The increased police vigilance and protection accorded has helped to bring about this happy condition of affairs. In the past it was often necessary to save life and property by meeting the attacks of roughs and rowdies with equal violence and disorder. Circuses expected and received little or no help from supine or frightened police, and learned to fight their own battles. It has never been charged that any circus was not fully capable of meeting force with force, and the lawless affrays of the circus lot would form a bloody narrative. No show in the old days dared venture forth without a squad of picked fighters, and if the occasion demanded the whole encampment was eager and ready for the fray. The war cry “Hey Rube!” had forceful significance then. The circus man’s favorite weapon was the guy stake, a shaft of wood used to support chains and ropes. An iron ring circled one end, the other was pointed enough to penetrate the hardest ground. Wielded by brawny workmen, experienced in its manipulation and skilled by long practice in the art of rough combat, the instrument mowed down the ranks of the enemy with deadly execution. Fists, knives and pistols availed nothing against the onslaught. Fear and mercy were unknown in those lawless times. Years ago if murder was done the guilt was not always fixed upon the circus employee. The hasty concealment of a body in the hay behind the cages in the menagerie tent temporarily hid evidence of the crime. In the darkness of the departure, there was a surreptitious burial. The lifeless form was hastily conveyed under ground where had been the circus ring and where the chances of discovery and disinterment were remote. Many a victim of savage circus warfare rests in these unmarked graves, and pick and shovel would solve the mystery investing scores of circus day disappearances. Particularly in the Southern States, soon after the war, were these sanguinary battles waged and with fatal results. In justice to the circus men, let it be said that their consciences gave no reproof and they felt no sense of moral guilt for the reason that they were never the instigators of riot, that they strove to quell trouble in its incipient stages and that they fought for their lives and their employer’s property. They knew, too, that public prejudice would prevent a fair legal trial and saw to it, if human ingenuity could prevail, that no serious charge could be laid against them, much less that of homicide. CHAPTER XI THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CIRCUS HORSE