.

With a frightened look in his eyes, Paxton started back from the pinioned figure on the floor.

“Good Lord, Beauty! You haven't killed him, have you?”

“Not yet,” was the response, in the same quiet tone. “Here, take hold of this rope, and, if he undertakes to yell, put your foot in his face and choke him. There's nothin' bad enough for him. He isn't hurt. Those are just scratches.”

Tremblingly Paxton obeyed, and stood alongside Margovin as the latter's eyes showed signs of returning consciousness. Almost roughly, Beauty caught the prostrate man by his heels, and dragged him out to the center of the floor.

When the Austrian came further to his senses and rolled his head to one side, he saw the clown grimly holding the rope, and seemed to slowly understand that it controlled the noose around his throat. His brain cleared to normal, the bewildered look left his eyes, and gave way to a sullen comprehension. He turned his head in the other direction. Seated on his trunk was the man who had brought him to this position, leaning forward and idly handling a worn pistol of heavy caliber. The firm lips were twisted into a shape of the utmost contempt, the eyes that glared at him were as cold and unfeeling as though of gray glass.

For a full minute, they glowered at each other until a slow and deadly fear crept into Margovin's expression, as if he were confronted by death, inexorable, and merely waiting there above him. He made two or three attempts before he could speak, and then his voice responded only in a strained whisper that sounded terrified and pleading as he said: “You're going to murder me?”

“I am,” was the steady reply. “I'm going to kill you as surely as I live, and I'm going to kill you just when I please, and just the way I want to.”

Margovin's lips opened in fright, and he attempted to scream, but the shout was abruptly checked as the clown, a remorseless look in his eyes, jerked the rope taut, strangling the shout to an inarticulate gurgle.

The Austrian's eyes seemed to start from his head in an agony of fear, and the clown bent over and loosened the noose.

“No more of that, Margovin!” commanded the plainsman, cocking the pistol, and holding it in direct line with the giant's head. “I expected you to squeal like a jack rabbit when a hound catches him by the scruff of the neck, and so I made all preparations. If you undertake to yell again, we'll either choke you to death, or else I'll put the gun close up against your head—just like this. See? And the sound wouldn't travel a hundred feet.” The strong man's eyes bulged as he felt steel against his temple. “You're all alone, Margovin; we saw to that, because I wanted a little quiet conversation with you. It wouldn't be quite just to kill you here and now. You made that girl suffer for a long time, so I'm goin' to make you suffer, and that's the only reason I don't kill you now, and also because it's a certainty that, sooner or later, I'll get you—kill you, I mean. Do you understand that?”

The frontiersman paused to roll a cigarette, slipped the gun back in his coat pocket, and glanced casually at Jim, who was suddenly terrified by his compulsory participation.

Beauty smiled faintly, and his fingers did not tremble in the least as he lighted the roll of papered tobacco. He inhaled two or three times, and when. he spoke again his voice was almost gentle and caressing in its tone. Had it not been for the conveyed certainty that he was passing sentence, tragedy would have seemed far distant.

“You'll not leave the show, Margovin, because the minute you do, I'll shoot you down on the street, in your room, on board a steamship, anywhere I find you; and I shall keep watch, you can bet on that! Why, I'll ride herd on you more carefully than I ever did on a bunch of cattle! You can't stampede and get away from me. The world isn't big enough to hide you, and there's nothin' moves fast enough to keep me from catchin' you. You'll stay with the show, because that's your only chance. Now we've got that settled.”

He took another languid puff, and leaned forward until he was staring hard into the frighteneed eyes that looked up toward him as if appalled and fascinated with the horror of some dread thing from which there was no escape.

