"Let's feel of you again." The circus man took hold of Pony and felt his joints. "You're put together pretty tight; but I reckon we could make you do if you'd let us take you apart with a screw-driver and limber up the pieces with rattlesnake oil. Wouldn't like it, heigh? Well, let me see!" The circus man thought a moment, and then he said: "How would double-somersaults on four horses bareback do?" Pony said that would do, and then the circus man said: "Well, then, we've just hit it, because our double-somersault, four-horse bareback is just going to leave us, and we want a new one right away. Now, there's more than one way of joining a circus, but the best way is to wait on your front steps with your things all packed up, and the procession comes along at about one o'clock in the morning and picks you up. Which'd you rather do?" Pony pushed his toe into the turf, as he always did when he was ashamed, but he made out to say he would rather wait out on the front steps. "Well, then, that's all settled," said the circus man. "We'll be along," and he was going away with his dog, but Tim Leonard called after him: "You hain't asked him whereabouts he lives?" The circus man kept on, and he said, without looking around, "Oh, that's all right. We've got somebody that looks after that." "It's the magician," Jim Leonard whispered to Pony, and they walked away. THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN A crowd of the fellows had been waiting to know what the boys had been talking about to the circus man, but Jim Leonard said, "Don't you tell, Pony Baker!" and he started to run, and that made Pony run, too, and they both ran till they got away from the fellows. "You have got to keep it a secret; for if a lot of fellows find it out the constable'll get to know it, and he'll be watching out around the corner of your house, and when the procession comes along and he sees you're really going he'll take you up, and keep you in jail till your father comes and bails you out. Now, you mind!" Pony said, "Oh, I won't tell anybody," and when Jim Leonard said that if a circus man was to feel _him_ over, that way, and act so kind of pleasant and friendly, he would be too proud to speak to anybody, Pony confessed that he knew it was a great thing all the time. "The way'll be," said Jim Leonard, "to keep in with him, and he'll keep the others from picking on you; they'll be afraid to, on account of his dog. You'll see, he'll be the one to come for you to-night; and if the constable is there the dog won't let him touch you. I never thought of that." Perhaps on account of thinking of it now Jim Leonard felt free to tell the other fellows how Pony was going to run off, for when a crowd of them came along he told them. They said it was splendid, and they said that if they could make their mothers let them, or if they could get out of the house without their mothers knowing it, they were going to sit up with Pony and watch out for the procession, and bid him good-bye.