w was laid up and he would see the
boys through in anything they proposed to do to the sky pilot that was
going to play his game in ring No. 1 at 10:30 the next day.

Well, after I heard the circus men talk about what they would do to the
preacher, I was afraid they would kill him, so when he and a helper
brought a little melodeon into the ring, facing the reserved seats, I
told him the boys were going to raise a rumpus and drive him out of the
tent with the bulldog hanging to his coat tails. He put his hand on his
pistol pocket and pulled a long, blue gun about half way out, and let it
drop back down beside his leg, and he winked at me and said he guessed
not, scarcely, as he had preached to crowds so tough that a circus gang
was a Sunday school in comparison.

Then I got on a front seat to watch the fun. About 800 of the circus
hands, performers, clowns and peanut butchers, came in, snickering, and
sat down on the reserved seats in front of the little pulpit, improvised
from the barrels the elephants stand on, and some of them laughed and
said: "Hello, Bill!" and "Ah, there!" and "Get on to his collar," and a
lot of other things.

The little husky preacher had a Salvation Army girl to play the
melodeon, and he didn't take any notice of the remarks the boys made,
except to set his jaws together and moisten his lips. Finally they were
all seated, and he got up to open the services, when a big canvasman, a
regular Smart Aleck, got up on a seat and said: "Pardner, how you going
to open this jack pot?"

The crowd laughed and the preacher pulled his long blue gun up out of
his pocket, and laid it on the barrel, and then picked it up and pointed
it at the big canvasman and said: "This game is going to be opened with
this hand, seven of a kind, all 45 caliber, dum-dum bullets, and unless
you sit down quick I will send a mess of bullets into your carcass right
where your heart ought to be. If you open your mouth again before I say
'amen!' real loud at the close of the services, I will shoot all your
front teeth out. Do you comprehend? If so, be seated."

The big fellow dropped on to the blue seat, as though he had been hit
with a piledriver, and the crowd was so tickled to have the bully's
bluff called, that they cheered the preacher. Then he said, "We will now
open this jack pot with singing and I shall keep one eye on the
gentleman who was last up, but who is now seated pretty low down."

You could have heard a pin dro