The roll-over tiger sprang. Tommy fired the gun into her open mouth. She screamed and sprang back. But the others had not felt her pain. The others saw only their trainer now—and how many years they had waited for that! How many years had they sat on these pedestals glaring hungrily at this man, biding their time, doing his bidding, waiting for the time when they could smother him with their weight, rake him with their claws, feel his warm flesh between their mighty jaws!
And down they came!
Immediate death was not scheduled by fate in that instant, for a great lion jostled a tiger as they both leaped in the van. Blood enemies, personal enemies, they whirled and met with a thud which shook the bars like straws.
Tommy, in an agony of fear, pitched himself backwards, still striving to gain his feet. He faced about to shout imploringly at the menagerie men. Already spikes were being snatched up and fagots thrust into the cage. But it was slow, slow work, and death was only split instants away.
The warring brutes had touched off the bomb. Released from the constraint of whip and flame, others smashed into each other with all the strength of pent-up hate. Still others remembered the fallen trainer and strove to get at him through the press. The two brutes who had started it, intent upon each other, shifted their warring ground toward Tommy. In a moment they were fighting on top of him, paying him no heed, but blanketing him and trampling him and clawing him just the same.
The tent had gone crazy. Five thousand voices had emitted a single sound, and now again there was silence. The menagerie men poked unavailingly through the bars. Three fought together all at once trying to open the door and drag the trainer out.
“You fools!” screamed a shrill voice. “You fools, get away from that door!”
Tommy, through the haze of battle, saw a sight which came into his consciousness more acutely than even the shock of immediate death.
Somehow Jerry Gordon—the real Jerry Gordon, in the image of Little Tom Little—had fought away from his captors. And now, seeing his beasts tear themselves to bits, seeing his own desired body threatened in war upon the sawdust, about to be slaughtered, he too had forgotten his momentary identity. He belonged in that cage, and he was fighting his way to it.
“Use your gun!” screamed the real Gordon.
And in that instant the thing was again effected. Tommy could not have helped it had he tried. He had been called, the words were hot in his brain, and a moment later all the strain was done. For there he stood, safe outside the cage, staring in at Jerry Gordon, all buried underneath the savage cats!
Here he was safe. He had turned the tables again. There was Gordon in his rightful self. Here was he, Tommy—
Jerry Gordon, beneath the howling hell, blazed away hysterically with his revolver, straight up into the bodies of the brutes. But the bite of powder had only one effect. They had forgotten Gordon. They had been intent upon killing one another. But the sting in the bellies of the lion and the tiger made them leap back away from one another and see their original goal.
Jerry Gordon, beneath the howling hell, blazed away hysterically with his revolver, straight up into the bodies of the brutes.
Gordon tried to get up, but even he understood that he would never make it. His whip had vanished. His chair was a mound of splintered wreckage. And now, as he yanked on his trigger, his shots only infuriated the animals more, only drew their attention to him, only started their charge—the last charge Jerry Gordon would ever see.
The petrified menagerie men had brought up the tear gas, but so seldom had it been used that the one who threw the bombs did not pull the catch. Harmlessly they rolled around on the sawdust, trampled presently out of sight.
The pikes were not long enough, and the wielders showed no taste for going into that cage through the main door.
Safe outside, Little Tom Little watched. There was something all wrong about this, something horrible. He was the cause of Jerry Gordon’s coming death. He had done this to the man—and then he had slipped out of there, to remain safe and sound outside those bars. Coward! This was certain proof of it. Craven coward, that’s what he was, to cause another man’s death and then let him die!
But a midget thirty inches tall was only a mouthful for any one of these brutes. He would last no longer than Gordon. But he had caused it. He had done this thing to an innocent man.
It was too much to bear. Safety was nothing compared to these thoughts. With a sharp cry to Gordon, Little Tom Little snatched a torch from an attendant’s paralyzed hand and slid through the bars!
