Tuesday's Serial: "St. Martin’s Summer" by Rafael Sabatini (in English) - VII.

 

CHAPTER VIII. THE CLOSING OF THE TRAP

Upon leaving the Champs aux Capuchins, hawk-faced Monsieur Gaubert had run every foot of the way to the Sucking Calf, and he had arrived there within some five minutes, out of breath and wearing every appearance of distress—of a distress rather greater than his haste to find his friend should warrant.

At the door of the inn he found the carriage still waiting; the post-boy, however, was in the porch, leaning in talk with one of the drawers. The troopers sat their horses in stolid patience, keeping guard, and awaiting, as they had been bidden, the return of Monsieur de Garnache. Rabecque, very watchful, lounged in the doorway, betraying in his air none of the anxiety and impatience with which he looked for his master.

At sight of Monsieur Gaubert, running so breathlessly, he started forward, wondering and uneasy. Across the street, from the Palais Seneschal, came at that same moment Monsieur de Tressan with rolling gait. He reached the door of the inn together with Monsieur Gaubert.

Full of evil forebodings, Rabecque hailed the runner.

“What has happened?” he cried. “Where is Monsieur de Garnache?”

Gaubert came to a staggering halt; he groaned and wrung his hands.

“Killed!” he panted, rocking himself in a passion of distress. “He has been butchered! Oh! it was horrible!”

Rabecque gripped him by the shoulder, and steadied him with a hand that hurt. “What do you say?” he gasped, his face white to the lips.

Tressan halted, too, and turned upon Gaubert, a look of incredulity in his fat countenance. “Who has been killed?” he asked. “Not Monsieur de Garnache?”

“Helas! yes,” groaned the other. “It was a snare, a guet-apens to which they led us. Four of them set upon us in the Champs aux Capuchins. As long as he lived, I stood beside him. But seeing him fallen, I come for help.”

“My God!” sobbed Rabecque, and loosed his grasp of Monsieur Gaubert’s shoulder.

“Who did it?” inquired Tressan, and his voice rumbled fiercely.

“I know not who they were. The man who picked the quarrel with Monsieur de Garnache called himself Sanguinetti. There is a riot down there at present. There was a crowd to witness the combat, and they have fallen to fighting among themselves. Would to Heaven they had stirred in time to save that poor gentleman from being murdered.”

“A riot, did you say?” cried Tressan, the official seeming to awaken in him.

“Aye,” answered the other indifferently; “they are cutting one another’s throats.”

“But... But... Are you sure that he is dead, monsieur?” inquired Rabecque; and his tone was one that implored contradiction.

Gaubert looked and paused, seeming to give the matter a second’s thought. “I saw him fall,” said he. “It may be that he was no more than wounded.”

“And you left him there?” roared the servant. “You left him there?”

Gaubert shrugged his shoulders. “What could I do against four? Besides, the crowd was interfering already, and it seemed best to me to come for help. These soldiers, now—”

“Aye,” cut in Tressan, and he turned about and called the sergeant. “This becomes my affair.” And he announced his quality to Monsieur Gaubert. “I am the Lord Seneschal of Dauphiny.”

“I am fortunate in finding you,” returned Gaubert, and bowed. “I could place the matter in no better hand.”

But Tressan, without heeding him, was already ordering the sergeant to ride hard with his troopers for the Champs aux Capuchins. Rabecque, however, thrust himself suddenly forward.

“Not so, Monsieur le Seneschal,” he interposed in fresh alarm, and mindful of his charge. “These men are here to guard Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye. Let them remain. I will go to Monsieur de Garnache.”

The Seneschal stared at him with contemptuously pouting underlip. “You will go?” said he. “And what can you do alone? Who are you?” he asked.

“I am Monsieur de Garnache’s servant.”

“A lackey? Ah!” And Tressan turned aside and resumed his orders as if Rabecque did not exist or had never spoken. “To the Champs aux Capuchins!” said he. “At the gallop, Pommier! I will send others after you.”

The sergeant rose in his stirrups and growled an order. The troopers wheeled about; another order, and they were off, their cantering hoofs thundering down the narrow street.

Rabecque clutched at the Lord Seneschal’s arm.

“Stop them, monsieur!” he almost screamed in his excitement. “Stop them! There is some snare, some trick in this.”

“Stop them?” quoth the Seneschal. “Are you mad?” He shook off Rabecque’s detaining hand, and left him, to cross the street again with ponderous and sluggish haste, no doubt to carry out his purpose of sending more troopers to the scene of the disturbance.

Rabecque swore angrily and bitterly, and his vexation had two entirely separate sources. On the one hand his anxiety and affection for his master urged him to run at once to his assistance, whilst Tressan’s removal of the troopers rendered it impossible for him to leave Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye unguarded—though what he should do with her if Garnache came not back at all, he did not at this stage pause to consider. On the other hand, an instinctive and growing suspicion of this Monsieur Gaubert—who was now entering the inn—inspired him with the opinion that the fat Seneschal had been duped by a wild tale to send the troopers from the spot where they might presently become very necessary.

