Page:Weird Tales Volume 29 Number 1 (1937-01).djvu/28

ten cents, ladies and gentlemen. One dime——"

That kind of stuff. You've heard it in front of the sideshow tent next to the big top many times. But that's all there is to my game. I don't take any more part in the freaks' lives than I can help, and even that's too much sometimes.

It was too much that dinnertime at Scranton on the start west of our spring tour. Professor Brokar, whose real name is Welch, came into the counter dump where I was saving a quarter on a real meal, and walked up to me.

Welch is a big guy with a loud voice and something funny about his dark eyes. He's kind of red-faced as a rule. But he wasn't red-faced that evening. His pan was dead-white and he had the shakes like a man who is getting over a ten-day drinking-bout.

I thought I had the dope. Welch has been playing around with a kind of good-looking girl acrobat lately, see? Her old man, who's been an acrobat himself and now is sort of night watchman and general pensioner around the circus, don't like that so much. Welch is a married man. His wife is the bee-yu-tee-ful jane he hypnotizes every day; a girl who is good-looking at that, except for a dull look around the eyes.

When Welch comes up to me looking like he'd seen a ghost, I told myself old Wallace, the lady acrobat's father, had been after him. The old man's got sand. There's been kidding around the lot: Does Welch hypnotize his wife off-stage as well as on so he can get out for an evening with Celia? And does he hypnotize Celia so she can't tell next morning what happened and for how much?

Welch tugs at my arm. "Come on outside a minute, Joe. I got to see you."

"You're seeing me," I said, freeing my arm. I don't like this Welch so good. His wife's an awful nice kid, even if she is a little glazed around the eyes from too much hypnotizing. I think it's lousy the way he goes after Celia Wallace with everybody in the circus knowing about it.

"I got to talk to you alone," he says.

"Is old Wallace after you?" I asked him. "Or is it Bu-Jo, the dog-faced man?"

That's another angle in this Welch-Wallace thing. See? Bu-Jo, whose real name is Jim Blaine and who comes from some place in Connecticut, has been nuts about Dorothy Welch for a long time. Quietly nuts. Naturally he knows no girl is going to go starry-eyed over a guy with a door-mat for a face. He's never said anything to anybody but me—and only about two words to me. But I know how he feels about Dor, and I know he's burned up at the way Welch is running out on her lately.

"Cut the funny stuff," Welch snarls, wiping sweat from his pale face. "This is serious as hell. Come on out."

Well, Professor Brokar is one of the main cards in the show. His hypnotizing act packs 'em in. I don't want to get part of my meal-ticket nervous and upset just before the evening show goes on, so I beat it out of the restaurant with him.

As soon as we're alone he wipes sweat from his sick-looking face again, and says: "I want you to help me cremate her."

I burned my hand instead of lighting my cigarette.

"Cremate who? What in blazes are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about Dor, my wife. She's dead."

I dropped the cigarette untouched to the sidewalk.

"She wasn't dead two hours ago. She was very much alive."

"She's dead now." Welch bites his