"They have no market value, but they are mighty pleasant," returned Lloyd.
"This ain't a paying crowd," the merchant cast his eye disparagingly about. "If business don't improve you and your company won't more than make your keep here." He seemed bent on "rubbing it in."
"We would be glad to do that," said Lloyd in excellent temper. "We thought it was a bigger town—what there is of it seems to be dandy,—and we thought there would be a more populous vicinity. But because we have made a mistake there is no use in sitting down with our finger in our mouth. We are going to give every attraction straight along just as if we were playing to big money."
The sour old man looked hard at the manager; he would fain maintain his caustic admonitions, his disparaging criticism. He hated folly in all its forms; but commercially he felt it to be wicked. A man who wasted money, or fooled it away, he deemed a criminal, albeit not liable to the law. Nevertheless he was mollified in spite of himself.
"Gray," he said to his head clerk, "put up the shutters. All the clerks may go to the fair—and the porter, too—pay his way. We can't do business with this tom-fool street fair gyrating before the door, and we don't want all these hillbillies standing around the counters squirting tobacco juice all over the stock, between the times that they go out to stare-gaze the pictures on the signs. I won't house 'em. If they want to see the fair let 'em drop their nickel in the slot, and get the worth of their money."
The closing of this, the principal store in the town, was followed by the placing of other shutters in show windows and the fastening of doors. The chaffering at the counters thus ceasing, the idlers were turned into the street, and here the wiles of the spielers caught them, and soon the ticket takers were busy making change. The tent of "Isaac" was thronged; it is amazing the fascination that the repulsive exerts on the uncultivated mind. Old and young, men, women, and children, yearned with curiosity to see him "eat 'em alive," and a steady procession went in and came out in various stages of gratified disgust. When it was announced that the boa constrictor would be fed on chickens there was a rush for the horrid spectacle, and for a time the peanut roaster and candy stand were dreary and deserted. Wick-Zoo, the wild man, who was caged, half clad in skins, a repellent object of matted hair, and long teeth, and wild eyes, who ran a few steps hither and thither in the restricted limits of his bars, uttering low moans varied now again by a keen, shrill howl, was overwhelmed with visitors until an unlucky episode created a panic amongst them. A mountain woman, young, plump, black-eyed, and with bright rosy cheeks hardly discounted by her pink-checked cotton gown, put a white dimpled hand inadvertently within the bars as she held on to the cage to avoid the jostling of the crowd. It seemed unto Wick-Zoo good and meet to make a demonstration toward the tempting member, and he rubbed his muzzle against it with a jocosity hardly to be expected of a "wild man from Borneo." He was of limited mental endowment, as was natural, and had no prescience of the awful uproar that ensued when the woman screamed that he was snapping his terrible teeth at her, and as she fell back upon the crowd the tent of Wick-Zoo was nearly torn down upon his devoted head before his admirers could fairly extricate themselves. Lloyd, hearing the clamour, came hastily to the rescue, and as he entered the deserted precincts the poor "wild man" hailed him:
"Oh, Beaut, for the love of pity can't you gimme a beer? I'm nigh smothered with thirst."
The happy turn of the tide, the eager desire to make the best of every advantage, the prudent monition that one day is not a week and that the show must live up to its best possibilities, kept Hilary Lloyd a very busy man that morning.
The first check to his hopes came when he encountered Clotilda Pinnott, arrived with all her kith and kin in a big white-covered ox-waggon, to redeem her promise to do a song-and-dance "turn" at the Fair.