Lloyd could not remember an evening in his humble career as impresario
that had so strained and racked his endurance. The pyrotechnic
exhibition bade fair to be a failure, some of the combustibles having
gotten damp in the downpour of rain on the previous evening, and each
piece refusing to fizzle or shoot or whirl, whatever its particular
method of explosion might be, while all the town gathered and stared,
and laughed, and grew indignant, and made sarcastic comments somewhat
incompatible with the fact that the fireworks were a free show, and
that no spectator was defrauded of his money. Suddenly, after so much
futile effort, and without any of the usual incentives, a small waggon
which had brought the explosives from the station to the square, was
lifted toward the stars in jets of red, blue, yellow, green and white
light; rockets were darting, comet-like, hither and thither through
the crowd; Catherine wheels whirled; Roman candles blazed; cannon
crackers exploded; all in simultaneous clamour and flare. The terrified
horse, breaking loose from his harness, set off at a frantic speed, and
the driver was thrown to the earth, not dead nor wounded as the men,
rushing to his assistance, expected to find him, but powder-smirched,
slightly jarred, convulsed with laughter, declaring that his ascension
discounted the Flying Lady's jaunts into the air, and showing himself
to be very considerably drunk--a state which had not been at all
obvious before the explosion.
The crowd's interest in combustibles had very sensibly diminished and
when the final balloons had gone wafting away over the dark stretches
of the infinite loneliness of the Great Smoky Mountains--to astonish
the eyes of some remote dweller therein, knowing naught even of the
existence of so sophisticated a fact as a street fair, or perchance
to be seen only by a marauding wolf or a crafty fox and seeming to
follow with the red eye of menace the beast's pursuit of his prey,--the
craning necks of the villagers were tired and the sight-seers turned
with ready zest to the merry-go-round, the kinetoscope, the vendors
of indigestible edibles, the various show-tents, the revolutions of
the Ferris Wheel. The continual ascent and descent of the passengers,
swinging in the great periphery, maintained a perennial interest
for the public of Colbury. As the wheel lifted its patrons higher
and higher into the air it paused entirely now and then, that they
might swing gently at a giddy elevation and look away from the town,
studded with the lights of the street fair, flaring in the clear, dark
atmosphere, and enjoy the far prospect of valley and river and the
clifty defiles of the mountains, all an illumined purple and silver in
the sheen of the serene autumnal moon.
But even in this simple routine, quiet shunned the harassed manager.
The wheel was laden, as Lloyd in his general supervisory duties,
strolled up and with his hands in his pockets stood watching its
revolution. Every seat but one was filled, and the exclamations
of delight and wonder in the voices of children and women sounded
pleasantly enough on the air. Suddenly raucous tones from high in the
darkness broke forth; a man was thickly protesting fear and anger
and contention, and soon his voice rose into sobs and wild cries,
infinitely weird and nerve thrilling, sounding from the height and
the indefinite gloom, and fraught with unimagined disaster. Amongst
the venturesome wights, swinging so high above the earth, the utmost
consternation prevailed, and pleas of eager insistence to be lowered
and released came from every swing. A halloo of inquiry from the
manager below addressed to the disturber of the peace elicited only
agonised prayers for succour and cries of pain that rose piercingly
into the night. The mystery being insoluble Lloyd's first care was to
caution the other occupants of the swings to remain firmly seated in
their places and to release them seriatim as soon as the great wheel
could complete its revolution. While this was in progress he stood
close by, scanning the passengers as one by one they emerged, keenly
watching lest the spoil-sport, madman, or victim, who had so signally
destroyed the pleasure of the crowd and injured the prestige of the
Ferris Wheel, escape undetected in the press. He proved easily enough
identified, however, as, still whimpering in the intervals of uttering
wild cries, he came to the ground and was seized upon by the stalwart
showman.
He had been stabbed, he declared, and he would sue the company. When
reminded that he had been in a seat alone, and inquired of as to the
perpetrator of the deed he asseverated that when as high as the top of
the wheel a stranger had climbed into the seat with him, a stranger of
a most terrible aspect. In fact, this terrible stranger looked just
like the devil, he solemnly averred, with evident familiarity with the
diabolic features. And there, while suspended so high above the world
that none could succour him, this demon-man had stabbed him--and he
would have damages of the show company--stabbed him in the right side.
With the most dismal forebodings, for the man was evidently half
fainting and had the pallor of death, Lloyd called the engineer
from the little gasoline motor of the wheel to his assistance, and
supporting the victim between them they took their way to the drug
store on the corner. Lloyd noticed the feeble step of their burden,
as his feet half dragged on the ground, and the nerveless languor of
his form, and began to fear that he was indeed in bad case. The truth
did not even vaguely dawn upon Lloyd until the physician, who had been
hastily summoned, looked the victim over and declared that his skin was
unbroken throughout and he had never been stabbed.
