“But if I put on that stunt I’m going to make it different.  I’m going to dress it up, make it sensational so that it will be the talk of the country where circuses are exhibited.”

“And won’t you run any danger?” questioned the girl quickly.

“Oh, I suppose so; just as I do when I work on the high trapeze or ride my motor cycle along the high wire.  But it’s all in the day’s work.  And now let’s talk about something pleasant—­I mean let’s get off the shop.”

Helen sighed.  She was plainly disturbed, but she did not want to burden Joe with her worries.  She knew he must have calm nerves and an untroubled mind to do his various acts in the circus that night.

After supper and before the evening performance Joe made a careful examination of his trapeze apparatus.  Beyond the place where the acid had eaten into the wire strands, causing them to become weakened so that they parted, the appliances did not appear to have been tampered with.  Nor were there any clews which might show who had done the deed.  That it could have happened by accident was out of the question.  The acid could have gotten on the wire rope in one way only.  Some one must have climbed up the rope ladder to the platform and applied the stuff.

“But who did it?” asked Jim Tracy, when Joe had told him of the discovery of the acid-eaten cable.

“Some enemy.  Perhaps the same one who was responsible for our loss in tickets this afternoon,” answered the young magician.

“Carfax?” asked the ringmaster.

“It might be, and yet he isn’t the only man who’s been discharged or who has a grudge against me.  There was Gianni with whom I had a fight.”

“You mean the Italian?  Yes, he was an ugly customer.  But I haven’t heard of him for years.  I don’t believe he’s even in this part of the country.”

“And we haven’t any reason to suppose that Carfax is, either, after his fiasco in trying to expose my Box of Mystery trick.  But we’ve got to be on our guard.”

“I should say so!” exclaimed the ringmaster.  “And now about your trapeze act, Joe!  Are you going to put it on again to-night?”

“Of course.  It’s billed.”

“Then you’ll have to hustle to rig up a new rope.”

“I’m not going to put on a new rope,” declared Joe.  “The act went so well when I seemed about to fall, that I’m going to keep that feature in.  I’ll rig up a catch on the severed cable.  At the proper time I’ll snap it loose, seem to fall, swing by the dangling bar as I did before, and land on the platform that way.  It will be more effective than if I did it in the regular way.”

“But won’t it be risky?”

Joe shrugged his shoulders.

“No more so than any trapeze act.  Now that I’m ready for the sudden drop I’ll be on my guard.  No, I can work it all right.  And now about these extra admissions?  What are we going to do about them?”

“Well,” said the ringmaster, “maybe we’d better talk to Moyne about them.  If they ring an extra thousand persons in on us again to-night the thing will be getting serious.”