Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/115

Rh ugly—in the imaginary water of a pool. Burls was making an appeal, in dumb show, to Milly and her father, to be allowed to ride behind her on Prince, running after her as she swung around the circle, and tripping and falling continually. When "Pop" Yost stopped the horse, Burls tried to climb up one of its hind legs, sliding down it as if it were the greasy pole"; and Yost laid aside his whip to lend a hand. Immediately, Sutley reached the whip, bent a pin to the end of the lash, impaled upon the hook—in pantomime—an imaginary earthworm as long as a shoelace, and began to fish. He was so innocently absorbed in watching for a bite that Yost's indignation fell on him unawares. He accepted the traditional ill-treatment from the ringmaster in a shrinking helplessness that was pathetically funny, and when Yost had gone back to the pair on the horse he bent another pin, went through all his pockets for a length of twine, baited with another make-believe worm, and settled himself meekly to his fishing again.

To the audience, they were merely four mountebanks, of no recognizable human personality, performing like trained animals together. It was not apparent, across the footlights, that the girl received Burls on the horse with an inimical indifference; and the crack of the ringmaster's whip expressed to the house nothing of the parental ill-temper of which it spoke to Milly and her partners. Sutley seemed wholly interested in his absurd angling, covering his head with a red handkerchief to shade himself from a pretended sunlight, and