“To make it quite clear to you,” the level voice went on, “I'll explain: From this day on, I'm goin' to do a lot of complainin' and get mighty weak. I'm afraid I'll have a bad heart that any shock might be the means of stoppin'. I'll be so nervous that everybody around will call me a poor invalid; but you'll know that it ain't so, and that I'm strong, and hard, and just waitin' for an opportunity to kill you. You'll think of that day and night, Margovin. You'll give more time to thinkin' about that, if possible, than you did as to how you were goin' to hurt a poor little girl that you thought had nobody to defend her. You'll wake up in the night, fancyin' that the time has come when I've decided to finish this pleasant little job, and you'll sit up in bed, and you'll scream like the big coward that you are. I'm goin' to tell people that I'm afraid of you on account of my bein' such an invalid; so that when I do kill you, there ain't a jury in the whole world that'll ever convict me. I'll plead self-defense, and say the reason I did it was because you attacked me, and so, me bein' an invalid, and you the strongest man in the world, they would say I was justified. Easy, ain't it? If you quit this show, I'll kill you within an hour afterward. If you stay with this show, you'll live longer; but you're goin' to live in hell for every minute of the time I leave you, because, Margovin, just as sure as you're alive, I'm goin' to put you underground.”

He stopped and silenced Jimmy, who had started to make a terrified appeal of mercy for the prostrate man, and walked across until he was where he could reach the rope; and, as he undid the noose from around the giant's twitching neck, he added almost cheerfully: “By the way, there won't be any use in your rushin' out to the police or to the Old Man to tell what has happened here to-night; because, if you do, there's two of us here who'll simply swear that it's a lie, maliciously put out to hurt us; so you see that no matter which way you turn, you'll keep on bein' just as helpless as you are right now.”

His swift hands fumbled at the reata until the end was loose. He resumed his seat on the strong man's trunk, and again pulled out that menacing weapon.

“Jim, stand back,” he said; then: “Now, Margovin, you roll over until you can get clear of that rope.”

For a moment, the Austrian, now beaded with perspiration that had replaced the water dashed over his face, lay still, as if afraid to move.

“Roll over, I say, and get out of that rope!” curtly ordered the cowboy. “I'm not goin' to stay here all night for a thing like you!”

In almost frantic haste, the Austrian obeyed, until at last he stood free and unimpeded.

“Now coil it, and hang it up there on that hook!” commanded Beauty. “You gave me the trouble of takin' it down.”

Quite meekly, and despite his enormous strength, trembling, the big man obeyed.

The cowboy said: “Come on, Jimmy!”

He backed toward the door without shifting his eyes from his enemy, and with a harsh and hungry look in his eyes, as though he half regretted the respite of life he had granted.

In the very doorway he paused to say softly: “Remember, you're mine,” and added, in a mocking tone: “You've no idea how precious you are to me. Why, you big sneak, I wouldn't lose the joy of killin' you, as I'm goin' to, for this whole show or for the town of New York. Ive got you just as sure as there's a God in heaven. Good night, Margovin; think it over!”

The door shut even as the giant staggered back to a seat and ran trembling fingers over his restricted throat, while, echoing hollowly from the deserted reaches of the great structure, he heard the sounds of sturdy feet walking away. He listened as if fearing their return; but they did not waver. They sounded as inexorable as the steps of fate.

Chapter IX.

The New York engagement was over, and by leaps and bounds the show was turning Westward for that long and glad engagement that was to carry the performers into foreign climes. Mademoiselle Zoe made her reappearance in the Coliseum of Chicago, where, beyond a slight paleness, there was little to indicate how closely she had rubbed elbows with death. The strong man had worked feverishly throughout the engagement at the Madison Square Garden, and once, in a panic, had attempted to resign; but a combination of circumstances—avarice, the off season when other engagements were scarce, and a returning confidence coupled with an increase of salary—had caused him to renew his contract for the big over-seas tour.

There in the Garden, he began to doubt the determination of the strange Westerner; for the latter appeared unconcernedly at regular intervals in the dressing room for his change, did not even glance at the strong man, speak to him, nor even notice his presence. It was as if he had forgotten.

The little clown was nervous, as if continually apprehensive; but that meant nothing to the bully who regarded the little man as insignificant, and worthy of no, more consideration than would be bestowed upon a worm; so each day his confidence returned, until he was amazed at himself for his fright of that night. And he expressed the return of confidence by his blustering manner and overweening egotism.

It was while working in the Coliseum in Chicago, and no longer compelled to dress in proximity to the cowboy, that he heard the first whisper that sent a sudden chill to his new-born courage.

