Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/119

 zebra, whose kick was reputed to be fatal, the long-striding and stately-necked camels, the confused snarl and roar of invisible animals behind the alluring little shuttered windows, leaving youth to wonder which could be the tameless Royal Bengal Tiger and which the old Man-Eating Leopard with so many lives to his credit. Was it any wonder, indeed, that Lonely's sleep had been broken and brief the night before?

He had hoped to be on the field before any of the town boys; but when he arrived a dozen scantily-robed urchins and half a hundred men were already lined up along the railway tracks. So Lonely, after wistfully but ineffectually following one of the drivers back and forth between the railway and the tent grounds, side-tracked his attention to a more alert-looking man in a black derby, and through so doing was at last permitted to carry a pair of huge rubber boots, a leather bucket, and four horse-blankets. There was something foreign and fine, he decided, even in the smell of those particular horse-blankets.

He was struggling under this load toward the main tent entrance, happy but almost