We had to stay over Sunday in Evansville, and the show people were so scared the manager thought he better have religious services in the tent Sunday, so they got a revivalist preacher to preach to them, a fellow who used to preach to the cowboys out west.  Sunday morning the tough fellows in the show said they wouldn’t do a thing to the preacher when he came on to do his stunt.  Their idea was to wait until he got well on his sermon and then begin to interrupt him and ask questions, and finally to get a blanket and toss him up a few times for luck, and then chase him out and have the circus bulldog, that chews the clown’s pants, catch the minister’s coat tail and just scare him plum to death.

The boys said it would be the biggest picnic that ever was—­a regular barbecue.  The boss canvasman said he was opposed to mixing religion with the circus business, because the fellows could get all the religion they needed in the winter, when the show was laid up and he would see the boys through in anything they proposed to do to the sky pilot that was going to play his game in ring No. 1 at 10:30 the next day.

Well, after I heard the circus men talk about what they would do to the preacher, I was afraid they would kill him, so when he and a helper brought a little melodeon into the ring, facing the reserved seats, I told him the boys were going to raise a rumpus and drive him out of the tent with the bulldog hanging to his coat tails.  He put his hand on his pistol pocket and pulled a long, blue gun about half way out, and let it drop back down beside his leg, and he winked at me and said he guessed not, scarcely, as he had preached to crowds so tough that a circus gang was a Sunday school in comparison.

Then I got on a front seat to watch the fun.  About 800 of the circus hands, performers, clowns and peanut butchers, came in, snickering, and sat down on the reserved seats in front of the little pulpit, improvised from the barrels the elephants stand on, and some of them laughed and said:  “Hello, Bill!” and “Ah, there!” and “Get on to his collar,” and a lot of other things.

The little husky preacher had a Salvation Army girl to play the melodeon, and he didn’t take any notice of the remarks the boys made, except to set his jaws together and moisten his lips.  Finally they were all seated, and he got up to open the services, when a big canvasman, a regular Smart Aleck, got up on a seat and said:  “Pardner, how you going to open this jack pot?”

The crowd laughed and the preacher pulled his long blue gun up out of his pocket, and laid it on the barrel, and then picked it up and pointed it at the big canvasman and said:  “This game is going to be opened with this hand, seven of a kind, all 45 caliber, dum-dum bullets, and unless you sit down quick I will send a mess of bullets into your carcass right where your heart ought to be.  If you open your mouth again before I say ‘amen!’ real loud at the close of the services, I will shoot all your front teeth out.  Do you comprehend?  If so, be seated.”