When Hans came inside the tent, a whispered word to Andy was sufficient to make the young fugitive understand what was coming.

Hans removed the top head of his big bass drum.  Andy snuggled along the rounded woodwork of the instrument, and the drum head was replaced.

The double load was a pretty heavy one for the portly musician to handle, but all went well.

He got away from the dressing tent without arousing the suspicions of the constable’s assistants.  The drum was hoisted to the top of a moving wagon at some distance.  Andy was rather crowded and short of breath, but he lay quiet and serene as the wagon started up.

They must have traveled four miles before the musician’s welcome invitation to “come oud” followed a second removal of the drum head.

Andy looked about him.  They were slowly traversing the main road leading from Centreville to Clifton.

There was bright moonlight, and the general view was interesting and picturesque.  Ahead and behind a seemingly interminable caravan was in motion.

Chariots, cages, vehicles holding tent paraphernalia, a calliope, ticket wagons, horses, mules, ponies, seemed in endless parade.  Performers and general circus employees thronged the various vehicles.

That in which Andy now found himself was a wagon with high, slatted sides, piled full of trunks, mattresses, seat cushions and curtains.

The fat musician reclined in a dip in the soft bedding; his bulky body had formed.  Over beyond him lay a sad-faced man in an exhausted slumber, looking so utterly done out and ill that Andy pitied him.

A boy about Andy’s own age, and two men whose attire and general appearance suggested side show “spielers,” or those flashily dressed fellows who announce the wonders on view inside the minor canvases, lay half-buried among some gaudy draperies.

The two men lay with their high silk hats held softly by both hands across their breasts.  The circus tinge was everywhere.  One of them in his sleep was saying:  “Ziripa, the Serpent Queen.  Step up, gentlemen.  Eats snakes like you eat strawberry shortcake.  Eats ’em alive!  Bites their heads off!”

As the wagon jolted on Hans comfortably smoked a pipe fully four feet long.  His twinkling little eyes fairly laughed at Andy as the latter stepped out of the drum.

“Hey, you find him varm, hey?” he asked.

“I’d have smothered if I hadn’t kept my mouth close to that vent hole,” explained Andy.  “Is it all right for me to show myself now?”

“Yaw,” declared the fat musician.  “You see dot sign?”

He pointed back a few yards.  Andy recognized the four-armed semaphore set where a narrow road intersected the highway they were traversing.

“Oh, yes,” said Andy quickly, “that shows the State line.”

“Yaw, dot vas so.  No one can arrest you now, Marco says, and Marco vas like a lawyer, hey?”