"We can sort of screen our movements that way," he said.
Reaching the hook down into the water, Joe caught it in a portion of Benny's "fish" suit. It was an easy matter to raise the now almost drowned performer to the surface, and then lift him out into the arms of Joe, the ring-master and the clown.
"We'll have to carry him to the dressing tent and have a doctor," said Jim Tracy. "And we'll have to do it on the quiet. Get some of the clowns, Bill, and have them march in a body, carrying Benny between them. Make it look as if it was all a part of the show. Carry it off as well as you can. Though what in the world I'm going to do to explain why the tank act isn't finished, I don't know. But we've got to take care of Benny first. Is he alive yet?"
"Just about," answered Joe, making a hasty examination.
Bill Watson quickly summoned some of his fellow clowns, and on a stretcher which two of the eccentric men had been using in a funny act of their own, Benny was carried from the main tent. The clowns so surrounded him that not a glimpse did the audience have of the stretched-out, silent, green-clad figure.
"Pretend it's all a joke," whispered the ringmaster fiercely.
"Sure," muttered Bill Watson.
It was a pretty grim joke, and only the great necessity for not starting a panic in the crowd of sightseers would have induced any one to take part in it.
And while poor Ben is being carried where he can have medical attention, new readers will be told briefly something about Joe Strong as he figures in the previous books of this series.
The first volume is entitled "Joe Strong, the Boy Wizard; Or, The Mysteries of Magic Exposed." Joe, whose mother had been a circus rider under the name Madame Hortense, and whose father, a sleight-of-hand worker, was known as Professor Morretti, was, at the opening of the story, an orphan, living with Mr. and Mrs. Amos Blackford in the town of Bedford. Deacon Blackford had taken care of Joe since the boy was about five years old, and was, in a sense, his foster-father.