“I’ll slip in here and wait till things quiet down a bit,” thought Billy. “If I try to get out now the whole crowd will be after me. Where there is so much excitement and so many things to see, a little commotion like this doesn’t last long.”
It was while he was waiting for things to subside that he saw and heard the queer antics of the fat lady after they had pulled her out of the hole she had made in the platform. It seemed to the watching and listening Billy that she was more mad than hurt.
“Where is that horrid goat?” she screamed. “I want to sit down on him just once for luck. I’ll teach him to jump at folks like that! There won’t be a grease spot left when I get through with him. Why don’t some of you bring him to me?”
Then she began to laugh and cry and toss her fat arms about. All of a sudden she stopped short.
“Come to me, Don Orsino,” she said to the giant. “I’m going to faint and you must hold me.”
Billy never could believe that he heard correctly what the big giant replied, but it sounded to him as though he told her to shut up and not be a fool, and that she looked like the old scratch and that she had better look out or she’d lose her job.
Billy was so indignant that any lady should be treated in such a manner that he came very near rushing out of his hiding-place and going for the giant, big as he was, with fire in his eye and head down.
“One punch, if he didn’t see me coming, would knock him off his perch and teach him some manners. I’ll try it.”
But just then Billy remembered what the fat lady had said about sitting down on him, and how there wouldn’t be a grease spot left when she did, and so he thought better of his rash resolve to go to her rescue.
It is fortunate for both him and us that he reconsidered for had he not, this story would have come to a sudden and very flat ending.