The Turner Twins

by Ralph Henry Barbour

The two who had tied the victim to the chair retired from the platform. The Signor seized the screen and opened it wide and turned it around and closed it and turned it again.

“You seea?” he demanded. “There is nothing that deceive! Now, then, I placea da screen so!” He folded it around the boy and the chair, leaving only the side away from the audience uncovered. He drew away the width of the platform, and, “Music, ifa you please,” he requested. The orchestra, whose members had moved their chairs to one side, struck up a merry tune, and the Signor, folding his arms, bent a rapt gaze on the blank, impenetrable blackness of the screen. A brief moment passed. Then the Signor bade the music cease, took a step forward, and pointed to the screen.

“Away!” he cried, and swung his arm in a half-circle, his body following with a weird flaring of his brilliant robes until, with outstretched finger, he faced the audience. “Ha! He come! Thisa way, Signor! Comea quick!”

As one man the audience turned and followed the pointing finger. Through the deserted arbor came a boy in a white garment. He pushed his way through the throng and jumped to the stage. As he did so, the Signor whisked aside the screen. There was the chair empty, and there was the rope dangling from it, twisted and knotted.

A moment of surprised silence gave place to hearty applause. Theoretically it might have been possible for the boy in the chair to vanish from behind the screen, reach the farther end of the garden, and run back into sight; but actually, as the audience realized on second thought, it couldn’t possibly have been done in the few seconds, surely not more than ten, that had elapsed between the placing of the screen and the appearance of the boy behind them. And then, how had he got himself free from the rope? An audience likes to be puzzled, and this one surely was. The garden hummed with conjecture and discussion. There were some there who could have explained the seeming phenomenon, but they held their counsel.

Meanwhile, on the platform the Signor was modestly bowing alternately to the audience and to his subject, the latter apparently no worse for his magic transposition. And the orchestra again broke into its interrupted melody. The applause became insistent, but Signor Duodelli, perhaps because his contract with the committee called for no further evidence of his powers, only bowed and bowed and at last disappeared into the obscurity of the shadows. Whereupon the Banjo and Mandolin Club moved into the house, and presently the strains of a one-step summoned the dancers to the big drawing-room.

Laurie, unconsciously rubbing a wrist, smiled as he listened to the comments of the dissolving audience. “Well, but there’s no getting around the fact that it was the same boy,” declared a pompous little gentleman to his companion. “Same hair and eyes and everything! Couldn’t be two boys as much alike, eh? Not possibly! Very clever!”

Laurie chuckled as he made his way to Polly’s booth. That young lady looked a little tired, and, by the same token, so did the Yale booth! Only a bare dozen framed pictures and a small number of post-cards remained of her stock. “Don’t you think I’ve done awfully well?” asked Polly, a trifle pathetically. She seemed to need praise, and Laurie supplied it.

“Corking, Polly,” he assured her. “I guess you’ve sold more than any of the others, haven’t you?”

“N-no, I guess some of the others have done better, Nod; but I think they had more attractive articles, don’t you? Anyhow, I’ve taken in twelve dollars and thirty cents since supper, and I made four dollars and eighty-five cents this afternoon; only I must have dropped a dime somewhere, for I’m ten cents short. Or perhaps someone didn’t give me the right amount.”