“I don’t imagine so.”
When Joe said this he knew nothing of the warrant having been sworn out for his arrest. Harry had not told his chum of this detail.
“Then I don’t see that you need do anything,” said Mr. Crabb. “I, myself, don’t believe the accusation against you. And until you are put to some real trouble over it you may as well ignore it. We’ll just go on as usual. You are doing well, and our show is succeeding better than I hoped for. I am glad you came to me.”
Joe was grateful for this trust, and resolved to do his best in his future work. He worked up several new and simple tricks, many of them, such as dancing cards, the nodding skull and others, being adaptations from other stage illusions.
You have, most of you, perhaps, seen a magician suspend a card, apparently in mid-air, and cause it to go up or down as some one in the audience requests. Sometimes a metal ball on a rod is used. These tricks are worked by means of a black thread which is attached to the card or ball and is pulled by a confederate behind the scenes.
Indeed, the black silk thread has been called the magician’s best friend. It is absolutely invisible on the lighted stage against the proper background, and the right kind is strong enough to lift considerable weight.
A card chosen from the pack is made to rise or fall as follows: the magician gets possession of the card selected by some one in the audience, either by keeping his finger in the place in the pack into which it is thrust, or by “forcing” a certain card on the person in the audience. The performer knows what card he is going to “force” and, later, can readily pick it out of the pack as he shuffles it. To “force” a card, the operator rapidly spreads out a pack of cards, face down, in front of a person, and quickly thrusts one card out farther than the others, literally “forcing” it into the hand. It is a predetermined card, but not one in a hundred realizes that.
At any rate, having the card, the performer goes back to the stage and adroitly contrives to fasten the card to the unseen black silk thread with a tiny bit of beeswax. Then, with the card apparently suspended in mid-air, but in reality hung by an unseen thread, which runs through screw-eyes on the stage floor, the card is made to go up or down or stop midway, just as the audience calls for, by the pulling of the thread by the assistant behind the scenes. When the trick is over the performer slyly takes the card off the pellet of wax, no trace of which shows, and passes the card around for examination. Of course it is an ordinary card. The trick was all in the string.
Joe made a variation of that trick by using a round-bottomed little papier-maché figure, bought in a toy store. There was no trick about the figure. It was one of those which can not be made to lie down, but continually bob up, because of a weight of lead in the rounded bottom.
Joe laid a glass shelf across the backs of two chairs, and after passing the little round-bottomed figure about for inspection, returned with it to the stage, placing it on the glass shelf.