So I got some telegraph blanks and envelopes, and I have written messages from the show managers, twice a day. The morning message would tell about the business of the day before, and how they missed pa. Then I would add something like this: “The farmers around Olathe are all inquiring for you,” or “The farmers around Topeka wish you were here, ’cause they want to give you a reception,” or “About 200 farmers at Parsons think we ought to let them in free, on account of being old friends of yours.” The last one broke pa all up. The message said: “Many farmers from Atchison are going to come with us to Kansas City to confer with you on an old matter of business.” Pa jumped like a box car off the track, and wanted the doctors to send him to a hospital at St. Louis, and he told the doctors the reason, but they cheered him up by saying that if any mob came to the hospital after him, they would hide him in the pickling vat, and make the mob believe he was dead. That is the way it stands now. But pa is not so darn happy as I have seen him, though I try to do all I can to keep his mind off his trouble. I tell him as long as his conscience is clear, he is all right, but he says: “But, Hennery, that’s the trouble; it ain’t clear. Well, let us have peace, at any price.”
CHAPTER XXV
Pa Breaks in the Zebras and Drives a Six-in-Hand Team in the Parade—The Freaks Have a Narrow Escape from Drowning.
Pa is stuck on the zebras. I do not know what there is about a zebra unless it is the wail paper effects of his exterior decoration that should make a man leave all the other animals and cleave unto the zebra, but pa has been putting in his leisure time all summer breaking the zebras to harness, and driving them single and double in the ring Sundays.
Everybody about the show knew pa was going to spring some surprise on us. I have tried to reason pa out of his unnatural infatuation for zebras, but you might as well talk to a rich old man who gets stuck on a chorus girl, and gives her all his money, and has to go and live at the poor house.
A zebra always looks to me like a joke that nature has played. Who, but nature, would ever think of laying out a plan for a zebra, and painting it in stripes, like a barber’s pole, and yet we must admit that few human artists could paint a million zebras and get the stripes on as perfect as nature does with her eyes shut. The mule and the zebra are distant relatives, ’cause lots of mules have a few stripes on their legs, but the zebra is the eldest son who is aristocratic and inherits the stuff, while the mule is the younger son who never gets a look in for the money, but has to work for a living. So it is no wonder to me that the mule kicks. The zebra is the dude of the family, and the mule looks up to him, when he ought to kick his slats in, and rub out his stripes with a mule shoe eraser.
While pa was in the hospital at Kansas City he formed a plan to paralyze the town by driving six zebras to a tally-ho coach, in the parade, and the reporters interviewed pa, and the papers were full of it, and the people were wild with excitement, and everybody wanted to see a six-in-hand zebra team, driven by Alkali Ike, one of the greatest western stage drivers that was ever held up by road agents. Pa was to be Alkali Ike. The show struck Kansas City Sunday morning, and the management was scared at what pa had advertised to do, and they all wanted to call off the zebra stunt, but pa said if they cut it out the people would mob the show, so all day Sunday we hooked up the six zebras, and the hands led them around the tent with a mule with a bell on ridden in the lead. They seemed to go pretty well, but I could see pa’s finish when he got out on the streets with that crazy team. Pa wanted all the freaks to ride on the tally-ho, and he had invited nine newspaper fellows to ride with him. Pa thought the zebra team would follow the bell mule ahead, like a 20-mule borax team would.
Well, Monday morning the parade started, and along about the middle of the parade, just ahead of the calliope, was pa and his six zebra team, his freaks and reporters, and pa handled the ribbons like a pirate. The fat woman sat on the driver’s seat with pa, for ballast, and the rest of the freaks were sandwiched in between the reporters. We went along all right for half a mile, the circus hands walking beside the zebras, to kill them if they tried to jump over a house, while I rode the bell mule. If I had been planning the zebra business, I would have picked out a level town to try it on, but Kansas City is all hills and ravines, and going up hill the zebras’ tally-ho had to be pushed by a couple of elephants, ’cause the zebras wouldn’t pull the load, and going down hill we had to lock the wheels, and slide down.
When we got on the main street, where the crowd filled both sides, almost up to the team, and the people began to cheer, the zebras began to waltz and kick, and try to jump over each other, but the hands got them untangled, and we worried along, though pa was pale, and looked like a man smoking a cigar while sitting on an open powder keg. The fat woman grabbed pa every little while, and screamed that she wanted to get off and walk, but pa told her to hush up and try to be a man.
Well, as we were going down hill, by a park, near the Midland hotel, that confounded calliope had got right up behind the tally-ho, and the organist cut her loose, with the tune: “A Life on the Ocean Wave.” Every zebra jumped into the air, the brake footpiece escaped pa’s foot, and the tally-ho run on to the heels of the wheel zebras, and it was all off. There never was such a runaway since the days of Ben Hur. Pa had presence of mind enough to make the fat lady get down off the seat, and he put his feet on her to hold her down, the crowd yelled, and our zebras run into the cage ahead, containing the behemoth of Holy Writ, and knocked off a hind wheel, and every wagon ahead was either tipped over or disabled. The people fairly went wild, thinking the runaway was a part of the show. The giant fainted from fright, ’cause he always was a coward; the bearded woman threw her arms around a reporter, and scratched his face with her whiskers, while the Circassian girl got her white wig caught In the branch of a tree and lost it, and she was as bald as an ostrich egg. Pa took out the whip and larruped the zebras, to put some new stripes on them.
