Part 17

"Now there was Billy Batcheller. He was a fine leaper, and could do his two somersaults over four elephants or eight horses with the prettiest lift you ever saw. He could do it easy. But one day--we were showing out west with the Reynolds circus--as he came down the leaping-run he struck the board wrong, somehow, and in the turn he changed his mind; instead of doing a double he did one and a half and shot over the last horse straight for the ground, head first. One second more and he was a dead man; he would have broken his neck sure, but I saw him coming and caught him so with my right arm, took all the skin off under his chin, and left the print of my hand on his breast for weeks. But it saved him. And the queer thing was he never could explain it--none of them ever can; he just changed his mind. So did Ladell, who used to do doubles from high bars down to a pedestal. He made his leap one night, just as usual--it was at Toronto, in 1896, I think--and as he turned he changed his mind, and I forget how he landed, but it killed him all right."

"Did you ever have an experience of this kind yourself?" I asked.

"Not exactly," he answered, "and I'm thankful I haven't, but I came near it once in Chicago. It was the night after Howard got hurt, and I guess fear--just plain, every-day fear--was at the bottom of my feeling. My wife and I were doing an act sixty feet above the ground, and without a net. I would hang by my hands from a couple of loops at the top of the Coliseum, and she would hang, head down, from my feet, her ankles locked across mine, just a natural locking of the feet, with no fastenings and only ordinary performing shoes.

"When I had her that way, a man below would pull a drag-rope and get us swinging higher and higher, until finally we would come right up to a horizontal. I tell you it was a hair-raising thing to see, but until this night I had never thought much about the danger. I thought of it now, though, as I remembered Howard's fall, and I got so nervous for my wife that I felt sure something terrible was going to happen. I was just about in the state where a man starts his act and can't go through with it, where he changes his mind. And you'll be surprised to hear what gave me heart to go on."

"What was it?"

"It was the music, sir; and ever since that night I've understood why some generals send their soldiers into battle with bands playing. As we stood by the dressing-room entrance waiting to go on, it seemed as if I couldn't do it, but when I heard the crash of that circus band calling us, and came out into the glare of light and heard the applause, just roars of it, why, I forgot everything except the pride of my business, and up we went, net or no net, and we never did our toe swing better than that night. Just the same, I'd had my warning, and I soon got another act instead of that one; and--" He hesitated. "Well, sir, to-day I wouldn't take my wife up and do that toe swing the way we used to, not for a million dollars. And yet she's crazy to do it."

IV

SOME REMARKABLE FALLS AND NARROW ESCAPES OF FAMOUS ATHLETES

AS we finished our talk, Mr. Potter asked me to call some evening at their rooms, on Tenth Street, and see a family of trapeze performers in private life. I was glad to accept this invitation, and looked in upon them a day or two later. Like the other figures in these studies of thrilling lives, they presented a modest, simple picture in their home circle. There is nothing in the externals of lion-tamers, steeple-climbers, divers, balloonists, or gymnasts to betray their unusual calling. Nor is there any heroic sign in eye or voice or bearing. They are plain, unpretentious folk, for the most part, who do these things and say little about them.

In one room were Tom and Royetta playing checkers, while Clarence, the "kid," weary, no doubt, from the morning's practice, lay on a bed storing up resistance against the next day's shoots and twisters. In a room adjoining were Mr. Potter himself and Mrs. Potter enjoying the call of a lady acrobat, one of the famed Livingstons, trick bicyclists.

As soon as was fitting, I put the old question to Mr. Potter, the question that always interests me, how it happened that he became a gymnast, and he went back to his Western boyhood and the early longings that possessed him to be a performer in the air. Plainly he was born with the gymnast instinct, and he ran away from home to follow his heart's desire. Then he told us how at seventeen he was traveling with a ten-cent show, doing a single trapeze act in the ring and an out-of-door free exhibition of tight-rope walking from canvas top to ground. Once he went at a difficult feat so eagerly--he was always his own teacher--that he fell clean off a trapeze sixty feet above ground, and by some kind providence that watches over boys escaped serious injury.