Full of fears, anxiety, and mistrust, it was a very dispirited Rabecque that now slowly followed Monsieur Gaubert into the inn. But as he set his foot across the threshold of the common-room, a sight met his eyes that brought him to a momentary standstill, and turned to certainty all his rising suspicions. He found it tenanted by a half-dozen fellows of very rude aspect, all armed and bearing an odd resemblance in air and accoutrements to the braves he had seen at Condillac the day before. As to how they came there, he could only surmise that they had entered through the stable-yard, as otherwise he must have observed their approach. They were grouped now at the other end of the long, low chamber, by the door leading to the interior of the inn. A few paces distant the landlord watched them with uneasy eyes.

But what dismayed Garnache’s servant most of all was to see the man who called himself Gaubert standing in talk with a slender, handsome youth, magnificently arrayed, in whom he recognized Marius de Condillac.

Rabecque checked in his advance, and caught in that moment from Marius the words: “Let her be told that it is Monsieur de Garnache wishes her to descend.”

At that Rabecque stepped towards them, very purposeful of mien. Gaubert turned at his approach, and smiled. Marius looked up quickly; then made a sign to the men. Instantly two of them went out by the door they guarded, and ere it swung back again Rabecque saw that they were making for the stairs. The remaining four ranged themselves shoulder to shoulder across the doorway, plainly with intent to bar the way. Gaubert, followed immediately by Marius, stepped aside and approached the landlord with arms akimbo and a truculent smile on his pale hawk face. What he and Marius said, Rabecque could not make out, but he distinctly heard the landlord’s answer delivered with a respectful bow to Marius:

“Bien, Monsieur de Condillac. I would not interfere in your concerns—not for the world. I will be blind and deaf.”

Marius acknowledged the servile protestation by a sneer, and Rabecque, stirring at last, went forward boldly towards the doorway and its ugly, human barrier.

“By your leave, sirs,” said he—and he made to thrust one of them aside.

“You cannot pass this way, sir,” he was answered, respectfully but firmly.

Rabecque stood still, clenching and unclenching his hands and quivering with anger. It was in that moment that he most fervently cursed Tressan and his stupid meddling. Had the troopers still been there, they could have made short work of these tatter-demalions. As it was, and with Monsieur de Garnache dead, or at least absent, everything seemed at an end. He might have contended that, his master being slain, it was no great matter what he did, for in the end the Condillacs must surely have their way with Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye. But he never paused to think of that just then. His sense of trust was strong; his duty to his master plain. He stepped back, and drew his sword.

“Let me pass!” he roared. But at the same instant there came the soft slither of another weapon drawn, and Rabecque was forced to turn to meet the onslaught of Monsieur Gaubert.

“You dirty traitor,” cried the angry lackey, and that was all they left him breath to say. Strong arms gripped him from behind. The sword was wrenched from his hand. He was flung down heavily, and pinned prone in a corner by one of those bullies who knelt on his spine. And then the door opened again, and poor Rabecque groaned in impotent anguish to behold Mademoiselle de La Vauvraye pause white-faced and wide-eyed on, the threshold at sight of Monsieur de Condillac bowing low before her.

She stood there a moment between the two ruffians who had been sent to fetch her, and her eyes travelling round that room discovered Rabecque in his undignified and half; strangled condition.

“Where... Where is Monsieur de Garnache?” she faltered.

“He is where all those who cross the will of Condillac must sooner or later find themselves,” said Marius airily. “He is... disposed of.”

“Do you mean that he is dead?” she cried.

“I think it very probable by now,” he smiled. “So you see, mademoiselle, since the guardian the Queen appointed you has... deserted you, you would do well to return to my mother’s roof. Let me assure you that we shall very gladly welcome your return. We blame none but Garnache for your departure, and he has paid for the brutality of his abduction of you.”

She turned in despair from that mocking gentleman, and attempted to make appeal to the landlord, as though he could help her who could not help himself.

“Monsieur l’Hote—” she began, but Marius cut in sharply.

“Take her out that way,” he said, and pointed back down the passage by the stairs. “To the coach. Make haste.”

She sought to resist them now; but they dragged her back, and there was a rush of the others following through the doorway, the rear being brought up by Gaubert.

“Follow presently,” was his parting command to the man who still knelt upon Rabecque, and with that he vanished too.

Their steps died away in the passage; a door banged in the distance. There followed a silence, disturbed only by the sound of Rabecque’s laboured breathing; then came a stir outside the door of the inn; some one shouted an order. There was a movement of hoofs, a creak and crunch of wheels, and presently the rumble of a heavy carriage being driven rapidly away. But too well did Rabecque surmise what had taken place.

The ruffian released him at last, and, leaping to his feet, was gone before Rabecque could rise. Once up, however, the lackey darted to the door. In the distance he saw his late assailant running hard; the coach had disappeared. He turned, and his smouldering eye fell upon the landlord.

“O pig!” he apostrophized him, snarling at him to vent some of his pent-up rage. “O cowardly pig.”

“What would you?” expostulated the frightened taverner. “They had cut my throat if I resisted them.”

Rabecque poured abuse upon him, until for very lack of words he was forced to cease, then, with a final bark of contempt, he went to recover his sword, which had been flung into a corner of the room. He was stooping in the act, when a quick step rang behind him on the threshold, an angry voice harsh and metallic pronounced his name:

“Rebecque!”

