Pecks Bad Boy with the Circus | Page 4

and ogling
the Circassian beauty?"
Pa put his hand on my head and said: "Mother, Hennery will go with
me, to see that I do not get into any trouble as a circus financier and
general manager of the menagerie and Wild West aggregation, and
hippodrome, in the great three-ring circus, and you can stay home and
give us absent treatment for what ails us, and pack the money I shall
send you in bales with a hay press, and put it in cold storage till we
come back in the fall. It is settled, we go to conquer, and the world will
lay at our feet before the middle of August, and you will be a proud
woman to own a husband who will be pointed at as the most successful
amusement purveyor the world has ever witnessed, and a son who will
start in at the bottom round of the circus ladder and rise, step by step,
until he will stand beside the great Barnum."
Ma thought seriously for a few minutes, and then she said: "O, pa, if it
was anything but the circus business you and Hennery went into, like
selling soap or being a bank defaulter, or something respectable, I could
look the neighbors in the face, but of course if there is money in it, and
you feel that the good Lord has called you to the circus field, and you
will see that Hennery does not stay out nights, and Hennery will
promise to see that you put on a clean collar occasionally, and you will
promise me that you will not let any of those circus women in spangles
make eyes at you, I will consent to your going with the circus, just this
once, as the doctor has advised that you lead an active life, and I guess
you will get it traveling with a circus, for it nearly killed me that time I
took Hennery to see the animals, and the tent blew down, and we got
separated and the sacred cow chased ma up the church steps, and
Hennery and a monkey were brought home by a policeman about
daylight the next morning, that time you were off fishing, and I never
told you about going to the circus when you were away. So we are
circus proprietors, are we? Well, it ain't so bad," and ma went upstairs

to cry at our success, and pa and I went out to walk off the effects of
the breaking the news to ma.
[Illustration: Sacred Cow Chased Ma Up the Church Steps.]
I had a long talk with pa about our changed circumstances, and asked
him what I would be expected to do in the show, and he says I will fit
in anywhere. He says that a boy who knows as much about everything
as I think I know, but don't know a blamed thing about, will be
invaluable about a show, and that going into a new business is like
going to college as a freshman, as all the old circus men will haze us,
and we must not expect an easy life, but one full of excitement,
sleepless nights, ginger, the glare of the torchlights, the races, the flying
trapeze, the smell of the sawdust and tanbark, the howling of the wild
beasts, and the plaudits of the multitude of jays and jayesses, and it will
be like one grand circus day spread all over the summer and fall. He
says he wants me to learn the circus business from the ground up, from
the currying of the hyenas with a currycomb and brush, to going up into
the roof of the tent on the trapeze and falling into the net, while the
audience faints with excitement. I asked pa if he wanted me to keep on
playing tricks on him while we were on the road, and he said he had got
so used to my tricks that he couldn't live without them, and he didn't
want me to let a chance escape to make him have a good time.
April 11.--Ma and pa have had several discussions about what kind of a
position it is going to leave her in, among the neighbors, for pa and I to
go off with a circus, and ma wanted to withdraw from the church, and
board up the windows of the house, and make folks think we had gone
to the seashore, but pa convinced her that we would have preaching in
the main tent every Sunday and he says there is no more pious lot of
people on earth than those who travel with a circus, and then ma
wanted to go along. She said she could do the mending of the long
socks that the women wear