“What?” Leslie straightened with a sudden interested jerk.
“The child of a circus,” Jewel Marie repeated. “I certainly gave you a jolt that time, now didn’t I?” She broke into a little laugh.
“Yes. You sound interesting. Go on,” Leslie encouraged.
“Have you ever heard of ‘Chiquita,’ the child trapeze wonder?”
“Let me think. Have I?” Leslie considered for a moment. “No,” she returned, “I haven’t. I never cared much about circuses, even as a child. With what circus did you travel?”
“One called ‘Fernando’s Mammoth Shows.’ That was a long time ago when I was six years old. I’m nineteen now. My father, Harvey Ogden, owned the show, in partnership with the ringmaster, Fernando de Castro, a Spanish Mexican. They used his name for the circus because they liked it better than Ogden for circus purposes. My mother was Spanish. She was a star trapeze performer. She and my father were married when she was seventeen.”
Now started on the story she had longed to confide to Leslie the narrator spoke in short dramatic sentences. “I began working in the ring, doing acrobatic stunts when I was seven. By the time I was ten I was doing a trapeze act with my mother. We showed mostly in Mexico, and in the southern part of the U. S. When I was eleven we were caught in a flood. We were showing in a town along the Mississippi River when the flood came. It cleaned out the circus. My father was drowned. My mother was saved, but she contracted pneumonia, and died two weeks later in a hospital. Fernando and his wife, Fleurette, a bareback rider, and I were up in the town shopping when the flood came. The circus lot was near the river and a good deal lower down than the rest of the town. Twenty-two of our people, besides my father, were drowned. It was terrible.”
“It must have been.” Leslie had assumed her characteristic pose of elbow on chair, chin in hand. She was leaning forward a trifle, a sure indication of her sympathetic interest.
“Nandy, that’s what I always called him, and Fleurette and I went to Mexico City after the flood. My father and mother had left me quite a lot of money, and Nandy had himself appointed as my guardian. It was up to Nandy and Fleurette to find another engagement, for Nandy had put most of his money into the circus, and lost it through the flood. I wanted to work, too, but none of us cared about going back again to circus life. My parents had wished me to become well-educated. Finally Nandy thought out a trapeze act for Fleurette and me. She was fine on the trapeze, too, and we went into vaudeville, with Nandy as manager. We toured the U. S. for three years, and made plenty of money, for we were headliners. After that we went to Europe and Nandy featured me as ‘La Petite Oiseau.’ We stayed in Europe, working, until last year. During all that time I had a tutor, an English woman, Miss Jaffrey. She was an awful frump, but she knew how to tutor. She had a sister who was teaching French at Warburton prep. She arranged for me to go to school there, without letting the dean know I was a professional. Nandy said it wouldn’t do to let it be known at school that I was a trapeze performer. While I was at Warburton, Nandy took a job as manager of a vaudeville house in Paris. Fleurette grew too stout for fast trapeze work so she quit the business. Nandy fixed me up a dandy solo act and I worked, off and on, last summer at the Paris house he was managing.
“I had to carry out my father’s and mother’s wishes about going to college, so I wrote to half a dozen colleges for bulletins. I picked Hamilton College, but I lost the bulletin before I’d more than hardly glanced at it. If Jaffrey’d been with me she’d have written to Hamilton and arranged everything for me, but she left me when I went to Warburton. I meant to write for another bulletin, but I hate to write letters, so I let it go, thinking it would probably be as easy to get a room on the campus as it would be to get one in a hotel. I remembered something about Hamilton Hall and made the mistake of taking it for a campus house. Now you understand what an idiot I was to make such a silly mistake,” the little girl ended ruefully.