win approval from any audience. Each horse averaged
eighteen hundredweight; thus, to the eye of the onlooker, seven thousand
two hundred pounds of straining horse-flesh seemed wrenching and dragging
apart the slim-waisted, delicately bodied, hundred-and-forty pound woman
in her fancy street costume. It was a sight to make women in circus
audiences scream with terror and turn their faces away.

"Slack down!" Collins commanded the drivers.

"The lady wins," he announced, after the manner of a ringmaster.--"Bill,
you've got a mint in that turn.--Unhook, madam, unhook!"

Marie obeyed, and, the hooks still dangling from her sleeves, made a
short run to Billikens, into whose arms she threw herself, her own arms
folding him about the neck as she exclaimed before she kissed him:

"Oh, Billikens, I knew I could do it all the time! I was brave, wasn't
I!"

"A give-away," Collins's dry voice broke in on her ecstasy. "Letting all
the audience see the hooks. They must go up your sleeves the moment you
let go.--Try it again. And another thing. When you finish the turn, no
chestiness. No making out how easy it was. Make out it was the very
devil. Show yourself weak, just about to collapse from the strain. Give
at the knees. Make your shoulders cave in. The ringmaster will half
step forward to catch you before you faint. That's your cue. Beat him
to it. Stiffen up and straighten up with an effort of will-power--will-
power's the idea, gameness, and all that, and kiss your hands to the
audience and make a weak, pitiful sort of a smile, as though your heart's
been pulled 'most out of you and you'll have to go to the hospital, but
for right then that you're game an' smiling and kissing your hands to the
audience that's riping the seats up and loving you.--Get me, madam? You,
Bill, get the idea! And see she does it.--Now, ready! Be a bit wistful
as you look at the horses.--That's it! Nobody'd guess you'd palmed the
hooks and connected them.--Straight out!--Let her go!"

And again the thirty-six-hundredweight of horses on either side pitted
its strength against the similar weight on the other side, and the
seeming was that Marie was the link of woman-flesh being torn asunder.

A third and a fourth time the turn was rehearsed, and, between turns,
Collins sent a man to his office, for the Del Mar telegram.

"You take her now, Bill," he told Marie's husband, as, telegram in hand,
he returned to the problem of Michae