The gang sat down in silence until the Concert Manager cut in with some weather talk. It looked stormy, and as it was the last night of the stand and a long haul to the cars, everybody was feeling a little sore. With a storm coming up, the tent to watch, and then the haul and an eight-hour jump with a hustle for the march in spangles down the highway the next morning. It had everybody grouchy and thinking about hall shows with a roof and a stove.
“Youse is doing a lot of guff about a rain,” cut in the Side Show Spieler, as he polished up his shiny brim on the corner of the leaping tick, “but youse kin stay inside when its droppin’, but for me—the open and still the same old gab for the dimes.”
The Boss Canvasman came up along the ring bank, and without noticing the crowd on the sawdust began to jamb down the cinders around the net-pole with the heel of his boot. From the distance came a low rumble of thunder. The gang looked at each other. Everybody in the outfit feared a storm; not so much for the storm itself, but for the effect it had on the Boss Canvasman. He never talked, but when the basses under the hills were growling and the lightning was doing a fancy jig against the blue, he let loose a vocabulary that would put a canalboat captain to the blush of shame and send a sea-soaked old jib reefer to flight as a down and out cusser beyond appeal, cards torn up, tables turned over and police at the door. He used the same two-em words, but the way they hit the air would have made holes in a battleship.
The broadcloth boys, who came over in the sailing ships and scared the Indians into religion by telling them how warm it was in perdition, couldn’t touch the Boss Canvasman for a scare when he got on the same topic. He had a way of saying “hell!” that made you want to turn in a fire alarm just for personal comfort.
Presently he came across to the gang, and to the surprise of all the rink-bank squatters loosened up.
“Talkin’ ’bout workin’ in the rain, is you?” he said, with a sneer, and a cross-hook glance at the Side Show Spieler. “You’ve got no kick. Say, you’ll have your head on some Mamie’s shoulder in the last day coach, up an’ away, while me an’ my gang is still workin’ on this lot gittin’ this round top on the wagon without streakin’ her wid mud.”
There was not a reply, for the boys knew he was right. The Side Show Spieler hung around a bit, and, with a typhoid smile, remarked that he guessed he’d bow hisself out, and more than that, he did.
“Speakin’ about storms,” said the Boss Canvasman, as he tied a long, running knot in the guy that held the triple bars, “I guess you fellows ’ceptin’ some of the old boys, dunno what it is for a rain an’ a blow. I dun bin circusin’ it for forty year, and, say, I’ve met some blows an’ lightnin’ that no sailor chap ain’t hit, I don’t care how often he’s bin ’round the Horn.”
You couldn’t have looked into the face of that old fellow without believing every word. He was burned brown by every clime, creased and seamed by every frost, and parched and dryed by every wind, and his hands for knots and gnarls had an old oak twice around the track and then past the judges and turf writers, all off and back to the street cars.
“Say, I’m going to tell you fellers sumthin’,” said the Boss, as he sat down and began twisting together a piece of rope that was getting to look like a lion’s tail. The gang was startled, for in the memory of none there never lodged the fact that the Boss Canvasman had been seen to sit down as long as the pole was standing. But he did, and what’s more, he reeled off a yarn.