body protect itself in an emergency.

"Now," said Ryan, "I'll give you a case where two of us did some quick
thinking, and it helped a lot. We were with a circus in Australia,
making a night run. It was somewhere in New South Wales, and every man
was asleep in his bunk. First thing we knew, bang, rip, tear! a drowsy
engineer had smashed into us and taken the rear truck of our sleeper
clean off, and there were the floor timbers of our car bumping along
over the ties. We had the last car.

"Our engineer never slowed up, and our floor was going into
kindling-wood fast. It was as dark as pitch, and nobody said a word.
Fred Reynolds and I--Reynolds was a clown acrobat--had lower berths
right at the end, next to the negro porter, and I don't say we escaped
because we were acrobats, but--well, this is what we did. Fred gave one
mighty leap, just like going over elephants, and cleared the whole trail
of wreckage that was pounding along behind the car and landed safe on
the track. It was a crazy thing to do, in my opinion, but it worked. I
made a spring for the chandelier, and hung there until the train
stopped. And afterward I found my trousers back on the road-bed with the
legs cut clean off, and I guess my own legs would have gone the same way
if they'd been there. What did the porter do? Oh, he did nothing,
and--and he was killed."

III

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR TRIES HIS HAND WITH PROFESSIONAL TRAPEZE PERFORMERS

ON this particular morning--it was a damp day in February--I had been
watching the Potter family, familiar on circus posters in tights and
spangles, at their practice of aerial leaps, when Henry Potter, who is
husband, father, and brother of the others, and chief of the act,
suggested that if I wanted a vivid idea of what it was to work on the
flying trapeze I might come up and take his place on the cradle and let
Tom chuck the "kid" across to me and see if I could catch him.

The "kid" was Roy Potter (sometimes Royetta, when presented in feminine
trappings), a slender lad of seventeen, who had just been doing doubles
and twisters and half turns, leaping with shoot and graceful curve from
brother to brother up there in mid-air under the rafters of this
moldering old skating-rink.

"Go ahead," he urged; "it's easy enough. All you've got to do is hang by
your knees, and it can't hurt the boy, for he'll drop in the net if you
miss him. Besides, we'll put the 'mechanic' on him."

The "mechanic" is an arran