"Of course!" answered Joe. "It's partly his idea. He's an old fire-actor, you know, and he's given me some good suggestions. Yes, he's going to help me. I think we'll put the act on next week. We've got to train some new performers first."
"New performers! Say, what are you going to do, Joe, take a troupe of fire-eating actors out on the road?"
"Something like that, yes," answered the young magician, with a laugh. "You'll see."
Joe Strong varied his acts in the circus tent Sometimes he would omit the "vanishing lady" act, as Helen wanted to put through some extra work with Rosebud, and there was not time for both. Again he would leave out some of his acrobatic work, or perhaps not do the trick of seeming to catch fire and extinguishing the flames in Benny Turton's tank. Once in a while he would omit the ten thousand dollar mystery box trick.
But on the day when he had the above conversation with Jim Tracy they were showing in a large factory town. There had been good business in the afternoon, and Joe had not done the box trick. But just before the evening show Jim came to Joe and said:
"There've been several requests, Joe, that you put the box trick on to-night."
"Requests from whom?" Joe asked.
"One of the newspaper men was telling me they received a lot of telephone calls to-day asking if the box trick would be done and the reward paid in case some one discovered the way it was done."
"What did you say?"
"I said I thought you'd put the trick on in that case. Don't you think you'd better? We didn't advertise it specially for to-night, but there might be a lot of sore-heads if we don't pull it off."