time he rushed, and when he got artful and rushed with his head down, why, the
thing to do was to stick out your leg. When he grabbed at the leg you drew it

back and hit hint on the nose again. That was all.
With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he showed me his

scars. There were many of them, and one recent one where a tigress had reached
for his shoulder and gone down to the bone. I could see the neatly mended

rents in the coat he had on. His right arm, from the elbow down, looked as
though it had gone through a threshing machine, what of the ravagewrought by

claws and fangs. But it was nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him
somewhat when rainy weather came on.

Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as anxious
to give me a story as I was to get it.

"I suppose you've heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?" he
asked.

He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.
"Got the toothache," he explained. "Well, the lion-tamer's big play to the

audience was putting his head in a lion's mouth. The man who hated him
attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing that lion crunch

down. He followed the show about all over the country. The years went by and
he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew old, and the lion grew old. And at last

one day, sitting in a front seat, he saw what he had waited for. The lion
crunched down, and there wasn't any need to call a doctor."

The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which would
have been critical had it not been so sad.

"Now, that's what I call patience," he continued, "and it's my style. But it
was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin, sawed-off,

sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville, he called himself, and he
had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and used to dive from under the roof

into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as you please.
"De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as quick

as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called him a
frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little worse, he shoved him

against the soft pine background he used in his knife-throwing act, so quick
the ring-master didn't have time to think, and there, before the audience, De

Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking them into the wood all
around the ring-master so close that they passed through his clothes and most

of them bit into his skin.
"The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was pinned

fast. So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and no one dared be
more than barely civil to his wife. And she was a sly bit of baggage, too,

only all hands were afraid of De Ville.
"But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was the

lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head into the lion's
mouth. He'd put it into the mouths of any of them, though he preferred

Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always be depended upon.
"As I was saying, Wallace--'King' Wallace we called him--was afraid of nothing

alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I've seen him drunk, and on a
wager go into the cage of a lion that'd turned nasty, and without a stick beat

him to a finish. Just did it with his fist on the nose.
"Madame de Ville--"

At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was a divided
cage, and a monkey, poking through the bars and around the partition, had had

its paw seized by a big gray wolf who was trying to pull it off by main
strength. The arm seemed stretching out longer end longer like a thick

elastic, and the unfortunatemonkey's mates were raising a terrible din. No
keeper was at hand, so the Leopard Man stepped over a couple of paces, dealt

the wolf a sharp blow on the nose with the light cane he carried, and returned
with a sadly apologetic smile to take up his unfinishedsentence as though

there had been no interruption.
"--looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De Ville

looked black. We warned Wallace, but it was no use. He laughed at us, as he
laughed at De Ville one day when he shoved De Ville's head into a bucket of

paste because he wanted to fight.
"De Ville was in a pretty mess--I helped to scrape him off; but he was cool as

a cucumber and made no threats at all. But I saw a glitter in his eyes which I
had seen often in the eyes of wild beasts, and I went out of my way to give

Wallace a final warning. He laughed, but he did not look so much in Madame de
Ville's direction after that.

"Several months passed by. Nothing had happened and I was beginning to think
it all a scare over nothing. We were West by that time, showing in 'Frisco. It

was during the afternoon performance, and the big tent was filled with women
and children, when I went looking for Red Denny, the head canvas-man, who had

walked off with my pocket-knife.
"Passing by one of the dressing tents I glanced in through a hole in the

canvas to see if I could locate him. He wasn't there, but directly in front of
me was King Wallace, in tights, waiting for his turn to go on with his cage of

performing lions. He was watching with much amusement a quarrel between a
couple of trapeze artists. All the rest of the people in the dressing tent

were watching the same thing, with the exception of De Ville whom I noticed
staring at Wallace with undisguised hatred. Wallace and the rest were all too

busy following the quarrel to notice this or what followed.
"But I saw it through the hole in the canvas. De Ville drew his handkerchief

from his pocket, made as though to mop the sweat from his face with it (it was
a hot day), and at the same time walked past Wallace's back. The look troubled

me at the time, for not only did I see hatred in it, but I saw triumph as
well.

"'De Ville will bear watching,' I said to myself, and I really breathed easier
when I saw him go out the entrance to the circus grounds and board an electric

car for down town. A few minutes later I was in the big tent, where I had
overhauled Red Denny. King Wallace was doing his turn and holding the audience

spellbound. He was in a particularly vicious mood, and he kept the lions
stirred up till they were all snarling, that is, all of them except old

Augustus, and he was just too fat and lazy and old to get stirred up over
anything.

"Finally Wallace cracked the old lion's knees with his whip and got him into
position. Old Augustus, blinking good-naturedly, opened his mouth and in

popped Wallace's head. Then the jaws came together, CRUNCH, just like that."
The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetlywistful fashion, and the far-away look

came into his eyes.
"And that was the end of King Wallace," he went on in his sad, low voice.

"After the excitement cooled down I watched my chance and bent over and
smelled Wallace's head. Then I sneezed."

"It . . . it was . . .?" I queried with halting eagerness.
"Snuff--that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old Augustus

never meant to do it. He only sneezed."
LOCAL COLOR

"I DO not see why you should not turn this immenseamount of unusual
information to account," I told him. "Unlike most men equipped with similar

knowledge, YOU have expression. Your style is--"
"Is sufficiently--er--journalese?" he interrupted suavely.

"Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny."
But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and

dismissed the subject.
"I trave tried it. It does not pay."

"It was paid for and published," he added, after a pause. "And I was also
honored with sixty days in the Hobo."

"The Hobo?" I ventured.
"The Hobo--" He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the titles while he

cast his definition. "The Hobo, my dear fellow, is the name for that
particular place of detention in city and county jails wherein are assembled

tramps, drunks, beggars, and the riff-raff of petty offenders. The word itself
is a pretty one, and it has a history. Hautbois--there's the French of it.

haut, meaning high, and bois, wood. In English it becomes hautboy, a wooden
musicalinstrument of two-foot tone, I believe, played with a double reed, an

oboe, in fact. You remember in 'Henry IV'--
"'The case of a treble hautboy

Was a mansion for him, a court.'
From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English used the

terms interchangeably. But--and mark you, the leap paralyzes one--crossing the
Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or ho-boy, becomes the name by which

the night-scavenger is known. In a way one understands its being born of the