As soon as Little Chief had started on his scamper, I turned and walked into the town. The circus performance was not quite over, so I went to the door of the big tent and told the man there that I wanted to see the proprietor of the show on important business. I hadn’t a cent of money, so I didn’t expect to go in. But the man at the door politely invited me to enter and see the end of the show. For a moment I thought of accepting his invitation, but then I remembered that all the ranch-men for twenty miles round would be there, and that they all knew me by sight as “that wild gal of Campbell’s.” I didn’t want any of them to see me at the circus, lest they should tell of it when the search for me began. So I told the man that I would not go in, and asked him where and how I could see the owner of the show after the performance. He called a man and told him to take me to “the Lady Superior, in the dressing-tent.” I found out presently that all the people in the circus called the manager’s wife by that name, and the manager they called “the Grand Panjandrum.” In fact, they had a nickname of some sort for every one in authority. The Lady Superior received me as a queen might. She had just been riding around the ring in a red and gold chariot drawn by six white horses, and playing Cleopatra in what they called “the magnificent and gorgeous historical panorama of human splendour.” As Cleopatra, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, George Washington, Genghis Khan, Julius Cæsar, and a great many others took part in the spectacle, the people in the audience must have got their notions of history considerably mixed up, but at any rate the Lady Superior always seemed to enjoy her part, and particularly her gorgeous raiment. I had a hard time trying not to laugh in her face when I was first presented to her on that night. She was still dressed in her robe of flaming, high-coloured silk, trimmed with ermine and spangles, with her crown still on her head, and she was almost greedily eating a dish of beef à la mode with roast onions. But in spite of her gorgeous apparel and her defective grammar, she proved to be a good-natured creature, and she received me very kindly. I told her what I could do as a bareback rider, and she took me to her hotel in her carriage as soon as she had put on some plain clothes. I told her that I didn’t want anybody in that town to see me, so she drove up to a back door of the little tavern and smuggled me into her room. I remember that the tavern was a little two-story, wooden building, with the inside partition walls made of rough boards set on end so loosely that one could see through the cracks into the next room. But it was called the Transcontinental Hotel, and the painter had found some difficulty in getting the big name into one line across the narrow front of the building.