"And won't you run any danger?" questioned the girl quickly.
"Oh, I suppose so; just as I do when I work on the high trapeze or ride my motor cycle along the high wire. But it's all in the day's work. And now let's talk about something pleasant—I mean let's get off the shop."
Helen sighed. She was plainly disturbed, but she did not want to burden Joe with her worries. She knew he must have calm nerves and an untroubled mind to do his various acts in the circus that night.
After supper and before the evening performance Joe made a careful examination of his trapeze apparatus. Beyond the place where the acid had eaten into the wire strands, causing them to become weakened so that they parted, the appliances did not appear to have been tampered with. Nor were there any clews which might show who had done the deed. That it could have happened by accident was out of the question. The acid could have gotten on the wire rope in one way only. Some one must have climbed up the rope ladder to the platform and applied the stuff.
"But who did it?" asked Jim Tracy, when Joe had told him of the discovery of the acid-eaten cable.
"Some enemy. Perhaps the same one who was responsible for our loss in tickets this afternoon," answered the young magician.
"Carfax?" asked the ringmaster.
"It might be, and yet he isn't the only man who's been discharged or who has a grudge against me. There was Gianni with whom I had a fight."
"You mean the Italian? Yes, he was an ugly customer. But I haven't heard of him for years. I don't believe he's even in this part of the country."
"And we haven't any reason to suppose that Carfax is, either, after his fiasco in trying to expose my Box of Mystery trick. But we've got to be on our guard."