“Joachim loves music,” replied the stranger, mildly. “He’ll travel all day if I’ll only play and sing to him.”
“Love of music will be the death of friend Joachim, then,” commented Buck.
“Is there a hostelry near by?” asked the other, lifting his old hat politely. With satirical courtesy Buck lifted his—and at that psychological moment the only plug hats in the whole town of Smyrna saluted each other.
“There’s a hossery down the road a ways, and a mannery, too, all run by old Sam Fyles.”
“Crack ’em down, gents,” rasped the parrot. “Twenty can play as well as one.”
The man under the chaise top pricked up his ears and cast a significant look at the plug hat on the platform. Plug hat on the platform seemed to recognize some affinity in plug hat on the van, and there was an acceleration of mutual interest when the parrot croaked his sentence again.
Buck tipped forward with a clatter of his chair legs and trudged down to the roadside. He walked around the outfit with an inquisitive sniffing of his nose and a crinkling of eyebrows, and at last set himself before the man of the chaise top, his knuckles on his hips.
“Who be I?” he demanded.
The stranger surveyed him for some time, huggling his head down in cowering fashion, so it seemed in the dusk.
“You,” he huskily ventured, “are Buck’s Leviathan Circus and Menagerie; Ivory Buck, Proprietor.”