The sword clattered from Rabecque’s hand suddenly gone nerveless—nerveless with sheer joy, all else forgotten in the perception that there, safe and sound, stood his beloved master.

“Monsieur!” he cried, and the tears welled up to the rough servant’s eyes. “Monsieur!” he cried again, and then with the tears streaming down his cheeks, sallow and wrinkled as parchment, “Oh, thank God!” he blubbered. “Thank God!”

“For what?” asked Garnache, coming forward, a scowl like a thunder-cloud upon his brow. “Where is the coach, where the troopers? Where is mademoiselle? Answer me!”

He caught Rabecque’s wrist in a grip that threatened to snap it. His face was livid, his eyes aflame.

“They—they—” stammered Rabecque. He had not the courage to tell the thing that had happened. He feared Garnache would strike him dead.

And then out of his terror he gathered an odd daring. He spoke to Garnache as never he had dreamt to speak to him, and it may well be that by his tone and by what he said he saved his life just then.

“You fool,” he cried to him. “I told you to be on your guard. I warned you to go warily. But you would not heed me. You know better than Rabecque. You would have your way. You must go a-brawling. And they duped you, they fooled you to the very top of their bent, monsieur.”

Garnache dropped the servant’s hand and stood back a pace. That counter-blast of passion and that plain speaking from a quarter so unexpected served, in part at least, to sober him. He understood the thing that had happened, the thing that already he suspected must have happened; but he understood too that he alone was to blame for it—he and his cursed temper.

“Who—who fooled me?” he stammered.

“Gaubert—the fellow that calls himself Gaubert. He and his friends. They fooled you away. Then Gaubert returned with a tale that you had been killed and that there was a disturbance in the Champs aux Capuchins. Monsieur de Tressan was here, as ill-luck would have it, and Gaubert implored him to send soldiers thither to quell the riot. He dispatched the escort. I sought in vain to stay them. He would not listen to me. The troopers went, and then Monsieur Gaubert entered the inn, to join Monsieur de Condillac and six of his braves who were waiting there. They overpowered me, and carried mademoiselle off in the coach. I did what I could, but—”

“How long have they been gone?” Garnache interrupted him to inquire.

“But few minutes before you came.”

“It would be, then, the coach that passed me near the Porte de Savoie. We must go after them, Rabecque. I made a short cut across the graveyard of Saint Francis, or I must have met the escort. Oh, perdition!” he cried, smiting his clenched right hand into his open left. “To have so much good work undone by a moment’s unguardedness.” Then abruptly he turned on his heels. “I am going to Monsieur de Tressan,” said he over his shoulder, and went out.

As he reached the threshold of the porch, the escort rode up the street, returned at last. At sight of him the sergeant broke into a cry of surprise.

“At least you are safe, monsieur,” he said. “We had heard that you were dead, and I feared it must be so, for all that the rest of the story that was told us was clearly part of a very foolish jest.”

“Jest? It was no jest, Vertudieu!” said Garnache grimly. “You had best return to the Palais Seneschal. I have no further need of an escort,” he added bitterly. “I shall require a larger force.”

And he stepped out into the rain, which had begun again a few minutes earlier, and was now falling in a steady downpour.

Monday's Illustrated Word: Walt Disney's Pinocchio by Merrill De Maris (in English)

Art by Hank Porter
The strip served as a promotional tie-in for the 1940 animated feature film and was published as part of the "Silly Symphony" Sunday comic strip series. 

 

December 24, 1939.

December 31, 1939.

January 7, 1940.

January 14, 1940.

January 21, 1940.

January 28, 1940.

February 4, 1940.

February 11, 1940.

February 18, 1940.

February 25, 1940.

March 3, 1940.

March 10, 1940.

March 17, 1940.

March 24, 1940.

March 31, 1940.

April 3, 1940.

 

 

 

Saturday's Good Reading: “Not Down on the Bill” by John Ulrich Giesy (in English).

The band stopped playing. Throughout the “big top” there fell one of those pauses which always precede a major act on the bill—a sort of preliminary silence which arrests the attention of the spectators and contributes in a subtle manner to the nerve-tension which the amusement-seeking public now considers synonymous with getting their money's worth.

High up on a spidery tower, midway of the tent, and directly in front of the reserved section, movement occurred. A man arose and approached a black square on which shone polished levers. A second figure arose, cast off a robe which shrouded its outlines, and stood revealed as a girl in pale pink fleshings about supple, pliant torso and limbs.

Viewed from below she looked small, dainty, young and blonde in a gold-and-crimson way. She took up a sort of wand and advanced to the edge of the tower's top, from which a wire stretched down at a slight angle from an upright, beside a little ladder like set of steps.

The ringmaster raised his hands. The silence continued. All other acts in the three rings below, and on the wires and trapeze above, came to a halt. The announcer's megaphone rang out to all parts of the monster tent:

“Ladies and gentlemen! Mlle. Mitchi Maya in her daring performance on the Live Wire! There are five thousand volts of deadly current passing through the wire upon which she works. Five thousand volts! Enough to strike a dozen men dead. A slip—a misstep—ah! Permit me to ask you all to maintain absolute silence during this exceedingly hazardous act. Are you ready, Mlle. Maya? Then—go!”

