“Who wouldn’t?” remarked Fred. “But what good does it do us to have it in Ridgefield? That’s twenty miles away, and you know the doctor won’t let us go.”
“Maybe it’ll come to Rockledge, too,” put in Howell hopefully.
“No chance,” declared Billy. “I asked the man who was putting up the posters, and he said that this town wasn’t on the list.”
“That’s too bad,” said Bobby regretfully. “I haven’t been to a circus for a long time and I sure would like to see it.”
“Like’s no name for it,” chimed in Shiner. “I’m just crazy to see it. Just think, fellows, the tightrope walkers and the bareback riders, the acrobats turning somersaults over the elephants, the fellows swinging on the trapeze and the horizontal bars—”
“And the clowns,” added Billy, as Shiner paused for breath.
“Billy likes the clowns because he can steal all their old chestnuts and pass them off on us,” was Pee Wee’s vengeful dig.
“But there’s something new in this,” went on Billy, not deigning to notice Pee Wee’s fling. “They show a real Eskimo band, headed by a chief named Takyak who has a trained walrus that can do all kinds of stunts. I never saw anything like that in any circus I’ve ever been to.”
“What’s a walrus?” asked Shiner, who was not very strong on the subject of natural history. “Something like a shark?”
“No, you silly,” returned Billy, who, fresh from his study of the posters, had the advantage over his mates. “It looks something like a seal, only it’s bigger and fatter—oh, it’s as fat as Pee Wee—” Here the latter gave an indignant snort—“and it’s got big tusks and as much whiskers as those fellows over in Russia—you know the ones I mean, those Bolsheviks—and it’s sure the kind of thing I wouldn’t like to meet up an alley on a dark night, and they say it can do anything but talk, and the Eskimos had a big fight when they captured it, but now they’ve got it so tame that it eats out of their hands, and it lives on fish, and it’s got a bellow that you can hear for a mile and—”