ribs
when he held her down with his feet; but pa says his feet did not sink
into her more than a foot or so, and he couldn't have hit a rib, nohow.

Well, I'm glad to be back in the show, 'cause there is more going on
than there was in the hospital, where I put in a week while the doctors
were pulling the cactus pin feathers out of pa that grew out on him in
Indian Territory. Gee, but if I had to leave the circus business and go
back to school, I know I should die of lonesomeness.

I got a chance to talk with pa at supper, and asked him if he was really
crazy, as the hands say he is, and how he liked zebras, anyway, and he
said: "Hennery, zebras are just people, they stampede just like
politicians and bankers, and business men generally, and never know
enough to let well enough alone. The mule is the only draft animal that
always pulls straight and gets there right side up."

If I was going to run a circus for easy money, and a picnic, I wouldn't
have any menagerie connected with it, 'cause the animals make more
trouble than all the rest of the show. They are just like a lot of
children in a reform school, they don't want to work, and they are just
looking for a chance to fight when your back is turned, or to escape.
They don't know where they would go if they did escape, but they don't
want anybody over them, to teach them morals, though when meal time
comes the reform school boys and the menagerie animals eat like tramps,
because the food is so good, and then kick because it isn't better. If
your performers in the circus proper do not suit you can discharge them,
and if they are sick you can leave them in a hospital, and go on with
the show, and forget about them until they show up in a week or two,
pale as ghosts, and weak as cats, and demand back salary; but your
animal has to be taken along and petted, and when you give him medicine
to save his life, he will try to bite your hand off.

And yet you can't help getting stuck on the animals, and a man gets
stuck on the kind of animal that is most like him. The grizzly old
granger, who never buttons the collar of his shirt, and whose Adam's
apple looks like a hen's head, will stay by the camels, hours at a time,
the pious church man feels at home among the sacred cattle, the
strong-arm holdup man will linger by the grizzly bear, the prize-fighter
will haunt the lions' den, the garroter will gaze lovingly at the
tigers, the sneak thief seems to love the hyenas, and t