CHAPTER XIII.
THE WIDOW AND THE LINK.
THE Museum of Marvels was "resting" at Devil's Head. The Professor was resting, personally and particularly, on a stretcher bed in a small, hot, fly-infested room in "The Devil's Head" Hotel, pending the mending of divers injuries sustained in a disaster that put the show temporarily out of action. Thunder did not travel with his own horses, finding it much cheaper to hire a team to pull his caravan from one pitch to another. The pair of bays engaged to tow the museum, and traps and wares from Field Hill to Corner Stone had been so upset by the eccentric conduct of a frenzied inebriate, who fled along the stone road in a woman's nightdress, being pursued by purely imaginary griffins, dodoes, unicorns and dragons, all in primary colours, that they wheeled and bolted with the whole caboodle, and running into a bridge railing upset Professor Thunder and Professor Thunder's Museum of Marvels into Billy's Creek, greatly to the detriment of the show, and to the serious discomfort of the Professor who was pulled from under Ammonia, the gorilla, just when that amusing animal had almost succeeded in stifling him in the slurry for which Billy's Creek was famous.
While the Professor rested and underwent repairs, and whiled his time negotiating for damages with the owner of the horses and the frantic person in the woman's nightdress, Matty Cann, the' Living Skeleton, and Nicholas Crips, the Missing Link, were allowed their liberty. The Living Skeleton went home to the bosom of his affectionate family, with stern instructions to carefully regulate his diet, and Nickie went on to Winyip, sworn to preserve professional secrets, and bound to hold himself in readiness for resumption of duties at a day's notice.
Nickie wore a good suit of store clothes, he bore on his rascally head quite a reputable hat, his linen was fairly meritorious, his boots were above reproach, he wore socks like a man accustomed to luxuries, he was clean-shaven, he jingled money in his pocket. In his varied career Nickie had had ups and downs; true, his "ups" had been brief, but they were frequent enough to keep him almost in touch with respectability. At Winyip, a considerable township in its way, he passed quite easily for a dramatic artist taking rest and change to dissipate brain fag, the result of too studious application to his art.
When the Professor was himself again he called his company together and descended upon Corner Stone. The caravan remained at Corner Stone for a night and a day, and then moved on to Winyip. Nickie the Kid, for some reason of his own, strongly opposed the trip to Winyip; possibly because he was reluctant to appear as a mere man-monkey with a demoralised head and a rudimentary tail in a township in which he had recently figured to great advantage as Crips Nicholas, the eminent Shakespearean actor.
Winyip proved to be an excellent show town and Mahdi, the Missing Link, came in for a good deal of attention, although his performance was more subdued than ordinarily, and he showed little of the actor's natural anxiety to monopolise the limelight, but a local moral reformer wrote to the "Winyip Advertiser and Porkkakeboorabool Standard" enlaring on the shocking action of a depraved showman in keeping this poor heathen, which was "almost a human creature," confined in a cage like a beast of the field. The disputation that followed was kept alive by Professor Thunder.
People flocked to see the wonderful man-monkey, and on the afternoon of the second day came a tall, stern woman of about forty. She was nearly six feet high, her nose was large, her chin small and sliding, and she wore glasses. Across her left arm she nursed a large, shabby umbrella, and her habitual expression was that of one who has discovered a smell of drains.
This big woman was very curious. She peered into every hole and corner, she examined Bonypart, the Living Skeleton, very closely through her glasses, looking critically at his features, and was equally curious with the monkeys. She even inspected Professor Thunder with such minuteness, and with such an air of one who has at last detected a shameful imposition, that at length the celebrated showman exclaimed with some grandeur: "Excuse me, ma'am, but I'm not an exhibit."
"Oh," gasped the female, "I beg your pardon. My name is Martha Spink; I live at 'The Nook.' Do you happen to know a—eh—theatrical person named Nicholas—Crips Nicholas?"