Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/277

 for eighteen months before I joined them I hadn't earned a penny."

He looked it, bloated and aged and enfeebled before his time.

Meanwhile the ring-master went on:—

"And when we got to the bridge, the horses got frightened and wouldn't cross. All at once the waggon gives a great bump and Sam begins calling out that we'd fallen into the river and swimming for his life about the waggon floor. Didn't you, Sam?"

But the clown, deep in his paper, made no answer.

"Hulloa, Sandow, who's bin makin' your face up this time?" asked the manager, as the hulking saddler sauntered up for a newspaper, with a bruised eye and an ugly, swollen nose.

"It be Jacko agin, sir. He were drunk agin at t' start, and when I went fur to wake him, he sets on me, with the result what you all kin see."

"What did you do to him?"

The big man lifted his heavy shoulders.

"I jest chucked him oot o' t' waggon. That be the wirst o' having my strength. If I was a mite o' a chap like him" (pointing to Quito), "I'd have given him the grandest hiding he'd iver experienced. Yes, that I would, yer damned little varmint," he added, as Jacko, a wizened, impish creature not five feet high, appeared grinning behind him.

"Circus-life! Circus-life!" the old doctor philosophised to me confidentially, wiping his beery eyes. "It's bin a terrible come-down for me."

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