With a crackling sputter, two large arc-lights, one green on the tower, one red above the net where the wire ran down and ended, leaped into life as the man on the tower pushed a shining lever home. The girl bowed. She ran up the little steps to a level with the wire. She bowed again, poised like a diver; then—she stepped out on the wire itself.

A burst of flame came from under her shoe at the contact. The side of her body above the limb she stood on sprang into an outline of tiny parti-colored lights. She advanced a step. Again a flash of blue fire marked her action. Lights outlined the limb and girdled her slender waist on the opposite side.

She put down both feet and stood drawn in colored light. She walked, she ran, she danced on the deadly thing beneath her, turned and ran back to the ladder-like steps, and so down to the tower-top.

Already her assistant was busy. As the avid crowd sighed its relief and gaped for more, he led her to the edge, this time beneath the wire.

She turned back her face and seized something in her mouth. On her back the man was fastening something, one could not just see what; but in a moment one understood. She lifted her naked arms. The wings of a giant butterfly sprang into view. They waved as in preparation for flight, and—she was off!

Hanging by her teeth, arms outstretched, the wings and her body a mass of scintillating brilliance, the wheel upon which she slid and beneath which she clung throwing off sparks like the flare of a trolley from a charged wire!

She flashed down the wire, landed in the net and stood bowing to the wave of applause which greeted her having accomplished the thing once more. Then she slid to the ground on a rope, ran from the ring and so back to the “trapping-room.”

The “Human Butterfly” act of the Barnaby Shows was ended.

It was a genuine “thriller.” I, who was press agent of Barnaby's Shows, knew all about it. I knew that it had already been the indirect cause of a man's death, and of a wedding; and that it had nearly killed the woman who had just performed it anew and was making her way out of the ring while the audience rustled back to a casual interest in less sensational numbers of the bill.

I glanced into her face and nodded as she passed me in the fly of the big top. She nodded back with a smile. She was as winsome, as fresh near at hand as she looked on the tower. She was young, and seemingly happy.

I remembered the night when her petite body lay unconscious in the net. For the wire on which she worked was really charged as the announcer had claimed. The act was risky. It was genuine—no fake.

Forget that I am a press agent, because the story of the thing is true, on my honor as a man.

 

 

We of the circus know that about once every so often the public must have a thrill in their bill of entertainment. Human nature stays pretty much the same from year to year. The Romans had gladiatorial combats, and the old barons and such, knightly tournaments. Folks got hurt in those affairs.

Nowadays people like to see men and women go up in balloons and jump off with a few yards of canvas between them and kingdom come, or else see a loop-the-loop, or an airman fly upside down—anything where a mishap will mean sudden death. I don't know why, but it's so. You know it.

And so we amusement-venders have to pull a dangerous stunt now and then. That is how Pitkin came to dope out the “Butterfly” in the first place. He was our electrician. We have a new one now. But he fixed this “thriller” and it gave one audience, at least, a sensation not down on the bill.

Pitkin was nuts on electricity—had all sorts of funny notions about what it could do—was always experimenting with the “juice,” and he certainly knew how to make it do what he wanted it to.

He figured that a big act like this, full of blue sparks and things, would make a big hit, and he put it straight up to old man Barnaby himself.

At first Barnaby was shy of the thing. Then his need of a new act and the scheme of the thing itself took hold on him. Pitkin assured him that he could make it as safe as a church during Lent, and he fell for the act and had it built.

Now in itself, the act is all right—if something don't go wrong. That's the whole thing with most of the big stunts, however. It's the thing which sometimes gives the dear public something not down, and it's because of the off chance of something going wrong that they all hold their breaths and hope. But they're not hoping it will.

In working, Mitchi wore insulated shoes and her tights were rubber, too. The mouthpiece of her pulley was made of soft rubber into which she bit. Unless she were to brush the wire with her naked arms or her face she was pretty safe.

She had to be quick at the net, of course, so as to hit it right and not fall against the wire. But that's nothing much for the trained acrobat which she was.

Still, when it came to getting a woman for the act after it was built, Pitkin and Barnaby had some trouble, until they picked up Mitchi Maya out of an aerial troupe.

She'd been with the show for some time and was about the neatest little gymnast you ever saw. She had blue eyes like the flowers of wild flax, and a little straight nose, and a clear, fine skin, with a figure as supple and pliant as a spring. And she had a nerve to match her good looks, which isn't always the rule by a long shot.

The old Hungarian who was head of the aerial troupe had picked her up as a baby, adopted and trained her, and he always kept her with him. There was some story about a widowed mother in the old country, and I know Mitchi used to send money somewhere over there.

Well, when she heard about the “Butterfly” going begging for a woman, I guess she got a bug she could save a lot more money out of the job. They pay big for such stunts. She thought if she earned enough she could get the old dame over here and sort of look after her first hand instead of by correspondence.

First off she had a long powwow with the old Magyar who had raised her, and though he put up some kick about her leaving his act, he gave in in the end like we all do for a pretty woman. Next she goes to the “old man” and says she'll sign on for the big bill; and the first thing we knew Pitkin and she were working the thing up between shows and before performances, after the big top was up.

