Joe Strong the Boy Fire-Eater | Page 9

just this. There are a great many more people in the main
top now than there are admission prices in the treasurer's cash box. The
books don't balance, as it were."
"More people in the tent than have paid their way?" asked Joe. "Well,
that always happens at a circus. Small boys will crawl in under the
canvas in spite of clubs."
"Oh, it isn't a question of the small boys--I never worry about them,"
returned Mr. Moyne. "But there are about a thousand more persons at
the performance which will soon begin than we have admission prices
for. In other words there are a thousand persons occupying fifty cent
seats that haven't paid their half dollar. It isn't the reserve chairs that are

affected. We're all right there. But fully a thousand persons have come
into the show, and we're short five hundred dollars in our cash."
"You don't tell me!" cried Joe. He saw that Mr. Moyne was very much
in earnest. "Have the ticket men and the entrance attendants been
working a flim-flam game on us?"
"Oh, no, it isn't that," said the treasurer. "I could understand that. But
the men are perfectly willing to have their accounts gone over and their
tickets checked up. They're straight!"
"Then what is it?" asked Joe.
"That's what we've got to find out," went on Mr. Moyne. "In some way
the thousand people have come in without paying the circus anything.
And they didn't sneak in, either. A few might do that, but a thousand
couldn't. They've come in by the regular entrance."
"Did they force themselves past without tickets?"
"No, each one had the proper coupon."
"Has there been a theft of our tickets?" demanded the young magician
and acrobat.
"No, our ticket account is all right, except there are a thousand extra
entrance coupons in the box--coupons taken in by the entrance
attendants. It's a puzzle to me," confessed the treasurer. "There is some
game being played on us, and we're out to the tune of five hundred
dollars by it already."
"Is there any way of finding out who these persons are who have come
in without paying us and having them ejected?" asked Joe.
"I don't see how," admitted Mr. Moyne. "If they were in reserved seats
it could be done, but not in the ordinary un-numbered fifty cent section.
The whole situation is that we have a thousand persons too many at the
show."

"Well, we'll have a meeting of the executive body and take it up after
the performance," said Joe, as he quickly prepared to get into his aerial
costume. "We'll have to go on with the performance now; it's getting
late. If we're swamped by people coming along who hold our regular
tickets we'll have to sit 'em anywhere we can. If we lose five hundred
dollars we'll make it up by having a smashing crowd, which is always a
good advertisement. I'll see you directly after the show, Mr. Moyne."
"I wish you would," said the harassed treasurer. "Something must be
done about it. If this happens very often we'll be in a financial hole at
the end of the season."
He departed, looking at some figures he had jotted down on the back of
an envelope.
Joe Strong was puzzled. Nothing like this had ever come up before.
True, there had been swindlers who tried to mulct the circus of money,
and there were always small boys, and grown men, too, who tried to
crawl in under the tent. But such a wholesale game as this Joe had
never before known.
"Well, five hundred dollars, for once, won't break us," he said grimly,
as he fastened on a brightly spangled belt, "but I wouldn't want it to
happen very often. Now I wonder what luck I'll have in my big swing. I
haven't done it in public for some time, but it went all right in practice."
Joe looked from his dressing room. He was all ready for his act now,
but the time had not yet come for him to go on. He saw Helen
hastening past on her way to enter the ring with her horse, Rosebud,
which a groom held at the entrance for her.
"Good luck!" called Joe, waving his hand and smiling.
"The same to you," answered Helen. "You'll need it more than I. Oh,
Joe," she went on earnestly, "won't you give up this big swing? Stick to
your box trick, and let me act with you in the disappearing lady stunt.
Don't go on with this high trapeze act!" she pleaded.

"Why, Helen! anybody would think you'd been bitten by the jinx bug!"
laughed Joe. "I thought you were all over that."
"Perhaps I am foolish," she said. "But it's because--"
She blushed and looked away.