y!" came a voice. "If he gets on the track
an engine may hit him!"

That, Joe knew, would be a serious loss. For the animal was valuable,
having cost the Sampson Brothers four thousand dollars originally, and
his value had increased. Joe remembered hearing that Jumbo, the big
elephant, many years ago, had been struck by an engine and killed, his
skeleton now being in the American Museum of Natural History in New
York.

"Get him! Get him!" begged the head animal man.

"I wish I could!" thought Joe.

As he moved to get out of the way of the beast the young acrobat
stumbled over a coil of rope which had been used to let some of the
heavy wagons down the gangplank off the flat cars.

"If I could only lasso him with the rope it might stop him," thought
Joe. "But I don't know how to manage a lasso, even if I could tie a
noose in this rope. And I don't see how one lassoes a hippo anyhow.
However, here goes! I'll do the best I can. Maybe I can tangle his feet
up in the kinks of the rope so he'll fall."

Joe caught up the rope, and, without trying to straighten out the
coils, threw it at the big animal, which was opposite him, Joe having
leaped to one side. And he did by accident what the circus men had for
some time been trying to do by design. He threw coils of the rope about
the short legs of the "river horse" and down went the hippopotamus with
a thud.

"That's the stuff! Good work!" cried the animal's keeper. "Quick now,
boys! Rope him!"

Before the beast could get up he was pounced upon by a crowd of the
animal men and securely bound with ropes.

"Whew!" exclaimed the keeper, as he faced Joe in the now gray dawn of
the morning, "that was some work!"

"How did he get loose?" Joe asked.

"The bottom dropped out of his wagon. Must have been rotten. He dropped
with it and started off on his own hook. He walked all over a lot of us
while we were trying to corner him."

"Walked on us! Say, he danced a jig on my stomach!" complained Bill
Dudley, one of the animal men, as he came limping up. "Have you got him
safe?"

"Yes," replied the keeper.

"Well, don't let him get loose again. He almost made a pancake of me!"

The circus men now led the subdued beast to temporary quarters until
his own cage could be repaired, and the work of unloading the rest of
the circus was proceeded with.

"Is it all right?" Helen asked Joe, as he walked back to his car.

"Yes. The excitement is all over. It was the hippo," and he