“Forward!” said Buckhurst, and the grotesque escort started with a clatter of heavy sabots and a rattle 292 of scythes. The crowd fell back to give them way, then closed in behind like a herd of sheep, following to the mayor’s house, where Buckhurst set his sentinels and then entered, closing the door behind him.
“Well!” muttered Speed, in amazement.
After a long silence, Kelly Eyre looked at his watch. “It’s time we were in the tent,” he observed, dryly; and we turned away without a word. At the bridge we stopped and looked back. The red flag was flying from the mayor’s house.
“Speed,” I said, “there’s one thing certain: Byram can’t stay if there’s going to be fighting here. I heard guns at sea this morning; I don’t know what that may indicate. And here’s this idiotic revolution started in Paradise! That means the troops from Lorient, and a wretched lot of bushwhacking and guerrilla work. Those Faöuet Bretons that Buckhurst has recruited are a bad lot; there is going to be trouble, I tell you.”
Eyre suggested that we arm our circus people, and Speed promised to attend to it and to post them at the tent doors, ready to resist any interference with the performance on the part of Buckhurst’s recruits.
It was already nearly one o’clock as we threaded our way through the crowds at the entrance, where our band was playing gayly and thousands of white head-dresses fluttered in the sparkling sunshine that poured intermittently from a sky where great white clouds were sailing seaward.
“Walk right up, messoors! Entry done, mesdames, see voo play!” shouted Byram, waving a handful of red and blue tickets. “Animals all on view before the performance begins! Walk right into the corridor of livin’ marvels and defunct curiosities! Bring the little ones to see the elephant an’ the camuel—the fleet ship of the Sairy! Don’t miss nothing! Don’t fail 293 to contemplate le ploo magnifique spectacle in all Europe! Don’t let nobody say you died an’ never saw the only Flyin’ Mermaid! An’ don’t forget the prize—ten thousand francs to the man, woman, or che-ild who can prove that this here Flyin’ Mermaid ain’t a fictious bein’ straight from Paradise!”
Speed and I made our way slowly through the crush to the stables, then around to the dressing-rooms, where little Grigg, in his spotted clown’s costume, was putting the last touches of vermilion to his white cheeks, and Horan, draped in a mangy leopard-skin to imitate Hercules, sat on his two-thousand-pound dumbbell, curling his shiny black mustache with Mrs. Grigg’s iron.
“Jacqueline’s dressed,” cried Miss Crystal, parting the curtain of her dressing-room, just enough to show her pretty, excited eyes and nose.
“All right; I won’t be long,” replied Speed, who was to act as ring-master. And he turned and looked at me as I raised the canvas flap which screened my dressing-room.