"Why, what could have been his motive in all this commotion?" asked
Lloyd in wonderment.
"Can't you see?" the doctor queried in turn. "He is on the verge of
delirium tremens."
As Lloyd stood in the door of the drug store in the light which
streamed through the great red and green glass bottles in the windows,
that bespoke its functions, he listened to the snickering comments of
the men on the sidewalk while they recited to newcomers the details
of the incident, and his mind laid hold of certain unexplained points
which were most pertinent to its proper comprehension.
"Why, I thought that Colbury was a dry town," he addressed one of the
bystanders. "Where do all these drunken men get their liquor?"
"I dunno--_do you_?" His interlocutor favoured him with a facetious
wink which was in the nature of things an equivocal demonstration, for
as he faced the light of the drug store windows the wink was both red
and green.
"Well, the liquor must be pretty cheap to be drunk in such glorious
plenty," Lloyd remarked impersonally.
For the crowd was of a grade that has little money to spend, and it
would seem that the Fair must needs absorb a good part of it.
"Liquor _is_ cheap!--you bet your life," his interlocutor treated him
to another rainbow-tinted wink, "liquor _is_ cheap,--for Shadrach
Pinnott is in town!"
The simple words explained many things to Lloyd's quick
perceptions--the waggon laden with baskets to sell, the secluded
camping-ground on the river-bank, yet near the town, which was
a virtuous dry town with not a saloon open in the place. This
surreptitious sale of liquor was doubtless illegal in more than one
sense, evading the tax of the revenue law of the government as well
as defying the restrictions of the municipal prohibition. He was
remembering the occasion of his arrival on the mountain--how the
girl had followed him to the house as if she feared his escape; how,
despite the torrents of rain, she had sought her father and brothers
to submit to their judgment the mystery of his sudden appearance; how
eagerly anxious was the old beldame in volunteering to account for
their vocation and the use to which they put the product of their
great orchards; how obviously relieved they had seemed when they had
learned his own vocation. It was all plain, now; they were distillers
of illicit whisky and brandy, and they had suspected him as an emissary
of the revenue department, a detective, or one of the marshal's men. It
was not an unnatural conclusion, perhaps; strangers in those secluded
fastnesses, unheralded and without vouchers, were rare and obnoxious to
suspicion.
The matter was peculiarly distasteful to Lloyd individually, who was
a sober, law-abiding citizen, and in the interests of the Street
Fair, specially repugnant. He resented the fact that the enterprising
moonshiners should contrive to utilise the presence of his show in
the streets of Colbury to share the profits of the occasion with
their nefarious and illicit trade. Absurdly enough in view of its
humble insignificance Lloyd was proud of his Fair--it was a clean
show, he averred; it had no disreputable hangers-on nor traffic; its
members worked faithfully for their scanty wages; it lived up to its
representations, barring of course the few illusions and devices
necessary to heighten amusement. It tolerated no false dealing on the
part of its concessionaries toward the unsophisticated and simple
population; it was a strictly temperance organisation--the acrobats
required sobriety to conserve the control of the nerves, and the other
members of the company, hard at work from early morn till late at
night, had neither time nor inclination to indulge in the flowing bowl.
Lloyd was nettled, even more, troubled, that it should be associated in
any way with the risky trade plying on the outskirts of the town. The
sudden presence of numbers of intoxicated men could be accounted for
by the authorities in no way but by the suspicion of the sly sale of
liquor in the Fair itself, or by some surreptitious vendor disconnected
with its management. This elusive law-breaker would be difficult to
discover, even though he bore the reputation of previous exploits
of the kind; the sale of the home-made baskets was a very efficient
blind; the spot which the moonshiner had selected was invaluable for
his purposes, so secluded, so close to the bank--a sudden alarm and
the chaste sylvan waters of the crystal river would be adulterated
in a wise never known before, the land flowing with toddy, in lieu of
the conventional milk and honey. Lloyd winced as he reflected that he,
the manager of the Carnival, had been seen to repair to this spot this
afternoon, that he had earlier visited the moonshiners' house, and
apparently given them their first intimation that they should attend
the Street Fair.