"It's queer about falls," said Mr. Potter. "It's often the little ones that kill. Now, there I fell sixty feet, and you might say it didn't hurt me at all. Another time, showing in Yucatan, I fell only forty feet, and smashed two ribs. And the worst fall I ever had was fifteen feet at the Olympia, in London. I was driving four horses in a tandem race, and was thrown straight on my head. That time I nearly broke my neck."

"Twenty-five feet is my best fall," put in Mrs. Potter, smiling. "I was doing an act on the flying rings, and one of 'em broke. Remember that, Harry?"

His face showed how well he remembered it. "Perhaps you won't believe this," he said, "but when I saw her falling I couldn't move. I was 'tending her in the ring, and wasn't ten feet from where she struck. I could have caught her and saved her if my legs would only have moved. But there they were frozen, sir, and I just had to stand still and see my wife come down smash on her head. Pretty tough, wasn't it? She lay unconscious for two days--that was at Monette, Missouri. Oh, yes, I remember it!"

I asked Mrs. Potter if she had ever been afraid, and she shook her head. Never once, not even at Chicago, in the perilous toe swing, when even the other gymnasts told her she would certainly be killed. She knew her husband would hold her safe, and she really enjoyed that toe swing more than any act they ever did.

"I'll tell you this, though," she admitted, "I would be afraid to do these things with any one except my husband."

"Yes, and I'd be afraid to have her," added Potter. "Why, down in Mexico, when I broke my ribs, there was a man--a fine gymnast, too--who offered to take my place so we wouldn't lose our salary, but every time I saw him practice with my wife it made me so nervous I called it off and let the salary go."

In spite of these manifest hazards, Potter insists that there is no healthier life than a gymnast leads. "We never are ill," he said, "we never take cold, we travel through all sorts of fever-stricken countries and never catch anything, and we always feel good. Look at that boy of mine! He's seventeen years old, and he's got a chest on him like a man. Thirty-eight inches is what it measures. Why, I can't find a coat that'll fit him."

He went on to point out some plain advantages, in addition to health, that ordinary citizens might derive from a moderate knowledge of trapeze work. In a fire, for instance, a man so trained would have little difficulty in saving himself and others by climbing and swinging. And firemen themselves would double their efficiency by regular practice on high bars.

Again, in case of a runaway, a man familiar with the trapeze knows how and when to spring for the bridle of a plunging horse. Or should he find himself almost under the wheels of a trolley-car, he could leap for the platform rail and swing up to safety.

"I'll give you a case," said Potter, "where the training we get helped a good deal. It was a season when I was working with the Barnum outfit; we were showing in the East, and during the hippodrome races a little girl got away from her people somehow, and the first thing anybody knew, there she was out on the track, with three four-horse chariots not a hundred feet off, and coming on a dead run. As the crowd saw the child they gave a great 'Uff' in fear, and lots of women screamed. It wasn't in human power to stop those horses, and it seemed as if the little tot must be killed.

"She was about half-way across the track when I started for her. Lots of men would have started just as I did, but very few would have gone at just the right angle to save her. Most men would have tried to run straight across, but I was sure the horses would trample me and the child, too, if I tried that. So I took her on a slant, running across and away from the horses, and I caught her little body as a gymnast knows how, didn't waste any time at it, and then--hoo!--we were over, with the breath of those horses on our necks. If it hadn't been for the practice I've had judging time and distance, we'd both have been killed that trip."

I come now to another occasion when I spent two profitable hours with the St. Belmos, husband and wife, who for years past and in many parts of the world have appeared in a trapeze act that calls for the greatest nerve and precision of movement. As a climax to this act, St. Belmo makes a leap and swing of forty feet over his audience, springing head first through a circle of knives and fire that barely lets his body pass, then catching a suspended trapeze that breaks away at his touch and carries him on in a long sweep, then leaping again, feet first, from this flying bar through a paper balloon, where he holds by his arms and drops swiftly thirty-five feet to the ground.

