"Now brace yourself! Spread your legs. And straighten out."With his hands he manipulated her arms and shoulders into position. "Remember, you've got to meet the first of the strain with your arms straight out. After the strain is on, you couldn't bend 'em if you wanted to. But if the strain catches them bent, the wire'll rip the hide off of you. Remember, straight out, extended, so that they form a straight line with each other and with the flat of your back and shoulders. That's it. Ready now.""Oh, wait a minute," she begged, forsaking the position. "I'll do it--oh, I will do it, but, Billikens, kiss me first, and then Iwon't care if my arms are pulled out."
The dark youth who held Michael, and others looking on, grinned.
Collins dissembled whatever grin might have troubled for expression, and murmured:
"All the time in the world, madam. The point is, the first time must come off right. After that you'll have the confidence.--Bill, you'd better love her up before she tackles it."And Billikens, very angry, very disgusted, very embarrassed, obeyed, putting his arms around his wife and kissing her neither too perfunctorily nor very long. She was a pretty young thing of a woman, perhaps twenty years old, with an exceedingly childish, girlish face and a slender-waisted, generously moulded body of fully a hundred and forty pounds.
The embrace and kiss of her husband put courage into her. She stiffened and steeled herself, and with compressed lips, as he stepped clear of her, muttered, "Ready.""Go!" Collins commanded.
The four horses, under the urge of the drivers, pressed lazily into their collars and began pulling.
"Give 'em the whip!" Collins barked, his eyes on the girl and noting that the pull of the apparatus was straight across her.
The lashes fell on the horses' rumps, and they leaped, and surged, and plunged, with their huge steel-shod hoofs, the size of soup-plates, tearing up the sawdust into smoke.
And Billikens forgot himself. The terribleness of the sight painted the honest anxiety for the woman on his face. And her face was a kaleidoscope. At the first, tense and fearful, it was like that of a Christian martyr meeting the lions, or of a felon falling through the trap. Next, and quickly, came surprise and relief in that there was no hurt. And, finally, her face was proudly happy with a smile of triumph. She even smiled to Billikens her pride at making good her love to him. And Billikens relaxed and looked love and pride back, until, on the spur of the second, Harris Collins broke in:
"This ain't a smiling act! Get that smile off your face. The audience has got to think you're carrying the pull. Show that you are. Make your face stiff till it cracks. Show determination, will-power. Show great muscular effort. Spread your legs more.
Bring up the muscles through your skirt just as if you was really working. Let 'em pull you this way a bit and that way a bit.
Give 'em to. Spread your legs more. Make a noise on your face as if you was being pulled to pieces an' that all that holds you is will-power.--That's the idea! That's the stuff! It's a winner, Bill! It's a winner!--Throw the leather into 'em! Make 'm jump!
Make 'm get right down and pull the daylights out of each other!"The whips fell on the horses, and the horses struggled in all their hugeness and might to pull away from the pain of the punishment. It was a spectacle to win approval from any audience.
Each horse averaged eighteen hundredweight; thus, to the eye of the onlooker, seven thousand two hundred pounds of straining horse-flesh seemed wrenching and dragging apart the slim-waisted, delicately bodied, hundred-and-forty pound woman in her fancy street costume. It was a sight to make women in circus audiences scream with terror and turn their faces away.
"Slack down!" Collins commanded the drivers.
"The lady wins," he announced, after the manner of a ringmaster.--"Bill, you've got a mint in that turn.--Unhook, madam, unhook!"Marie obeyed, and, the hooks still dangling from her sleeves, made a short run to Billikens, into whose arms she threw herself, her own arms folding him about the neck as she exclaimed before she kissed him:
"Oh, Billikens, I knew I could do it all the time! I was brave, wasn't I!""A give-away," Collins's dry voice broke in on her ecstasy.
