invested with several touches of skillful stage management, the purpose
being to enhance the thrills provided and send the audience forth
pleased and enthusiastic. In high boots and a tiger-skin tunic, Mr.
Riley, armed with an iron bar held in one hand and a revolver loaded
with blank cartridges in the other, stood poised and prepared to leap
into the den at the ostensible peril of his life and put his ferocious
charge through a repertoire of startling feats. His eye was set, his
face determined; his lower jaw moved slowly. This steel-hearted man was
chewing tobacco to hide any concern he might feel.

Red Hoss Shackleford, resplendent in his official trappings, made an
elaborate ceremonial of undoing the pins and bolts which upheld the
wooden panels across the front elevation of the cage. The announcer took
advantage of the pause thus artfully contrived to urge upon the
spectators the advisability of standing well back from the guard ropes.
Every precaution had been taken, he informed them, every possible
safeguard provided, but for their own sakes it were well to be on the
prudent side in case the dauntless trainer should lose control over his
dangerous pupil. This warning had its usual effect. With a forward rush
everyone instantly pressed as closely as possible into the zone of
supposed menace.

Here a curious psychological fact obtrudes. In each gathering of this
character is at least one parent, generally a father, who habitually
conveys his offsprings of tender years to places where they will be
acutely uncomfortable, and by preference more especially to spots where
there is a strong likelihood that they may meet with a sudden and
violent end. Wyattsville numbered at least one such citizen within her
enrolled midst. He was here now, jammed up against the creaking rope,
holding fast with either clutch to a small and a sorely frightened child
who wept.

Red Hoss finished with the iron catches. Behind the shielding falsework
he heard and felt the rustle and the heave of a great sinewy body
threshing about in a confined space. He turned his head toward the
announcer, awaiting the ordained signal.

"Are you all ready?" clarioned that person. "Then go!"

With a clatter and crash down came the wooden frontage. It was a part
of the mechanics intrusted to the docile and intelligent Chieftain that
so soon as the woodwork had dropped he, counterfeiting an unappeasable
bloodthirstiness, should fling himself headlong aga