r.
Pa is an easy mark and he believed the old sailor, who is tattooed and
makes a show of himself with the freaks, and pa took a change of clothes
and a bottle of mustard and a cruet of vinegar and a bottle of red
pepper and went into a dressing room and got behind a wagon and began to
take the cure the sailor had prescribed. I don't know as it was right to
do it, but about the time pa had got to the red pepper course and was
sprinkling it on his skin pretty thick, and he was beginning to get
pretty hot, and was yelling a little, I told the chief of police, who
was looking around with the health officer for suspicious cases, that
there was a man acting sort of queer behind the wagon that had a piece
of canvas over the wheels. They both rushed in on pa and grabbed him.
Gee! but pa looked and smelled like a plate of pigs' feet and the doctor
said it was an unmistakable case of yellow fever, he could tell by the
smell, and then pa turned pale and yellow from fright, and they wrapped
him up in a piece of canvas and took him away in an emergency hospital
ambulance, and the whole show at once knew that we were in for a
quarantine.
[Illustration: The Doctor Said it was an Unmistakable Case of Yellow
Fever.]
They burned up the suit of clothes pa took off and the one he was going
to put on, and the ambulance drove away, while pa shook one fist at the
sailor and one at me, and his skin began to shrink and smart, and he
yelled, and the audience stampeded, and the show was in the dumps.
We had to stay over Sunday in Evansville, and the show people were so
scared the manager thought he better have religious services in the tent
Sunday, so they got a revivalist preacher to preach to them, a fellow
who used to preach to the cowboys out west. Sunday morning the tough
fellows in the show said they wouldn't do a thing to the preacher when
he came on to do his stunt. Their idea was to wait until he got well on
his sermon and then begin to interrupt him and ask questions, and
finally to get a blanket and toss him up a few times for luck, and then
chase him out and have the circus bulldog, that chews the clown's pants,
catch the minister's coat tail and just scare him plum to death.
The boys said it would be the biggest picnic that ever was--a regular
barbecue. The boss canvasman said he was opposed to mixing religion with
the circus business, because the fellows could get all the religion they
needed in the winter, when the sho
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