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. 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. Bring up the muscles through your skirt just as if you was really working. Let ’em pull you this way a bit and that way a bit. Give ’em to. Spread your legs more. Make a noise on your face as if you was being pulled to pieces an’ that all that holds you is will-power.—That’s the idea! That’s the stuff! It’s a winner, Bill! It’s a winner!—Throw the leather into ’em! Make ’m jump! Make ’m get right down and pull the daylights out of each other!”
The whips fell on the horses, and the horses struggled in all their hugeness and might to pull away from the pain of the punishment. It was a spectacle to win approval from any audience. Each horse averaged eighteen hundredweight; thus, to the eye of the onlooker, seven thousand two hundred pounds of straining horse-flesh seemed wrenching and dragging apart the slim-waisted, delicately bodied, hundred-and-forty pound woman in her fancy street costume. It was a sight to make women in circus audiences scream with terror and turn their faces away.
“Slack down!” Collins commanded the drivers.
“The lady wins,” he announced, after the manner of a ringmaster.—“Bill, you’ve got a mint in that turn.—Unhook, madam, unhook!”
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. They must go up your sleeves the moment you let go.—Try it again. And another thing. When you finish the turn, no chestiness. No making out how easy it was. Make out it was the very devil. Show yourself weak, just about to collapse from the strain. Give at the knees. Make your shoulders cave in. The ringmaster will half step forward to catch you before you faint. That’s your cue. Beat him to it. Stiffen up and straighten up with an effort of will-power—will-power’s the idea, gameness, and all that, and kiss your hands to the audience and make a weak, pitiful sort of a smile, as though your heart’s been pulled ’most out of you and you’ll have to go to the hospital, but for right then that you’re game an’ smiling and kissing your hands to the audience that’s riping the seats up and loving you.—Get me, madam? You, Bill, get the idea! And see she does it.—Now, ready! Be a bit wistful as you look at the horses.—That’s it! Nobody’d guess you’d palmed the hooks and connected them.—Straight out!—Let her go!”
And again the thirty-six-hundredweight of horses on either side pitted its strength against the similar weight on the other side, and the seeming was that Marie was the link of woman-flesh being torn asunder.
A third and a fourth time the turn was rehearsed, and, between turns, Collins sent a man to his office, for the Del Mar telegram.
“You take her now, Bill,” he told Marie’s husband, as, telegram in hand, he returned to the problem of Michael. “Give her half a dozen tries more. And don’t forget, any time any jay farmer thinks he’s got a span that can pull, bet him on the side your best span can beat him. That means advance advertising and some paper. It’ll be worth it. The ringmaster’ll favour you, and your span can get the first jump. If I was young and footloose, I’d ask nothing better than to go out with your turn.”
Harris Collins, in the pauses gazing down at Michael, read Del Mar’s Seattle telegram:
“Sell my dogs. You know what they can do and what they are worth. Am done with them. Deduct the board and hold the balance until I see you. I have the limit of a dog. Every turn I ever pulled is put in the shade by this one. He’s a ten strike. Wait till you see him .”
Over to one side in the busy arena, Collins contemplated Michael.
“ Del Mar was the limit himself,” he told Johnny, who held Michael by the chain. “When he wired me to sell his dogs it meant he had a better turn, and here’s only one dog to show for it, a damned thoroughbred at that. He says it’s the limit. It must be, but in heaven’s name, what is its turn? It’s never done a flip in its life, much less a double flip. What do you think, Johnny? Use your head. Suggest something.”
“Maybe it can count,” Johnny advanced.
“And counting-dogs are a drug on the market. Well, anyway, let’s try.”
And Michael, who knew unerringly how to count, refused to perform.
“If he was a regular dog, he could walk anyway,” was Collins’ next idea. “We’ll try him.”
And Michael went through the humiliating ordeal of being jerked erect on his hind legs by Johnny while Collins with the stick cracked him under the jaw and across the knees. In his wrath, Michael tried to bite the master-god, and was jerked away by the chain. When he strove to retaliate on Johnny, that imperturbable youth, with extended arm, merely lifted him into the air on his chain and strangled him.
“That’s off,” quoth Collins wearily. “If he can’t stand on his hind legs he can’t barrel-jump—you’ve heard about Ruth, Johnny. She was a winner. Jump in and out of nail-kegs, on her hind legs, without ever touching with her front ones. She used to do eight kegs, in one and out into the next. Remember when she was boarded here and rehearsed. She was a gold-mine, but Carson didn’t know how to treat her, and she croaked off with penumonia at Cripple Creek .”
“Wonder if he can spin plates on his nose,” Johnny volunteered.
“Can’t stand up on hind legs,” Collins negatived. “Besides, nothing like the limit in a turn like that. This dog’s got a specially. He ain’t ordinary. He does some unusual thing unusually well, and it’s up to us to locate it. That comes of Harry dying so inconsiderately and leaving this puzzle-box on my hands. I see I just got to devote myself to him. Take him away, Johnny. Number Eighteen for him. Later on we can put him in the single compartments.”
CHAPTER XXVI
Number Eighteen was a big compartment or cage in the dog row, large enough with due comfort for a dozen Irish terriers like Michael. For Harris Collins was scientific. Dogs on vacation, boarding at the Cedarwild Animal School , were given every opportunity to recuperate from the hardships and wear and tear of from six months to a year and more on the road. It was for this reason that the school was so popular a boarding-place for performing animals when the owners were on vacation or out of “time.” Harris Collins kept his animals clean and comfortable and guarded from germ diseases. In short, he renovated them against their next trips out on vaudeville time or circus engagement.
To the left of Michael, in Number Seventeen, were five grotesquely clipped French poodles. Michael could not see them, save when he was being taken out or brought back, but he could smell them and hear them, and, in his loneliness, he even started a feud of snarling bickeringness with Pedro, the biggest of them who acted as clown in their turn. They were aristocrats among performing animals, and Michael’s feud with Pedro was not so much real as play-acted. Had he and Pedro been brought together they would have made friends in no time. But through the slow monotonous drag of the hours they developed a fictitious excitement and interest in mouthing their quarrel which each knew in his heart of hearts was no quarrel at all.