“Don’t you lie to me!” he snarled. “The both of you done me when I was tied up with my circus clear’n to the hubs in mud. Mounseer Hercules of the curly hair!” he snorted, and ran a sneering gaze over the outfit. “She wouldn’t chase you very fur now. You took her, I say, a girl I’d lifted off the streets and made the champion lady rider of--and was goin’ to marry and thought more of”--another cautious look at the Squire, “yess’r, thought more of than I did of anyone else in the world. What did you do with her?” “Well, I was startin’ and she wanted to go along and so I took her aboard. She seemed to want to get away from your show, as near as I could find out.” The giant hugged his knees together and blinked appealingly. “It must be a bang-up livin’ you’re givin’ her.” Again Hiram disdainfully surveyed the equipage. “Seems as if you hadn’t heard the latest news,” broke in Peak, his face suddenly clearing of the puckers of apprehension. “She never stuck to me no time--honest to Gawd, Look. She only made believe she was goin’ to marry me. It was so I’d take her along. She ducked out with ev’ry cent of the sixteen hundred I’d saved up and run away with Signor Dellybunko--or whatever his name was--who was waiting for her along the road. Honest, I ain’t seen hide nor hair of her since, nor I don’t ever want to,” he rattled on eagerly, “and I’ve still got the letter that she left for me, and I’ll prove what I say. She said in it that she’d been plannin’ to do the same thing with you, but she had made up her mind that you wasn’t as easy as I was and she couldn’t work you.” Hiram’s shoulders straightened and he pulled his trailing moustaches with a bit of swagger. “She was out just to do someone so’s she and Dellybunko could get away with the stuff,” insisted Peak. “She says so in the letter, and you was smart and I was easy--that’s all!” “It’s the old army game, gents!” squawked the parrot. He cracked his beak against the bars of the cage. Hiram shoved his hands into his pockets and with a sort of meditative air of conscious superiority kicked another spoke out of the wheel. “Hadn’t you just as soon tear pickets off’n the fence, there, or something of that sort?” wistfully asked Peak. “This is all I’ve got left, and, honestly, I’ve never had no great courage to do anything since she run away with that sixteen hundred. I never had no great enterprise and ability like you’ve got, anyway. I just went all to pieces.” He scrubbed his raspy palms on his upcocked knees.