Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/114

102 and simple-minded as most modern circus-women are; but the stage had added a touch of coquetry, and she smiled down at Sutley challengingly.

His eyes, in his set face, looked up at her as if through the eyeholes of a mask. "He wants to go back to the road. He won't go unless he goes with your act."

She said: "Then 'e 'll be a long time goin'." She put on a big sun-bonnet and tied its strings under her chin. "All right, 'En. I 'll 'elp."

He nodded.

She settled herself for her public appearance, as her father, with a ringmaster's long whip in his hand, took Prince by the bridle and led him out to the cocoa matting of the Amphitheater ring. Burls ran after, pretended to trip on the wooden ring-bank, fell on his face, and came before the footlights pressing the flat of his hand to his nose-end and grimacing for a laugh—which he did not "draw."

The gaunt Sutley followed. When he came to the spot where Burls had fallen, he stepped over it with a carefulness that was only slightly exaggerated; and a little titter of amusement went like a ripple over the house.

Burls muttered: "Yaps! Yaps!"

Prince began to amble around the ring and the country-girl in her Mother Hubbard clung to the two-handed girth of webbing that gave her a hold on the horse's back. Sutley sat down on the bank facing the footlights and began to dabble his feet—huge, false feet, bare and