HE professional strong-man had legs like concrete towers, and his shoulders suggested the abutments of a bridge; but with them he had mild gray eyes and absurd Cupid's-bow lips which made his mouth almost a sweet as a woman's. This, together with a certain innocence of expression which betokened a naïve and guileless soul, was why they called him Baby-faced Joe. Just now Joe was engaged in the writing of a letter. His tongue was nearly bitten in two, and his mighty muscles ached from the strain of functioning all their strength through the mere holding of a pen. When at length the stupendous task was finished, every ounce of him was weak as—unwilling to trust the precious missive to the mails, and distrustful of a mother's prying eye—he placed it secretly in the tiny boxlike dressing-room through which Freda must pass to reach the bally-box.
This act of Joe's was consummated at the ghostly hour of eleven , when the building was deserted by all its human inhabitants save only the Wild Man of Java, who kept a sleepy watch which did not extend to marking curiously the concerns of Joseph Holmquist.
There was an eye, however, which did note the strong-man's actions and brand them as suspicious. This was the innocent, amber optic of Scipio, the five-year-old orang-outang. Affectionate, curious, sedate,—not yet come to those years of viciousness which invariably overtake his kind in captivity—the baby ape-man sprawled upside down before the monkey-cage on a cast-off automobile cushion, head hanging off, meditatively picking his teeth with a straw. But his whimsically inverted eyes were roving according to their habit, and missing not one detail of all that went on about him. Suddenly the dental operation was interrupted. One ungainly leg, extended lazily in the air as if in the act of grasping a limb in its native jungle, remained forgotten, but all the rest of him was absorbed in the perception of something entirely new to his child-mind.
Never had he seen Joe Holmquist with a letter before. Swannick, the manager of the show, often had letters that he carried in his hand and dropped in the funny little iron box at the corner, and others that he got from the man with the gray clothes and a leather bag, letters which he either tore up and threw away or put carefully into his pocket; but Joe Holmquist carrying a letter importantly as if it were one of his barbells, putting it into his pocket, then taking it out again and smelling of it,—Scipio's interpretation of kissing,—all this was new and unusual and required explanation. Therefore, sixty seconds after Joe went out to lunch, the young anthropoid had gone to the full length of his chain on one side, to possess himself of the wild-man's lance; and next, proceeding to the full length of the chain upon the other, he parted the curtains of the dressing-box, speared the envelope where it stood upon the make-up shelf and retired to the straw floor of his cage to consider its contents carefully and in private. Thus did Scipio tie an awkward knot in the web of the strong-man's life. But there were other webs and other knots.
An hour and a half passed. The daily exhibition of Gallagher's Congress of Freaks was getting under way. A mechanical organ wheezed laboriously, and the hoarse voice of the was heard in the land. As Joe posed, flexing his mighty muscles with an absently impressive air, his mild gaze wandered across the alligator-tank and the snake-charmer's den to the open street-front and Freda—Freda of the coquettish, drooping lash, the rouge-red, saucy lip, the bare and tapering arm and the short, spangled skirt. With gold-stockinged, shapely legs and ankles cunningly clocked and daintily crossed, and with bosom heaving gently from recent exercise, the girl sat in a chair on a platform some four feet above the sidewalk along which streamed the first instalments of a Saturday afternoon throng at .
When the strong-man's glance had found her, a look, yearning appeared in his tender gray eyes, and his absurd Cupid's-bow lips parted in a rapt and wistful sigh, a sigh which was interrupted by a slight start when he saw that while the round-shouldered bally-man harangued the crowd her act had gathered, the girl was calmly reading a letter—at first with approving interest in the dark eyes, but later with a scornful smile. Then the missive found mysterious lodgment somewhere out of sight, and Freda stared about with an air of boredom. Interpreting this, the obtuse angle of inquiry and of apprehension in Joe's blond brows became the acute one of trouble and of grief.