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.

The way pa escaped injury was ’cause he had to take the place of the fat woman on the platform with the freaks, as the fat woman was overcome with the heat and had to stay in the car.

The way they fixed pa up to resemble the fat woman was scandalous. They have some rubber things in the wardrobe tent that you can blow up and make a big arm, and a big leg, and a big stummick, so anybody couldn’t tell the difference, and they fixed pa up with blowed up clothes of flesh colored rubber, and but for his chin whiskers you couldn’t tell him from the fat woman. He said he wouldn’t cut off his whiskers for anybody’s circus, so they fixed a veil to cover part of his face and put the fat woman’s dress on pa, and put him up beside the skeleton, the midget and the giant.

Pa said he didn’t want to do it, ’cause it seemed too much like fraud, but they told him the fate of the show depended on our all being willing to take any part assigned to us, and so pa sat down and began to fan himself, and tried to look flirty like a woman.

The other freaks never noticed but what it was the fat woman until the show was half over. It was too much for me, and I just laffed at pa. I got up behind him and told him in a whisper that I wanted a dollar to play the slot machine, and he told me to go to thunder, and get out of there. I couldn’t stand it to be insulted by my own father, so I took a hat pin out of the hat of the bearded lady and punched it into pa’s blowed up rubber shirt, and pa began to sis, like a soda fountain, and the wind struck the living skeleton and blew him over like a cyclone, and by that time pa was blowing off wind in a dozen places that I had punctured, and he was scared for fear there wouldn’t be anything left of him, and the giant saw the fat woman slowly fading away, and the coward had heart failure and lay down on the platform. Somebody shouted that the fat woman was all melting away, and a fellow who was watering a camel out of a bucket came to the rescue and threw the bucket of dirty water all over pa, and then I thought I better go away into the tent and see the fight, but pa was taken to the dressing room and rescued from the shrinking rubber balloons that were busted, and he said he would hunt the man that punctured his tire to his dying day, but he didn’t know it was me.

Gee, it looks to me as though pa has been engaged to act as the easy mark in this show. Say, they got pa to practice on roaring like a lion, so he could stand behind the cage when the lion has a sore throat and roar, and scare folks, and pa has been going around behind the cages, every evening, when the menagerie is closed, and the crowd in the main tent, making noises that have made the animals look at each other as much as to say, “Well, what do you think of that?” The rhinoceros was so disgusted at Paducah that he reached out his nose and took pa on his horn and held him up to the scorn of the other animals until pa’s pants gave way and he was a sight, and he was so scared that he got out of the tent and made a run for our train, chased by the police, who thought he was a burglar that had been eat by a house dog.

The worst thing we have had on pa was at Louisville, where we stayed over Sunday. Another fellow and I got a system on slot machines, and one day we beat the machines out of a shotbag full of nickels, and when we showed up at the tent all the fellows wanted to know how we did it, and pa said it was gambling, and we ought not to do it, but he also wanted to know how we managed to win, and when we told pa about it pa said it was no sin to beat a slot machine, ’cause it was an inanimate thing, just a machine, and anybody who could beat a nickel in the slot machine at his own game was equal to a Rockefeller.

So after everybody had got excited about our nickels I told them how to beat the machine. I told them I didn’t get excited and go rushing in where angels fear to tread, and feed the slot machine on good hard earned nickels of my own, but waited until the countrymen and tenderfeet had fed it on nickels until it was too full for utterance. When the machine swelled out like it was blowed up, and it kind of wheezed, like it was ready to cough up, and was only waiting for an excuse, I put a cough lozenger about the size of a nickel in the slot and turned the diaphram. The machine shuddered a minute and then had a regular hemorrhage, and coughed up a tin cupful of nickels into my hand, and the machine seemed to rest easy, and take nourishment again from the silly fellows, who thought they could beat it.

Well, sir, the whole crowd was so excited they could hardly wait to find a slot machine, and finally they bought nearly all my cough lozengers, and went out into the night, and pa and I went along, ’cause pa said he understood all the slot machines were owned by Rockefeller, and he made more money on them than he did on Standard oil, and the money that he gave away to schools and churches was from his rake-off on his slot machines. Pa said it would be a good thing if someone could break up the reprehensible practice by beating the blasted machines to a finish.

So pa he got a bag to bring back the nickels in, and a bunch of us went to a store where one whole side of the place was filled with slot machines, and the way the people were playing the game was scandalous. Pa watched a machine until the players had fed it so it seemed as though it would die unless it got air, and he stepped up and put in a lozenger and turned the wheel, and held the bag under the spout for the coin, but it didn’t come. Some more fellows put in nickels, and the machine gave little hacking coughs and coughed up three or four nickels, but nothing that seemed at all in the nature of a financial hemorrhage, when pa took another lozenger and put it in, and by ginger the machine began to heave up nickels like it was in the trough of the sea.

Pa was so excited he forgot to hold the bag, and nickels went all over the floor, and everybody made a grab for them, and pa was shoved aside, and he swore he would have the place pulled, and just then a law officer took pa in charge because he had put a cough lozenger in the slot machine, and he searched pa and found a lot more bronchial trochées, and pa was in for it on a charge of malpractice, for giving cough medicine for the stomach trouble of the slot machine, instead of pepsin tablets.

They took pa in a back room and searched him some more, and found his roll, and then a man who said he was a lawyer offered to help pa, and keep him out of the penitentiary. He told pa the law of Kentucky made the crime of trifling with a slot machine the same as breach of promise, or arson, and that he would be lucky if he got off with ten years in the pen, with 30 days’ solitary confinement in a Turkish bath cell, with niggers for companions.

Pa turned blue and asked the lawyer if there was no way out of it, and the lawyer told him that for $120 in spot cash he would let him go, and fight the case after the show had got out of the state. A hundred and twenty-five dollars was the amount they found on pa, and he told them that inasmuch as they already had it, they better keep the money and let him go, and he would be always a living example of the terrors of gambling.

So they let pa go, and all the way to the train he told us he hoped this experience would be a lesson to us not to covet the money of the rich, and as far as he was concerned, John D. Rockefeller could go plum to thunder with his money after this.

Then we got to the car, and found about a dozens of the circus men who had been out to beat the slot machines, broke flat, and I had to divide my shot bag of nickels with them, that I had won before I let them into the game, before they would let me go to bed.

Dad says this circus life is making me pretty tough.