o their most familiar
feats.

"I'll tell you what accounts for the death of most gymnasts," he went
on. "It's changing their minds while they're in the air. That's what we
call it, but it's only a name. Nobody knows just what happens when a
gymnast changes his mind--I mean what happens inside him. What happens
outside is that he's usually killed.

"Now there was Billy Batcheller. He was a fine leaper, and could do his
two somersaults over four elephants or eight horses with the prettiest
lift you ever saw. He could do it easy. But one day--we were showing out
west with the Reynolds circus--as he came down the leaping-run he struck
the board wrong, somehow, and in the turn he changed his mind; instead
of doing a double he did one and a half and shot over the last horse
straight for the ground, head first. One second more and he was a dead
man; he would have broken his neck sure, but I saw him coming and caught
him so with my right arm, took all the skin off under his chin, and left
the print of my hand on his breast for weeks. But it saved him. And the
queer thing was he never could explain it--none of them ever can; he
just changed his mind. So did Ladell, who used to do doubles from high
bars down to a pedestal. He made his leap one night, just as usual--it
was at Toronto, in 1896, I think--and as he turned he changed his mind,
and I forget how he landed, but it killed him all right."

"Did you ever have an experience of this kind yourself?" I asked.

"Not exactly," he answered, "and I'm thankful I haven't, but I came near
it once in Chicago. It was the night after Howard got hurt, and I guess
fear--just plain, every-day fear--was at the bottom of my feeling. My
wife and I were doing an act sixty feet above the ground, and without a
net. I would hang by my hands from a couple of loops at the top of the
Coliseum, and she would hang, head down, from my feet, her ankles locked
across mine, just a natural locking of the feet, with no fastenings and
only ordinary performing shoes.

"When I had her that way, a man below would pull a drag-rope and get us
swinging higher and higher, until finally we would come right up to a
horizontal. I tell you it was a hair-raising thing to see, but until
this night I had never thought much about the danger. I thought of it
now, though, as I remembered Howard's fall, and I got so nervous for my
wife that I felt sure something terrible was going to happen. I was just
about in the state