“De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as quick as the paw of a tiger.  One day, because the ring-master called him a frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little worse, he shoved him against the soft pine background he used in his knife-throwing act, so quick the ring-master didn’t have time to think, and there, before the audience, De Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking them into the wood all around the ring-master so close that they passed through his clothes and most of them bit into his skin.

“The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was pinned fast.  So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and no one dared be more than barely civil to his wife.  And she was a sly bit of baggage, too, only all hands were afraid of De Ville.

“But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing.  He was the lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head into the lion’s mouth.  He’d put it into the mouths of any of them, though he preferred Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always be depended upon.

“As I was saying, Wallace—­’King’ Wallace we called him—­was afraid of nothing alive or dead.  He was a king and no mistake.  I’ve seen him drunk, and on a wager go into the cage of a lion that’d turned nasty, and without a stick beat him to a finish.  Just did it with his fist on the nose.

“Madame de Ville—­”

At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around.  It was a divided cage, and a monkey, poking through the bars and around the partition, had had its paw seized by a big gray wolf who was trying to pull it off by main strength.  The arm seemed stretching out longer end longer like a thick elastic, and the unfortunate monkey’s mates were raising a terrible din.  No keeper was at hand, so the Leopard Man stepped over a couple of paces, dealt the wolf a sharp blow on the nose with the light cane he carried, and returned with a sadly apologetic smile to take up his unfinished sentence as though there had been no interruption.

“—­looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De Ville looked black.  We warned Wallace, but it was no use.  He laughed at us, as he laughed at De Ville one day when he shoved De Ville’s head into a bucket of paste because he wanted to fight.

“De Ville was in a pretty mess—­I helped to scrape him off; but he was cool as a cucumber and made no threats at all.  But I saw a glitter in his eyes which I had seen often in the eyes of wild beasts, and I went out of my way to give Wallace a final warning.  He laughed, but he did not look so much in Madame de Ville’s direction after that.

“Several months passed by.  Nothing had happened and I was beginning to think it all a scare over nothing.  We were West by that time, showing in ’Frisco.  It was during the afternoon performance, and the big tent was filled with women and children, when I went looking for Red Denny, the head canvas-man, who had walked off with my pocket-knife.