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And Billikens, very angry, very disgusted, very embarrassed, obeyed, putting his arms around his wife and kissing her neither too perfunctorily nor very long. She was a pretty young thing of a woman, perhaps twenty years old, with an exceedingly childish, girlish face and a slender-waisted, generously moulded body of fully a hundred and forty pounds.
"No, no, Billikens," she pleaded to the stout though youthful man who was her husband. "I can't do it. I'm afraid. I'm afraid." "Nonsense, madam," Collins interposed. "The trick is absolutely safe. And it's a good one, a money-maker. Straighten up a moment." With his hands he began feeling out her shoulders and back under her jacket. "The apparatus is all right." He ran his hands down her arms.
And her face was a kaleidoscope. At the first, tense and fearful, it was like that of a Christian martyr meeting the lions, or of a felon falling through the trap. Next, and quickly, came surprise and relief in that there was no hurt. And, finally, her face was proudly happy with a smile of triumph. She even smiled to Billikens her pride at making good her love to him.
And Billikens relaxed and looked love and pride back, until, on the spur of the second, Harris Collins broke in: "This ain't a smiling act! Get that smile off your face. The audience has got to think you're carrying the pull. Show that you are. Make your face stiff till it cracks. Show determination, will-power. Show great muscular effort. Spread your legs more.
She controlled herself and strove to obey, though ever and anon she cast appealing glances to Billikens, who stood remote and aloof, his brows wrinkled with displeasure. Each of the men driving the harnessed spans lifted up the double-trees so that the girl could grasp the hooks. She tried to take hold, but broke down again. "If anything breaks, my arms will be torn out of me," she protested.
But the husband raged at her: "By God, Julia, if you throw me down this way!" "Oh, I'll try, Billikens," she whimpered. "Honestly, I'll try. See! I'm not afraid now." She extended her hands and clasped the double-trees. With a thin writhe of a smile, Collins investigated the insides of her clenched hands to make sure that the hooks were connected. "Now brace yourself! Spread your legs.
Collins barked, his eyes on the girl and noting that the pull of the apparatus was straight across her. The lashes fell on the horses' rumps, and they leaped, and surged, and plunged, with their huge steel-shod hoofs, the size of soup-plates, tearing up the sawdust into smoke. And Billikens forgot himself. The terribleness of the sight painted the honest anxiety for the woman on his face.
Remember, straight out, extended, so that they form a straight line with each other and with the flat of your back and shoulders. That's it. Ready now." "Oh, wait a minute," she begged, forsaking the position. "I'll do it oh, I will do it, but, Billikens, kiss me first, and then I won't care if my arms are pulled out." The dark youth who held Michael, and others looking on, grinned.
It was so funny to read how the girls of Old Egypt had consulted palmists and fortune tellers and astrologers just as girls did in Bond Street now; and that what 'Billikens' and 'Swasticas' and birth-stones were to us, images of gods were to the girls of Egypt who lived before the days of Moses!
Marie obeyed, and, the hooks still dangling from her sleeves, made a short run to Billikens, into whose arms she threw herself, her own arms folding him about the neck as she exclaimed before she kissed him: "Oh, Billikens, I knew I could do it all the time! I was brave, wasn't I!" "A give-away," Collins's dry voice broke in on her ecstasy. "Letting all the audience see the hooks.
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