“No, indeed. It’s real blood this time; true Indian, too. The tiger is getting rampacious, and they’re going to fix him.”
While Harry gave the information, he was gathering together knives, forks, spoons, bowls, and plates, as handy as any woman—and, in his eagerness to see the tiger, Frank was gathering up dishes before he knew what he was about.
“That’s clever in you,” said Harry. “If I had somebody to like around here, ’twouldn’t seem so bad.”
“I should like it first-rate—a great deal better than staying at home and hoeing corn,” thought Frank, and presently, while Harry plunged the dishes into hot water, Frank found himself telling the story of the cornfield that his father had given him. Before the last dish was wiped, Harry had told Frank how he came to belong to the circus. In listening to Harry’s account of his escape from the great fire that swept over Michigan a few years ago, both children forgot all about the tiger in his cage, and when Harry came, in his story, to the place where he lost all his family, he wiped his eyes with the dishcloth many times before he could go on to the place where he had found the circus encamped, and somebody to give him food and clothing.
“Heigh ho!” exclaimed Frank, “what a hero you are! I wish my Kate could see you. Nothing ever happens to me. It’s go to bed every night in the same bed, and get up every morning in the same room, and see just the same things and folks over and over again. Stupid, ain’t it?”
“I’d go and go, and walk and climb and run, years and years, to see the same old faces and have the same old home again!” said Harry, choking and sobbing to a degree that quite upset Frank Hallock.
“You just come home with me, then, and see my father and mother,” said Frank, not knowing how to suggest comfort in any other form.
“They wouldn’t let me,” sobbed Harry, quite broken down by a touch of sympathy. “Nice folks don’t like circus folks at all; you know they don’t.”
“I don’t see why, when ministers’ children and deacons’ children, and everybody’s boys and girls, go to the circus,” replied Frank; and then feeling that he had not touched the heart of the trouble, he plunged into it by saying, “Look here, you Harry Cornwall, you are not circus folks at all; you are only a boy out of the Michigan fires. Why, my mother sent off lots of clothes to Grand Haven and Port Huron, and other places out there; and my sister Kate tucked into one of the boxes her new gold necklace that Grandma Thornton had just sent her for her birthday, without anybody’s finding it out until the box had been gone pretty nigh a month. Come home with me, I say; everybody will be glad to see you.”
“O, I can’t,” ejaculated Harry, having conquered his sobs during the time of Frank’s long speech; “I’ve got to ride Flurry this afternoon and evening. Flurry is the pony I was on this morning, and in the night, some time, we break up and travel on, maybe for half the night. Hark! they are taming the tiger now. Hear the poor fellow mew!”