Adventure, December 1914 — page 168: what you’re looking at

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

166 left. As for Pitkin, he grunted and let it go at that. Nobody expected anything else from him. He was a funny fellow, dark as Mitchi was light, and wiry, with a sort of sallow skin and a great mop of black hair which he wore so long it curled up at the back like a duck’s tail. He had black eyes, or at least -black-brown, and a half-way discour- aged mustache. By his own tell he was a Russian who had left the old homestead on the jump, about a hose-length ahead of a Siberian excursion the Czar was getting up for some undesirable ‘‘cits.”’ Pitkin made a getaway and beat the police to the frontier. He’d been what he called a student with progressive thinks in his tank. He had a sort of slow, quiet way about him and wasn’t much of a mixer. He’d rather get off by himself and mope around half a day than join a friendly gab- fest or a game of cards. But he sure was studious when it came to using the ‘“‘juice”’ for funny effects. Oh, he was bright all right—only, to look at the chap, you wouldn’t ever have thought he had a live wire of feeling coiled up in himself. He just gloomed around and we rather let him alone, most of the time. But he was human under all his reserve —human in a wild, untrained sort of way, for all his being astudent. Dogs, you know, are said to be domesticated wolves, and Pit- kin was human the same way that a wolf is a dog. I fancy the Czar was right—the chap wasn’t safe to run with ordinary mutts like the rest of our crowd. We found that out later, too, and it all came about through the butterfly act. Being with Mitchi like he was, in trying out the act and working it up he saw a lot of the girl. As a matter of fact I don’t blame him for getting stuck on that pretty little kid. She was pretty, and game, and on top of that she was a sweet-dispositioned little thing and a prime favorite with our bunch. The upshot of it was that the Russky fell head over heels in love and wanted to get matried right away. Mitchi told him straight out that she didn’t care for him that way and that she wouldn’t marry any man unless she loved him. He took it mighty badly and grew more sullen than ever. He was one of those people who have to Adventure have what they want, no matter how they get it; and he wouldn’t take no for an an- swer. Every now and then he’d come back with his proposal. And each time he got the same answer he grew a trifle more grouchy about it. He used to go mooning around with his big eyes, black and mourn- ful, except when he was looking at Mitchi, and then they seemed to snap, and dance, and sparkle. I’ve seen him stand and eye her, and after a while spread out his fingers like claws and shut them as if he imagined he could grab her and drag her to him. He’d get a sort of hungry wolf-look on him at times like that. But Pitkin wasn’t the only person who had found Mitchi attractive. Before she left her own to go into Pitkin’s act, Mitchi had been a member of a Hungarian family. It wasn’t a family, really, like some of them are, but a bunch the old Magyar who ran it had picked up here and there and trained. One of them was a young fellow named Col- lins whom the old man had grabbed just before Barnaby signed the troupe. He was a mighty good aerialist, was Tom Collins, but instead of a Hungarian he was Irish, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a mighty well set-up figure. Before she left the act he did one of those flying swings and catches with Mitchi. One of the fel- lows would grab her by the heels and swing head downward with her. After a bit he’d let go and toss her to Tom, who was hang- ing by his knees from his bar. It was a trick calling for a cool head and a sure eye for distance, because the Magyar people worked without a net, and it’s a long ways from the bars to the ground. Their apparatus was placed ’way up toward the canvas of the big top, higher even than the top of the tower for the Butterfly number, and a miss would have spelled good night for Mitchi. Tom, like Pitkin, was human— in a more human fashion. He was a good old-dog-Tray sort of human, though his nerve showed up all right when it was needed and made him a bit of the wolf for a time. You can’t expect a man to go on catching a pretty girl in his arms twice a day for months, without noticing what sort of a girl she is. Collins got so he had a hungry look in his eyes, too, those days. He had a rather romantic respect for the girl, which made his love a wholly different thing from Pitkin’s. Just the same we folks MICLOOOK C©@