The act created a good deal of excitement, even among our crowd themselves. I remember we all stood around mighty shaky the first time it got a try-out.

Some of the women got pretty pale the first time that little kid stepped out on that hell-spitting wire in her little pink tights, and I know I felt sort of lumpy in the throat myself.

But Mitchi was as cool as a nice icy grapefruit, and she got by with the trial in great shape. Then, too, Pitkin swore there wasn't any real danger.

He explained all about it. It seems that the balancing-wand she carried, with a big brass knob on the end, was a sort of safety device. At least that is what I gathered from his line of talk. He said the knob collected all the surplus electricity which wasn't taken care of by her shoes and suit.

It was something like some sort of jar—Leyden jar he called it. Anyway, as I understood it, it was a sort of fancy lightning-rod she carried, which caught up all the diffused currents and made her safe. As for the slide, it only lasted a few seconds, and the rubber mouthpiece was built so that she couldn't get hurt.

Still, it sure looked fierce to see that kid frolicking around on the thing. It gave me the willies the first time, and it sort of gets me fussed up now and again, even now. You see I can't just forget what happened—once.

 

After the trial we all congratulated them, and Mitchi laughed, with her little red mouth open so you could see her strong white teeth. She said it was a lot easier in fact than the trapeze act of the old Magyar's she had left. As for Pitkin, he grunted and let it go at that. Nobody expected anything else from him.

He was a funny fellow, dark as Mitchi was light, and wiry, with a sort of sallow skin and a great mop of black hair which he wore so long it curled up at the back like a duck's tail. He had black eyes, or at least black-brown, and a half-way discouraged mustache. By his own tell he was a Russian who had left the old homestead on the jump, about a hose-length ahead of a Siberian excursion the Czar was getting up for some undesirable “cits.”

Pitkin made a getaway and beat the police to the frontier. He'd been what he called a student with progressive thinks in his tank. He had a sort of slow, quiet way about him and wasn't much of a mixer. He'd rather get off by himself and mope around half a day than join a friendly gabfest or a game of cards. But he sure was studious when it came to using the “juice” for funny effects.

Oh, he was bright all right—only, to look at the chap, you wouldn't ever have thought he had a live wire of feeling coiled up in himself. He just gloomed around and we rather let him alone, most of the time.

But he was human under all his reserve—human in a wild, untrained sort of way, for all his being a student. Dogs, you know, are said to be domesticated wolves, and Pitkin was human the same way that a wolf is a dog.

I fancy the Czar was right—the chap wasn't safe to run with ordinary mutts like the rest of our crowd. We found that out later, too, and it all came about through the butterfly act.

Being with Mitchi like he was, in trying out the act and working it up he saw a lot of the girl. As a matter of fact I don't blame him for getting stuck on that pretty little kid. She was pretty, and game, and on top of that she was a sweet-dispositioned little thing and a prime favorite with our bunch.

The upshot of it was that the Russky fell head over heels in love and wanted to get married right away. Mitchi told him straight out that she didn't care for him that way and that she wouldn't marry any man unless she loved him. He took it mighty badly and grew more sullen than ever.

He was one of those people who have to have what they want, no matter how they get it; and he wouldn't take no for an answer. Every now and then he'd come back with his proposal. And each time he got the same answer he grew a trifle more grouchy about it. He used to go mooning around with his big eyes, black and mournful, except when he was looking at Mitchi, and then they seemed to snap, and dance, and sparkle.

I've seen him stand and eye her, and after a while spread out his fingers like claws and shut them as if he imagined he could grab her and drag her to him. He'd get a sort of hungry wolf-look on him at times like that.

But Pitkin wasn't the only person who had found Mitchi attractive. Before she left her own to go into Pitkin's act, Mitchi had been a member of a Hungarian family. It wasn't a family, really, like some of them are, but a bunch the old Magyar who ran it had picked up here and there and trained. One of them was a young fellow named Collins whom the old man had grabbed just before Barnaby signed the troupe.

He was a mighty good aerialist, was Tom Collins, but instead of a Hungarian he was Irish, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a mighty well set-up figure. Before she left the act he did one of those flying swings and catches with Mitchi. One of the fellows would grab her by the heels and swing head downward with her. After a bit he'd let go and toss her to Tom, who was hanging by his knees from his bar.

It was a trick calling for a cool head and a sure eye for distance, because the Magyar people worked without a net, and it's a long ways from the bars to the ground. Their apparatus was placed 'way up toward the canvas of the big top, higher even than the top of the tower for the Butterfly number, and a miss would have spelled good night for Mitchi. Tom, like Pitkin, was human—in a more human fashion. He was a good old-dog-Tray sort of human, though his nerve showed up all right when it was needed and made him a bit of the wolf for a time.

You can't expect a man to go on catching a pretty girl in his arms twice a day for months, without noticing what sort of a girl she is. Collins got so he had a hungry look in his eyes, too, those days.

He had a rather romantic respect for the girl, which made his love a wholly different thing from Pitkin's. Just the same we folks knew he was crazy about her, and Pitkin knew it, too—trust a man like him to sense it!