“I'm afraid,” said an acrobat, talking to one of his companions immediately behind the giant, “that Beauty Jones won't last long. They say he's got a bad heart and is nervous and shaky; and that 'most any sudden shock would kill him.”

The conversation of that terrible night in Madison Square Garden recurred to Margovin. In a rush of comprehension, he knew that the threat of the Westerner was being carried out in a deliberate, inflexible sequence. The cowboy had said that this would be his method. Step by step, the giant foresaw it all, and all his regained confidence crumbled as if it had been the flimsy underpinning of a foolishly built structure. The fear of death returned. He almost tottered as he started to do his turn, and went through it so poorly as to cause comment.

After his performance, weak and shaking, he hastened for the first time in his life to a near-by saloon and braced himself with stimulant; but the worst was yet to come. As he turned from the door, he saw, idly leaning against the lamp-post and grinning, the man who had pronounced death upon him.

On the following night, as the great show entrained, he discovered under the light of an arc lamp, swinging high above the switch yards, this same watchful figure. The Westerner's face appeared harsh and white, and the eyes full of meaning. It seemed to Margovin that he could not by any chance escape that same quiet watchfulness; but now this watchfulness had assumed a more defiant manner. In St. Paul and Minneapolis, the figure came a little closer. It began to jostle him at unexpected moments, and always it was painfully polite and apologetic. Once it whispered: “Why don't you get up pluck enough to take a smash at me, you big stiff? Can't you see that the time gets short and that all I want is an excuse? Margovin, your knees are shakin', and your lips tremblin'. Try to keep people from seein' it. Go out game, if you can! But, poor man, you can't! You're goin' to die like a sheep that has its throat cut without enough spirit to blat.”

And then the figure was gone, grinning, alert, and swift.

Once the strong man had seen a picture that clung to his untrained mind as something so terrible that it could not be forgotten. It was that of a living sword that relentlessly, up to the very end, pursued its victim. It was symbolized in this strange man of the reata, the living sword that crouched in corners, that came unexpectedly from obscure shadows, watched as its victim entered the ring, and waited for him as he donned his clothing to depart. It began to haunt the Austrian in his dreams. Again and again he lived those moments of terror when, bound by the rope, he heard sentence pronounced upon him. The prediction had come true. He awoke in the night, sat up wildly in his berth, and screamed in fright, fancying that through the curtains appeared a face, and that against his head was held that cold round steel that could carry a leaden death whose report “would not be heard a hundred feet away.”

Death hovered over him in the night, and accompanied him in the ring. Death jostled him in many ways, and apologized for the delay, and always it came a little closer, and forever it was the unconquerable phantasm, fearless and waiting. The only times that he had any relief from this surveillance were on those occasions when Beauty Jones disappeared for walks with the equestrienne, and it was no balm to the Austrian's mind when he jealously discovered a constantly increasing friendliness between those two. Moreover, the plainsman, ever since the night of Marie's reappearance, had been constantly with her when she entered the ring for her act, and strove to encourage her in every way possible, as if fearing that her nerve had been shattered by the accident in Madison Square Garden.

The clown, too, seemed to share guardianship with the Westerner, and kept near her, as if to offer protection from all intruders. When alone, the Austrian gritted his teeth, and frequently wished that the blow delivered that night by the tracks in Los Angeles had killed the little man, instead of merely disfiguring him; but if the mild-eyed little jester was aware of this prodigious enmity, he gave no sign of cognizance. His own nature was such that he could not cherish animosity, and was more than willing to forgive the Austrian and dismiss the matter from mind.

Watching the giant curiously, the clown discovered that the strong man was going to pieces slowly but surely, and a big pity for the bully prompted him to at last plead for his enemy. He took occasion one afternoon to call Beauty Jones out for a stroll after the performance, and when certain that they were beyond the hearing of any one, voiced his appeal.

“Beauty,” he said, looking up at the Westerner whom he regarded as a benefactor, “have you noticed lately that Margovin has taken to drinking? Something that an athlete never does?”

The plainsman looked at him, and grinned pleasantly as if with satisfaction.

