Chapter 5

"Barton knew that the game was up, and in his drunken rage he attacked me and it kept my hands full to manage him; but the others rushed for the cage, and while Bonavita and Stevenson beat off the lions with the help of the keepers on the outside who were firing pistols and Roman candles and using fire-extinguishers through the bars, Bobby Mack picked up Leotta and carried her outside. Of course, that ended Leotta's career in the show business and finished Barton's employment with me. The poor little thing's beauty was gone, for a lion's claws make deep cuts, and it was many a day before she was able to leave the hospital. You can see that I have reason to be confident of the accuracy of the predictions of my weather bureau, for if there had been no thunderstorm brewing I might have developed a sensational lion act."

"Or if Leotta had understood English," commented the Press Agent, as he beckoned to the waiter. "Of course, it is sometimes an advantage to have performers who can't converse with the audience, but it is mighty inconvenient if they can't understand the orders of the boss. I lost the chance of making a lot of money once, because a squaw who was working for us couldn't understand the white man's lingo. A guy named Merritt and myself were disappointed about getting a concession for a snake show at the Pan-American Exposition, and we found ourselves broke in Buffalo, which is separated from the Bowery by about five hundred miles of very tough walking when you haven't got the price of a railway ticket. Merritt was mad clean through at being thrown down by the Exposition managers, but he was an inventive genius and I knew that he would figure out a way to raise the price of transportation.

"'Jim,' says he as we counted up our available assets and found that they were pretty well along toward a minus quantity, 'it makes me dead sore to be turned down this way without getting a run for our money, and it's up to us to increase our capital and incidentally give the bunch that done us dirt the double cross. Get your think tank working and see what it will produce.' I couldn't see a way out, but when a squaw from the Tonawanda Reservation, who was selling trailing arbutus, came up to us and offered us a nosegay, Merritt gives a whoop and claps me on the shoulder.

"'Jim,' says he, 'I've got it and we'll make our everlasting fortunes!' He commenced to question the squaw, but all the English she knew was 'ten cent a bunch,' and he didn't make much headway until a big buck Injin who had been watching her from across the street came over and butted in. It appeared that he was her husband, and when Merritt stated his proposition the buck accepted the terms without the formality of consulting the squaw. When the Exposition opened we had a big tent on an open lot across from the main entrance, with a life-sized picture of 'The Marvelous Mermaid' as big as a house. As I remarked, Merritt was an inventive genius and he had worked up a scheme to deceive the confiding public. He had provided a platform and carefully cut out a hole so that the squaw could stand on the ground and the edges of the hole fitted snugly about her waist. He made her lean forward and rest her chin in her hands in the conventionally accepted mermaid position, and then he fitted a fish tail which lay along the top of the platform, and it was so skillfully joined to her that it looked as if it grew there. She was a good-looking squaw and she certainly played her part and made an interesting picture.

"Of course, he couldn't explain to her what he wanted her to do, but he would tell the buck, who would carefully translate and impress the instructions upon her memory with the aid of a bale stick. The thing which he put most stress upon was that she was to remain absolutely still, no matter what happened. I sold the tickets and put up the spiel on the front, and Merritt lectured inside and we did a land-office business. Lots of smart guys came around and tried to get gay with the mermaid, but she couldn't understand their joshing and never cracked a smile. The blame tent caught fire one night when it was filled with people, and she had such a wholesome recollection of the bale stick that she kept as still as a cigar-store Indian until we had cleared the place and put the fire out.

"'Jim,' says Merritt as he looked her over admiringly after that experience, 'there is a great advantage in having a squaw for the top part of that there fish. She can't understand what the Willie boys say to her and nothing feazes her. A white gal would have had hysterics and given the whole snap away.' It gave Merritt a lot more confidence and we felt pretty safe after that experience, and neglected to have the buck repeat his bale-stick admonitions to her upon the necessity of cultivating repose of manner. Everything was lovely and we were turning hundreds of people away and making more money than the big show. One afternoon we were playing to a record house and Merritt was doing himself proud on his lecture.