The result was that one day when Mitchi turned him down pretty sharply and told him to cut out his nagging in the future, he up and accused her of liking Collins better than she did him.

Mitchi rather lost her head for a minute and told him he was a pretty good guesser, though up to that time, as I know now, Tom had never told her a word about how he felt. I guess maybe the girl spoke on impulse, right out of her heart. She'd had a chance to notice big-hearted Tom, all right, the same as he had her, and she was a lot nearer his age and more his sort.

Anyway that's what she said, and Pitkin blew up. He swore that before Tom should have her he'd kill him, and added, if that wasn't enough he'd kill her.

Mitchi told him to stop talking foolish because Tom hadn't showed any signs of wanting to marry anybody that she knew of; and she certainly wouldn't marry a man unless he asked her, and not always then.

But Pitkin was too crazy mad to have any sense.

“You want to marry zat peeg, Collins!” he sputtered. “You haf say eet—but you s'all not. I swear it. Me you s'all marry an' no uzzer. Say zat you weel marry me, Mitchi, or I s'all keel zis Collins. I weel keel—keel—even you, Mitchi, my heart—even you!”

He lifted his hands and, clutching into his mane of black hair, waggled his head around and groaned.

At least that's what the ringmaster, who happened to be passing says he did. The ringmaster jumped in and called him down pretty swift, and he moped off.

 

Of course the thing leaked during the day, and Tom heard all about it. That night in the trapping-room, while everybody was dressing, he walked over to the Russian right before the whole male end of the show and put it to him straight, to let the girl alone. Of course he didn't mention Mitchi's name—Tom wouldn't—but we all knew what he meant.

“Look here, Pitkin,” he began. “I've heard a lot of stuff you've pulled about bumpin' me off. Now that's all right. Any time you want to get busy—why, start. But that ain't all. I ain't goin' to mention names, but I'm hep to what's eatin' you, my boy, and I want to tell you that maybe that sort of work goes where you come from, but it's too raw for over here. You want to be careful how you spill any more chatter like that while you're runnin' with this bunch, bo.”

For a minute Pitkin didn't answer. He stood with his black eyes snapping, breathing hard, and a look on him like a dog getting ready to jump at your throat, then—

“I say w'at I mean, Misser Collins,” he got out between gasps.

Tom gave him back stare for stare.

“I hope not, Pitkin,” he says rather slow, “because if I hear of your trying any more of this hazing—of these threats—oh, not about me, Pitkin—but on somebody else—I'll break your —— neck.”

Pitkin yelled out in Russian and jumped for him. I was there and saw it. Tom just put out a hand and shoved him back. The boy wasn't looking for trouble.

After a bit we got Pitkin quieted down and the thing blew over for the night; but as it happened later Tom was a bit of a prophet without really meaning to be.

When he was dressed for his act, which went on before Mitchi's, Tom hunted her up, however, and cautioned her to be careful of the Russian, and told her, if she found herself needing help, to call on him. Mother Boone, our “circus mother,” says they talked mighty low for a spell after that, and that Mitchi laughed in a rather embarrassed fashion and ran back into the women's section of the tent, while Tom walked off whistling in a rather self-satisfied way.

After that Mitchi began to spend a lot of time with Collins, and Pitkin got so that he went around muttering and mumbling to himself. I think he really was touched a little. It's the only way I can explain the thing he planned to do. I noticed, too, that Tom used to watch the Russian every time the act went off after that.

The aerial act with which he worked, although beginning before the butterfly, stopped while the big act was on. Tom's bar was nearest the tower, perhaps twenty feet away and higher than its top.

Well, he'd sit on his trapeze during the interruption and watch every move the Russian made, and though none of us knew it then, he had planned it all out in case anything should happen while the butterfly act was on.

We made a couple of jumps after the two men had their run-in in the trapping-room, and nothing happened. Everything went smooth, and most of us had about let the matter slip out of our minds. And then the thing hit us like a shock of Pitkin's own “juice” and knocked us off our pins.

 

We were playing a two-day stand and the business was tremendous. Every performance packed the big top to the canvas. The Butterfly was simply going immense.

It was the last night of the stand. Collins was dressing for his turn when Pitkin rushed into the trapping-room and began to rummage about in his own trunk like a dog clawing for a buried bone. All the time he was mumbling away and sort of chuckling to himself.

At the time Tom didn't give much attention to him, but afterward he remembered and spoke of it to me.

Tom finished dressing and went out to the fly of the big top to wait for his troupe's signal. There he found Mitchi, wrapped in her cloak, waiting for the Russian to join her before they should get their call. Quite as a matter of course, Tom stopped and spoke to the girl.

She seemed rather nervous and hardly herself. He asked her what was the matter.

“I'm afraid, Tom,” she told him without any feminine fencing. She'd come to trust Collins pretty fully. “Boris—” Pitkin's name was Boris—“has been awfully queer all day. He's asked me to marry him twice since morning.” She laughed in a forced fashion, and went on: “That's a record. Once a day has been his limit. But ever since the last time, this afternoon, he's gone around muttering to himself—and I don't like his looks. Honest, Tom, I don't believe he's just right. I believe he's crazy——”

Collins grinned.