“And have you noticed another thing,” the little man added, “that his work is going to pieces?”

“Sure,” said Beauty. “I rather thought it would.”

Paxton moved around until he was squarely in front of his friend, and looked up at him.

“Beauty,” he said, “I'm getting to be an old man, almost sixty, and I don't amount to much, and I haven't been able to do a whole lot for you; not nearly so much as I wished I might have done, and I haven't any good ground to ask it; but I wish you'd do a favor for me.”

The cowboy looked down upon him affectionately, and, discovering the earnestness in the clown's face, himself grew grave.

“What is it you want, Jimmy?” he asked solicitously.

“I want you to let up on Margovin. I want you to promise me that you won't kill him.”

For a moment, Beauty studied the smaller man's face, then turned away and looked at the horizon as if thinking of all that had happened since that day he joined Bigger's in the Wyoming town.

“Jim,” he said quietly, “it's never been my rule to promise I'd do a thing without makin' good on it, and I don't like to welsh now. The Lord knows that big animal did enough to justify any one in puttin' a hole through him. When I think of the way he tortured and frightened that poor little Marie, it's pretty hard for me to quite forgive him. I know all about it now. She's told me. Why, he kept that thing up with her for more than two weeks until he broke her nerve. You're askin' quite a lot, old man!”

The little clown put a friendly hand upon his arm, and his eyes took on an added look of melancholy.

“Beauty,” he said, “I'm disappointed in you. I don't think that you understand how much I have appreciated your friendship, and what you've done for me. However, it's been enough so that I've come to have more than mere friendliness for you. It's affection, boy, that I'm giving you, just as if you were my own son. It isn't big, or noble, old fellow, and it isn't worthy of you, to lower yourself to a point where you've nothing in mind very much higher than that which makes murderers.”

There was a curious intermingling of affection, entreaty, and arraignment in his voiced words, and the sturdy plainsman felt suddenly abashed and mean. His eyes, usually direct and candid, lowered themselves, and he stared moodily at the ground as Paxton continued:

“Revenge of any sort is the characteristic of a mighty small spirit, Beauty. It's the sort of trait that mongrels among men conceive to be the highest of attainments. To forgive, or at least forego, is the big attribute and privilege of big souls. I'm not preaching to you; but as I said a little bit ago, I'm old enough to be your father, and I like you, and, failure that I am, I can see wherein you fail. Beauty, it won't do. There's mud in your mind, and you've got to cleanse it. I ask not for your sake, but mine, and this is the first favor I've ever asked you.”

He stopped speaking, drew a deep breath as of sorrowful resignation when the plainsman did not immediately answer, and turned as if to move away.

Beauty stared at the back of his white head, and his shoulders that were beginning to show the effect of years, and it seemed to him that his best friend was walking away as though to pass forever from their common grounds of esteem. He strode forward quite hastily, and put his hand on the little man's shoulder. The latter turned and faced him with grave, questioning eyes.

“Jim,” said the adventurer, “you're right. I don't want you to go away like this. I want to have you keep on thinkin' just as you've told me. I can't say that I'm ashamed of myself, just yet, because I suppose I'm not big enough. And I don't know that I'm goin' to try to be, because I detest and hate that Austrian more than I ever did any one in my life; but I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll promise you not to kill him, or even hurt him, unless he tries to kill or hurt me. But I'll be honest with you, and tell you somethin' else: I'm goin' to give him a dose of his own medicine and keep him worried until I run him out of this business. He put that girl through a mental hell. I'll give him a little more of it just to show him how it goes. You remember what I said to him that night there in New York? Well, when I think it's gone about far enough, I'll go to him and tell him that on her account, not mine, mind you, I have decided that I'll let him quit, and tell him to get out and to lose no time about it; and to keep out of my way as long as he lives. Does that suit you?”

The little man suddenly put both hands up on Jim's shoulders, and scanned his face. For quite a little time he did not speak, and when he did there was more in the manner of his speech than what he said that expressed his thought.

“Now,” he exclaimed, “you're proving yourself the man! Nobility is a fine thing to cultivate, boy, and it grows.”

