And Billikens forgot himself. The terribleness of the sight painted the honest anxiety for the woman on his face. And her face was a kaleidoscope. At the first, tense and fearful, it was like that of a Christian martyr meeting the lions, or of a felon falling through the trap. Next, and quickly, came surprise and relief in that there was no hurt. And, finally, her face was proudly happy with a smile of triumph. She even smiled to Billikens her pride at making good her love to him. And Billikens relaxed and looked love and pride back, until, on the spur of the second, Harris Collins broke in:
“This ain’t a smiling act! Get that smile off your face. The audience has got to think you’re carrying the pull. Show that you are. Make your face stiff till it cracks. Show determination, will-power. Show great muscular effort. Spread your legs more. Bring up the muscles through your skirt just as if you was really working. Let ’em pull you this way a bit and that way a bit. Give ’em to. Spread your legs more. Make a noise on your face as if you was being pulled to pieces an’ that all that holds you is will-power.—That’s the idea! That’s the stuff! It’s a winner, Bill! It’s a winner!—Throw the leather into ’em! Make ’m jump! Make ’m get right down and pull the daylights out of each other!”
The whips fell on the horses, and the horses struggled in all their hugeness and might to pull away from the pain of the punishment. It was a spectacle to win approval from any audience. Each horse averaged eighteen hundredweight; thus, to the eye of the onlooker, seven thousand two hundred pounds of straining horse-flesh seemed wrenching and dragging apart the slim-waisted, delicately bodied, hundred-and-forty pound woman in her fancy street costume. It was a sight to make women in circus audiences scream with terror and turn their faces away.
“Slack down!” Collins commanded the drivers.
“The lady wins,” he announced, after the manner of a ringmaster.—“Bill, you’ve got a mint in that turn.—Unhook, madam, unhook!”
Marie obeyed, and, the hooks still dangling from her sleeves, made a short run to Billikens, into whose arms she threw herself, her own arms folding him about the neck as she exclaimed before she kissed him:
“Oh, Billikens, I knew I could do it all the time! I was brave, wasn’t I!”
“A give-away,” Collins’s dry voice broke in on her ecstasy. “Letting all the audience see the hooks. They must go up your sleeves the moment you let go.—Try it again. And another thing. When you finish the turn, no chestiness. No making out how easy it was. Make out it was the very devil. Show yourself weak, just about to collapse from the strain. Give at the knees. Make your shoulders cave in. The ringmaster will half step forward to catch you before you faint. That’s your cue. Beat him to it. Stiffen up and straighten up with an effort of will-power—will-power’s the idea, gameness, and all that, and kiss your hands to the audience and make a weak, pitiful sort of a smile, as though your heart’s been pulled ’most out of you and you’ll have to go to the hospital, but for right then that you’re game an’ smiling and kissing your hands to the audience that’s riping the seats up and loving you.—Get me, madam? You, Bill, get the idea! And see she does it.—Now, ready! Be a bit wistful as you look at the horses.—That’s it! Nobody’d guess you’d palmed the hooks and connected them.—Straight out!—Let her go!”
And again the thirty-six-hundredweight of horses on either side pitted its strength against the similar weight on the other side, and the seeming was that Marie was the link of woman-flesh being torn asunder.
A third and a fourth time the turn was rehearsed, and, between turns, Collins sent a man to his office, for the Del Mar telegram.