As he still stood on the street corner, looking about mechanically,
his hat drawn down over his brow, his hands in his pockets, he was
lost in thought and saw naught of the scene before him--the torches
in front of the stands of confectionery and the peanut roaster; the
electric stars that studded the circumference of the Ferris Wheel; the
big mooney lustre of the rows of tents, the flare within illumining
the outer aspect of the canvas; the courthouse rising up in the midst,
taking on a sort of castellated dignity as its tower loomed in the dim
light of uncertainty above; the motley crowd surging hither and thither
wherever a sudden commotion gave promise of special attraction or the
added sensation of an accident; the straggling glimmer from the lighted
windows of the residences of the town along the hillside; and further
away the contour of august mountain ranges under the melancholy light
of a young moon, little more than a gilded sickle cutting the mists,
like the test of the temper of the scimitar of the Orient dividing the
gauze veil at a single stroke. He heard naught of the varied clamours
of the town--the callow vociferations of the ever-present small boy,
the clatter of tongues in conversation and comment, the sudden brazen
outpour of tumult when the brass band sent a popular melody pulsing
along the currents of the air, the frantic cries of the spielers
contending against each other and vaunting their rival attractions.
Great favourites these were with the country crowd, and it was a facile
laugh that rewarded their pleasantries. Sometimes these verged on
hardihood. "Isaac! Isaac! he eats 'em--he eats 'em alive! Come in! Come
in, an' see the snake-eater, lady--he eats 'em alive!" Then resounded
his rival, "Oh, lady, don't go down there. Come in here and see the Fat
Lady--weighs six hundred pounds."
And anon the retort, "Oh, lady, that feller ain't got no fat
woman--none but skin-and-bone would look at him. Here's Isaac--worth
the money; he eats 'em--he eats 'em, alive."
And once more "Weighs six hunderd pounds--come in and see her tip the
beam--oh, lady, don't believe that snake-man. The serpent was ever the
snare of the fair sex! That feller is the same one that crawled in the
garden of Eden, lady. Come in, lady, and see the handsomest woman of
her size in the world--tips the beam at six hunderd pounds!"
Lloyd was deaf to it all. He was still revolving the situation,
which was by no means devoid of danger to him. Should the foolhardy
enterprise of the moonshiners reveal their infringement of the law and
bring down disaster, which could only end in a Federal prison, he might
well be involved on the suspicion of connivance and profit-sharing.
The truth was that the financial prospect of the Fair must have been
greatly ameliorated by the depot of liquid refreshment established
on its outskirts. He had not earlier been able to understand the
crowd's reinforcement in point of numbers as the day had worn on. He
remembered, with a sort of helpless astonishment at the toils of the
circumstances as they began to enmesh him, how public he had permitted
to be the fact of his acquaintance with these people; the glowing
advertisements of the "song-and-dance turn" of Shadrach Pinnott's
daughter, which in themselves must have been ample intimation to the
initiated that there was something else to be found at the Street Fair
as alluring as youth and beauty; the courtesies that he had shown the
family as recognition in some sort of the very questionable value of
her performance.
He had realised that it was in itself a sort of exhibition, at which
he had himself been able to laugh in the lightness of his heart--he
had thought it a very heavy heart then, so unprescient had he been of
worse troubles to come,--when he had made the tour of the show with
the venerable Mrs. Pinnott on his arm, and they had gone up in the
Ferris Wheel together. All the crowd below had laughed and guyed the
twain, as the mingled fright and ecstasy of the ancient dame sounded
on the air while she swayed aloft and clutched her youthful cavalier
with a grip of steel. Now and again the listening wights were convulsed
with merriment at her pertinent remarks, charged with a pungent
old-fashioned native wit, and, when once more on solid ground, the
rough but good-natured crowd had given a rousing cheer for "May and
December." It was hardly possible that any ascent could be more public.
He was taking himself to task now for his plastic folly. He said to
himself that he did not know any other man who would have been guilty
of it. The indifference of other men, their surly self-centred natures,
their aversion to ridicule, their sense of the value of their own time
in rest, if duty did not absorb it, in the luxury of waste, if no
dissipation entrenched upon it--all would have protected other men from
a situation which had as a sequence menace so serious. Other men might
have found a lure in the girl's beauty and thus involved themselves in
a troublous association. It was only he, however, who would interest
himself in the enjoyment of a funny old crone, by giving her a ride on
the Ferris Wheel and a sight of all the wonders of the show, sinking
his individuality out of sight, and laughing himself at the crowd's
ridicule of the incongruity of the companions. It was no unselfishness,
he told himself grimly. He found his own happiness in such ill-advised
benefactions. And this fad, that had seemed so simple, so natural, had
developed a curiously resilient blow. He could well understand now why
the men of the family had no interest concerning the details of the
show, and manifested no filial disposition that her narrow, restricted
life should be enriched with the sights and sounds that were so much
to her wondering simplicity. Overpowered by all they had at stake in
their venturesome pursuit of their vocation, in defiance of imminent
discovery and the penalties of a long term of imprisonment, they had
neither time nor thought for such trivialities as making for her behoof
the tour of the Fair.
