at the opening of these
proceedings, and I had to kill him. And I begs the pardon of this old
gentleman for lying to him." And then pa shook hands with the sailor and
the parson, and the parson put his blue gun down his trousers leg, and
said: "By the way, the bulldog you were going to let take a lunch off
me, is he all right?"

Then the parson and the girl went away, and the boys carried out the
melodeon, and the quarantine was declared off. After dinner the boys
took down the tents and put them on the train that Sunday afternoon,
singing decent songs as they pulled up the stakes and rolled up the
canvas, and on the train, late in the night, we could hear "Old Hundred"
being sung as the cars ran through the pennyrial district of Indiana.

CHAPTER VIII

Pa Takes the Place of the Fat Woman with Disastrous Results--A
Kentucky Colonel Causes a Row--Pa Tries to Roar Like a Lion and the
Rhinoceros Objects--Pa Plays the Slot-Machine and Gets the Worst of
It.

This has been an eventful week with the show. We have had heat
prostrations in Kentucky, nearly the whole show got drunk on 16-year-old
whisky, and if it hadn't been for the animals keeping sober this show
would have been pulled for disorderly conduct.

Nobody knows how the row started, but pa says every man in Kentucky
carries a blue gun and a bottle of red licker, and they wear white hats,
so the red, white and blue business is all right, only it is a
combination that is death on a circus. I think one of the ushers, at the
afternoon performance, told an old colonel that he must move along
quicker, when the colonel began to talk back, and say, "Who is you
talkin' too, sah?" And the usher stood it as long as he could, when he
took the colonel by the collar and sat him down so quick he didn't come
to for a couple of minutes, and when the colonel got his senses, and
found that the usher had ushered him into a seat between two gaily
decorated colored women the trouble began. The colonel never forgot that
he was a gentleman, for he rose up, took off his hat to the colored
women, and said: "You must excuse me, ladies, but I shall have to go and
kill the scoundrel who sat me down with niggers," and he got down off
the seats and struck the usher with his cane, and the usher yelled:
"Hey, Rube!" and all the circus people made a rush for the colonel. The
colonel said, "Men of Kentucky, to the rescue," and before I could crawl
under the seats the air