's rubber
serpents, the fat woman's pillows, and the bearded lady's false
whiskers (I don't know what they did about the living skeleton), these
fellows were now gaping before Tristan's platform, and growing hostile
as their rather inadequate brains failed to cook up any damaging
explanation.

"Yah!" yelled a long-necked, flap-eared youth, suddenly. "He's got an
iron bar in that rope!" They had come too late to see the parachute
drop. Tristan grinned and pulled himself down the rope, which of
course fell limp behind him. At this, the crowd jeered and booed the
too-hasty youth, who became so resentfully abusive of Tristan that one
of the attendants pushed him out of the tent. As he passed me, I
caught fragments of wrathy words:

"Wisht I had a ... Show'm whether it's a fake...."

* * * * *

Tristan closed his act by dropping full-length to the end of his
invisible wire, then pulled himself down, got into his stilts, and was
unfastening the belt, when the manager rushed in with a request that
he repeat, for the benefit of a special party just arrived on a
delayed train.

"Go on and look at the animals, old man." Tristan called to me. "I'll
be with you in about half an hour!"

I strolled out idly, meeting on the way the flap-eared youth, who
seemed bent on making his way back into the tent, wearing a mingled
air of furtiveness, of triumph, and anticipation. Wondering casually
just what kind of fool the lad was planning to make of himself next, I
wandered on toward the main entrance--only to be stopped by an
appalling uproar behind me. There was a raucous, gurgling shriek of
mortal terror; the loud composite "O-o-o!" of a shocked or astonished
crowd; a set of fervent curses directed at some one; loud confused
babbling, and then a woman's voice raised in a seemingly endless
succession of hysterical shrieks. Thinking that an animal had gotten
loose, or something of that kind, I wheeled. Unmistakably the racket
came from Tristan's own tent.

Cold dread clutching at my heart, and with lead on my boot soles, I
rushed frantically back. At the entrance I was held by a mad onrush of
humanity for some moments. When I reached the platform, Tristan was
not in sight. Then I noticed the long-necked boy sitting on the
platform with his face in his hands, shrieking:

"I didn't mean to! I didn't mean to! Damn it, don't touch me! I
thought sure it was a fake!"

I saw a new, glittering jack-knife l