Haxon was reassured. He began to reflect that not even the practised eye of the worldlings could have discerned Lloyd's vocation. Haxon thought indeed that Lloyd looked as much like a man of a high social grade as either of them, though not so smart. He would not have said this, however; he grudged his friend the satisfaction of this flattering theory. Yet not all at once could he quit the theme.
"But what's the matter with the Royal Navy?" he plained.
"It's all right," Lloyd declared.
"If 'Captain Ollory' is such a dead give away as all that, why did you let it go on the bills? I know I wanted it—but I did not want to be a laughing-stock when I break my neck."
"Why, Haxon, I'm sure surprised at you—you've bloomed out into such a confounded fool. Of course such people as those know that 'Captain Ollory' is a stage name, and the 'Royal Navy' is to make the country folks stare. They understand that as a little piece of business, and a mighty good little piece it is, too, as you might know by the way they laughed at it. They know that 'Captain Ollory' is a high-class acrobat whose real name doesn't go on the bills, and if they don't know that already they are going to find it out pretty damn quick. I'm blamed if they and their ladies ain't pretty considerable astonished when they see that turn—it's worth forty such fairs, and they jolly well know it."
Haxon had lifted his head; his feathers were gradually smoothing down.
"There's the band now, taking up their positions," Lloyd admonished the acrobat.
Both men gazed down into the square where presently the glitter of polished brazen tubes caught the mid-day sunshine amongst the shifting groups of the country folk. Suddenly the leader lifted his baton—there was a double ruffle of the drums, then the wide blare of the horns surged out, and the illuminated rare air pulsed with the regular throb of the tempo. Haxon precipitately quitted the verandah to assume the pink satin garments slashed with dark red and the pink silk tights in which "Captain Ollory of the Royal Navy" plunged down from the giddy heights in that "high dive" which had so astonished the population of Kildeer County.
The summer tourists, seeking amusement in the unaccustomed paths of the Street Fair, had not prospered. The aspect of the untutored people from the mountains and coves hard by—the jostling, unkempt, jeans-clad men, the slatternly women with snuff-brush in mouth and a wailing infant in arms—so preponderated over the genteeler element of the town that the latter was almost unnoted and ignored.
"Poor humanity," Ruth Laniston exclaimed wearily; "how uncouth, how grotesque it seems when so near to nature's heart."