ested a bird--a large and
dissipated flamingo, for instance.

Mr. Dorgan stared with his mouth open. He stared so steadily that he
even took a telegram from the messenger boy who entered the tent, and
signed for it without looking at the address. The messenger boy, too,
stopped to stare at the Tasmanian flamingo. The men who had brought
the blue case set it down and stared. The freaks gathered in front of
the cage and stared.

"What is it?" asked Syrilla in a voice trembling with emotion.

"Say! Where in the U.S.A. did _you_ come from?" asked Mr. Dorgan
suddenly. "What in the dickens are you, anyway?"

"I'm a Tasmanian Wild Man," said Mr. Gubb mildly.

"You a Tasmanian Wild Man?" said Mr. Dorgan. "You don't think you look
like a Tasmanian Wild Man, do you? Why, you look like--you look
like--you look--"

"He looks like an intoxicated pterodactyl," said Mr. Lonergan, who had
some knowledge of prehistoric animals,--"only hairier."

"He looks like a human turkey with a piebald face," suggested General
Thumb.

"He don't look like nothin'!" said Mr. Dorgan at last. "That's what he
looks like. You get out of that cage!" he added sternly to Mr. Gubb.
"I don't want nothin' that looks like you nowhere near this show."

"But, Mr. Dorgan, dearie, think how he'd draw crowds," said Syrilla.

"Crowds? Of course he'd draw crowds," said Mr. Dorgan. "But what would
I say when I lectured about him? What would I call him? No, he's got
to go. Boys," he said to the four roustabouts, two of whom were those
Mr. Gubb had seen in the property tent, "throw this feller out of the
tent."

"Stop!" said Mr. Gubb, raising one hand. "I will admit I have tried to
deceive you: I am not a Tasmanian Wild Man. I am a deteckative!"

"Detective?" said Mr. Dorgan.

"In disguise," said Mr. Gubb modestly. "In the deteckative profession
the assuming of disguises is often necessary to the completion of the
clarification of a mystery plot."

He pointed down at the Pet, whose newly rouged and powdered face
rested smirkingly in the box below the cage.

"I arrest you all," he said, but before he could complete the
sentence, the red-headed man and the black-headed man turned and
bolted from the tent. Mr. Gubb beat and jerked at the bars of his cage
as frantically as Mr. Waldo Emerson Snooks had ever beaten and
jerked, but he could not rend them apart.

"Get those two fellers," Mr. Gubb shouted to Mr. Hoxie, and the strong
man ran from the tent.