In the midst of all the excitement and din, Billy heard first of all, and it seemed to him louder than all, Tom Treat, who yelled at the top of his voice:
“Look, Harry, it’s Billy Whiskers!”
“Holy smoke!” was all Harry could say in reply, he was so astonished.
Though he was greatly confused and didn’t yet know where he was or what had really happened, Billy’s first thought was that he must get out of sight quick or that he would be a goner. He looked about and saw that he was not far from the platform where all the freaks were, and that it was the only place he could jump and not light right on top of some of the people.
“It’s the biggest jump I’ve ever tried but I have got to do it now and trust to luck. If I once get to that platform, I can scoot to the other side of it, drop down behind and hide till all the hubbub blows over. Here goes!”
With that he suddenly pulled himself together in a sort of a bunch and shot straight out into the air right over the heads of a lot of astonished people. Tom Treat, when telling his chum, Jack Wright, about it next day, said that Billy could not have gone further or faster if he had been fired out of a gun.
Billy imagined that if he were able to reach the platform his troubles would all be over, but in this he was sadly mistaken.
When the freaks, the human skeleton, the hairy man from Borneo, the giant, the dwarf, the fat lady and all the rest discovered Billy on the elephant, they laughed fit to kill and clapped their hands, but when they saw him coming right at them through the air like a cannon ball, they were scared enough. The fat lady, who thought that he must surely hit her, tried to get out of the way all of a sudden. Of course she could hardly move when she wasn’t excited. In trying to be quick about it now, she only succeeded in upsetting her chair and tumbling over backwards. Down she went right through the floor of the flimsy old platform, nearly scraping her sides off. Her sudden upset made all the boards of the floor fly up, throwing the rest of the freaks every which way, all more or less in a heap.
On top of them all landed Billy Whiskers. Of course he wasn’t hurt, and, as good luck would have it, none of the others were, not even the fat lady seriously, though she had hysterics and cried and laughed by turns and threw her fat arms, which looked like bologna sausages, wildly about and kept calling on the giant to protect her. This was after Billy Whiskers, the unwilling cause of all the commotion, had pulled himself safely out of the wreck and had hidden completely out of sight in a big empty box which he had luckily found on the other side, and quite near the scene of the great catastrophe.
