"It was nothing," she said laughing. "He jumped at me from the top of a cage when I came in, but I beat him off and whipped him back into his cage. It was only the close quarters which made it bad, for I am used to fighting them." She was interrupted by a yapping and caterwauling in the doorway, and sprang on the bed, her face white with terror, as a small terrier and the menagerie cat rolled into the room in a clawing, biting mix-up. The terrier was raising a litter of puppies in the next room, and the cat had transformed the space back of Morelli's bed into a feline nursery, and a meeting of the two anxious mothers in the hall had led to trouble. Madam Morelli always goes through her performance in an evening dress, and she stood on the bed, her long train gathered closely about her, trembling like a leaf, when the Proprietor finally separated the combatants and restored peace.
"You wouldn't think that a woman who had just come from a fight with a two hundred pound jaguar, which could easily tear her to pieces, would be scared at a scrap between a toy terrier and a mongrel cat," said the Proprietor, laughing, as he led the way to the café table. "But she makes a specialty of the larger species."
"This matter of specialties seems to run through every branch of the show business," said the Press Agent as they took their seats at the table. "I ran a dime museum in St. Louis a few years ago—in those days there was lots of money in it—and the freaks would never stand for any change in their billing. We used to have a fresh lot sent on by our New York agent every two weeks, and one Monday morning when I went down to look over the new arrivals, I knew that he had been up against the demon Rum, when he engaged such a tough looking bunch. The alleged fat woman looked as if she was wasting away with consumption, and the bearded lady had a way of absentmindedly humming the popular airs in a bass voice which gave the whole snap away. There was one likely looking girl and when I asked her what she was she told me she was the web-footed lady and showed me her feet, which had little pieces of skin growing between the toes.
"I knew that wasn't good enough, so I told her she was mistaken; that she was a Circassian beauty, and I gave her a wig and the fixings and put her on the platform. But say, would you believe it? She was so mad and embarrassed by the change in her stunt that when the lecturer was calling attention to her blond beauty, she would blush until she looked like an Indian Princess, and every time he turned his back she would take off her shoes and wiggle her toes at the audience to show what she really was.
"Things which Nature never intended them to do."
"It was up to us to get some real attraction to tide over the time until our agent should get sober and send us another bunch of freaks, so Merritt, who was my partner, and myself hunted up a big buck nigger and made a deal with him to go on as a 'Wild Man.' We ripped up a hair mattress and glued the contents onto him, and wired a couple of big tusks to his teeth, and with an iron collar around his neck and a log chain around his waist he was as good an imitation as was ever faked. We put him in a big cage which we had used the week before for a mangy old lion; one of the five hundred or so 'Wallace the Untamables' which were touring the country, and Merritt taught him to howl like a steam calliope.
"We called him 'Fuzzy Wuzzy, the Terrible Man-Eating Cannibal,' which was a waste of words, but Merritt had language to burn. He had got hold of a phony five hundred dollar bill, and when he was giving his spiel about how Fuzzy Wuzzy was captured upon a desert island, where he was found chewing a human leg, and how he couldn't eat anything but raw meat, and was always trying to get at his keeper for dessert, he would wave his phony five hundred spot over his head and give it to 'em good.
"'Five hundred dollars, ladies and gents, I will give to any man who will remain for the short space of two minutes in the cage with Fuzzy Wuzzy! Five hundred dollars to any man who is brave enough to run the risk of letting this terrible man-eating cannibal get his hinder limbs about him, for then all would be lost and Fuzzy Wuzzy would fasten his terrible fangs in his victim's throat and suck his ber-lud.'