"'Ladies and gentlemen,' says he, 'I have the honor to present to this intelligent audience a creature which is commonly, but erroneously, supposed to be extinct at the present day; but you have before you a living and convincing proof that mermaids still exist. I confess that until I was able to obtain this unique specimen, which was captured while basking in the sun and singing a love song upon an iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean, I shared the opinions of my fellow scientists that the mermaid was a fabulous or extinct creature; for during a lifetime devoted to exhibiting the mysterious marvels of nature to the American public it had never been my good fortune to acquire one. You will observe that she is half woman and half fish, and she is perfectly helpless when out of the water. She is unfortunately unable to express herself in any known tongue; in fact, she has never uttered a sound since her capture and we fear that she has lost her voice, which--' Just then he was interrupted by a howl of terror from the platform, which was followed by a roar of laughter from the audience, and when he turned he saw the squaw standing up and trying to wrap the fake tail around a pair of well-developed, copper-colored legs. Her face was as pale as a squaw's face could get and Merritt knew the jig was up. I was peeking in the door, and when I saw what had happened I gathered up the box-office receipts and faded away. I met Merritt that evening in our usual saloon, and underneath a pair of black eyes and a battered-up phiz I could see that he was wearing a look of deep disgust.

"'Jim,' says he, 'this is what comes from pinning your faith to a woman and not appreciating the weakness of the sex. She faced the danger of being burned alive and never turned a hair; but when she saw a measly little mouse crawl under the platform she busted up the whole show.'"

The Stranger said good-night and started for the city, but before he reached the railway station he was drenched by the downpour which the Proprietor had predicted.

MAKING A STAR LION AND AN INTERRUPTED TEMPERANCE MEETING

MAKING A STAR LION AND AN INTERRUPTED TEMPERANCE MEETING

"You were not in this part of the country when New York was in an uproar for two days over the escape of one of my lions," said the Proprietor to the Stranger as they joined the Press Agent. "I suppose that ninety per cent. of the people who remember it think that it was all a fake, but I can assure you that I put in the most strenuous forty-eight hours of my career while he was loose, and it pretty nearly decided me to give up the show business. It was my first experience at running an independent show, and after great persuasion I had induced my father to let me bring some boxing kangaroos, two young lions and Wallace, a fine big brute about fifteen years old, from our English establishment to the States. Wallace was already a famous--or infamous--lion in England, where he had the score of three trainers to his credit. He had received the name of 'The Mankiller' over there, and they were rather relieved to have me get him out of the country.

"His last victim was a Frenchman, one of the best-known trainers in the business, and he went into the cage to subdue Wallace on a wager. He won, and a remarkable performance it was, but I won't take the time to tell you about that now. He made just one little mistake: his vanity got the better of him when he turned his back on the lion to bow to the audience after remaining in the cage for ten minutes. As I said, he won the bet, and it about paid the funeral expenses of what was left of him. After that the only man who could go near Wallace was a half-breed American Indian from up near Cape Cod; Broncho Boccacio, he called himself. I don't know what the other half of him was, and I don't remember how he happened to be with our English show, but all sorts and conditions of men drift into the animal training business. At any rate, he was the only man who could do anything with Wallace, and that wasn't much. He would get into the cage and chase him around a bit and then jump out quick--always backward after seeing what happened to the Frenchman. I brought him along to take especial charge of the brute. It took a couple of days to get the animals through the customs, and in the meantime I cast about for quarters and finally rented a stable on Eighteenth Street to keep them in until I should secure an engagement." He took a pencil from his pocket and drew a plan on the white table top.

"The stable was arranged in this way: here in the front was the carriage house with these narrow stairs at the side leading up to the loft. On each side of the door was a window facing on the street, and back of the carriage room was the stable proper--two stalls and a loose-box. On one side of the stable was a saloon and on the other a carpenter shop, so I didn't expect much complaint from my neighbors, as my men patronized one, while I ordered the carpenter to build a traveling cage for Wallace which would slide on wheels, as our English cages were too heavy to handle in a country where labor is as high as it is here. I moved the lions up to the stable to let them rest a bit after the voyage and started to look for an engagement. It was a hard row to hoe, as I was not known in this country, and the best I could do was a booking at a dime museum for a month, and I had to take a lowish price at that, but I ordered a big nine sheet poster and trusted to luck to make more out of them later.

