Allegretti, the Italian boxer, was quite as impossible as Millie. Once Johnny had bantered him for a boxing match, but the fellow had showed all his white teeth in a snarl as he said:
“No box-a da bum.”
He had meant Johnny.
Johnny’s blood had boiled, but he had made no response. Only when he was out of hearing, he had declared, “Never mind, old boy, I’ll get you yet.”
But thus far he had not “got” him. The way into the good graces of Gwen, queen of the circus, seemed effectually blocked. He had not tried approaching her, for he felt that would be folly.
In spite of the sharply drawn lines of caste which prevailed in the circus, life within the tented walls when the performers were off duty was astonishingly simple. Grease paint came off at the end of the last act. About the dressing tent and the assembly yard the women stars appeared plain and simple-minded people. There was nothing of the bravado that Johnny had expected to find. The three girls who held the center of his attention, because of the ring, were wonderfully well-developed physically. Millie was slender and quick as a cat. Mitzi von Neutin, the trapeze performer, was also slender and strong. She was French; Johnny knew that from the many “Mais, oui” and her “Mais, non,” with which she answered the questions of the other performers. With her abundance of yellow hair she was like a kitten, as she curled up on a rug in the corner of the tent reading a French novel.
But Gwen—Gwen was perfection itself. Not too stout, not too thin; strong, yet not masculine, she was indeed a queen. About the tent, when off duty, she wore a short blue skirt and a blue middy blouse open at the neck and tied with a dark red ribbon. Twice Johnny had seen her boxing with the Italian. Each time the blood had rushed to his temples. To think of such a queen taking her exercise with so coarse a creature filled him with inward rage.
“Oh, well, he’s of the caste,” Johnny had grumbled. “No matter; so shall I be in time. I don’t know just how, but I will.”
Pant, too, had puzzled him greatly. He had not forgotten his friend’s uncanny power of seeing in the dark. He had heard of the strange appearance and disappearance of the crimson flash in the animal tent and elsewhere, and suspected that Pant was at the bottom of it, but just what his game was, or what strange secret of the power of light Pant possessed, he could not guess.
Johnny had at last succeeded in buying the five bonds which Pant had wanted. He had obtained two of them for $39 each. These he had bought from a fat, red faced man who was a guard at the entrance to the big top. He was even now waiting to deliver them to Pant.