"Boss," said Red Hoss fervently, "I gits you."
Two nights later the greater disaster befell. It was a thick, drizzly, muggy night, when the foreground of one's perspective was blurred by the murk and when there just naturally was not any background at all. Down by the Richland House a strange white man wearing a hand-colored mustache and a tiger-claw watch charm hailed Red Hoss. This person desired to be carried entirely out of town, to the south yards of the P. T. & A. Railroad, where Powers Brothers' Carnival Company was detraining from its cars with intent to pitch camp in the suburb of Mechanicsville hard by and furnish the chief attractions for a three days' street fair to be given under the auspices of the Mechanicsville lodge of Knights of Damon.
After they had quit the paved streets, Red Hoss drove a bumpy course diagonally across many switch spurs, and obeying instructions from his fare brought safely up alongside a red-painted sleeping car which formed the head end of the show train where it stood on a siding. But starting back he decided to skirt alongside the track, where he hoped the going might be easier. As he backed round and started off, directly in front of him he made out through the encompassing mists the dim flare of a gasoline torch, and he heard a voice uplifted in pleading:
"Come on, Lena! Come on, Baby Doll! Come on out of that, you Queenie!"
Seemingly an unseen white man was urging certain of his lady friends to quit some mysterious inner retreat and join him where he stood; all of which, as Red Hoss figured it, was none of his affair. Had he known more he might have moved more slowly; indeed might have stopped moving altogether. But--I ask you--how was Red Hoss to know that the chief bull handler for Powers Brothers was engaged in superintending the unloading of his large living charges from their traveling accommodations in the bull car?
There were three of these bulls, all of them being of the gentler sex. Perhaps it might be well to explain here that the word "bull," in the language of the white tops, means elephant. To a showman all cow elephants are bulls just as in a mid-Victorian day, more refined than this one, all authentic bulls were, to cultured people, cows.