"The lions were in three cages in the stable, and in one of the stalls I had a trotting horse which had been purchased for my brother in England, and which I kept there until I should have an opportunity to ship it to the other side. The kangaroos were in the loft, and a couple of days after they were all settled my two little girls came over from the hotel with me one morning and went up there with the nurse to play with them while I went into the carpenter shop next door to settle for the new cage, which had just been delivered. Broncho, as soon as he struck his native soil, had discovered a camp of other Indians on the Bowery and spent most of his time in their encampment, leaving a Cockney Englishman in charge of the lions and the horse. I intended to wait until he arrived before shifting Wallace to the new cage, but the Englishman thought he would show his cleverness and attempted to do it alone without waiting for us. He threw a piece of meat into the new cage and then rolled it up to the old one, and when the doors were opposite each other he opened them. Of course Wallace made a spring for the meat in the new cage, but he struck the edge of the door, and as the Cockney had neglected to block the wheels the cage rolled away and the keeper gave a yell and bolted for the stairs. There was a loose lion downstairs--and a bad one at that--and the nurse and two children in the loft.

"The first I knew of it was from the nurse, who had grabbed the children and stood with them in the door which had been used to pass the hay in, yelling 'Fire!' and 'Murder!' but I knew that there was hell to pay as soon as I reached the street, by the sound which came from the stable. We got a ladder from the carpenter shop and hustled the nurse and children down to the street, and then I went up to the loft, while the nurse and the Cockney held the small door from the stable to the street, which could not be fastened from the outside until the carpenter spiked some plank over it.

"A look into the stable convinced me that I did not want to go down the stairs, for with one blow Wallace had converted a thousand-dollar trotting horse into two dollars' worth of lion meat, and he was crouched on the body, which he had dragged from the stall, clawing at its throat and drinking the blood. The place looked like a shambles, and the growls which came from Wallace as the other lions threw themselves against the bars of their cages in their efforts to get out and join in the feast were redoubled when he caught sight of my head through the trap-door. I slammed it down and drew the kangaroo cage on top of it and then went down to the street to see that the windows and doors were securely boarded up. A great crowd was gathering and I was afraid that the police would shoot the brute, for I saw the possibilities of an advertisement which would more than pay for the expensive meal which Wallace was making from the trotting horse.

"Just as I reached the street, Broncho strolled up. As I said, he was a queer-looking guy; his skin was copper-colored and he had piercing black eyes and long, fuzzy black hair which fell down to his shoulders. His nose was hooked and something about his face always reminded me of a bird of prey. He was only a half-breed, but when I told him what had occurred he was all Indian and he drew a long knife and started for the Cockney, who gave only one look at the expression on Broncho's face and then started for Harlem, touching only the high spots until he was quite out of sight. Broncho didn't chase him; he just looked after him with a smile on his face, glad to see him disappear, as there had been more or less bad blood between them for a long time. Then he came to me and laughed at the idea of danger and offered to go into the stable and put Wallace back in the cage. I knew that it would be impossible until the lion had gorged himself on horse meat, and now that the damage was done I was in no hurry to allay the excitement until the police and reporters arrived. We didn't have to wait long, for the crowd had grown until the street was blocked, and, of course, the reporters asked more than a thousand questions. When I had worked the sensation up pretty well I consented to let Broncho take his training rod and go down, and I went with him carrying a club and a pitchfork. Things commenced to happen right away, for Wallace didn't wait for the call of time, but sailed right into us, and when I saw that he was getting the better of Broncho I made a bluff at going back to the carcass of the horse. Wallace bounded back to protect it and crouched on it, snarling viciously, but the delay gave me a chance to help Broncho up the stairway. There was not enough of his trousers left to wad a gun, and while I was bandaging up a deep claw wound in his thigh that advertisement seemed less and less important to me, and I would have given a good deal to have Wallace safely behind the bars of his cage again. He was contracted for four weeks anyway, and it takes a pretty big sensation to be remembered for more than thirty days in New York.

"Well, we fussed about all day, trying to figure out some way to get the beggar back in his cage, and I got an earache listening to advice from people who had never seen a lion, but who considered themselves experts. At sunset Wallace still held the fort and the streets were blocked in all directions, for the afternoon papers were out with extras with scare-heads. The boards over the windows made the interior of the stable so dark that no one could see into it, but the roars which came from it gave the spectators all the thrills they were entitled to and caused a stampede every few minutes. We tried to drive Wallace into the cage with a stream of water from the fire plug, but he only shook his head and growled at it, so we gave it up and waited for daylight. There were about forty policemen and a crowd of reporters about the place all night, and I was getting nervous for fear some fool would shoot the lion, whose value was increasing every minute, so I kept awake and did a heap of thinking.

