Almost before the first string of cars halted and while the clanking of the iron links still ran down its length like a code signal being repeated, a lot of mop-headed men in overalls appeared, crawling out from all sorts of unsuspected sleeping places aboard. Magically a six-team of big white Norman horses materialized, dragging empty traces behind them. They must have been harnessed up together beforehand in a stock car somewhere. A corrugated wooden runway appeared to sprout downward and outward from an open car door, and down it bumped a high, open wagon with a big sheet-iron cooking range mounted on it and one short length of stovepipe rising above like a stumpy fighting-top on an armored cruiser. As the wheels thumped against the solid earth a man in a dirty apron, who had been balancing himself in the wagon, touched a match to some fuel in his firebox. Instantly black smoke came out of the top of the stack and a stinging smell of burning wood trailed behind him, as the six-horse team hooked on and he and his moving kitchen went lurching and rolling across shallow gulleys and over a rutted common, right into the red eye of the upcoming sun. Other wagons followed, loaded with blue stakes, with coils of ropes, with great rolls of earth-stained canvas, and each took the same route, with four or six horses to drag it and a born charioteer in a flannel shirt to drive it. The common destination was a stretch of flat land a quarter of a mile away from the track. Truck patches backed up against this site on one side and the outlying cottages of the town flanked it on the other, and it was bordered with frayed fringes of ragweed and niggerheads, and was dotted over with the dried-mud chimneys of crawfish. In the thin turf here a geometric pattern of iron laying-out pins now appeared to spring up simultaneously, with rag pennons of red and blue fluttering in the tops, and at once a crew of men set to work with an orderly confusion, only stopping now and then to bellow back the growing swarms of boys who hung eagerly on the flank of each new operation. True to the promise of its lithographed glories the circus was in our midst, rain or shine, for this day and date only.