in numbers. The owners and managers were hard pressed to keep enough men to do the menial work about the tents, and sent the employment agent to search the city for recruits. One of these recruits chanced to be Snowball, the bullet-headed friend of the strange hanger-on, Pant.

CHAPTER VI JOHNNY BOXES THE BEAR

Johnny Thompson paced the beach up which the waves of Lake Michigan were rolling. There had been a storm, the aftermath of which was even now coming in. Johnny’s mind was in a turmoil. He had been with the circus five days now. Two more days they would remain in Chicago. He was still groom for Millie Gonzales’ three grays. Millie was as impossible as ever. Three times she had struck at him with her whip, when he had appeared to overstep his rights as her menial.

“If she has the ring, fine chance I’ve got unless I steal it from her,” he grumbled.

Allegretti, the Italian boxer, was quite as impossible as Millie. Once Johnny had bantered him for a boxing match, but the fellow had showed all his white teeth in a snarl as he said:

“No box-a da bum.”

He had meant Johnny.

Johnny’s blood had boiled, but he had made no response. Only when he was out of hearing, he had declared, “Never mind, old boy, I’ll get you yet.”

But thus far he had not “got” him. The way into the good graces of Gwen, queen of the circus, seemed effectually blocked. He had not tried approaching her, for he felt that would be folly.

In spite of the sharply drawn lines of caste which prevailed in the circus, life within the tented walls when the performers were off duty was astonishingly simple. Grease paint came off at the end of the last act. About the dressing tent and the assembly yard the women stars appeared plain and simple-minded people. There was nothing of the bravado that Johnny had expected to find. The three girls who held the center of his attention, because of the ring, were wonderfully well-developed physically. Millie was slender and quick as a cat. Mitzi von Neutin, the trapeze performer, was also slender and strong. She was French; Johnny knew that from the many “Mais, oui” and her “Mais, non,” with which she answered the questions of the other performers. With her abundance of yellow hair she was like a kitten, as she curled up on a rug in the corner of the tent reading a French novel.

But Gwen—Gwen was perfection 

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