body slid
across the floor. The four of us stood around the trap-door to beat
Wallace back, and when he realized that he was losing his prey it kept
us busy.

"Say, a dead horse seems to have more legs than a centipede when you try
to drag it through a narrow space, and they all stick out in different
directions. Of course, this one stuck and then there was more trouble,
for when I took an axe to dismember it, a cop threatened to arrest me
for cutting up a horse in the city limits. It took three hours to
satisfy the red-tape requirements and get a permit from the Board of
Health, and then I had a long, sickening job, for we had to haul up
what was left of the poor beast in fragments, and all the time Wallace
was snapping at them or rushing at us. We gave him several nasty cracks
over the snout, the only place where a lion seems to be sensitive to
pain, but it only made him uglier than ever and I knew that there was a
pretty fight ahead of us. It was a case of 'Perdicaris alive or Raisouli
dead' with me, for the police were getting impatient, and I knew they
would shoot him if we did not get him caged before night.

"We drew lots to see who should be the first to go down, and I think
that McDonald stacked the straws, for Broncho won--or lost--I was
second, the other Barnum man third and McDonald last; but he made good
after we got down there, and it was what the President would have called
a 'crowded hour.' If Wallace hadn't been full of horse meat, which made
him a trifle slow, I think he would have chased the bunch of us out, and
as it was he gave us all we wanted to do. We used blank cartridges,
Roman candles, training rods and whips, and I learned afterward that
the crowd outside thought we were all being torn to pieces, but we
finally conquered and it was a singed and battered lion which jumped
back into the den and gave me a chance to slam the door. The noise of
the clicking lock sounded good to me, and I went up the stairs with a
lighter heart, in spite of tattered clothes and a scratched hand and
bruised body. I knew that I had a small fortune in the beast, but I
nearly cried when I went into the saloon to freshen up, and the first
thing I saw was the poster with the announcement that Wallace would be
shown at the dime museum. I knew that it would make the reporters, who
had been writing columns of space, suspect that it was all a fake and
prearranged. The manager was afraid that I would renege on my contract
a