"You wouldn't get a man to do it blindfolded?" I suggested.
"Not a straight drop, no; but a drop with somersaults, yes."
"What, two somersaults down to the net, blindfolded?"
"Yes, sir, that would be easy. I tell you a man's eyes don't help him when he's turning in the air. Why, Tom and I would throw that boy of mine (Royetta) across from one to the other, he turning doubles, just the same whether he was blindfolded or not. It wouldn't make any difference.
"I'll tell you another thing," he continued, "that may surprise you. It's possible for a fine gymnast to swing from a bar, say sixty feet above the net, turn a back somersault—what we call a cast somersault—then shoot straight down head first for thirty feet and then tuck up and turn a forward somersault, landing on his shoulders. I couldn't do it myself ever since I got hurt down in Mexico, but Tom Hanlon could. I mention this to show what control a man can get over his body in the air. He can make it turn one way, then go straight, and then turn the other way."
After proper expression of wonder at this statement, I asked Mr. Potter if something might not go wrong with this wonderful automatic time machine that a gymnast carries within himself. Of course there might, he said, and that is why there is such need of practice. Let a man neglect his trapeze for a couple of months, and he would be almost like a beginner. And even the best gymnasts, he admitted, men in the pink of training, are liable to sudden and unaccountable disturbances of mind or heart that make them for the moment unequal to their most familiar feats.
"I'll tell you what accounts for the death of most gymnasts," he went on. "It's changing their minds while they're in the air. That's what we call it, but it's only a name. Nobody knows just what happens when a gymnast changes his mind—I mean what happens inside him. What happens outside is that he's usually killed.
"Now there was Billy Batcheller. He was a fine leaper, and could do his two somersaults over four elephants or eight horses with the prettiest lift you ever saw. He could do it easy. But one day—we were showing out west with the Reynolds circus—as he came down the leaping-run he struck the board wrong, somehow, and in the turn he changed his mind; instead of doing a double he did one and a half and shot over the last horse straight for the ground, head first. One second more and he was a dead man; he would have broken his neck sure, but I saw him coming and caught him so with my right arm, took all the skin off under his chin, and left the print of my hand on his breast for weeks. But it saved him. And the queer thing was he never could explain it—none of them ever can; he just changed his mind. So did Ladell, who used to do doubles from high bars down to a pedestal. He made his leap one night, just as usual—it was at Toronto, in 1896, I think—and as he turned he changed his mind, and I forget how he landed, but it killed him all right."
"Did you ever have an experience of this kind yourself?" I asked.
"Not exactly," he answered, "and I'm thankful I haven't, but I came near it once in Chicago. It was the night after Howard got hurt, and I guess fear—just plain, every-day fear—was at the bottom of my feeling. My wife and I were doing an act sixty feet above the ground, and without a net. I would hang by my hands from a couple of loops at the top of the Coliseum, and she would hang, head down, from my feet, her ankles locked across mine, just a natural locking of the feet, with no fastenings and only ordinary performing shoes.