The Circus Strikes the Quaker City--They Go on a Ginger Ale Jag--Pa
Breaks Up an Indian War Dance and Comes Near Being Burned Alive--The
World's Fair Cannibals Have a Roast Dog Feast.
Ever since we knew the show was billed for Philadelphia for a Saturday
and that we should have to stay over Sunday in that town, there has been
symptoms of a revolt. Everybody connected with the show has a horror of
being found dead in Philadelphia. They claim it is too dead for live
people, and not very satisfactory to dead people.
A performer who was with the show last year says that nobody but the
newspaper people who had free tickets attended the performances, and
some of them wouldn't go in the tent unless the press agent promised to
set up a free lunch, with devilish ginger ale to drink, and that the
press people got riotous on ginger ale. A ginger ale jag is terrible.
When a man is full of ginger ale his intestines loop the loop, and tie
up in knots, and gripe like cholera infantum, and unless his friends
hold him he goes out into the world and wants to kill the women and
children, and non-combatants.
Last year our press agents filled up the members of the local press with
ginger ale, and when we struck Philadelphia this time the newspapers had
sworn out warrants for our show, on the charge of compounding a felony,
which I suppose is the legal name for ginger ale. The way the Quakers
patronize a show is to put on their gray clothes, and their big white
hats and stand on the corners when the parade goes by, and never crack a
smile, or act interested, and when the parade has passed they go to the
circus lot and see the balloon ascension, and stand on wagon wheels and
try to look over the side of the tent at the performance, and then they
kick because the audience on the back seats cut off their view from the
wagon wheels.
Last year our show killed a Quaker, and the community is down on us. The
Quaker got in the show because he owned a half inch of ground that its
tents were on, and he stood right by the ring, and when the champion
female rider was suspended in the air between two bareback horses, he
leaned over too far inside the ring, and she kicked his hat clear up to
the roof of the tent, and a female trapeze performer up there caught it
and sat down on it on the trapeze. The old Quaker had heart disease and
fell dead. What the Quakers complained of was that after the Quaker's
remains had been removed from the ring, that the show went right on.
They claimed that we ought to have shown proper respect for the dead by
closing the show for 30 days, and wearing crape on our arms, but a
circus is not built that way.
Ordinarily it may be quiet enough in Philadelphia on Sunday, but pa
found that he had more of a run for his money than at any place we have
been so far. We have had a tribe of Indians with our wild west
department all summer, and pa has not stood very well with the Indians
since he was in charge of the show at Fort Wayne, and they all got
drunk, and he had them tied up to the poles around the ring until they
got sober. They have laid for pa ever since, and it was only a matter of
time when they got him. Then at Pittsburg our manager picked up a
company of cannibals that had got left over from the St. Louis fair, and
who agreed to perform for their board and clothes, and as they don't
wear any clothes to speak of, and only eat dog week days, and hope to
get a human being to roast on Sunday, it seemed a pretty good bargain.
Well, the Indians got permission to hold a green corn dance in a piece
of woods near the circus lot, and the management got them a wagon load
of corn, and they had built a fire and were roasting the corn, and
dancing, and pa didn't know about it, and just after dark the Quaker who
owned the woods complained to pa, who was on watch Sunday night, that
his Indians had got off the reservation and were preparing to go on the
warpath, and he wanted them to get off his premises. Pa said he would go
right over and drive them back to the tents.
I tried to get pa to let the police go and drive them off, but he said
he hadn't no time to go and wake up the police, and they wouldn't get
around anyway before the middle of the week. So pa took a tent stake and
started for the green corn roast. The Indians were taking turns dancing
and eating roasted corn, and they had a barrel of beer, and I knew
enough about Indians to keep away from them when they mix beer with
green corn, for it has about the same effect as committing suicide with
carbolic acid.
Pa put his hat on one side of his head and went right into the midst of
the Indians, and grabbed a chief called "One Ear at a Time," and hit him
with the tent stake, and knocked him down, and said, "Now, you git."
Well, sir, that Indian had no more than struck the fire in a sitting
position, and filled the air with the odor of fried buckskin, before the
whole tribe jumped on pa, and they kicked him with their moccasins, and
were going to murder him, while the chief who acted as the burnt
offering got out of the fire, and sat down in the cold mud to cool
himself. He held up his hand as a signal of attention, and he called a
council of war, while the squaws sat on pa to hold him down.
