Ten feet he crawled, then paused to listen. In the stillness he heard the occasional creak of the wire, the spatter of the spot light. Then again he caught that gliding sound. It was retreating from him, moving closer to the girl. This time he crept twenty feet or more before he paused. Again the same sounds greeted his strained ears. Again the gliding sound. The creature, whether beast or human, traveling faster than he, must be not more than thirty feet from the swinging, swaying girl.
And now, like a flash, his eyes, for a moment relieved from the dancer’s dazzling light, saw the creature—a gaunt tawny beast it was, a tiger stalking human prey. For a second Johnny shivered and shrank back. How had this creature escaped? This he could not know. Its purpose was all too evident. Attracted by the gleam of the fairylike figure dancing on the wire, it was thinking only of breaking her bones with its yellow fangs.
Johnny paused for half a minute, then resumed his forward movement. Poorly armed as he was, he would not allow the beast to have its way unopposed.
Yet, after covering another yard or two, he paused. The girl was ten feet in air. Did the tiger have the power to leap that high? For a tiger of the jungle this would be no feat at all, but for this one of the cage, Johnny was in doubt. And Gwen? Did she have the iron nerve to keep on dancing down the wire with a great yellow beast leaping madly for her feet?
It was a tense moment. Every muscle in his body quivered. The hand that gripped his knife almost crushed the hilt.
The questions that surged through his brain were not long in being answered, for now, in the dim half light about her, the girl saw the beast. For one brief second her eyes were dilated with fear. The parasol, trembling, wavering, almost slipped from her grasp.
Johnny rose on one knee. “If she falls? If she falls?” he breathed silently.
But she did not fall. Seeming to summon all her nerve and strength, she held her parasol high and once more danced gracefully down the wire.
* * * * * * * *
Two hours before this moment in our story, Pant had left the circus grounds, and, crossing a viaduct over the tracks, had made his way down the avenue toward the river. As he cut across the roadway and lost himself down a dark alley near the river, he might have been heard saying to himself: