from the first of May until bad weather in the autumn, its long train of yellow cars moved from city to city, preceded by advance men and bill posters. Its flaming twenty-four sheets had, at one time or another, adorned the boardings, empty barns and fences of most of the country. It was a complete unit in itself, from the cowboy band in their checked flannel shirts to the candy butchers; it had its sideshows like any circus, its "spectacular," popularly known as the Spec; it had its freaks, its Arabs, its ballet. It even carried with it a few camels and a half dozen elephants, in addition to its buffaloes, steers and its innumerable horses.
But it was, first, last and always, an attempt to show the Old West. It had its stage-coach holdup, its prairie schooner attacked by Indians, and mostly it had its cowboys.
They came in the spring from all over the cattle country, the southern ones sitting their bucking horses tight and using their long spurs only moderately, the northern ones looser in the saddle but apt to scratch "wider and higher." They wandered in, after the long lonely winter on the range somewhere, found good food and good housing, and between trials in the arena were content to sit on their heels in the Oklahoma sun and talk, or to buy pop and feed it to the bear in his cage beside the ranch store.
Tom was contented; his gregarious instinct was satisfied, the interest of the new life bid fair to put Kay out of his mind. He drew some money in advance and bought clothing at the store, a green silk shirt and yellow handkerchief, and a new enormous cream-colored Stetson. The girls—cowgirls and high-school riders—began to look at him and talk about him; when he was riding in the arena there would be a small gallery, ardent and applauding. He never looked their way, but he was intensely conscious of them. And one day he took a rope into the field and standing on his head neatly threw his loop over a running horse. He had to wash the dirt out of his hair later on, but the girls were thrilled.
He had misadventures, naturally. One day, carelessly standing too close to the pen of Tony, the bear, he felt a sudden clutch from the rear and left the seat of a new pair
