He burst through the entrance to the enclosure and ran along a passageway into the private office of Signor Amado himself. That ferocious looking worthy was, at the moment, delivering a philippic to his principal assistant, a pungent diatribe directed against the press, press agents, stupid park managements and the inherent injustice of mankind in general. At the sight of the wild-eyed and blood-stained visitor from an alien clime in the doorway, he passed in the middle of a sentence. His jaw dropped and his face turned ghastly white. He ducked behind a desk and mumbled a fervid appeal to the patron saint of his native village in Lombardy. The visitor looked around for something to destroy. His gaze encountered a half empty bottle of Chianti on a table and he sprang for it with the fierce avidity of a lion leaping at his prey from ambush. The contents of the bottle were gurgling down his throat to the accompaniment of half-choked chuckles of delight when the pursuing mob closed in a few seconds later and quelled the revolution. McClintock rushed in as the special policemen were putting a pair of handcuffs on the would be Trotsky. Signor Amado, arising from behind the desk, confronted him.
“Whatafor you leta theese fella in here, eh?” he cried belligerently, his old pose of aggressiveness automatically asserting itself at the sight of the pinions which held the savage intruder safely bound.
McClintock laughed at the sheer absurdity of this remark.
“We didn’t let him in any place, Tony,” he replied. “He just happened to drop in here and several places along the line before we could catch up with him.”
“Whata make him so bada man, er?” inquired the animal trainer.
“Booze, Tony, plain old-fashioned booze. They tell me he picked up a bottle on the beach some one must have dropped off an excursion boat. These fellows can’t stand intoxicants of any kind. It makes ’em wild. I see he’s been cutting into your Chianti.”
He gave orders for the temporary bestowal of the now thoroughly chastened and mollified revolutionary, and was following the latter’s captors out of the office when Signor Amado plucked him by the sleeve.
“Say, meester,” inquired the latter. “You geta my face in de papers tomor’, eh?”
The manager shook his head.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible—that is tomorrow,” he replied. “I told you this morning we’d do the very best we could to work up another story about you next week when this monkey yarn was sort of died down. Then we’ll see what we can do about landing your picture right. Don’t worry. Leave it all to me.”