“He's crazy about you, all right,” he said.

“I meant crazy—about me,” said Mitchi. “And he's been threatening again, Tom. He says—he'll kill you—unless I do what he wants.”

“I ain't nervous,” Tom assured her. “He talks too much. Your bad man talks after, not before. But if he don't stop pesterin' you, why—I'll have to marry you myself.”

Mitchi laughed in a nervous fashion.

“Then if he keeps it up I'll have a right to break his neck,” Collins went on, rather carried away by his words and the girl's demeanor and nearness, and his own love for every atom of her. “I told him I would once.”

Mitchi gave him a smile.

“It's all right to joke,” said she, “but I'm really nervous tonight, Tom. If you'd seen Boris' eyes——”

Tom rather lost his head for a minute.

“I ain't joking, Mitchi,” he informed her in a way which brought her eyes up to his. “An' I tell you what you do. After tonight go to the old man and put it to him straight. He'll call this guy off or tie a can on him. Or—if you'd rather, marry me, Mitchi. As my wife, your bughouse Russky wouldn't have a leg left to stand on. Can't you think of worse things than bein' Mrs. Collins?”

I don't know what Mitchi would have answered to that, because just then Tom's act was called and he had to leave on the jump. Even love has to step down when your number is called in the circus. He joined his troupe, trotted in and was pulled up to his bar.

Later he told me that it wasn't till after that, when the act was really started, that he really began to feel worried. Then it came to him all at once that something was due to happen.

Just why it should be that night he didn't know. All along Pitkin's threats had gone for nothing. In fact Tom rather felt that the man was afraid to start any trouble. But now it hit him all at once that trouble was due.

He says he went through his own act by instinct pure and simple, and all the time something kept telling him to grab a rope and slide down and stop things before the Butterfly was called.

But he didn't. Circus people are pretty loyal to the show, as a class. They know the performance has to go on, no matter what happens; and most of them will suffer a lot of pain, or worry, or sickness, before they'll drop out of their act or make a holler of any sort. And the Butterfly is the big number, of course.

Tom told himself he was foolish; that just because he loved the girl so much he was nervous about her; that Pitkin was merely trying to scare her into the marriage, and he felt better—or at least he decided there was no cause for worry. Still, all the time he was worrying.

He says now that he knew something was coming, only he wouldn't admit it to himself because he couldn't believe anybody would attempt a thing as fiendish as the thing Pitkin did.

Just the same, when Mitchi and Pitkin came in, Tom watched the girl climb the tower, and all his love took hold on him afresh. She was little, and slender, and sweet, and he could see her face looked worried, too.

When the band stopped, and the megaphone barked, and his own and all the other acts in the rings came to a pause, he says now, he had all he could do to keep from yelling out and telling them to stop right there.

All he did do, however, was to draw himself up and sit on his bar, watching Pitkin and Mitchi's little pink figure, with every muscle in him tight with watching.

The act began all right. Mitchi did her stunts on the wire and came back for the slide. Pitkin took her to the edge after he'd fastened on her wings, and held the mouthpiece for her. They did it that way then, though now she always takes the mouthpiece in her teeth first. And there's a reason for that.

Well, Pitkin, who always wore rubber gloves, lifted the mouthpiece for her to bite, and Tom saw him speak to her when he did it. Mitchi shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. The Russian frowned and sort of nodded his head.

Mitchi flapped her wings and tilted back her pretty little face. Even then Tom never suspected anything except that Pitkin had proposed again, which he had—the last time, too, as it happened. I guess in his crazy mind he thought he was giving the girl a final chance.

 

All at once Mitchi goes up on her toes and grips the rubber bit in her mouth, and then, right before the whole tent, she stiffens and seems to stretch out in a sort of spasm. And before anybody could lift a hand, Pitkin pushes her off the tower and down she goes.

You know how a current will produce a spasm of the muscles. Well, that's what happened. When the current hit her through the jaws, they locked into the rubber and she couldn't let go or fall off. Pitkin knew that and figured on it to give the current time to kill her.

She flashed along the wire, hit the net and lay still under the wire, with the bit still fast in her teeth. And she never moved.

It sure was awful. When she hit, some of the lamps she wore broke and cut through her tights, but she never felt it. She just lay there and cooked. She was unconscious.

I gave one look at her poor little huddled shape in the net and turned away—sick.

Then I looked up at the tower. Pitkin stood there with his arms folded and his head back, and the most awful, hellish grin on his face I ever saw.

The whole tent was in an uproar. Several men ran toward the tower as if to climb up and shut off the current. Women were screaming and fainting all over the place, and men were yelling and cursing in excitement.

The ringmaster was trying to prevent a panic in the crowd. Through the megaphone he began barking at Pitkin over the shrieks and yells:

“Turn off the juice! Turn off the juice!”

Pitkin seemed to wake up at that, and looked down. The smile on his devil's face got wider, it seemed. He waved a hand toward poor little Mitchi and pointed to himself, as if to say he had meant to do it, and had succeeded, and defied us to do anything in time to save the life he was taking.

