to get it.

"I suppose you've heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?"
he asked.

He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.

"Got the toothache," he explained. "Well, the lion-tamer's big play to
the audience was putting his head in a lion's mouth. The man who hated
him attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing that lion
crunch down. He followed the show about all over the country. The years
went by and he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew old, and the lion grew
old. And at last one day, sitting in a front seat, he saw what he had
waited for. The lion crunched down, and there wasn't any need to call a
doctor."

The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which
would have been critical had it not been so sad.

"Now, that's what I call patience," he continued, "and it's my style.
But it was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin,
sawed-off, sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville, he called
himself, and he had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and used to dive
from under the roof into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as
you please.

"De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as
quick as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called him
a frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little worse, he shoved
him against the soft pine background he used in his knife-throwing act,
so quick the ring-master didn't have time to think, and there, before
the audience, De Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking
them into the wood all around the ring-master so close that they passed
through his clothes and most of them bit into his skin.

"The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was
pinned fast. So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and no
one dared be more than barely civil to his wife. And she was a sly bit
of baggage, too, only all hands were afraid of De Ville.

"But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was the
lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head into
the lion's mouth. He'd put it into the mouths of any of them, though
he preferred Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always be
depended upon.

"As I was saying, Wallace--'King' Wallace we called him--was afraid
of nothing alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I've seen him
drunk, and on a wager go into