He was shaking so in his terror that he could scarcely keep the grip upon the weapon. But he made himself lunge forward like a fencer, straight into the face of the tiger which sprang upon Gordon.
The brute got the torch halfway down its throat. It halted and spun about, and leaped away with a yowl of pain. And the lion on the right transferred his attention to the midget. The lion sprang, got the torch in his chest, and went yelping for the chutes.
Another tiger sprang and another tiger stopped, bowling Tommy over and over, but running out instantly just the same. Battered, Tommy got up. Berserk with rage, he completely forgot his size for the first time in his life. Like a small javelin tipped with flame, he sizzled into the press of fighting cats around Gordon.
They raked at the torch. They screamed. They reared back and fell over themselves to get out of the way. And then they saw their fellows heading for the dark safety of the chute, and, nose to tail, the remainder of the forty plunged out of sight.
The arena was empty of cats. The dust hung in the clash of spotlights. The smoke of the torch wreathed upward to blacken Tommy’s face.
Gordon, lying on his side, groaned and turned a little. Then he was still. The bars came down, blocking off the chute.
There was no danger now.
Tommy let the torch fall and stared down at his small hands. He wondered if he were going to be so very ill. It was almost certain that he would be.
There was a clanging and a clatter and the door came open. But it was not an attendant. It was Betty, and her tinsel crown was all in disarray and her fingers were bleeding from tearing so long at the jammed safety lock. She flung herself down beside Jerry, feeling for his heart, trying to cushion his bleeding head.
Men began to swarm into the place. The din out of five thousand throats came like the sound of diving planes.
“Jerry, Jerry!” cried the girl. “Jerry, don’t die! You can’t die!”
His eyes came open and he stared dazedly at her.
“Jerry!” she whispered brokenly.
He tried to struggle up and got into a sitting position, shaking his head to get the fog out of it.
“Jerry, you were right about Schmidt. I did it . . . only God knows why! You were right, and you’ll hate me. But I’ll make it up, Jerry. Honest I’ll make it up!”
He looked at her for a little while and then took her hand. A doc came, opening his bag, but Jerry Gordon stood up and pushed him back.
“You think these cuts are anything, Doc? Hell, man, I’ve been sick for weeks and weeks, but this is all I needed!” And, limping, he let Betty help him from the arena.
Mrs. Johnson was struggling to get through the people who surrounded Tommy. He could not hear what men were saying, anyhow. He didn’t need what they were saying.
“I . . . I don’t know what to say!” said Mrs. Johnson.
“Why say anything?” said Tommy impudently. He fished in his pockets for a handkerchief, but all he could find were letters and small books. Incuriously he hauled them out, and not until they fell from his hand and he had to pick them up did he know what they were.
Suddenly a great light sizzled through him. He flicked open the first bankbook, on which was written “Hermann Schmidt.” He stared at the list of deposits, at the ten
s of thousands of dollars Schmidt had saved in three months out of a salary of a thousand dollars a month. And he stared at a love letter which began “My darling Hermann,” and ended “Your Betty.”
“But I hardly know—” Mrs. Johnson was saying. “After all, it is a criminal offense to steal—and our profits have been missing. . . .” She dabbed at her eyes. “What . . . what am I going to do?”
“Do?” said Tommy.
And there came Schmidt, all unawed by the scenes which had gone before, having in tow two John Laws, men without imagination or a sense of the fitness of things.
“There he is,” said Schmidt, pointing at Tommy. “He almost got away, but—” Then, seeing what Tommy had in his hands, Schmidt, always quick, snatched at them so swiftly that Tommy was forced to let go. “Now take him,” said Schmidt. “What he has done just now has no bearing on—”
“Give me that book and that letter!” shrilled Tommy.
Schmidt shoved him off and the two John Laws made a grab at him.
“Give me that book,” cried Tommy, “or . . . or I’ll tear your heart out!”
Schmidt was on the verge of laughing. But a sharp-toed little boot squarely in the shins turned the laughter into a yelp and a curse. Schmidt grabbed his injured limb and hopped for an instant. Again the John Laws made a snatch. But Tommy wasn’t in the space where their hands met.
