“None that we know of, ma’am.”
Jim stood looking on, his lips pressed hard together. The girl’s mother was dead. Her mother was dead! Why, that must be like having the world come to an end, pretty near. If your mother was dead, it didn’t matter if you did belong to a show. But that boy over there, his mother wasn’t dead, and yet he acted as “dumb” as a snail. Jim felt that if he, himself, belonged to a show he’d be yelling and jumping and having a whopping time. Every spare minute he’d be practicing up in his part. But these folks acted as if they hardly had life enough to cross the yard; and as for the horses, their heads hung down and their bones stuck out as if they were ready for the buzzards to pick. Jim hated to have that girl crying like that. There was no fun in having a show in your yard when a girl was making such a noise. He tried to forget about it, and walked around looking in the wagons—not the wagon where the girl was, but the others—hoping to find some wild animals in cages. But the only wild animals he saw were made out of wood.
“What’s them for?” he asked one of the men, pointing to a wooden zebra and a somewhat faded tiger.
“For the merry-go-round,” said the man. “Ever see one?” Jim shook his head, and the man tried to tell him what a merry-go-round was like. Jim was disgusted to think how long he had lived without seeing anything like that.
“I should think,” he said to the man, “that this here bench would be a good place to set up your show.”
“Oh, fine!” answered the man with a disagreeable laugh. “Then all the jack rabbits and spit cats in the whole neighborhood could come, couldn’t they?”
“If you’d set it up, please sir,” said Jim, “I’d run all over the mountain in no time, telling the folks about it. There’s lots of folks on this mountain—more’n you’d think. They’d pay you money.”
But the head man, Sisson, had come up and begun talking about the dead woman.
“I’m just figuring,” he said, “whether to take her down to a burying ground in the next town, or to make a grave up here.”
Just then Jim’s father came up.