By that time one of the boys was half way up the tower, but he never would have made it in time. Even if he'd got up, he'd have had to fight Pitkin before he could reach the switch.

Right there the band began playing, by orders, to quiet the crowd. It seemed ghastly, too. There they were banging out ragtime, with that girl burning to death before everybody's eyes. I felt sick all over, believe me. It was fierce.

 

It was Tom Collins, the man who really loved her, who saw the only way out and took it on the jump. While we were yelling at Pitkin to cut off the current, and he was grinning his hellish triumph, Tom got busy. He let himself down from his bar by his arms and began to swing.

He gave himself a pretty strong momentum and forced himself to wait until it was sufficient. Then he let go. I've mentioned that his bar was higher than the tower and twenty feet beyond it.

When Collins let go, he came down in a straight foot-dive for the top of the tower itself, where Pitkin stood waving his hands and beginning a sort of fiendish clog-dance, right on the edge.

Pitkin's back was toward Tom and he didn't see him coming. I did. I saw him leave the bar and come down like an arrow, holding both feet together. Right in the middle of Pitkin's insane dancing Tom hit the tower, tried to straighten up, and staggered, lurching full into the Russian's back.

Pitkin yelled out once. He screamed like a wounded animal sometimes will—a wild, hoarse, unhuman-like screech. Then, thrown completely off his feet by Collins' impact, he plunged out from the tower's edge and fell over and over into the ring below, to lie awfully still with his black head bent back under his shoulders.

Collins paid no attention to that. He was at the switch. When he bumped into Pitkin it stopped his own fall and straightened him up.

In one leap he reached the switchboard and pulled out the lever.

The lamps sputtered and died, and poor little Mitchi relaxed in the net. I think everybody in the tent sighed at once. It sounded like a gust of wind.

Two of the tent-men were already swarming up ropes to the net, and Tom was racing down the tower. By the time they lowered Mitchi over the edge of the net, he was there to take her in his arms. He caught her and cuddled her up on his breast and kissed her before the whole tent. Then he turned and raced for the exit.

The band was still playing and the other acts started again at the ringmaster's signal. Two hands picked Pitkin up and lugged him out to the trap-room. Collins with Mitchi in his arms passed me at the fly.

There was a wild, fierce look in the boy's eyes. Just for that once I saw the old primitive, human-wolf strain look out. He gave me a glance and ran on into the woman's section of the dressing-tent, without so much as by your leave.

I think he'd forgotten everything on earth but the woman rolled in against his heart. He laid her down and began pumping her arms up and back and down again, like you do those of a man who has drowned. All at once he spoke:

“Get a doctor—a doctor—for God's sake! Ain't anybody got any sense? Get a doctor! She ain't dead! She won't die! I won't let her, I tell you! Get a doctor—quick!”

Some of the girls and Mother Boone tried to get him to let them take charge, but he wouldn't. As it happened, though, there was a doctor in the crowd, and by that time he was coming into the dressing-tent door. He came in and took hold in good shape as soon as Tom would let him.

At first the boy was so rattled he wouldn't let anybody touch her; just knelt there beside her little pink body and snarled, and worked her arms up and down.

I went up and told him the man was a physician, and because he knew me he listened. He looked up at the doctor; then staggered to his feet.

“Take me away, Bill,” he mumbled.

I took him by the arm and led him outside the door of the girls' section.

There he balked. He wouldn't go a step farther. We hung around for a good two hours, and though everything else was loaded up for the jump, we didn't strike that tent till Mitchi could be moved. Old Barnaby sure acted white about that. A delay means a lot to show-folks; but Barnaby sure did the handsome. I guess he felt sort of guilty about having let Pitkin fix up the act in the first place, for he paid Mitchi's hospital-bill.

 

It was about one o'clock when the doctor came out and says he thinks she'll pull through with good care, and that he's going to call an ambulance. When he heard that, Tom began to laugh all at once.

“I told you she wouldn't die!” he said between chuckles to me. “I wouldn't let her! She's mine! But Pitkin died, didn't he, Bill? I told him I'd break his —— neck!”

And with that Tom dropped to the floor in a genuine faint.

He stayed behind, too, when the show went on. All the four weeks Mitchi was in the hospital he hung around. By the time she was ready to come back to the show, the two had decided to sign each other up for a life-engagement. They went off and got married, and Mitchi came back as Mrs. Collins.

But they work under her name. They bill as a brother-and-sister act, and Tom Collins handles the switch.

As for Pitkin, his neck was certainly broken. I think he deserved it for what he did that night. I've mentioned that the man was an electrical expert, and he had planned this thing all out. He'd taken an extra pulley and mouthpiece and soaked the whole thing in a strong copper solution for days.

That night he switched pulleys and put on his copper-loaded one. When Mitchi bit it the current jumped into her like lightning. That, by the way, is why she takes the bite now before her wings go on.

If any josher tried that stunt again, she'd taste it or drop on the tower, at least, even if Tom didn't get it first in his bare hands. He doesn't wear gloves. Tom Collins is sure mighty careful of his wife.

We picked up a new electrician, and nobody wept for Pitkin. Even the coroner, when he'd heard all the evidence we could give, decided his death was due to accidental causes, and nobody kicked on that.