Then the parson and the girl went away, and the boys carried out the melodeon, and the quarantine was declared off.  After dinner the boys took down the tents and put them on the train that Sunday afternoon, singing decent songs as they pulled up the stakes and rolled up the canvas, and on the train, late in the night, we could hear “Old Hundred” being sung as the cars ran through the pennyrial district of Indiana.

CHAPTER VIII

    Pa Takes the Place of the Fat Woman with Disastrous Results—­A
    Kentucky Colonel Causes a Row—­Pa Tries to Roar Like a Lion and the
    Rhinoceros Objects—­Pa Plays the Slot-Machine and Gets the Worst of
    It.

This has been an eventful week with the show.  We have had heat prostrations in Kentucky, nearly the whole show got drunk on 16-year-old whisky, and if it hadn’t been for the animals keeping sober this show would have been pulled for disorderly conduct.

Nobody knows how the row started, but pa says every man in Kentucky carries a blue gun and a bottle of red licker, and they wear white hats, so the red, white and blue business is all right, only it is a combination that is death on a circus.  I think one of the ushers, at the afternoon performance, told an old colonel that he must move along quicker, when the colonel began to talk back, and say, “Who is you talkin’ too, sah?” And the usher stood it as long as he could, when he took the colonel by the collar and sat him down so quick he didn’t come to for a couple of minutes, and when the colonel got his senses, and found that the usher had ushered him into a seat between two gaily decorated colored women the trouble began.  The colonel never forgot that he was a gentleman, for he rose up, took off his hat to the colored women, and said:  “You must excuse me, ladies, but I shall have to go and kill the scoundrel who sat me down with niggers,” and he got down off the seats and struck the usher with his cane, and the usher yelled:  “Hey, Rube!” and all the circus people made a rush for the colonel.  The colonel said, “Men of Kentucky, to the rescue,” and before I could crawl under the seats the air was full of baggage, seats, tent pins and white hats, guns were fired, and blood flowed, and the police pulled everybody, and the evening performance was given up.

One of the proprietors of the show got a wen on his head as big as a football from being struck by a handle of a revolver, and the colonel who started the row was knocked silly by a tray of red lemonade which the butcher smashed him with, and the colonel cried because the lemonade was all water, and he was afraid it would soak into him and cause him to warp.  When the lemonade butcher apologized, and the usher told him it was all a mistake his being seated with the niggers, the colonel wept on their necks and invited the whole crowd to go to his distillery and help themselves.

When we got to the next town every man in the show had a grouch and a Katzenjammer, and their hair was so sore it was murder and suicide combined to comb it.