Moon-Face and Other Stories | Page 7

to stay sober. Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill with
an ordinary stick. He had fought one for half an hour once. Just hit him
on the nose every time he rushed, and when he got artful and rushed

with his head down, why, the thing to do was to stick out your leg.
When he grabbed at the leg you drew it back and hit hint on the nose
again. That was all.
With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he
showed me his scars. There were many of them, and one recent one
where a tigress had reached for his shoulder and gone down to the bone.
I could see the neatly mended rents in the coat he had on. His right arm,
from the elbow down, looked as though it had gone through a threshing
machine, what of the ravage wrought by claws and fangs. But it was
nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him somewhat when
rainy weather came on.
Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as
anxious to give me a story as I was to get it.
"I suppose you've heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another
man?" he asked.
He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.
"Got the toothache," he explained. "Well, the lion-tamer's big play to
the audience was putting his head in a lion's mouth. The man who hated
him attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing that
lion crunch down. He followed the show about all over the country.
The years went by and he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew old, and
the lion grew old. And at last one day, sitting in a front seat, he saw
what he had waited for. The lion crunched down, and there wasn't any
need to call a doctor."
The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner
which would have been critical had it not been so sad.
"Now, that's what I call patience," he continued, "and it's my style. But
it was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin, sawed-off,
sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville, he called himself,
and he had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and used to dive from
under the roof into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as you

please.
"De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as
quick as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called
him a frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little worse, he
shoved him against the soft pine background he used in his
knife-throwing act, so quick the ring-master didn't have time to think,
and there, before the audience, De Ville kept the air on fire with his
knives, sinking them into the wood all around the ring-master so close
that they passed through his clothes and most of them bit into his skin.
"The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was
pinned fast. So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and no
one dared be more than barely civil to his wife. And she was a sly bit of
baggage, too, only all hands were afraid of De Ville.
"But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was
the lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head into
the lion's mouth. He'd put it into the mouths of any of them, though he
preferred Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always be
depended upon.
"As I was saying, Wallace--'King' Wallace we called him--was afraid
of nothing alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I've seen him
drunk, and on a wager go into the cage of a lion that'd turned nasty, and
without a stick beat him to a finish. Just did it with his fist on the nose.
"Madame de Ville--"
At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was a
divided cage, and a monkey, poking through the bars and around the
partition, had had its paw seized by a big gray wolf who was trying to
pull it off by main strength. The arm seemed stretching out longer end
longer like a thick elastic, and the unfortunate monkey's mates were
raising a terrible din. No keeper was at hand, so the Leopard Man
stepped over a couple of paces, dealt the wolf a sharp blow on the nose
with the light cane he carried, and returned with a sadly apologetic
smile to take up his unfinished sentence