I was surprised to find the hero of this perilous feat rather the reverse of athletic in appearance. St. Belmo struck me as a pale, thin, almost sickly man. Yet I judge it would fare ill with any one who tried to impose upon him as an invalid. Over that spare form are hard, tireless muscles, and for years to come St. Belmo feels equal to leaping this obstacle of blades and flame.

Most people, I suppose, in watching this act would imagine the knives to be of wood and tinsel, but I saw that they were of steel, and sharp, heavy double-edged knives a foot long, murderous weapons made by St. Belmo himself out of old saws. And fifteen of these, with points turned inward, form the heart through which this gaunt yet rather genial gymnast shoots his way.

I asked St. Belmo about the accidents that he had suffered. Had he ever struck the knives when leaping through? Yes, again and again. He had torn his clothes to tatters on them, and lined his body with scars. But that was years ago, when he was learning. Now he never touched the knives. He could leap through them, eyes shut, as surely as a man puts a spoon in his mouth without striking his teeth.

How about falls in the air? Well, he remembered two in particular, one at Syracuse, where he missed the trapeze because some one was careless in fastening a snap-hook that held it, and when he came through the blades and flames head first, and reached for the bar, the bar had swung away, and he plunged on smash down to the ground, and broke both legs.

"Didn't you look for the bar before you made the leap?" I questioned.

He shook his head. "I never see the bar for the dazzle of fire. I know where it must be, and leap for that place. If it isn't there, why--" He pointed down to his legs, and smiled ruefully.

He had another fall at Seattle, where he came down thirty-five feet and put both his knees out of joint, all because he was thinking of something else as he shot toward the balloon, and forgot to throw out his arms and catch in the hoop. It was exactly the case of a man who might walk over the edge of a housetop through absent-mindedness.

"Ever have a feeling of fear?" I asked.

"I don't know as you'd call it fear exactly," he began.

"Yes, it was fear, too," put in his wife, teasing. "I've seen your knees shake so up on the pedestal that you almost tumbled off."

"No wonder my knees shook," protested St. Belmo; "they've been out of joint times enough. Naturally, after an accident you feel a little queer for a while; but I'll own up there was once I felt afraid, and it wasn't long ago, either."

"I know," said his wife; "up at the Twenty-second Regiment Armory."

"That's right; it was in December. Remember when that bicycle-diver was killed? His name was Stark? Poor chap! He was a friend of ours, and we were there when it happened. You know, he got too much speed on the incline, and struck the far edge of the tank instead of the water. That was in the afternoon, and the same night we had to go on and do our act. I looked at that tank, and then I said, 'Boys, I'm leary about this, but I'm going to do my act. I'll come down somehow, boys; you watch me.' Honest, I thought I was going to be killed, but I got through all right."

Then he explained that the greatest danger in his act is neither at the knives nor at the balloon, but in the swift drop after the balloon with the hoop under his arms. This hoop, as it goes down, winds up a spring overhead that acts as a break on the fall, though a very slight one. Just before St. Belmo reaches the floor he lifts his arms above the hoop and drops through it to the ground, but he must do that at precisely the right moment, or he will suffer accident. If he drops through too soon he will strike too hard, and may break his legs. If he does not drop through soon enough, the hoop may jerk his arms out of the sockets. And in spite of this formidable alternative St. Belmo assured me that for more than a dozen years now he has made this drop continually, and never failed once.

Think of a calling that requires a man to steer perpetually, by the closest fraction of a shave, between a pair of broken legs and a pair of dislocated arms! Fancy such an alternative as part of the regular after-dinner routine! And then consider what marvelous precision must be in these bodies and minds of ours when a man can face such a hazard for years and never come to grief.

