“You’ve caught the knack,” spoke the ringmaster encouragingly.  “Be careful on the double somersault, though.”

“It’s just as easy to me,” asserted Andy.

He proved his words when his turn came again.  He was breathless but all aglow, as he and his seven fellow acrobats bowed in a row and retired to the performers’ tent.

Andy was delighted with himself, his comrades, his environment—­everything.  In fact, a constant glamour of excitement and enjoyment had come into his life.

This was the second day after his strange interview with his aunt.  It was the last evening performance of the show at Tipton.

Andy had been away from the circus for two days.  The morning after handing in the contracts, the manager had selected him to accompany the chief hostler and four of his assistants on a trip into the country.

The show was to make a long jump after closing the engagement at Tipton.  While Mr. Harding joined a second enterprise he owned in the West, the present outfit was to take up a route in the South.

Many of those connected with the show were to leave.  This cut the working force down.  They had too many horses, and with a string of fifty of these the chief hostler started out to sell off the same.

The expedition continued a day and a half.  When Andy came back, he found himself in time for two rehearsals.  That evening he made his first appearance in public as a real professional.

Outside of the charm of being seen, appreciated and applauded by others, Andy loved the vigorous exercise of the spring-board.  The mechanical athletic and acrobatic equipments of the show were superb.  He made up his mind he could about live among the balancing bars and trapezes, if they would let him.

One disappointment Andy met with that somewhat troubled him.  When he came back from the horse-selling expedition, he found that Luke Belding had left the show.

Billy Blow told Andy that Luke had been to his tent a dozen times to see him.  That morning early, before Andy’s return, the side show Luke was with had packed up and shipped by train to join a show going east.

“So I’ll never find out what I’m heir to,” smiled Andy.  “Oh, well, of course it was some absurd guess of Luke’s.  It’s funny, though.  That fellow, Jim Tapp, had the same delusion.  By the way, Aunt Lavinia seems to have been in earnest.  Nobody appears to be looking for me to go back to Fairview.  I am free to do as I choose.  Now, then, to make a record.”

Sunday was passed at Tipton.  Of the better class in the show, nearly all the lady performers and some of the men went to church, and Andy went also.  In the afternoon Billy Blow went the rounds of some friends, and took Andy with him.

It revealed a new phase of circus life, the domestic side, to Andy.  There was no “shop talk.”  The boy passed a pleasant hour among several very charming family circles.