"Didn't you save any lions or tigers?"
He shook his head. "Wasn't any use trying. They'd have been shot by policemen as fast as we could get 'em out. Besides, we couldn't get 'em out. We concentrated on elephants, and saved all the herd but five. There were free elephants all over Bridgeport that night, and a queer thing was we had to look sharp that some of the elephants we'd saved didn't run back into the fire. You know how horses will go back into a burning stable. Well, elephants are just the same. That's how we lost the white elephant. She walked straight into the blaze, when she might just as well have walked out through the open door."
By this time most of the company at "Billy's" had gathered about to listen, for Newman was a veteran among veterans, and was now in the full swing of reminiscence. He went back to his earliest days, back to Putnam County, New York, where young men might well be drawn to the circus life, so many famous showmen has this region produced—"Jim" Kelly and Seth B. Howes and Langway and the Baileys.
"I started with Langway, the old lion-tamer," said Newman, "and he was one of the best. I'll never forget what he told me once when he was breaking in a den of lions and tigers—there were three lions and two tigers, all full grown and fresh from the jungle.
"'Bill,' said he, 'I'm an old man, and this here is my last den. I won't break in no more big cats, but I'll break this den in so they'll never work for another man after I'm gone. It'll look easy what I do, and folks'll want you to tackle 'em, Bill, but don't you never do it, for if you do these cats'll chew ye up sure.'
MAN IN CAGE WITH LIONS.
"Well, he worked that den in great shape for a year or so, and then he died, and I minded his words. I let those lions and tigers alone. They hired a lion-tamer named Davis to work 'em, and sure enough he got chewed up bad, just as the old man said he would, and the end of it was that nobody ever did work that den again; it couldn't be done, although they'd been like kittens with Langway. What he did to 'em's always been a mystery."
Newman paused, as impressive story-tellers do, and then, drawing once more upon his memories, he told how a terrible death came to poor "Patsy" Meagher as he was drilling a herd of elephants once in winter quarters at Columbus, Ohio.