"Got the toothache," he explained. "Well, the lion-tamer's big play
to the audience was putting his head in a lion's mouth. The man who
hated him attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing
that lion crunch down. He followed the show about all over the
country. The years went by and he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew
old, and the lion grew old. And at last one day, sitting in a front
seat, he saw what he had waited for. The lion crunched down, and
there wasn't any need to call a doctor."

The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner
which would have been critical had it not been so sad.

"Now, that's what I call patience," he continued, "and it's my
style. But it was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little,
thin, sawed-off, sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville,
he called himself, and he had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and
used to dive from under the roof into a net, turning over once on
the way as nice as you please.

"De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was
as quick as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master
called him a frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little
worse, he shoved him against the soft pine background he used in
his knife-throwing act, so quick the ring-master didn't have time
to think, and there, before the audience, De Ville kept the air
on fire with his knives, sinking them into the wood all around the
ring-master so close that they passed through his clothes and most
of them bit into his skin.

"The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was