Tommy wasn’t there. He was up on Schmidt’s chest like a steeplejack, and he had two thumbs which stabbed into Schmidt’s eyes like hot pokers. Schmidt knocked him off.
Tommy lit like a rubber ball, bellowing his battle cry, “Give me that book!” And again he was upon Schmidt.
Perhaps he had learned something from the tigers, or perhaps Schmidt looked small compared to a lion. Anyway, small fists, correctly placed, and small boots stabbing sharp, and a small target which moves faster than the eye can follow will always be superior to slow and heavy brawn. The John Laws gaped in amazement and got in each other’s way.
Unwittingly, Schmidt allowed himself to be backed by the attack up to the treacherous hoop which had already done its work. And, stumbling on its low rim, Schmidt tottered and went down. It was no accident that Tommy lit with both feet upon Schmidt’s solar plexus.
Schmidt gave an agonized wheeze and tried to fend him off. But Tommy had learned well from the tigers. And though he might weigh but a few pounds and stand but a few inches high, the point to remember was never to give ground.
And Schmidt, the third time the boots landed in his midriff, rolled his eyes whitely back into his head and went out cold.
Now that he was quiet, Tommy was able to retrieve the bankbook and the letter. One John Law had withdrawn so that the other could get their game, but now the other got a bitten hand and felt himself burned from the rear. He whirled and leaped away from the torch in Maizie’s hands.
Tommy handed book and letter to Mrs. Johnson. She could not understand immediately and did not really get the idea until Tommy roared, “All right, you two fumbling pachyderms! If you can get anything through your thick skulls, that’s the man you want—Hermann Schmidt!”
Mrs. Johnson looked from book and letter to the recumbent Schmidt, and then, as he was beginning to come around, she booted the red waistcoat once more.
“Get up, you thief! Get up! And as for you two, get that man out of here before I finish what Tommy started. Do you hear?”
Maizie was gazing at Tommy so hungrily that she almost missed the arena door. As he helped her through, she said in a choked voice, “I knew when you were you, Tommy. I knew. And when you jumped in through the bars—”
“Forget it,” said Tommy with a grin. “You were right and I was wrong. But I was right, too, you see, because . . . because . . . well, if the ghost of the Professor is around, I’ll bet he’s plenty disappointed. He did me a favor, Maizie. He showed me that I was a selfish fool, a coward. I’m ashamed of myself. I didn’t think of you at all when I started this. I won’t ever do it again, Maizie. Never . . . I promise!”
Maizie’s eyes were very bright.
“And you’ll come back and be satisfied to be—a freak?”
“No!” cried Tommy. “Who said anything about going back? Look up there, Maizie!”
She saw that they stood under the mike platform. She felt a movement at her side and, startled, saw Tommy run up the steps. She saw him tip over the mike so that he could get it down to his height and then, brazenly from the speakers, she heard his best spieling voice.
“Ladees an’ gennulmen! Whatevah may happen in a circus, the show must go on! And it gives me pleasure to present to you, for your entertainment, an attraction which we have brought to you at great expense.”
It was Tommy the Showman, Tommy at his best, doing what he had longed to do, realizing the ambition that had burned all these years in his frail but valiant little body.
Tommy was glowing, vivid, terrifically alive—and happier than he had ever been in all his life.
Maizie’s breath caught in her throat. Suppose that happiness should be taken from him! Suppose he lost it now, in the moment that fulfilled his long-cherished dream! It would break his heart if—
Bewildered by the turn of events, Maizie looked from Tommy to Mrs. Johnson, across the hoople. But Mrs. Johnson was looking at five thousand spectators whose attention was riveted upon a minute figure by the mike, a figure whose voice even more than his bravery, whose handsomeness even more than his smallness, commanded their every faculty!