When we passed the camels they thought they were in the race, and they buckled in to keep up, and the chariot horses got the best of the drivers and they joined in. My mule kept up all right, and we went down the hill on to the level ground that runs to the Missouri river. When we got to the river the zebras turned short and tipped the tally-ho over into the water and the whole bunch on the coach was floundering in the muddy water; but there happened to be a sandbar under the water, so nobody was drowned, though we had to bail out the fat woman, she swallowed so much of the muddy river. The giant was senseless and two reporters got astride of him, thinking it was a rail, and drifted ashore, while pa laid on his back and floated like a duck, and when we got him out we found he had a life-preserver under his coat, and he said he put it on because he had a hunch that those zebras would make for running water if they ever got beyond control. Well, the crowd followed down to the river, and everybody was rescued, and the rest of the parade went over the route, and in the afternoon the tent was so full there were thousands standing up.
When pa came into the main tent with the zebras, in the grand parade around the ring, the crowd gave him three cheers, which probably caused the management to refrain from discharging him on the spot. Pa is like a cat, ’cause he always falls on his feet all right and he thinks the zebra tally-ho in the parade was the feature that caused the crowd to visit the show; but he says he will never drive zebras again, on account of the excitement.
The fat woman talks of having pa arrested for breaking one of her ribs when he held her down with his feet; but pa says his feet did not sink into her more than a foot or so, and he couldn’t have hit a rib, nohow.
Well, I’m glad to be back in the show, ’cause there is more going on than there was in the hospital, where I put in a week while the doctors were pulling the cactus pin feathers out of pa that grew out on him in Indian Territory. Gee, but if I had to leave the circus business and go back to school, I know I should die of lonesomeness.
I got a chance to talk with pa at supper, and asked him if he was really crazy, as the hands say he
is, and how he liked zebras, anyway, and he said: “Hennery, zebras are just people, they stampede just like politicians and bankers, and business men generally, and never know enough to let well enough alone. The mule is the only draft animal that always pulls straight and gets there right side up.”
If I was going to run a circus for easy money, and a picnic, I wouldn’t have any menagerie connected with it, ’cause the animals make more trouble than all the rest of the show. They are just like a lot of children in a reform school, they don’t want to work, and they are just looking for a chance to fight when your back is turned, or to escape. They don’t know where they would go if they did escape, but they don’t want anybody over them, to teach them morals, though when meal time comes the reform school boys and the menagerie animals eat like tramps, because the food is so good, and then kick because it isn’t better. If your performers in the circus proper do not suit you can discharge them, and if they are sick you can leave them in a hospital, and go on with the show, and forget about them until they show up in a week or two, pale as ghosts, and weak as cats, and demand back salary; but your animal has to be taken along and petted, and when you give him medicine to save his life, he will try to bite your hand off.
And yet you can’t help getting stuck on the animals, and a man gets stuck on the kind of animal that is most like him. The grizzly old granger, who never buttons the collar of his shirt, and whose Adam’s apple looks like a hen’s head, will stay by the camels, hours at a time, the pious church man feels at home among the sacred cattle, the strong-arm holdup man will linger by the grizzly bear, the prize-fighter will haunt the lions’ den, the garroter will gaze lovingly at the tigers, the sneak thief seems to love the hyenas, and the big game hunters watch the deer and elk. Some of us who have brains love the monkeys, they are so human.
CHAPTER XXVI
The Rings Are So Muddy the Performers Have to Wear Rubber Boots—The Freaks Present Pa with a Big Heart of Roses—The Show Closes and the Bad Boy Starts West with His Pa in Search of Attractions for the Coming Season.
Well, Missouri is the state to teach a circus humility, and we have taken the thirty-third degree in the last ten days. It has rained nine days and a half out of a possible ten days, and the mud is something we never dreamed of before. The wagons have been mired in the mud on the way from the train to the lot every day in the streets of cities big enough to have street cars and electric lights. The cities have one or two main streets paved, but the rest of the streets are just virgin soil, and you have got to swim to get to the paved streets. When you start away for the lot, it is like Washington crossing the Delaware.
And yet the people come from miles around to see the show, and everybody rides a web-footed mule, that can wallow in the mud. They hitch the mules to fences outside the tent, and while the performance is going on the mules bray in concert and drown the band.
Pa has been wild ever since we struck Missouri, and no wonder, ’cause everybody seems to lay everything in the way of weather on him. Every place we show the lot is one sea of mud, and when we get the rings made they seem like a chain of lakes, and in galloping around the rings the horses splash mud and water clear to the reserved seats. The riders of the horses have to come out in rubber hunting boots and when they get on the horses we have to pull their boots off and hold them until the act is over, then the riders sit on the horses and pull the boots on and get down in the mud of the ring and bow to the audience.