THE WILD-BEAST TAMER

I

WE VISIT A QUEER RESORT FOR CIRCUS PEOPLE AND TALK WITH A TRAINER OF ELEPHANTS

WELL down on Fourth Avenue, below the bird-fanciers, the rat-catchers, the antique-shops, and the dingy hotels where lion-tamers put up, is "Billy's" place, the great rendezvous of the country for circus folk, and here any afternoon or evening, especially in the dull winter-time, you may find heroes of the flying trapeze, bereft of show-ring trappings, playing monotonous euchre with keepers of the cages, or sitting in convivial and reminiscent groups that include everything from the high-salaried star down to some humble tooter in the band at present looking for a job. All kinds of acrobats come to "Billy's," all kinds of animal men, everybody who has to do with a show, barring the owners. If a Norwegian wrestler wants to get track of an Egyptian giant he goes to "Billy's." If an elephant-trainer needs a new helper he goes to "Billy's." It is at once a club, a haven, a post-office, and a general intelligence bureau for members of this wandering and fascinating profession.

It was my fortune recently to spend an evening at "Billy's," and I had as companion a veteran circus man, able to explain things. After taking in the externals, which were commonplace enough save for "big-top" celebrities ranged along the walls in tiers of photographs, we sat us down where a man in a blue shirt was telling how a lioness and three cubs got out of a cage somewhere one afternoon just after the performance. It seems one of the cubs had been playing with a loose bolt, and the first thing anybody knew, there they were, all four of them, skipping about free in the menagerie tent. The story detailed various efforts to get the lioness back into her cage--prodding, lassoing, shouting--and the total failure of these because she would neither leave her cubs nor let them be taken from her.

Finally, the situation grew serious, for the evening performance was coming on, and it was quite sure there would be no audience with an uncaged lioness on the premises. So it became a matter of business in this wise--a lioness worth a few hundred dollars against an audience worth a couple of thousand. Word was sent to the head of the show, and back came the order, "Kill her." In vain the keeper pleaded for one more trial; he would risk a hand-to-hand struggle with hot irons. The head of the show said, "No"; the lioness was desperate, and he wouldn't have his men expose their lives. It was a case of "Shoot her, and do it quick."

Of course, that settled it; they did shoot her, and as the blue-shirted man described the execution I was impressed by his tenderness in speaking of that poor, defiant mother, and then of the three little cubs that "howled for her a whole month, sir, and looked so sad it made us boys feel like murderers, blamed if it didn't!"

Another man, with steely gray eyes and a stubble of beard, ventured the opinion that they must have had a pretty poor quality of gumption in that outfit, or somebody would have got the lioness into her cage. He was mighty sure George Conklin would have done it. George was over in Europe now handling big cats for the Barnum show. There wasn't anything George didn't know about lions.

"Why, I'll give you a case," said he. "We were showing out in Kansas, and one night a cage fell off the circus train, became unlashed or something as she swung round a curve, and when we stuck our heads out of the sleeper there were a pair of greenish, burning eyes coming down the side of the track, and we could hear a ruh-ruh-r-r-r-ruh--something between a bark and a roar--that didn't cheer us up any, you'd better believe. Then George Conklin yelled, 'By the Lord, it's Mary! Come on, boys; we must get her!' and out we went. Mary was a full-grown lioness, and she was loose there in the darkness, out on a bare prairie, without a house or a fence anywhere for miles."

"Hold on," said I; "how did your circus train happen to stop when the cage fell off?"

With indulgent smile, he explained that a circus train running at night always has guards on the watch, who wave quick lanterns to the engineer in any emergency.

"Well," continued the man, "George Conklin had that cage fixed up and the lioness safe inside within forty minutes by the clock. Do? Why, it was easy enough. We unrolled about a hundred yards of side-wall wall tenting, and carried it toward the lioness. It was a line of men, holding up a length of canvas so that it formed a long, moving fence. And every man carried a flaming kerosene torch. There was a picture to remember, that line of heads over the canvas wall, and the flaring lights gradually circling around the lioness, who backed, growling and switching her tail--backed away from the fire, until presently, as we closed in, we had her in the mouth of a funnel of canvas, with torches everywhere, except just at her back, where the open cage was. Then Conklin spoke sharp to her, just as if they were in the ring, and snapped his whip, and the next thing Miss Mary was safe behind the bars. It was a pretty neat job, I can tell you."

