ny, made
up as a fat man, and do a backward somersault and a full twister at the
same time, the effect being a queer corkscrew turn that made the people
laugh. They little suspected that this awkward-looking leap was one of
the most difficult feats in the air ever attempted, or that it had cost
Ryan weeks of patient practice and many a hard knock before he mastered
it.

And then one day, after doing it hundreds of times with absolute ease,
he did it badly, then he did it worse, then he fell, and finally began
to be afraid of it and left it out of the act. Acrobats shake their
heads when you ask for an explanation of a thing like that. They don't
know the explanation, but they dread the thing.

"When a man feels that way about a trick, he's got to quit it for a
while," said Ryan, "or he'll get hurt. 'Most all the accidents happen
where a performer forces himself against something inside him that says
stop. Sometimes an acrobat has to give up his work entirely. Now,
there's Dunham,--you've heard of him,--the greatest performer in the
world on high bars. They'll give him any salary he wants to ask.
Graceful? Well, you ought to see him let go from his giant swing and do
a back somersault clean over the middle bar and catch the third! And now
they say he's gone out of the business. Somebody told me it was
religion. Don't you believe it. He's had a feeling--it's something like
fear, but it _isn't_ fear--that he's worked on high bars long enough."

"He's had bad luck with his partners, too," remarked Weitzel. "Couple of
'em missed the turn somehow and got killed. Say, that takes a man's
nerve as much as anything, to have his partner hurt. I don't wonder
Dunham wants to quit."

"Tell you where it's hard on an acrobat," put in Zorella--"that's where
he _can't_ quit on account of his family--where he needs the money. I
remember a young fellow joined the show out west to leap over elephants.
He got along well enough over two elephants, but when it came to three,
why, we could all see he was shaky. Some of the boys told him he'd
better stop, but he said he'd try to learn, and he was such a nice,
modest fellow and worked so hard that everybody wished him luck. But it
wasn't any use. One day he tackled a double over three elephants, and
came down all in sections, with his right foot on the mattress and his
left foot on the ground. That was his last leap, poor fellow, for the
ankle bones snapped as his left foot struck, and a few