Pa said you couldn’t fool him, ’cause he knew he was being initiated into the 20-steenth degree of the Masons, and he guessed he could tell a degree from a train wreck, ’cause the degree was a darn sight worse than a wreck, but the conductor took one of those long glass fire extinguishers and sprinkled the medicated water on the freaks in the next berth, and then turned it on pa, and pa tasted it, and thought he was at a banquet, and he said “that sauterne is not fit to drink.”

Then when the bearded woman yelled that the fire had almost reached her whiskers, and would nobody save her, pa began to get ready to move on, ’cause he concluded he hadn’t been riding a goat after all, and he told me to hand him his pants.  Pa is a man that will never go out among people, no matter how dark the night is, without his pants, and I admire him for it.  Some of the circus men didn’t care for dress that night, but got out just as they were, and the result was that when daylight came they had to tie hay around their legs.

Our car was bottom-side up, but I found pa’s pants and he got his legs in, and I buttoned him in, but I felt all the time as though I had buttoned them in the back, so the seat was in front, but the fire was crackling and pa pushed me out of a transom, and then he crawled out, and we sat down in the mud.

The bearded woman came next, with her whiskers done up in curl papers, and then the fat woman got one foot through the transom, and she couldn’t get it back in, and the train hands got an ax and were going to cut her leg off, and save one foot, at least, when pa got a move on him, and took the ax and broke out the side of the car, and got her out.  Eight or nine men lifted her tenderly onto a stack of hay, and she wrapped it around her, ’cause she left her clothes in her berth.

[Illustration:  Pa Got an Ax and Cut the Fat Woman Out.]

Well, it was a sight when the people were got out of our car, and they let it burn, to light up the scene, and pa and I and the boss canvasman went along the ditched train, and helped people out.  The giant was in two upper berths, and he got one leg out of the transom over one berth, and one leg out of the transom over the other berth, and we pulled his legs, but he couldn’t make it, so pa took an ax and made both berths into one, and got him out.

The giant shook himself and started on a run across the marsh, but he mired up to his neck, and a farmer who heard the noise came to order us off his hay field for trespass, and yelled:  “Here’s a head of some of your performers cut off away over here,” and he was going to bring it in, when the farmer found the head was alive, and he ran away from it.

In an hour we had everybody out, and made beds for them by spreading out hay cocks, and nobody seemed to be hurt so very much.  We heard a locomotive whistle up the road, and some one said the relief train was coming with doctors and nurses, but the show owner who was with us said:  “Relief doctors, nothing.  That is a train-load of lawyers and claim agents to settle with us.  The doctors will not come till to-morrow.  Now, everybody pretend to be hurt awful bad, and strike the sharks for $10,000 apiece, and come down to $100, if you can’t do any better.”