The woman riders are the worst to wear rubber boots, ’cause they fall down in the mud and spoil their dresses and kick scandalous, The trapeze performers have to be carried out of the dressing room on stretchers, and hoisted up to the net, ’cause they can’t do stunts up on the trapeze with wet feet, and we have worked ourselves to death getting things in shape.
The confounded elephants just glory in the mud, and the minute they get in the ring they all lay down and roll in the mud and water, so when they are ready to do their act they look like walking mud pies. The freaks are awful to handle, the giant being the only one that can wade through and look pleasant, and the fat woman would make you weary, she has to be carried back and forth to the platform by half a force of hands. Pa has had shawl straps and coffin handles fastened to her clothes, so there will be something to grab hold of to move her around. I don’t think that another year we will have any fat woman, ’cause pa says it costs more to get this 500-pound female from one place to another than all the rest of the show. He thinks that people who visit the show don’t care much about a fat woman anyway, but just guy her and ask her what kind of breakfast food she lives on. He thinks if we had three reasonably fat women that weighed about 200 pounds apiece, it would give better satisfaction and they would be easier to handle; but when she heard what pa said and felt that she was going to be shook next year she began to cry, and it was like turning on water in a bathtub. Pa had to pet her and then the bearded woman got jealous.
At Jefferson City there came a cold wave and everything was froze stiff, and you could skate in the rings, and the management decided to get to St. Louis and send the show to winter quarters, and organize for next season. So we have had a time closing up for the season, and sending the animals to the barns on our farm up north, and discharging and paying off the performers and bidding everybody good-by. We have bought presents for everybody, and it has been a picnic.
Pa had a big heart, with roses all around it, made of a horse collar, covered with flowers, which came from the freaks, and the performers remembered him with presents, and pa gave everybody something, and everybody got together in the main tent and made speeches.
The manager thanked everybody and promised that next year we would have the greatest show on earth. He said the management had decided that what we lacked this year was a wild west show, as the people everywhere seemed to dote on busting broncos, and roping cattle, and chasing buffaloes and seeing Indians and rough riders chase up and down the arena. He felt that in justice to our rough-riding president, it was proper to have a wild west show that would make things hum next year. He said he took pleasure in informing the people of the show that pa had been commissioned to go out west at once and secure the Indians and cowboys, horses that buck and bounce off the riders, cattle that would stand it to be lassoed and thrown down for the amusement of the public, buffaloes that would bellow and act like old times on the plains, stage coaches and robbers, and he promised that next year they would have no cause to be ashamed of the show. He said pa was authorized to spare no expense to round up a wild west show second to none. The performers and hands cheered the manager, and then they yelled for pa for a speech.
Pa got up on the tub that the elephants stand on, and said that it was true what the manager said about a wild west show, and that he was proud of the confidence reposed in him. He should be glad to take an expedition and go out into the far west and beard the wild west Indian in his tepee and engage Indians by the hundred to come with us next year. He would pierce the wilderness of the west in search of the wildest red men and would hunt the cowboy in his lair and secure those who could make the most trouble for cattle and horses and shoot up an audience if necessary to keep the peace, and he would buy buffaloes enough so every performer could ride one if he wanted to. He said while we had this year had some attempts at a wild west department in our show, it was only a tame imitation of what we would have next year, and he wanted them all to pray for him, that he might come out of the wild far west without being killed. He said he should take Hennery along with him as a mascot, and if the worst came he could trade me to an Indian tribe for ponies, or leave me as a hostage with some tribe until he returned the Indians at the close of next season. Pa closed his remarks by hoping that nothing had occurred during the past season that would cause anybody to have it in for him, ’cause he had tried to be impartial in his cussedness, and while he felt that he had been considered an interloper in the profession at first, he had found that everybody looked upon him later in the season as the main guy in
the show, and that all had felt at liberty to give it to him in the neck on every proper occasion and he felt that he had taken his medicine like a thoroughbred.
They gave three cheers for pa, and then they brought in the blankets and tossed everybody up until they lost everything out of their pockets and yelled that they had enough, and they wound up by tossing pa up in the blanket until he could see stars. They were going to give the fat woman a hoist, when the boss canvasman gave the signal to take down the tents, and all was in a hubbub for about 15 minutes.
When everything was down and everybody went to the train, after joining hands around the middle ring and singing “Old Lang Sine,” pa and I and the managers went to a hotel to organize our expedition to the far west in search of talent for a wild west show that shall be the greatest ever put under canvas. After all had gone away, and only pa and I and the managers were left, it seemed, as we thought over the incidents of the past season, as though there had been an earthquake and the whole show had been blotted out of existence.
Pa choked up and was going to cry, and I got my throat full of something so I could not speak, and the managers began to wipe their eyes, and pa saved the day by saying: “Oh, what’s the use, let’s order up some highballs,” and when they came, with a red lemonade for me, pa said: “Well, here’s to the people that crowd around the ticket wagon and fight to get the first ticket when the window is open, and go away after the show and say it is the greatest show ever.”
“Hey Rube!” said the manager, and we drank standing, and pa went out and bought tickets for Cheyenne, and some beads, to give to the Indians we shall visit in the west.
PECK’S UNCLE IKE AND THE RED HEADED BOY
The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack Page 66