"I knew that Wallace would fight for his 'kill' as long as any of the meat was left, so we rigged up a tackle to try and draw the carcass out. We were all ready at daylight and the crowd was bigger than ever. Say, if you want to count the idle people in New York just get up a free show at any hour of the day or night and they will all come. There must have been over a thousand loafing about the street all night. We were just getting ready to make a try for the horse when the idlers outside gave a cheer, and I saw an express wagon loaded with nets and ropes and all sorts of animal catching stuff drive up. Tody Hamilton, Barnum's press agent, had caught on to the possibilities of an advertisement, and sent to the winter quarters at Bridgeport for some of their animal men to come down and capture a loose lion. They supposed it was in Central Park, and when they found it was in a stable the job looked easy to them. One of them, a man named McDonald, had been with our English show, and when he heard that it was Wallace they were to tackle his enthusiasm seemed to melt. He told the others a few anecdotes of the lion, and two of them went to find the Cockney, I guess, for we never saw them again.

"We managed to throw a slip noose around the carcass from the stairs, and when we passed the end of the rope out of the window there must have been five hundred men pulling on it from the way that horse's body slid across the floor. The four of us stood around the trap-door to beat Wallace back, and when he realized that he was losing his prey it kept us busy.

"Say, a dead horse seems to have more legs than a centipede when you try to drag it through a narrow space, and they all stick out in different directions. Of course, this one stuck and then there was more trouble, for when I took an axe to dismember it, a cop threatened to arrest me for cutting up a horse in the city limits. It took three hours to satisfy the red-tape requirements and get a permit from the Board of Health, and then I had a long, sickening job, for we had to haul up what was left of the poor beast in fragments, and all the time Wallace was snapping at them or rushing at us. We gave him several nasty cracks over the snout, the only place where a lion seems to be sensitive to pain, but it only made him uglier than ever and I knew that there was a pretty fight ahead of us. It was a case of 'Perdicaris alive or Raisouli dead' with me, for the police were getting impatient, and I knew they would shoot him if we did not get him caged before night.

"We drew lots to see who should be the first to go down, and I think that McDonald stacked the straws, for Broncho won--or lost--I was second, the other Barnum man third and McDonald last; but he made good after we got down there, and it was what the President would have called a 'crowded hour.' If Wallace hadn't been full of horse meat, which made him a trifle slow, I think he would have chased the bunch of us out, and as it was he gave us all we wanted to do. We used blank cartridges, Roman candles, training rods and whips, and I learned afterward that the crowd outside thought we were all being torn to pieces, but we finally conquered and it was a singed and battered lion which jumped back into the den and gave me a chance to slam the door. The noise of the clicking lock sounded good to me, and I went up the stairs with a lighter heart, in spite of tattered clothes and a scratched hand and bruised body. I knew that I had a small fortune in the beast, but I nearly cried when I went into the saloon to freshen up, and the first thing I saw was the poster with the announcement that Wallace would be shown at the dime museum. I knew that it would make the reporters, who had been writing columns of space, suspect that it was all a fake and prearranged. The manager was afraid that I would renege on my contract after all the free advertising, but he didn't know me.

"Sure enough, the reporters came for me in a body while I was still tired and dirty from the fight and worn out with anxiety and loss of sleep. They accused me of having put up a job on them, but I guess the sight of my condition convinced them of my sincerity, for only one paper even hinted at any crookedness, and that proved the best advertisement in the whole business.

"It was the _Sun_ which came out in an article about Wallace, saying that he was toothless and decrepit from old age, and that there had never been the slightest danger from him. If the reporter who wrote it had gone into the stable with us, I don't think he would have written the article. I did my own announcing in those days and I always started off with the announcement, 'Ladies and gentlemen! If you see it in the _Sun_, it's so, and the _Sun_ says that Wallace is played out and toothless from old age.' Then I would make a move to the front of the cage, and Wallace, who had a special hatred for me, would spring at the bars and show as pretty a set of fangs as you would wish to see and I was always sure of a laugh.

"Well, I showed Wallace in New York and other cities for thirty straight weeks and got back the value of that trotter a good many times over," continued the Proprietor as he rose from the table. "His name is one to conjure with, even yet, and nearly every lion which is exhibited in the side shows at the county fairs is billed as 'Wallace, the Untamable!' The original Wallace is still alive and at our English breeding establishment." He said good-night and left the table, the Press Agent looking regretfully after him.