Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/151



ONELY awoke, the morning after the Show, dreaming that he was leading the circus procession, on a white horse decked out with a saddle-cloth of gold and wearing ostrich plumes above its ears. He had just ordered the red-and-white clown not to make faces at Annie Eliza, when a piercing scream came from that young woman of unmatched loveliness, who sat on a white stool in the snake-cage, with languid serpents coiled and twined about her spangled hips. For somebody had fed chewing-tobacco to the snakes, and they had gone mad, and were squeezing their mistress to death, squeezing her until she grew visibly longer foot by foot, before Lonely's very eyes. The town constable and the fire brigade came rushing up to effect her rescue. But Lonely waved them aside, and with one hand on his hip, and amid thunderous cheering, entered the cage, and blinded the snakes by putting mustard in their eyes. After which he