Perhaps it was not well to judge the circus without seeing it. "Because I am going," he continued, "and I should be glad of your company,--unless, of course, you are leaving for Omaha?" CHAPTER XIII ARMA PUERUMQUE CANO In the warfare that raged through the neighborhood it invariably fell on Ed Mason and me to support lost causes. As the two smallest, we were told off to represent the English at Bunker Hill. It was a revised and thoroughly patriotic Bunker Hill, for the English never reached the top, but had to retreat under a galling fire of green apples. As Confederates, we dashed boldly but ineffectually across the valley at Gettysburg. When the honor of the Old Guard at Waterloo was in our keeping, we did not die, but we did surrender ignominiously, and were locked up in a box-stall in Peter Bailey's father's stable. After that, the allied forces, consisting of Peter, Rob Currier, Joe and Charley Carter, and Horace Winslow, basely withdrew to inspect Auntie Merrill's pears (which were nearly ripe) and left us Napoleonic veterans to wither in captivity. It was not only in struggles among ourselves that we had to drink of the bitter cup of defeat. When we banded together against the common enemy, things were not much better. Take, for instance, the time when Peter Bailey decided to turn the stable into a police station. The stalls suggested cells (there were no horses kept in them), and the success with which the Old Guard had been imprisoned after their crushing defeat at Waterloo, showed the desirability of more captives. At first things took their usual course. Ed Mason and I were informed that we were a gang of cutthroats, burglars, highway robbers, pickpockets, counterfeiters, and other kinds of ruffians, and bade to sneak about the streets. We were warned not to run too fast when the police approached to arrest us, and told that it was "no fair" to make any determined resistance. When Peter Bailey, Rob Currier, and the others dashed out of the stable, clad (in their own estimation) in blue coats and brass buttons, we were to submit to arrest _ad libitum_. But after we had been dragged in and confined in cells a dozen or twenty times, it began to pall, even on the policemen. It had long ago become sickeningly familiar to us. To give the thing variety, new victims must be found. We were weary of the business and had ceased to feel any terror at the prospect of confinement. We never served terms longer than thirty seconds, for we had to be released immediately in order to be arrested once more. With only two criminals in the world, the policeman's lot became a tedious one. Both prisoners and police felt that unless something happened the stable could no longer a prison make, nor wooden stalls a cage.