Well, he went up to the woman in the dressing-room, and said he came after her stomach pump, ostrich size, and you’d a died to see the ruction.  The woman looked at pa as though he had escaped from a sanitarium, and then she seemed to think he was trying to make game of her, and she said:  “You old skate, do you know who you have the honor of addressing?  I am the queen of this realm, and they all kow-tow to me; now you come and take your medicine,” and before pa could say boo she had pulled a big clothes bag over his head and tied it around his feet, and said:  “Come on, girls, we are going to have roasted missionary,” and they were lighting a gasoline torch to roast pa, when the owner of the show came along and asked what was up.  When the wardrobe woman told him pa had insulted her, the owner gave her $10 to buy champagne for the performers, and she released pa, and he went back to choke his diamond out of the ostrich.

Pa says this life is more exciting, if anything, than staying at home, and it will either kill him or cure him of a desire to be a Barnum in about a month more.

CHAPTER VII.

    The Circus Has a Yellow Fever Scare—­The Bad Boy and His Dad Dress
    Up as Hottentots—­Pa Takes a Mustard Bath and Attends a Revival
    Meeting.

Well, we have had a row for your life, and all the excitement anybody can stand.  We got into Indiana and have had a yellow fever scare, a quarantine that lasted one night, so nobody could sleep on our train, a riot at Evansville ’cause we took on a couple of female trapeze women that came from Honduras, via New Orleans, and a revival of religion, all in one bunch, and pa is beginning to get haggard, like a hag.

The female trapeze performers, who had been expected ever since we started on the road, had been quarantined at New Orleans, where the yellow fever is raging, and finally got through the quarantine guard somewhere in Mississippi, and got to us Saturday afternoon, and some official telegraphed to the mayor that two yellow fever refugees had struck his town to join the circus, and he ordered the chief of police to hunt them out, and put them in a pest house.  The Honduras females were yellow as saffron, but it was caused by the climate of Honduras, but the whole show was scared to death for fear we would all have yellow fever, and the management detailed pa and I to hide the yellow girls from the police.

Pa fixed up one of the cages, with the girls blacked up as Hottentots and pa and I blacked up as an African king and prince of the blood, and we did stunts in the cage at afternoon and evening performances, and the crowd could not keep away from our cage, until pa got hot and unbuttoned his shirt and, before we knew it, everybody saw pa’s white skin below where his face and neck were blacked, and while we were talking gibberish to each other a country jake got mad and he led a crowd to open the cage and make us remove our shirts to prove that we were Hottentots.