Gwen’s brow was wrinkled in thought for a moment.

“Yes, I think it would,” she said suddenly. “I think it would be a berry! How’d you like to be the clown?”

“I wasn’t in aviation in the Army,” smiled Johnny.

“No, but really, would you?”

“Why! Why! Yes, I might. It might be better than boxing the bear, and since I’ve got to stick around, I might as well be a clown as anything.”

“Stick around?” she asked. “Why do you have to stick around?”

For an instant the words were on the tip of Johnny’s tongue which would have told her the whole truth. But his lips would not frame the sentence.

“Why, I—I,” he stammered; “just my nature, I guess. Always did like the circus.”

Johnny was not a great success as a boxer that morning. He was thinking of the diamond ring, and wondering why he had not demanded the right to keep it, once he had it in his grasp; wondering, too, how it happened that Millie had it one day, and Gwen another. “Queer mixup,” was his mental comment.

Late that night, after the show was over, when the lights were dim, Johnny wandered into the animal tent. He was just passing the cage of the black leopard when a low hiss halted him. Then he felt a grip on his arm. It was Pant.

“Sit down here in the dark, Johnny,” he whispered. “I’ll tell you the story of that black beast. I can tell it better with his wicked red eyes burning holes at me through the dark, just as they did once before, and him a free black cat!”

Johnny started as he stared at the cage where, on a narrow wooden shelf, the leopard must be reposing. All he could see was a pair of red balls of fire, and it seemed to him that in all his life he had never seen anything so full of hate as was the red gleam that seemed fairly to shoot out from them.

CHAPTER XIII PANT’S STORY OF THE BLACK CAT

“Life’s like this,” Pant gripped Johnny’s arm, as the two red balls in the back of the dark cage shifted from side to side; “life’s just like this: When once you’ve done a thing, you want to do it again. That’s why we have to watch our habits, if we want our lives to count for something. Lots of fellows don’t watch 

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