He dropped his hands, and they had almost retraced their steps in thoughtful silence before he added, as if he had been reviewing the whole situation: “I'm not sure that I blame you for wanting to run Margovin away from the show. I don't think either of us will ever quite feel that Marie is safe so long as he's around; but, Beauty, don't delay. Surely you've wrecked the fellow enough!”

And Beauty, generous, but unrepentant, impetuously promised that before the week was over his espionage of the strong man should come to an end. But when alone he chuckled softly, and said to himself: “I told Jimmy a week; but if ever a feller had hell on earth, it'll be Margovin through that time, because I've got to keep the bluff up and make him feel that I mean business, or when I tell him he's got to go, it won't work.”

In the succeeding days, by no faintest indication did the bullying Austrian surmise that he had been reprieved. Instead, the vigilance of the plainsman seemed to have increased, and, in proportion to the added and terrifying attention bestowed upon him, so did the strong man's terror grow, until he lived in a nightmare.

His hatred for the little equestrienne grew to almost murderous proportions inasmuch as he attributed this, his deadly situation, to her. He dared not attempt to frighten her directly, and for a time, with the savage cruelty of a barbarian, contemplated maiming her horses. To hamstring the beautiful animals that were her livelihood seemed to him a most perfect way of injuring her without detection. He purchased a small and sharp hatchet with this object in view; but at the last moment, it came to him with frightful clarity that the relentless plainsman would at once suspect the author of the outrage and would then waste no time whatever in using the revolver. And of his proficiency Margovin had no doubt, for one day, as the train waited on a sidetrack, he had seen Beauty give a marvelous exhibition of skill as he fired five shots into a tin can, tossed high into the air by Jimmy, before the can could fall.

Moreover, on that day, he was aware that the Westerner had done this with a suggestive interest; for, immediately after, his eyes had flashed a message that was unmistakable. It was as if he had said: “Margovin, some day you shall take the place of the can. Some day five shots will chase each other through your body as you fall.”

One bright, moonlight night, when the train came to a halt, he heard stealthy steps alongside the car, and something clutched the ledge of his window. He raised himself fearfully in his berth and looked out. On the window ledge were two firm hands, the knuckles of one maimed, and slowly, as if appearing with deliberation, a head came into view—the head of Beauty Jones. The cold gray eyes stared at him unblinkingly, as, spellbound by terror and fascinated as if by death, he met them. It seemed an age to him while the plainsman held himself up by his hands and looked in upon him, and then there was a catlike drop, and soft steps upon the gravel beside the train, and the giant found voice and shouted wildly as he threw himself from the berth.

Through the length of the car he heard expostulations and mutterings, and one said: “It's that big stiff. He's got the nightmare again.”

“Coming pretty often now,” another responded wearily.

And, ashamed lest those whom he had bullied and browbeaten for so long should discover his secret, the Austrian crawled back into his berth, lowered his window, though the night was warm, and drew the blind, fearful lest the apparition should again appear.

It was in a Western city far on the Northern boundary line that Margovin made his last appearance. The day was oppressive, and the journey of the preceding night had been trying to both nerves and body. Moreover, the strong man had not slept well, for after the show was over he had seen the plainsman, with an air of close familiarity that told all too plainly of a mutual understanding, reading a letter to the little girl whom he, the giant, had so nearly maimed for life. Hatred, jealousy, and fear combined had kept him awake until long after the other occupants of the sleeping car were at rest and the train rumbling on its way. Hence he was in no good condition to withstand the shock of the words that were muttered to him by Beauty Jones as he made his way through the trapping room.

“You must be careful this afternoon, Mr. Margovin, for I've had a dream that to-day you finish.”

Margovin glanced apprehensively at the plainsman's face as he hurried past and entered the ring. Those were almost the identical words, he remembered, that he had said to the little Marie on the day when she had been trampled underfoot. He remembered, also, that he had exulted with a cruel satisfaction when the big white horses had thundered over her prostrate body, and he wondered nervously if that terrible man by the curtains would not exult did a similar accident befall him. As he began his act, he looked suspiciously over his shoulder toward that one spot.