During this talk a broad-shouldered man had joined the group, and my companion whispered that he was "Bill" Newman, the famous elephant-trainer. Mr. Newman at once showed an interest in the discussion, and agreed that there are times when you can do nothing with an animal but kill it.

"Now, there was old Albert," said he, "a fine ten-foot tusker, that I'd seen grow up from a baby, and I was fond of him, too, but I had to kill him. It was in '85, and we were showing in New Hampshire. Albert had been cranky for a long time--never with me, but with the other men--and in Nashua he slammed a keeper against the ground so hard that he died the next morning just as we were coming into Keene. That settled it, and at the afternoon performance Mr. Hutchinson announced in the ring that we had an elephant on our hands under sentence of death, and he was willing to turn this elephant over to the local rifle corps if they felt equal to the execution. You see, he had heard there was a company of sharpshooters in Keene, and it struck him this was a good way to be rid of a bad elephant, and get some advertising at the same time.

"Well, those Keene riflemen weren't going to be bluffed by a showman. They said to bring on the elephant, and they'd take care of him. So, after the performance I led old Albert back to a piece of woods behind the tents, and we hitched tackle to his four legs and stretched him out between four trees so he couldn't move, and then the rifle corps lined up about twelve paces off, ready to shoot. That elephant knew he was going to die; yes, sir, he knew it perfectly well, but he was a lot cooler than some of those riflemen. Why, there was one fellow on the end of the line shaking so he could hardly aim. You see, they were afraid old Albert would break loose and come at 'em if they only wounded him.

"'Do you men know where to shoot?' I called out.

"'We're going to shoot at his head,' answered the captain.

"'All right,' said I; 'you'd better send for lanterns and more ammunition. You're liable to be shooting here all night.'

"'Then, where shall we shoot?' asked the captain.

"'That depends,' I answered. 'If you can send your bullets straight into his eye at a forty-five degree up-slant, you'll fix him all right. But if you don't hit his eye you can shoot the rest of his head full of holes, and he won't care. You've got to reach his brain, and that's a little thing in where I'm telling you.'

"This made the captain do some thinking, for Albert looked awful big and his eye looked awful small, and they didn't want to bungle the job. 'Well,' said he, 'is there any other place we can aim at except his eye?'

"'Aim here,' I told him, and I drew a circle with a piece of chalk just back of his left foreleg, a circle about as big as your hand. When a man has cut up as many elephants as I have he knows where the heart is. But most men don't.

"After this there was a hush, while the whole crowd held its breath, and old Albert looked at me out of his little eyes as much as to say, 'So you're going to let 'em do me after all, are you?' and then came the sharp command, 'Ready, fire!' and thirty-two rifle-balls started for that chalk-mark. And how many do you think got there? Five out of thirty-two; I counted 'em, but five did the business. Poor old Albert dropped without a sound or a struggle." Newman sighed at the memory.

"Isn't there some exaggeration," I asked, "in what you said about shooting an elephant full of holes without killing him?"

"Exaggeration!" answered Newman. "Not a bit of it. Why, there was an elephant named Samson with the Cole show, and he got loose once in a town out in Idaho and ran through the streets crazy mad, killing horses, smashing into houses, ripping the whole place wide open. Well, sir, they shot at him with Winchesters, revolvers, shot-guns, every darned thing they had, until that elephant was full of lead, but he went off all right the next day, and never seemed any the worse for it up to the day when he was burned to death with the Barnum show at Bridgeport."

The mention of this catastrophe reminded me of reports that wild beasts in a burning menagerie are silent before the flames, and I asked Mr. Newman if he believed it.

"No, sir," said he; "it isn't true. I was in Bridgeport when the Barnum show burned up, and I never heard such roaring and screaming. It was awful. Even the rhinoceros, which can't make much noise, was running around the yard grunting and squealing, with flames four feet high shooting up from his back and sides. You see, a rhinoceros is almost solid fat, and as soon as he caught fire he burned like an oil-tank."