The council of war sentenced pa to be burned at the stake, and they tied
him to a tree and began to pile sticks around him, and pa told me to go
to the circus lot and give an alarm, and send the hands to rescue him.
Gee, but didn't I run though, and yell an alarm big enough for a
massacre. I told the hands, who were sleeping under the seats, or
playing cards on the trunks that the Indians were burning pa at the
stake, and some of the hands said that would serve him right, and the
fellows that were playing cards said they didn't want to break up the
game when they were losers, to rescue no baldheaded curmudgeon. I
thought pa was a goner, sure, 'cause I could hear the Indians yell, and
I thought I could smell flesh burning. Oh, but I was scared for fear
they would burn pa alive.
[Illustration: The Indians Tied Pa to a Tree and Began to Pile Sticks
Around Him.]
Just then the man who had charge of our cannibals, who each had a dog
that they were looking for a place to roast, came along and I told him
about the Indians' corn roast, and he ordered the cannibals to go drive
the Indians away from their fire and roast their dogs. Well, it worked
like a charm, and the cannibals made a rush for the Indians and drove
them away just as they had lighted the fire around pa, and we were not a
minute too soon. After the Indians had skedaddled for the woods, and we
cut the cords that bound pa, the cannibals went to work and skun the
dogs, and began to cook them, and pa looked on, until it made him
squirmish, but he was so tickled at being saved from the Indians, that
he tried to be a good fellow with the cannibals. I guess it would have
been all right, only the cannibals got to drinking the Philadelphia
beer, and then it was all off, cause roast dog wasn't good enough for
them, and they wanted to roast pa.
First they offered pa dog to eat, but he had swore off on dog, and
passed on it, and that made the cannibals mad, and they got ready to
roast pa, and I guess they would have eaten him half cooked, if it
hadn't been for the performers and freaks who had missed their pet dogs,
and the circus hands told them the cannibals had just gone to the woods
with a mess of dogs to roast for a dog feast.
Well, they were just getting a fire around pa, and he was giving the
grand hailing sign of distress, when the performers, headed by the fat
woman, whose peeled Mexican dog was lost in the shuffle, came in amongst
the cannibals, and pa and the other dogs were rescued, in the darnedest
fight I ever saw. The performers just walked right over the cannibals,
and mauled them with stakes, and all the dogs that had not been killed
were pulled away from the heathen, and saved. The fat woman got her dog
all right, and when pa came up from the stake where they were going to
burn him, and congratulated her on recovering her dog, she turned on pa
and accused him of being the leading cannibal, and that he was the one
who put up the whole job to steal the dogs. She jabbed him with a
parasol, but pa was innocent.
[Illustration: The Fat Woman Jabbed Pa with Her Parasol.]
The Indians got back to the tent along towards morning, and the
cannibals went back with us, and we had to feed them on wieners, which
was the nearest to roast dog we could get for them at that time of
night.
Pa seems to get it in the neck in this show, 'cause everything that goes
wrong is laid to him, and if anything goes right, somebody else gets the
credit, and I think he would resign if it was not for his pride. After
the trouble about the Indians and the cannibals the manager called pa up
and reprimanded him for indulging the tribes in their wild orgies, and
said he couldn't maintain discipline as long as pa mixed up with them
and encouraged them in such things.
Pa tried to explain that he was the victim instead of being the cause of
the dog roast, but the manager dismissed pa by telling him not to let it
occur again. Then to show the inconsistency of the manager, he ordered
pa to go on ahead of the show to New York, and advertise that the
cannibals in our show would give an exhibition of roasting and eating a
human being, and to offer a reward for anybody that would consent to be
roasted and eaten in public.
Pa has gone to New York to look for somebody who will take the position
of meat for the cannibals, and he is instructed to spare no expense to
find such a man. He thinks he may find somebody connected with the Life
Insurance scandal, who has lost all desire to live any longer, and who
will gladly go into this "mutual" scheme. I don't know.
This circus business is too much for me, 'cause I am losing friends all
the time. Even the monkeys have got so they seem to be ashamed to be
seen talking to me, and when I pass the monkey cage they turn their
backs on me, as though I did not belong to their set. When a fellow gets
so low that monkeys feel above him, and throw out sarcastic remarks when
he goes by, it is time to change your luck some way.