band-wagons
be made so exasperatingly heavy? The atrociously carved Pans on the
corners, with their scarred faces and broken pipes, were cumbersome
enough to make a load for one pair of horses, all by themselves. Calico
would think of them as he was straining up a long hill. He could almost
feel them pulling back on the traces in a sort of wooden stubbornness.
And when the team rattled the old chariot down a rough grade how he
hoped that two or three of the figures might be jolted off. But in the
morning, when the show lot was reached and the travelling wraps taken
off the wagons, there he would see the heavy shouldered Pans all in
their places as hideous and as permanent as ever.

It was a hard and bitter lesson which Calico learned, this matter of
keeping one's tugs tight. Uncle Enoch had spared the whip, but in the
heart of Broncho Bill, who drove the band-wagon, there was no leniency.
Ready and strong was his whip hand, and he knew how to make the blood
follow the lash. No effort did he waste on fat-padded flanks when he
was in earnest. He cut at the ears, where the skin is tender. He could
touch up the leaders as easily as he could the wheel-horses, and when he
aimed at the swings he never missed fire.

Travelling with a round top Calico found to be no sinecure. The Grand
Occidental, being a wagon show, moved wholly by road. The shortest jump
was fifteen miles, but often they did thirty between midnight and
morning; and thirty miles over country highways make no short jaunt when
you have a five-ton chariot behind you. The jump, however, was only the
beginning of the day's work. No sooner had you finished breakfast than
you were hooked in for the street parade, meaning from two to four miles
more.

You had a few hours for rest after that before the grand entry. Ah, that
grand entry! That was something to live for. No matter how bad the roads
or how hard the hills had been Calico forgot it all during those ten
delightful minutes when, with his heart beating time to the rat-tat-tat
of the snare drum, he swung prancingly around the yellow arena.

It all began in the dressing-tent with a period of confusion in which
horses were crowded together as thick as they could stand, while the
riders dressed and mounted in frantic haste, for to be late meant to be
fined. At last the ring-master clapped his hands as sign that all was in
readiness. There was a momentary hush. Then a bugle sounded, the flaps
were thrown back an