If a disastrous suspicion of complicity in their enterprise on the
part of the management of the Carnival should be entertained by the
revenue authorities it would wreck the individuals of the combination
beyond all help or redemption, Lloyd reflected. They were strangers,
poor personally, and as a company on the verge of financial collapse.
Suspicion would mean for them arrest, the jail, utter ruin, for there
was no possibility of bail-bonds for stranded mountebanks in a remote
and unfamiliar region.
Lloyd staggered under a sense of responsibility. His first impulse was
to find Haxon, and in the confidential relations of mutual interest
seek some surcease for the terrors that had fallen upon him with fangs
that were rending and gnawing at his consciousness. Then he checked
himself. No change of plan could be speedily compassed. An itinerant
show is an unwieldy device. It was obvious policy that the Carnival
should continue the next day without any deviation of plan, until the
matter could be canvassed and some decision reached. Haxon's nerve must
not be shaken. His diurnal feat, his "high dive," was billed for the
morning, and a suggestion freighted with such momentous possibilities
would doubtless affect his self-control, his physical poise, and cost
him his life. A frightful fate waited on a false step, a trifling
miscalculation of distance. Lloyd shuddered at the thought. He had
seen Haxon earlier in the evening, and had marked with a sense of
gratulation the restoration of the spirits of the acrobat. The improved
business of the show, as the day wore on, had revived Haxon's hopes.
The company might yet pull through, he thought, making current expenses
and transportation. This was the first day, and though he could not
discern whence the patrons for the rest of the week were to come, he
found a degree of solace in the propitious present, the jollity of the
aspect of the square, the flaring lights, the enthusiastic crowds, and
all the "turns" were at their best.
With a sigh Lloyd felt that he must broaden his back to the burden.
He could carry this weighty secret without a sign till high noon
to-morrow, surely. He drew out his silver watch and consulted its
dial--he wondered would the course of events change before twelve
hours should pass. Still Haxon must not know--the routine could not
be altered without suspicion. Lloyd had a keen, intelligent power to
appraise cause and event, and he had already noted the sudden fierce
temper of rural crowds. He intuitively knew that the public here could
not be balked of its sensation with the proffered return of the money
at the door, like a metropolitan audience, even if it were practicable.
But Haxon's turn was a free show. It was already the inalienable
property of the public. A riot might ensue, and in any disturbance
disastrous facts might be elicited and precipitate the dangers he
feared. Haxon must not know. The crowd must be kept satisfied, and as
quiet and orderly as possible until the leap for life was made.
Suddenly Lloyd's heart sank as he wondered why the municipal
authorities had not interfered to seek the source of the inebriation of
the drunken men on the streets of this dry town. Surely they could not
be suspected of standing in with the liquor dealers, or were they even
now laying their plans, spreading their snares, waiting for the coming
of the revenue force, already summoned, for there were rewards of not
despicable sums for the informer.
He was about to start toward the hotel, still lingering in front of
the drug store at the corner of the intersection of one of the streets
with the square, and he became all at once aware of a covert watchful
gaze, that had been fixed on him so long, with such complete immunity
by reason of his mental absorption hitherto, that his abrupt turn
surprised and caught it. The look came from a pair of dark, bright
eyes, under the flapping brim of an old white hat, shown in the flare
from the windows of the drug store--young eyes, to his astonishment,
for he had fancied that it was an old lame man in the miller's garb,
who had "shadowed" him to the Pinnott encampment to-day. He could not
be sure of the incongruity, for the man turned his head instantly, and
the momentary impression was lost in the turmoil of anxiety, of eager
thought, of perplexed fears that filled the brain of the manager of the
joyous "carnival."
When one by one the lights of the Street Fair went out, when the town
was dark save for the corner lamps at long intervals, when the crowds
had vanished and the itinerants had repaired to the little hotel which
harboured the better paid, or the boarding-houses where the underlings
found refuge, except indeed the "freaks," who from motives of privacy,
so essential to their trade, never left their several tents, Lloyd
tossed to and fro on his sleepless pillow and canvassed anew within
himself the situation, and calculated again the problems of the expense
accounts and the gate receipts and the transportation, and wondered if
he had decided wisely, and then listened warily to the breathing of
Haxon, in his bed on the opposite side of the room, lest the tumult
of his wild thoughts might have boisterously wakened the acrobat and
defrauded him of his night's rest.