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The assistants carefully removed the great boas and pythons from the boxes, laying them on the floor, where they crawled lazily about, their delicate forked tongues vibrating like streaks of red flame, while Brandu removed a slat from a crate of rabbits and put a half-dozen of them on the floor.
Long as I have been in the business, I learn something new every day, and I never saw a cobra fed artificially until last week, when Brandu, my Hindoo snake charmer, received one direct from India. It seems that they are cannibal snakes and live upon their own kind in India, but that would be too expensive a diet here, and he forces feed down its throat."
The cobra gazed at him fixedly and the tense body slowly uncoiled from his arm and hung limp and motionless, and Brandu laid it on the floor as lifeless and inert as a piece of rope.
"I am always glad when that part of the performance is over," said the Proprietor with a sigh of relief. "Of course, it is all in the day's work with Brandu and he has done it thousands of times, but some day he will be a fraction of a second too slow and then well, I shall have to get another snake charmer. Watch him now and you will see something which only the men of his caste can do."
Its head reared up above the edge, the spectacled hood distended in anger, but Brandu quickly clapped on the cover and the snake feeding was finished for two weeks. "That is a great performance of Brandu's," said the Press Agent, "but it profits us nothing because the best part of it cannot be shown to the public.
Brandu and his two native assistants were carrying the boxes which contained the snakes into the big exhibition cage, and, when the three men joined them, the weirdness of the surroundings made a profound impression upon the Stranger.
Brandu crouched on the floor beside it, and, although the performance was not accompanied by the weird Oriental music which signaled the public appearances of the snake charmer, the tense expression of his face and the uncanniness of the surroundings made it sufficiently impressive, for he was about to handle the cobra de capello, the most venomous snake in all the great collection.
A crash of weird music from the band drowned the sound of a cracking whip and sharp commands which came from the runway, and announced the appearance of Brandu, the snake charmer, in the exhibition cage, and the audience watched him play with a cobra, all unconscious that Franz, the jaguar, which a few minutes before had desisted from his attempt to tear the fair shoulders of Morelli only after a dozen blank cartridges had been fired in his face, was a gentleman-at-large in Dreamland.
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