The Crimson Flash Part 9

That night, however, offered no further opportunity for making acquaintances. Indeed, he was made more and more conscious of the fact that in the circus there existed an almost unbreakable line of caste.

There were the performers and the attendants. The attendants were kept in their places. They did not mingle with the performers; they were distinctly considered beneath them.

"Oh, well," Johnny said to himself, "if that's that, why I'll have to get to be a performer, that's all."

But when he came to think it over soberly, he could imagine no means by which this end could be attained.

If he had but known it, the opportunity was to present itself in a not far distant time, and in a manner as startling as it was sudden.

In one thing that night he was extremely fortunate--he succeeded in securing a position where he could get a clear view of the performance of two very interesting persons, Gwen, the Queen, and Allegretti, the man who boxed the bear. The contrast of the two stood out in his thoughts long after the performers had moved out of the ring. Gwen was wonderful.

Johnny was sure he had never seen anyone to equal her in all his life.

Light as a feather, waving her delicate silk parasol here and there, she tripped across the invisible wire. Yet, fairy-like as she was, every move spoke of strength, of well developed and perfectly trained muscles. She wore the accustomed grease paint of the ring, but Johnny did not need to be told that beneath this there lay the glow of a healthy skin.

"She's all right," he decided. "I'll wager she's an American. Only an American girl could be like that."

Through the quarter of an hour during which Gwen was the center of attention of the vast throng, he watched her. The breathless leaps in air, the light, tripping dance from post to post, the bow, the smile--he saw it all and breathed hard as she at last danced out of the ring.

"If she has the ring, it's going to be hard to get it," he decided. "If another could be bought, and I had the money, I'd rather buy it and let her keep the old one, but there's only one in all the world, and if she has it I must get it from her. Gwen, big, wonderful American girl, I'm for you, but I'm also a hard hearted detective, and I'm on your trail."

The antics of the swarthy foreigner who boxed the bear were as ludicrous and grotesque as Gwen's act had been exquisite.

"Clumsy lobster!" Johnny exclaimed, after watching him for five minutes.

"What he doesn't know about boxing would fill an encyclopedia, and if he didn't have a good natured bear, he'd get his head knocked off. All he's good for is to dance with a bear on the street and hold out a tin cup for nickels. Nevertheless, Allegretti, old boy, I've got to sc.r.a.pe up an acquaintance with you someway, for that's on the road to the heart of Gwen, though how she can stand the garlic and the look of your ugly mug long enough to box a round with you is more than I can understand."

While Johnny Thompson was watching the performance, two little girls, sitting bolt upright in their beds in the big house of Major MacDonald in far-away Amaraza, were planning wild things for the future. Through the aid of their maid they had succeeded in securing for themselves suits that would do with the circus--pink tights, exceedingly short blue skirts, red slippers and green caps. All that bright afternoon they had spent in the back yard practicing on their ponies. Standing up on the back of one of them had been easy after the first few attempts, but when Marjory had tried standing with one foot on each pony she had slipped down between them and had come near to being crushed.

"We'll do that, too, some day," she had exclaimed resolutely.

And now, before they went to sleep, they were planning.

"Yes, sir," Marjory was saying, "that old circus will come back here some time; I just know it will! Maybe next week."

"And Johnny Thompson will be with it," broke in Margaret. "I just know he will, and we'll get on our ponies when the parade is started. We'll ride right in the parade, and Johnny will see us and say, 'There are my friends, Marjory and Margaret.' Won't he be proud of us!"

"Won't he, though!" The other twin clapped her hands in high glee.

They went to sleep finally, still thinking of Johnny and the circus, but little dreaming of the remarkable and thrilling adventures in store for them.

That same night, after the circus tents had been darkened, two strange things happened. The first was never made public; the second was the talk of the circus people the next morning.

Scarcely had the last straggling sight-seer wandered from the grounds, than two figures emerged from the side entrance to a small tent. They were followed at a distance by a third. Darting directly for the wall that lined the railway tracks, which at this point run some twelve feet below the surface, but open to the air, they scaled the wall, and, by the aid of a rope, let themselves down to the track.

The third person, having followed them to the wall and noted the direction they had taken, contented himself with following along the wall. Coming presently to some stairs, he crept silently down, then having listened for a moment, possibly for the sound of footsteps, he peered down the track. For an instant a pale crimson light flashed down the track. It might easily have been mistaken for the glow of a switch lantern. Then he pushed on after the pair.

The two men left the tracks at Randolph street and, taking a zigzag course, headed for the river. Into a long, low-lying building facing the stream they went. Not five minutes later the individual who had followed them was braced against a wall, peering in through a crack in a broken window pane. What he saw within was a low-ceilinged, dimly lighted room, furnished only with a small table, four chairs and a dilapidated chest of drawers. Four men were bent over the table. The lines of their faces drawn in eagerness, they were staring at some flat object on the table.

