That night, before they crept into their twin beds, Marjory and Margaret talked long and earnestly over something very important.
“Yes,” said Marjory at last, “we’ll find some real circus clothes somewhere. Then we’ll have Prince and Blackie saddled and bridled. Then we’ll ride off to find that old circus and bring Johnny Thompson back. We can’t get along without him; besides, he didn’t take it. I just know he didn’t.”
“And if he did, he didn’t mean to,” supplemented Margaret.
A moment later they were both sound asleep.
As Johnny Thompson bumped along in his rail gondola, with the click-click of the wheels keeping time to the distant pant of the engine, he dreamed a madly fantastic dream. In it he felt the nerve-benumbing shudder which comes with the shock of a train wreck. He felt himself lifted high in air to fall among rolls of canvas and piles of tent poles, heard the crash of breaking timbers, the scream of grinding ironwork, and above it all the roar of frightened animals—tigers, lions, panthers, tossed, still in their cages, to be buried beneath the wreckage, or hurled free to tumble down the embankment. In this dream Johnny crawled from beneath the canvas to find himself staring into the red and gleaming eye of some great cat that was stalking him as its prey. He struggled to draw his clasp knife from his pocket, and in that mad struggle awoke.
With every nerve alert he caught the click-click of wheels, the distant pant of the engine. It had been nothing more than a dream. He was still traveling steadily forward with the circus.
Yet, as he settled back, he gave an involuntary shudder and, propping himself on one elbow, stared through the darkness toward the spot where, in his dream, the great cat had crouched. To his horror, he caught the red gleam of a single burning eye.
Instantly there flashed through his mind the row of great caged cats he had seen that day. Pacing the floor of their dens, pausing now and again for a leap, a growl, a snarl, they had fascinated him then. Now his blood ran cold at the thought of the creature which, having escaped from its cage, had crept along the swinging cars, leaping lightly from one to the other until the scent of a man had arrested its course. Was it the Senegal lion? Johnny doubted that. Perhaps the tawny yellow Bengal tiger, or the more magnificent one from Siberia.
All this time, while his mind had worked with the speed of a wireless, Johnny’s hand was struggling to free his clasp knife.
Once more his eye sought the ball of fire. Suddenly as it had come, so suddenly it had vanished. He started in astonishment. Yet he was not to be deceived. The creature had turned its head. It was moving. Perhaps at this very moment it was crouching for a spring. A huge pile of canvas loomed above Johnny. A leap from this vantage, the tearing of claws, the sinking of fangs, and this circus train would have witnessed a tragedy.