The plainsman, watching him coldly, was there, and Margovin did not dream that at the conclusion of this very turn Beauty had decided to tell him that he must resign that day, and that Bigger's would go on without him.

The sweat streamed down the big man's forehead and into his eyes, and over the splendid muscles of his body, as he tossed the heavy playthings about. He felt suddenly that it required more effort than it had in other days, and sustained a fear that his physical prowess was leaving him. He remembered now that he had been drinking too much, and that his rest had not refreshed him as it had in those days when, as the swaggering bully of Bigger's Best, he had lorded it over his fellow performers.

He became childishly angry at his failure to catch the huge dumb-bell, and was compelled to make the second attempt. His anger shifted unreasonably, toward the little equestrienne, and thence to the cowboy. He wished that he dared catch the plainsman's head, rend it from his body, and toss it, thus, even as he tossed the huge, polished cannon ball.

The band had stopped playing, and one of those strange interims approaching absolute silence had come over the huge crowd of spectators. The cannon ball fell with a heavy thud to the earth. Margovin seized it, lifted it again, and tossed it into the air; but, even as he did so, shot a swift glance back toward the curtains. The cowboy was still there, motionless and watchful. Even in that instant, Margovin, the prodigy of strength, faltered. The huge ball, its polished surface glowing dully, descended, and the giant braced himself to catch it high up on the magnificent muscles that padded his great, broad shoulders; but, instead of landing with the firm spat of steel on brawn, there was a dull, crunching sound, and Margovin, the Goliath, toppled forward, his knees sagged abruptly, and he fell face downward in the ring.

For an instant there was no sound, as though the spectators looked upon this as a new and startling but unfinished act; but the swift rush of ring attendants, headed by the ringmaster, dispelled the illusion. Quick to meet emergencies, other men sprang out in front of the spectators, threw up their hands, and shouted for quiet, some of them asserting that it was nothing but a slight accident, and that the performance would go on, while others besought those who stood up on their benches to sit quietly, and still others thrust those who had leaped forward behind the ropes. From amidst his paraphernalia other performers lifted the stricken colossus, and swiftly carried him away to the dressing tent. One of his arms had fallen as they bore him away and swung to and fro with a horrid limpness, while his bulletlike head lolled grotesquely, and most unnaturally, until an acrobat supported it.

A physician from the audience hurried after them, volunteering assistance. He bent over the fallen giant, who lay in the midst of the awe-stricken men and women who surrounded him. There was something incongruous in their attire for such a scene—the anxious faces of the clowns, showing clearly through their painted masks, the flare of color where acrobats and gymnasts in silken tights leaned forward with questioning eyes, and the gaudy spangles of women performers as they wrung their hands in distress. Beauty Jones, in his cowboy costume, repentant, and reproaching himself, stood quietly looking at his fallen enemy. Jimmy Paxton was on a knee beside the doctor trying to assist, and Marie Barber, her eyes filled with horror and compassion for the man who had done everything that cruelty could suggest to injure her, stood at his feet.

“No use,” said the doctor; “the man is dead. The ball fell just four inches too high. It broke his neck.”

The plainsman had told the truth. It had been Margovin's last performance.

Chapter X.

For the second time, Beauty had stood beside the grave of one of Bigger's Biggest, and, despite the fact that Margovin, bad as he was, and justly deserving death, had been his enemy, was sorry that the man had gone. He had bitterly repented his part in the tragedy, and had learned the lesson so ably expounded by the little man of motley, that revenge in any form is the most unsatisfactory of all emotions. It was doubtful if many others who stood beside that grave grieved for the bullying giant who had been killed by his own mishap. Boastful and quarrelsome, malicious and vengeful, the Austrian had made no friends and many enemies; yet the cowboy who had indirectly brought him to earth regretted ever having threatened or pursued him.

The great show, as callous as an inanimate machine, went relentlessly onward, and, before the dead man was in his coffin, the manager had telegraphed tersely to his booking agent in New York:

Margovin dead. Send me another strong man by first train to take place so we will not lose billing. Rush!

A man might be killed now and then, but the big show must travel on time, and try to meet its paper. Not even the death of the manager himself could have checked it. An acrobat, member of a family, might fall to a mere distorted and maimed heap in the ring; but father and mother, sisters and brothers, must appear after slight lapse to smile at the spectators, perform, wave graceful, trained hands in salute, and suffer silently. A pole might fall and kill a horse; but its rider who loves it must mount another and ride—bravely ride! One of the exiles, the weary captives who had been trapped and brought thousands of miles to suffer unmerited tortures of unrest, the animals in the menagerie, might sicken and die of heartbreak, and a hole in the ground was its end. A vast entity, having distinct individuality but no soul, an inanimate organization so perfected that it seemed to have intelligence of its own, indifferent alike to sorrow or death, the great show could not pause.

It had reached lands that were familiar to Beauty Jones—rough hills and mountains that he had traversed—and for hours at a time he sat in Number Fifty looking from the car window with a vast homesickness in his heart. They paraded a town which he had known in the old days. Years had passed since he had seen it, and the majority of those with whom he had been acquainted were scattered and gone. There were the old familiar signs; this the old familiar street. There where the big brick building stood had been the frame shack of the pioneer merchant. That opera house covered ground which had been a barren space when last the boy beheld it, and the city had sprawled out like a great octopus, spreading tentacles in all directions. Trees that he had seen planted as saplings were now shading avenues and stretching heavy limbs toward one another in companionship. This was the place to which he had ridden, with cruelly broken knuckles, when seeking a surgeon.

Beauty wondered if the surgeon were still alive, and that afternoon patiently sought him, only to learn that his friend had traveled to a place beyond earthly greetings.

When the afternoon performance was on, he went through his act mechanically, and some of those who watched him commented on his performance.

“That heart of his will get him yet,” said an acrobat sorrowfully.

“Yes; and it's too bad!” replied another. “He's as white a man as I ever knew in the business. No side to him—just plain good fellow. Why, do you know that when that chap got hurt, back there in Philadelphia, this man gave him——”

And so they talked, those who had fathomed the heart of the strange man who had been with them, but not of them, and had impressed them as a kindly, frank being from a strange world. He had earned a place in their affections, and a niche for himself in their respect. But, while they talked, in that respite between shows, Bauty Jones had sought Marie and led her away to the shelf of the mountain that overlooked the town.

“Over yonder,” he said, as they rested on a porphyritic seat, “is the place I come from. It's a plain out there, beyond the gap. Sixteen miles it is—just nothin' but grass and wild flowers in the summer, and white snow in the winter. Or, anyhow, that's what it used to be. I reckon there's farms there now, and all the trees have grown big, and the shacks have made room for big, fine buildings, and the boys I knew are men, and where there was the still and open range, there is now the whirl and smash of the reaper. Somehow I don't seem to get it all. It's so changed!”

The girl at his side, in sympathy with his mood, strained her eyes as if yearning for vision beyond the hills, and drew a little closer to him.

“They say there's a town there now, where the ranch was,” he said, as if communing with himself. “And the house I built for the old lady who gave me kindness when I needed it, stands on a street. I never lived in it; but now, all without my knowin' how or why, it seems like home—a place to rest—where one can have friends and see the faces one knows each day.”

He turned toward her impulsively and with a great hunger in his eyes.

“I'm sick of this,” he said softly. “I'm plumb tired of it. I don't belong to it, and it can never belong to me. I want to live my own life in my own way, away from sham things!”

Something in the brown eyes that met his caused him to gasp, and to catch his breath, as if he had interpreted a vision. Neither of them said anything, but he caught her face between his hands, and for a long moment stared into the crying depths of her soul that were tendered, unmasked and unashamed, for his contemplation. Slowly his homely face was illumined to a shape of beauty, reflecting the high cleanliness and purpose of a simple, loyal mind, and his honest, gray eyes softened and glowed with a profound and overwhelming tenderness. Quite gently, as if apprehensive lest she escape his arms that yearned to forever shield her, he gathered her to him, and pillowed her head closely to his breast.

