Adventure, December 1914 — page 166: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

164 advanced to the edge of the tower’s top, from which a wire stretched down at a slight angle from an upright, beside a little ladder- like set of steps. The ringmaster raised his hands. The silence continued. All other acts in the three rings below, and on the wires and trapeze above, came to a halt. The an- nouncer’s megaphone rang out to all parts of the monster tent: “Ladies and gentlemen! Mlle. Mitchi Maya in her daring performance on the Live Wire! There are five thousand volts of deadly current passing through the wire upon which she works. Five thousand volts! Enough to strike a dozen men dead. A slip—a misstep—ah! Permit me to ask you all to maintain absolute silence during this exceedingly hazardous act. Are you ready, Mlle. Maya? Then—go!”’ With a crackling sputter, two large arc- lights, one green on the tower, one red above the net where the wire ran down and ended, leaped into life as the man on the tower pushed a shining lever home. The girl bowed. She ran up the little steps to a level with the wire. She bowed again, poised like a diver; then—she stepped out on the wire itself. A burst of flame came from under her shoe at the contact. The side of her body above the limb she stood on sprang into an outline of tiny parti-colored lights. She ad- vanced a step. Again a flash of blue fire marked her action. Lights outlined the limb and girdled her slender waist on the opposite side. She put down both feet and stood drawn in colored light. She walked, she ran, she danced on the deadly thing beneath her, turned and ran back to the ladder-like steps, and so down to the tower-top. Already her assistant was busy. As the avid crowd sighed its relief and gaped for more, he led her to the edge, this time be- neath the wire. She turned back her face and seized something in her mouth. On her back the man was fastening something, one could not just see what; but in a moment one under- stood. She lifted her naked arms. The wings of a giant butterfly sprang into view. They waved as in preparation for flight, and —she was off! Hanging by her teeth, arms outstretched, the wings and her body a mass of scintil- lating brilliance, the wheel upon which she Adventure slid and beneath which she clung throwing off sparks like the flare of a trolley from a charged wire! She flashed down the wire, landed in the net and stood bowing to the wave of ap- plause which greeted her having accom- plished the thing once more. Then she slid to the ground on a rope, ran from the ring and so back to the “‘trapping-room.”’ The ‘‘Human Butterfly” act of the Bar- naby Shows was ended. It was a genuine “‘thriller.” I, who was press agent of Barnaby’s Shows, knew all about it. I knew that it had already been the indirect cause of a man’s death, and of a wedding; and that it had nearly killed the woman who had just performed it anew and was making her way out of the ring while the audience rustled back to a casual in- terest in less sensational numbers of the bill. I glanced into her face and nodded as she passed me in the fly of the big top. She nodded back with a smile. She was as win- some, as fresh near at hand as she looked on the tower. She was young, and seemingly happy. I remembered the night when her petite body lay unconscious in the net. For the wire on which she worked was really charged as the announcer had claimed. The act was risky. It was genuine—no fake. Forget that I am a press agent, because the story of the thing is true, on my honor as a man. masse WE OF the circus know that about ei xe once every so often the public must “=~ have a thrill in their bill of enter- tainment. Human nature stays pretty much the same from year to year. The Romans had gladiatorial combats, and the old barons and such, knightly tournaments. Folks got hurt in those affairs. Nowadays people like to see men and women go up in balloons and jump off with a few yards of canvas between them and kingdom come, or else see a loop-the-loop, or an airman fly upside down—anything where a mishap will mean sudden death. I don’t know why, but it’s so. You know it. And so we amusement-venders have to pull a dangerous stunt now and then. That is how Pitkin came to dope out the “But- terfly’’ in the first place. He was our elec- trician. We have a new one now. But he Aj — MICLOOOK (©