“Look out for him, Leo,” said Dick Pomeroy, the tumbler, one day. “He’s cutting a club for you.”
“I’ve got my optics peeled,” laughed Leo.
That afternoon, after the performance, Leo was walking around outside, near the side-show.
Presently he saw something that at once interested him.
A “flim-flam worker,” as such criminals around a circus are called, was trying to swindle a countryman out of twenty dollars.
He was working an old game, which consists in getting an outsider to hold the stakes in a bet with another flim-flammer.
The game is to mix the stakeholder up and make him put up his own money, and then secure all the cash in sight.
Leo was interested for two reasons.
In the first place, he did not wish to see the countryman swindled.
In the second place, he knew that swindlers of any kind were not allowed to work in the vicinity of the “Greatest Show on Earth.”