Only a few months after the professor died, Madame Hortense had a bad fall from a new horse she was trying, and she received injuries which resulted in her death in a few weeks.
Joe was left alone in the world, with only an inheritance of a superb set of muscles, nerves, hawklike eyes and an active brain.
The circus people were kind to him, and did what they could, but a circus is not the best place in the world for an orphan boy, and the manager soon realized this.
Consequently he was glad to read an advertisement of a couple who wanted to adopt a strong, healthy boy of about Joe’s age. Letters were written, and Mr. Amos Blackford came on with his wife to have a look at Joe.
Mr. Beeze, the circus manager, had artfully neglected to state, in his early letters, the fact that Joe was the orphan of a bareback rider and a “Professor of Black Art and Magic”; and when Mr. and Mrs. Blackford discovered this they were well-nigh horrified. For they were old-fashioned persons, with very strict ideas about right and wrong, and to them a woman who rode a horse in a circus was a person not to be admitted to the best society, and they regarded the dead Professor Morretti in about the same light as they would an outlaw.
At first they were going back without Joe. But Mrs. Blackford could not resist the heart-appeal of the attractive little chap, and so he was taken, and carried to the Blackford home in Bedford by his foster-parents, who had since brought him up.
They had done well by Joe, as far as their rather narrow minds let them. They treated Joe harshly at times, without understanding that they did so. They wanted him to forget that he was ever in a circus, that his mother ever rode bareback, and that his father juggled Indian clubs and produced live rabbits from the vest pockets of innocent persons in the audience.
But Joe could not forget those things. He had been born in a circus, and the smell of the sawdust, the jungle odor from the animal tent, always brought back to him, most vividly, his early days.
He had not lived long in Bedford before he became known as a daring little fellow. Mrs. Blackford nearly fainted when once she saw him walking the back fence like a tight rope, with a clothes pole as a balancer in his chubby hands.
And from then on, by gradual stages, Joe advanced to more and more daring tricks, until one day on a challenge he walked the ridgepole of the church.