of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin, sawed-off, sword-swallowing and juggling
Frenchman. De Ville, he called himself, and he had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and
used to dive from under the roof into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as you
please.
"De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as quick as the paw of
a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called him a frog-eater, or something like that and
maybe a little worse, he shoved him against the soft pine background he used in his knife-
throwing act, so quick the ring-master didn't have time to think, and there, before the
audience, De Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking them into the wood all
around the ring-master so close that they passed through his clothes and most of them bit
into his skin.
"The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was pinned fast. So the word
went around to watch out for De Ville, and no one dared be more than barely civil to his
wife. And she was a sly bit of baggage, too, only all hands were afraid of De Ville.
"But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was the lion-tamer, and he
had the self-same trick of putting his head into the lion's mouth. He'd put it into the mouths
of any of them, though he preferred Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always
be depended upon.
"As I was saying, Wallace--'King' Wallace we called him--was afraid of nothing alive or
dead. He was a king and no mistake. I've seen him drunk, and on a wager go into the cage
of a lion that'd turned nasty, and without a stick beat him to a finish. Just did it with his fist
on the nose.
"Madame de Ville--"
At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was a divided cage, and a
monkey, poking through the bars and around the partition, had had its paw seized by a big
gray wolf who was trying to pull it off by main strength. The arm seemed stretching out
longer end longer like a thick elastic, and the unfortunate monkey's mates were raising a
terrible din. No keeper was at hand, so the Leopard Man stepped over a couple of paces,
dealt the wolf a sharp blow on the nose with the light cane he carried, and returned with a
sadly apologetic smile to take up his unfinished sentence as though there had been no
interruption.
"--looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De Ville looked black.
We warned Wallace, but it was no use. He laughed at us, as he laughed at De Ville one day
when he shoved De Ville's head into a bucket of paste because he wanted to fight.
"De Ville was in a pretty mess--I helped to scrape him off; but he was cool as a cucumber
and made no threats at all. But I saw a glitter in his eyes which I had seen often in the eyes
of wild beasts, and I went out of my way to give Wallace a final warning. He laughed, but
he did not look so much in Madame de Ville's direction after that.
"Several months passed by. Nothing had happened and I was beginning to think it all a
scare over nothing. We were West by that time, showing in 'Frisco. It was during the