And Mrs. Johnson, gazing back at Little Tom Little, had a look upon her face which clearly wondered why nobody had ever thought of this before. She saw Maizie, then, with questioning eyes upon her. And to Maizie Mrs. Johnson smiled and very slowly nodded her much wiser old head. . . .
The Last Drop
The Last Drop
EUCLID O’BRIEN’S assistant, Harry McLeod, looked at the bottle on the bar with the air of a man who has just received a dare.
Mac was no ordinary bartender—at least in his own eyes if not in those of the saloon’s customers—and it had been his private dream for years to invent a cocktail which would burn itself upon the pages of history. So far his concoctions only burned gastronomically.
Euclid had dismissed the importance of this bottle as a native curiosity, for it had been sent from Borneo by Euclid’s brother, Aristotle. Perhaps Euclid had dismissed the bottle because it made him think of how badly he himself wanted to go to Borneo.
Mac, however, had not dismissed it. Surreptitiously Mac pulled the cork and sniffed. Then, with determination, he began to throw together random ingredients—whiskey, yolk of an egg, lemon and a pony of this syrup Euclid’s brother had sent.
Mac shook it up.
Mac drank it down.
“Hey,” said Euclid belatedly. “Watcha doin’?”
“Mmmmm,” said Mac, eyeing the three customers and Euclid, “that is what I call a real cocktail! Whiskey, egg yolk, lemon, one pony of syrup. Here”—he began to throw together another one—“try it!”
“No!” chorused the customers.
Mac looked hurt.
“Gosh, you took an awful chance,” said Euclid. “I never know what Aristotle will dig up next. He said to go easy on that syrup because the natives said it did funny things. He says the native name, translated, means swello.”
“It’s swell all right,” said Mac. Guckenheimer, one of the customers, looked at him glumly.
“Well,” snapped Mac, “I ain’t dead yet.”
Guckenheimer continued to look at him. Mac looked at the quartet.
“Hell, even if I do die, I ain’t giving you the satisfaction of a free show.” And he grabbed his hat and walked out.
Euclid looked after him. “I hope he don’t get sick.”
Guckenheimer looked a
t the cocktail Mac had made and shook his head in distrust.
Suddenly Guckenheimer gaped, gasped and then wildly gesticulated. “Look! Oh, my God, look!”
A fly had lighted upon the rim of the glass and had imbibed. And now, before their eyes, the fly expanded, doubled in size, trebled, quadrupled . . .
Euclid stared in horror at this monster, now the size of a small dog, which feebly fluttered and flopped about on shaking legs. It was getting bigger!
Euclid threw a bung starter with sure aim. Guckenheimer and the other two customers beat it down with chairs. A few seconds later they began to breathe once more.
Euclid started to drag the fly toward the garbage can and then stopped in horror. “M-Mac drank some of that stuff!”
Guckenheimer sighed. “Probably dead by now then.”
“But we can’t let him wander around like that! Swelling up all over town! Call the cops! Call somebody! Find him!”
Guckenheimer went to the phone, and Euclid halted in rapid concentration before his tools of trade.
“I gotta do something. I gotta do something,” he gibbered.
Chivvis, a learned customer, said, “If that stuff made Mac swell up, it might make him shrink too. If he used lemon for his, he got an acid reaction. Maybe if you used limewater for yours, you would get an alkaline reaction.”
Euclid’s paunch shook with his activity. Larkin, the third customer, caught a fly and applied it to the swello cocktail. The fly rapidly began to get very big. Euclid picked up the loathsome object and dunked its proboscis in some of his limewater cocktail. Like a plane fading into the distance, it grew small.
“It works!” cried Euclid. “Any sign of Mac?”
“Nobody has seen anything yet,” said Guckenheimer. “If anything does happen to him and he dies, the cops will probably want you for murder, Euclid.”
“Murder? Me? Oh! I shoulda left this business years ago. I shoulda got out of New York while the going was good. I shoulda done what I always wanted and gone to Borneo! Guckenheimer, you don’t think they’ll pin it on me if anything happens to Mac?”