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Updated: May 31, 2025
"I may not try to break any under-water records," he went on, "but I'll do all the rest of it." Some of the circus folk had witnessed the sensational rescue by Joe, and when he and Helen reached the circus grounds our hero was met by Jim Tracy. "What's this I hear about you?" asked the ringmaster. "Nothing bad, I hope," answered Joe with a smile. "I should say not!
For a week he had been in training for the fantastic trapeze act which had won thunders of approbation. The Benares Brothers had appeared in the amphitheatre dome on a double trapeze. After several clever specialties, the ringmaster suddenly stepped forward. He lifted his hand. The orchestra stopped playing. Raising a pistol, the ringmaster directed it aloft. Bang!
Jim Tracy, ringmaster and, in this instance, stage manager of Sampson Brothers' Circus, paused in his announcement and with a wave of his hand indicated a youth attired in a spotless, tight-fitting suit of white silk. The youth, who stood in the center of a stage erected in the big tent, bowed as the manager waited to allow time for the applause to die away.
Quick to appreciate the value of the clown's interruption, the ringmaster took the great egg that Teddy had brought in, and held it aloft. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, as the band suddenly ceased playing, "wonders never cease in the Great Sparling Shows.
So, then, the ringmaster he made a little speech, and said he hoped there wouldn't be no disturbance, and if the man would promise he wouldn't make no more trouble he would let him ride if he thought he could stay on the horse. So everybody laughed and said all right, and the man got on.
"Even the lamps have halos," Teddy informed the people. "I had one once, but the ringmaster borrowed it and forgot to return it. But I don't care. He needs a halo more than I do." A howl greeted this sally. Teddy was about to say something else, after the first wave of laughter had swept over the audience, but no one heard him speak.
It caught across the bar of the "doped" trapeze. At a touch this latter came hurtling to the ground. Old Benares, watching also, trembled with intense anger. "It is infamoos!" he declared. "Where should my partner be, but for this boy?" The ringmaster examined the loosened trapeze bar. Just as Andy had stated, two slight threads alone had held it to the supporting ropes.
The table seemed emptied of victuals, and the young men and women, imitating Joe's example, leaned back in their chairs as though well satisfied with their hot meal. "There you are, ladies and gentlemen!" declaimed the ringmaster. "They have come to no harm from eating living fire.
Bill Watson quickly summoned some of his fellow clowns, and on a stretcher which two of the eccentric men had been using in a funny act of their own, Benny was carried from the main tent. The clowns so surrounded him that not a glimpse did the audience have of the stretched-out, silent, green-clad figure. "Pretend it's all a joke," whispered the ringmaster fiercely. "Sure," muttered Bill Watson.
They screamed in a chorus of delight when the funny old clown, who had been forcibly deprived of three tin flutes in rapid succession, now produced yet a fourth from the seemingly inexhaustible depths of his baggy white pants a flute with a string and a bent pin attached to it and, secretly affixing the pin in the tail of the cross ringmaster's coat, was thereafter enabled to toot sharp shrill blasts at frequent intervals, much to the chagrin of the ringmaster, who seemed utterly unable to discover the whereabouts of the instrument dangling behind him.
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