Each of the men driving the harnessed spans lifted up the double-trees so that the girl could grasp the hooks.  She tried to take hold, but broke down again.

“If anything breaks, my arms will be torn out of me,” she protested.

“On the contrary,” Collins reassured her.  “You will lose merely most of your jacket.  The worst that can happen will be the exposure of the trick and the laugh on you.  But the apparatus isn’t going to break.  Let me explain again.  The horses do not pull against you.  They pull against each other.  The audience thinks that they are pulling against you.—­Now try once more.  Take hold the double-trees, and at the same moment slip down the hooks and connect.—­Now!”

He spoke sharply.  She shook the hooks down out of her sleeves, but drew back from grasping the double-trees.  Collins did not betray his vexation.  Instead, he glanced aside to where the kissing pony and the kneeling pony were leaving the ring.  But the husband raged at her: 

“By God, Julia, if you throw me down this way!”

“Oh, I’ll try, Billikens,” she whimpered.  “Honestly, I’ll try.  See!  I’m not afraid now.”

She extended her hands and clasped the double-trees.  With a thin writhe of a smile, Collins investigated the insides of her clenched hands to make sure that the hooks were connected.

“Now brace yourself!  Spread your legs.  And straighten out.”  With his hands he manipulated her arms and shoulders into position.  “Remember, you’ve got to meet the first of the strain with your arms straight out.  After the strain is on, you couldn’t bend ’em if you wanted to.  But if the strain catches them bent, the wire’ll rip the hide off of you.  Remember, straight out, extended, so that they form a straight line with each other and with the flat of your back and shoulders.  That’s it.  Ready now.”

“Oh, wait a minute,” she begged, forsaking the position.  “I’ll do it—­oh, I will do it, but, Billikens, kiss me first, and then I won’t care if my arms are pulled out.”

The dark youth who held Michael, and others looking on, grinned.  Collins dissembled whatever grin might have troubled for expression, and murmured: 

“All the time in the world, madam.  The point is, the first time must come off right.  After that you’ll have the confidence.—­Bill, you’d better love her up before she tackles it.”

And Billikens, very angry, very disgusted, very embarrassed, obeyed, putting his arms around his wife and kissing her neither too perfunctorily nor very long.  She was a pretty young thing of a woman, perhaps twenty years old, with an exceedingly childish, girlish face and a slender-waisted, generously moulded body of fully a hundred and forty pounds.

The embrace and kiss of her husband put courage into her.  She stiffened and steeled herself, and with compressed lips, as he stepped clear of her, muttered, “Ready.”