Soon one of them, with the tips of his thumb and forefinger lifted the corner of a sheet of paper. He had lifted it half off from the flat object, to which it appeared to cling, when a startling thing happened--the room was suddenly illuminated with a brilliant blood red light. This lasted only a fraction of a second. The room was then left in darkness, black as ink; for even the candle had been overturned and snuffed out. From the darkness there came the sound of overturned chairs, as the four men made good their escape. By the time they reached the open air their tracker had vanished utterly.

He was, at that very moment, flattened against the corner of a dark wall, and was quite as unhappy over the turn of events as they were. At the very instant when he was about to discover a secret of vast importance, his foot had slipped, his face b.u.mped against the gla.s.s, and the unexpected happened.

The second occurrence, the one which caused much talk among the circus people, happened a short time later. As the attendants reported it, it would seem that their attention was first attracted to the strange phenomenon by the growl of a lion, whose cage was in the corner of the tent. To their surprise, the cage, the lion, and even the straw upon which he lay had turned blood red. Hardly had they finished staring at this than the snarl of a Siberian tiger at the opposite corner had called them to note that the red light, for light it must have been, had s.h.i.+fted to the tiger's cage. The red glare had continued to play hide and seek with the distracted animals for fully five minutes and, during all that time, not one of the attendants could detect its source. At times it appeared to stream down from the canvas top, then to shoot from a corner, or to leap up from the floor.

One notable fact was reported: In every instance save one, the animals whose cages were illuminated with crimson light cowered in a corner in snarling fear. The single instance in which this was not true was that of the black leopard. That beast leaped, clawing and snarling, at the bars of its cage, as if it would tear the originator of the crimson flash limb from limb.

As the report spread, the negroes of the troupe were panic stricken. They quit in numbers. The owners and managers were hard pressed to keep enough men to do the menial work about the tents, and sent the employment agent to search the city for recruits. One of these recruits chanced to be s...o...b..ll, the bullet-headed friend of the strange hanger-on, Pant.

CHAPTER VI JOHNNY BOXES THE BEAR

Johnny Thompson paced the beach up which the waves of Lake Michigan were rolling. There had been a storm, the aftermath of which was even now coming in. Johnny's mind was in a turmoil. He had been with the circus five days now. Two more days they would remain in Chicago. He was still groom for Millie Gonzales' three grays. Millie was as impossible as ever.

Three times she had struck at him with her whip, when he had appeared to overstep his rights as her menial.

"If she has the ring, fine chance I've got unless I steal it from her,"

he grumbled.

Allegretti, the Italian boxer, was quite as impossible as Millie. Once Johnny had bantered him for a boxing match, but the fellow had showed all his white teeth in a snarl as he said:

"No box-a da b.u.m."

He had meant Johnny.

Johnny's blood had boiled, but he had made no response. Only when he was out of hearing, he had declared, "Never mind, old boy, I'll get you yet."

But thus far he had not "got" him. The way into the good graces of Gwen, queen of the circus, seemed effectually blocked. He had not tried approaching her, for he felt that would be folly.

In spite of the sharply drawn lines of caste which prevailed in the circus, life within the tented walls when the performers were off duty was astonis.h.i.+ngly simple. Grease paint came off at the end of the last act. About the dressing tent and the a.s.sembly yard the women stars appeared plain and simple-minded people. There was nothing of the bravado that Johnny had expected to find. The three girls who held the center of his attention, because of the ring, were wonderfully well-developed physically. Millie was slender and quick as a cat. Mitzi von Neutin, the trapeze performer, was also slender and strong. She was French; Johnny knew that from the many "Mais, oui" and her "Mais, non," with which she answered the questions of the other performers. With her abundance of yellow hair she was like a kitten, as she curled up on a rug in the corner of the tent reading a French novel.

But Gwen--Gwen was perfection itself. Not too stout, not too thin; strong, yet not masculine, she was indeed a queen. About the tent, when off duty, she wore a short blue skirt and a blue middy blouse open at the neck and tied with a dark red ribbon. Twice Johnny had seen her boxing with the Italian. Each time the blood had rushed to his temples. To think of such a queen taking her exercise with so coa.r.s.e a creature filled him with inward rage.

"Oh, well, he's of the caste," Johnny had grumbled. "No matter; so shall I be in time. I don't know just how, but I will."

Pant, too, had puzzled him greatly. He had not forgotten his friend's uncanny power of seeing in the dark. He had heard of the strange appearance and disappearance of the crimson flash in the animal tent and elsewhere, and suspected that Pant was at the bottom of it, but just what his game was, or what strange secret of the power of light Pant possessed, he could not guess.

Johnny had at last succeeded in buying the five bonds which Pant had wanted. He had obtained two of them for $39 each. These he had bought from a fat, red faced man who was a guard at the entrance to the big top.

He was even now waiting to deliver them to Pant.

Presently that individual came shuffling by, and, motioning Johnny to follow him, continued down the beach until they had found a secluded spot in a turn of a breakwater.

"Got 'em?" Pant whispered.

"Sure."

"Good! Let's see!"