Later it would be time to find suitable lodgings. The more alluring of the pay-as-you-enter attractions were yet to be tested. By way of a beginning he handed over a ten-cent piece to a swarthy person behind a blue pedestal, and mounting eight wooden steps to a platform he passed behind a flapping canvas curtain. There, in company with perhaps a dozen other patrons, he leaned over a wooden rail and gazed downward into a shallow tarpaulin-lined den where a rather drowsy-appearing, half-nude individual, evidently of Ethiopian antecedents, first toyed with some equally drowsy specimens of the reptile kingdom and then partook sparingly and with no particular avidity of the tail of a very small garter snake. Chance, purely, had led Gash Tuttle to select the establishment of Osay rather than that of the Educated Ostrich, or the Amphibious Man, or Fatima the Pearl of the Harem, for his first plunge into carnival pleasures; but chance is the hinge on which many moving events swing. It was so in this instance. Osay had finished a light but apparently satisfying meal and the audience was tailing away when Gash Tuttle, who happened to be the rearmost of the departing patrons, felt a detaining touch on his arm. He turned to confront a man in his shirtsleeves--a large man with a pock-marked face, a drooping moustache and a tiger-claw watch charm on his vest. It was the same man who, but a minute before, had delivered a short yet flattering discourse touching the early life and manners and habits of the consumer of serpents--in short, the manager of the show and presumably its owner. "Say!" began this gentleman. "Say yourself," flashed Gash, feeling himself on safe ground once more; "your mouth's open." The man grinned in appreciation of the thrust--a wincing grin, as though owning himself beaten in the very first sally. "All right, old scout," he said jovially, "I will. Come back here where nobody can't hear me while I say it." He drew the younger man to the inner side of the platform and sank his voice to a confidential rumble. "Soon as I seen you comin' in I says to myself, 'That's the party I'm lookin' for.' You don't live here in this town, do you?" Gash Tuttle shook his head and started to speak, but the big man was going on. Plainly he was not one to waste time in idle preliminaries: "That's the way I doped it. You're in the profesh, ain't you? You've been workin' this street-fair game somewhere, ain't you?" "No," Gash Tuttle confessed, yet somehow at the same time feeling flattered. "Well, that just goes to show how a guy can be fooled," said the Osay man. "I'd 'a' swore you was on to all the ropes in this biz. Anyway, I know just by the cut of your jib you're the party I'm lookin' for. That's why I braced you. My name's Fornaro; this here is my outfit. I want somebody to throw in with me--and I've made up my mind you're the party I'm lookin' for."