 

Heedless of all those petty humans who formed its component parts, callous to the sufferings of its captives in the menagerie, reveling in glamour and sound, the great inanimate beings of canvas, Bigger's Biggest, squatted on the lot outside the mountain town. As the sun died and the twilight came, it awoke from somnolence for the second display that constituted each day's life, and torches flamed, men shouted, bands blared, and performers made ready for their work. Garish, unreal, ephemeral, it lived its brief and lurid hour, then swiftly drew within itself, as if angered by this halt in its never-ending round, and, piece by piece, slipped away in the toiling darkness to its trains.

The pungent odor of foreign beasts, the scents of venders' wares, the sweating turmoil of eager crowds, were all swept from the lot as if by the clean breath of an omnipotent giant come up from across the plains and hills. The first section had whirled away into the night, and the locomotives for the succeeding ones roared impatiently for their burdens. In Number Fifty, the manager looked up from the desk that stood neatly fitted into the corner of his dining room, and stared inquiringly at the ringmaster who had entered.

“Your friend Jones,” the latter burst out impatiently, “wasn't there to-night. Neither was Paxton, whose fine you remitted; nor Mademoiselle Zoe! And that ain't all! The stable boss is up in the air, because he says their horses are all gone. They took 'em out this evening on the excuse that they wanted to exercise “em! What do you think of that? Wanted to exercise 'em!”

Astonished and perplexed, the manager scowled at his subordinate, while the cigar between his fingers sent a slow, unwavering spiral of blue up into the still air.

“Not there? Beauty not there?” he voiced, as if astonished by an unprecedented happening. “Why—wait a minute.”

He rang for the steward, and by the time the black man appeared had recovered his pose and was again the automaton of a great enterprise.

“Was Mr. Jones here for supper?” he asked, with characteristic brevity.

The attendant fumbled in his coat pocket quite nervously, as if fearing a charge of complicity in some grave crime, and handed the frowning manager an envelope.

“Marse Jones dun give me dis about seben o'clock, sah. An' he dun said I war to give it to you-all, sah, dis ebenin'.” Striving for amity, the black man assumed a tremulous grin, and added: “An' dat ain't all Marse Jones give me, sah. Mos' ariphtoscratic and librul, Marse Jones! He dun give me twenty dollahs, sah, all foh my own. I dun reckon I'll buy me a circus all foh mah own.”

But the master of the great caravan did not hear. He was reading the letter in his hand:

Friend: I ain't got the heart after all your whiteness to me to tell you what I've got to say, because somehow it would hurt. You've been mighty good to me, and I've had a right good time with you, and you've paid all you owed, on the nail. But, you see, I ain't cut out for no show business, after all, and I'm back where I come from, and think it's a mighty good time to quit. More than two weeks ago I had a letter from a lawyer telling me I'm a rich man because my foster mother left me 'most all of a town out here and a big ranch thrown in. I ain't said nothing because I wa'n't sure till six o'clock this evening that I cared anything about it, but now I know. I've gone back, friend, to where I want to be, out where the grass rustles under the wind and birds sing in the mornings, and there ain't no trains to catch, and no dust and noise. I've come to where I'm going to stay. I know you won't be sore, boss, because right down inside you know what I mean. Miss Barber goes with me because by the time you get this she'll be Mrs. Jones. Jimmy going along, too, because me and him is pardners, you know, and has to stick together. We took the horses because they were ours. Also Jimmy's microscope. We're going to rest, boss, for a long time, just having our own way, and if you lose your job there's a place where the latchstring hangs out bigger'n three balls in front of a pawnshop door. And it's a whole lot more welcome, and the eats come three times a day.

William Howard Jones.

P. S.—Give Cora Butts my compliments, and tell an acrobat named Billings this goes for him, too. Also Mike, the lion tamer.

Please, old horse, don't be sore because we left, because all of us like you, and you're white clean through.

The manager of Bigger's Biggest got to his feet and impolitely turned his back on the ringmaster and the steward, and peered through the window and out at the starlit hills for a full minute before he faced about with something of homesickness and envy in his eyes, and said very quietly: “Well, I'll be darned! Never mind them. Go ahead.”

And Bigger's Biggest, relentless, indifferent, a gigantic, restless wanderer that strode across continents and seas, moved on.