followed them was braced against a wall, peering in through a crack in a broken window pane. What he saw within was a low-ceilinged, dimly lighted room, furnished only with a small table, four chairs and a dilapidated chest of drawers. Four men were bent over the table. The lines of their faces drawn in eagerness, they were staring at some flat object on the table. Soon one of them, with the tips of his thumb and forefinger lifted the corner of a sheet of paper. He had lifted it half off from the flat object, to which it appeared to cling, when a startling thing happened—the room was suddenly illuminated with a brilliant blood red light. This lasted only a fraction of a second. The room was then left in darkness, black as ink; for even the candle had been overturned and snuffed out. From the darkness there came the sound of overturned chairs, as the four men made good their escape. By the time they reached the open air their tracker had vanished utterly.

He was, at that very moment, flattened against the corner of a dark wall, and was quite as unhappy over the turn of events as they were. At the very instant when he was about to discover a secret of vast importance, his foot had slipped, his face bumped against the glass, and the unexpected happened.

The second occurrence, the one which caused much talk among the circus people, happened a short time later. As the attendants reported it, it would seem that their attention was first attracted to the strange phenomenon by the growl of a lion, whose cage was in the corner of the tent. To their surprise, the cage, the lion, and even the straw upon which he lay had turned blood red. Hardly had they finished staring at this than the snarl of a Siberian tiger at the opposite corner had called them to note that the red light, for light it must have been, had shifted to the tiger’s cage. The red glare had continued to play hide and seek with the distracted animals for fully five minutes and, during all that time, not one of the attendants could detect its source. At times it appeared to stream down from the canvas top, then to shoot from a corner, or to leap up from the floor.

One notable fact was reported: In every instance save one, the animals whose cages were illuminated with crimson light cowered in a corner in snarling fear. The single instance in which this was not true was that of the black leopard. That beast leaped, clawing and snarling, at the bars of its cage, as if it would tear the originator of the crimson flash limb from limb.

As the report spread, the negroes of the troupe were panic stricken. They quit 

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