Page:Hugh Pendexter--Tiberius Smith.djvu/13



NEVER had the good-fortune to meet Tiberius Smith, the veteran showman, but I have known that other remarkable man, Billy Campbell, and from his lips heard many chronicles of his patron's hardy and unusual doings. As he told me these yarns, his eyes often grew moist, and he would murmur in parentheses, "Ah, but he was a man. Heaven knows why his folks dubbed him Tiberius; maybe to get away from the Smith. But when it came to writing down the real answer he was the only Roman on the asphalt."

I first met Campbell at the "Away From Home Club," and as I came to know him, I learned to love him, and through him, his old master. And thus, as the winter nights drove us to our pipes and the cosey companionship of the blazing hearth, he