ish" suit. It was an easy matter to raise the now almost
drowned performer to the surface, and then lift him out into the arms
of Joe, the ring-master and the clown.

"We'll have to carry him to the dressing tent and have a doctor," said
Jim Tracy. "And we'll have to do it on the quiet. Get some of the
clowns, Bill, and have them march in a body, carrying Benny between
them. Make it look as if it was all a part of the show. Carry it off as
well as you can. Though what in the world I'm going to do to explain
why the tank act isn't finished, I don't know. But we've got to take
care of Benny first. Is he alive yet?"

"Just about," answered Joe, making a hasty examination.

Bill Watson quickly summoned some of his fellow clowns, and on a
stretcher which two of the eccentric men had been using in a funny act
of their own, Benny was carried from the main tent. The clowns so
surrounded him that not a glimpse did the audience have of the
stretched-out, silent, green-clad figure.

"Pretend it's all a joke," whispered the ringmaster fiercely.

"Sure," muttered Bill Watson.

It was a pretty grim joke, and only the great necessity for not
starting a panic in the crowd of sightseers would have induced any one
to take part in it.

And while poor Ben is being carried where he can have medical
attention, new readers will be told briefly something about Joe Strong
as he figures in the previous books of this series.

The first volume is entitled "Joe Strong, the Boy Wizard; Or, The
Mysteries of Magic Exposed." Joe, whose mother had been a circus rider
under the name Madame Hortense, and whose father, a sleight-of-hand
worker, was known as Professor Morretti, was, at the opening of the
story, an orphan, living with Mr. and Mrs. Amos Blackford in the town
of Bedford. Deacon Blackford had taken care of Joe since the boy was
about five years old, and was, in a sense, his foster-father.

Joe inherited from his mother an ability to ride almost any kind of
horse, and he had nerves that made him unafraid to do circus tricks at
great heights. As a boy he had climbed the village church steeple, to
the delight of his companions and the horror of his foster-parents.

One day "Professor Rosello" gave an exhibition of magic in Bedford, and
new events in Joe's life dated from then. The young man saved the
professor's life, and then, because of threatened punishment on the
part of Deacon Blackford, Joe ran away from home, eventually joining