If I Were You (5 page)

It was all a puzzle to the ex-midget but, overestimating his stride in an attempt to compensate, he again discovered his size and appearance and took heart.

What the devil! Wasn’t he Schmidt, the great Schmidt? Ringmaster of the Johnson Super Shows? Yes! No longer a midget, small enough to be trod under every foot, but a big person, and one of the greatest ringmasters in the world! They were afraid of Schmidt, that was it. Schmidt was their master, and now . . . now, ah! Wasn’t
he
Schmidt?

Crossing the lot, he heard a voice call, “Hermann!” in sweet accents. It was repeated several times, for he was not yet used to the name. Finally he realized that the call was for himself and he turned with a mimicry of Schmidt’s reserved air.

Mrs. Johnson had always been ready to laugh at Little Tom Little’s jokes, and now, when he saw her regarding him from her tent entrance with a very much different manner, he had to recollect himself very fast to keep from being startled. As yet he had not had to speak to anyone, and he was frightened at the prospect, lest his somewhat midgetish voice would betray him. With a guilty manner altogether quite foreign to the true Schmidt, he approached her.

Additional dismay came over him when he found that he was expected to make the opening remark. He recollected himself and twirled his mustache as he had seen Schmidt do so often, his eyes on the sky.

“I think,” he said with careful judging, “that we will have a very fine crowd today.”

“Hermann—”

Tommy was alarmed now. “And the acts seem to be in fine shape. I guess if every show we had was as promising as this one, we’d all be rich in no time.”

There came a change in her aged face and he welcomed it. “Things have been like this for the whole season without our getting anything but poorer. Have you some good news of some sort?”

“Ah . . . well . . . you never can tell,” he said vaguely.

“You’re holding something back!” said Mrs. Johnson with a kittenish air which accused him of teasing her.

Tommy regretted he had brought the matter to the front. “No. Honest, I didn’t mean anything. It’s just going to be a good day, I guess. Maybe,” he added brightly, “maybe I better be getting over to the big top to make sure everything is going all right.”

She looked startled, but he moved away too fast to be stopped.

“Hmm,” said Mrs. Johnson suspiciously.

Tommy felt unsettled. He ran a clammy hand over the unaccustomed bushiness of his
physiognomy
. In the protection of a snack stand, he seated himself upon a box and tried to collect his thoughts. The things he had begun to find out about Hermann Schmidt were not at all quieting, and though he had already begun to regret his swap, there was still too much glamour in the thought of being a ringmaster not to give the thing a thorough try. After all, he could last long enough to crack his whip in the main event, and after that he could let fate take its course.

Mealtime had robbed the lot of its attendants for the moment and so he sat on, waiting for something else to happen. For thought food, he used the fact that the attendants had been getting thin. That had been news, for pay had been regular enough. It amused him the next moment to think that he—Schmidt—would be the one to know the most about such affairs.

Presently the lot began to be popular once more and, feeling conspicuous, he started to move off, wondering where he should go, until it occurred to him that the
white wagon
, after all, was his. However, his few minutes of rest had spotted him, and promptly he was surrounded by men who had problems to be solved.

Although he had the routine of sawdust land at his fingertips, it made him very uncomfortable to be called upon for so many decisions at once. Joe Middler was taking too much “
strawberry shortcake
.” His
shill
wasn’t getting a long enough
string of coconuts
. The pup opera was minus its canine star, who had wandered too near a
gravedigger
’s cage, and it was either a new mutt or a dead hyena. The payoff was too high on a
juice joint
, and if
John Law
objected to the
kife
, what else could a guy do but howl? A
kinker
had a twisted wrist, and he figured Bill had had it in for ’im anyway since that dame in St. Looie had shown good sense, and he wasn’t goin’ to get a broken neck over any fool dame!

Tommy dispensed justice as best he could, and twice he turned down out-and-out bribes for a decision, much to the astonishment of the would-be bribers.

When things were at last settled and the show was in order, spots had begun and the place was humming with
thistle chins
. The spielers were clowning the come-in to what appeared to be a great crowd. People from far and near were already milling near the marquee and, all in all, it was a bright, hot, sweaty, dusty circus day, with bawling barkers all snarled up with the yelping horse piano and the jig band, and the constant hum of pleased suckers, with an undertone of lions’ roars and clacking wheels.

Tommy felt better. This was his element, and of this element he was now king. So delighted was he at the thought of at last snapping the lash in the
hoople
to the admiration of all, that he quite forgot to think at all of what was happening to himself, erstwhile Little Tommy Little, now Hermann Schmidt—in the flesh at least.

B
ut Schmidt had not forgotten anything, even in the soul-shattering experience of all of a sudden watching himself flick his crop and walk away, leaving behind a man less than thirty inches high.

Schmidt’s first impulse had been to dash after himself, crying out for help. But his coldly logical brain had told him that he would look very silly doing so. For Schmidt, as always, had sized up the situation as a purely abstract problem and was determined to solve it the best he could.

In the dusty emptiness of the sideshow tent, he had brought himself into a full realization of his strange and very disturbing predicament. In the
Black Forest
of his native land, he had heard such things had happened and, so far as he could tell, no kind fate had come along immediately to undo them. And the longer he measured his slightness up against his surroundings, the more he became convinced of the awfulness of his situation and the need to do something about it.

Schmidt recognized clearly that this extraordinary situation might well lead to an exposition of his former self. Therefore it behooved him, as soon as possible, to obtain the neat cache he had made and wipe out all existing records and letters now in his safe. This done, he would be less apprehensive and could, if necessary, grab a
red light
and be gone, though now merely a midget, with his gains, leaving the usurper of his true body to face the music.

There was only one disadvantage to this, and that lay with the person who had stolen his identity, for that person now had the only keys to the white wagon. However, his sudden smallness had not deflated Schmidt’s courage. He would wait for the usurper, attempt to get the keys. Failing that, he would carry out the rest of his plan.

And so it came about that when Little Tom Little betook his Schmidtly self up the steps of the white wagon and inserted a key in the lock, he was not the only one who entered.

As the midget slammed shut the door behind them, Tommy leaped a foot, whirling. From Schmidt’s malevolent expression, it was plain that something horrible was about to happen.

“You,” said Schmidt, in his now piping midget voice, “are going to do something about this!”

Tommy momentarily forgot his stature. Not unlike a midget, he had never been very long on courage when it came to physical conflict, but so engrossed was he with his determination to direct the show, if only once, that he made a stern show of it.

“Why should I?” he said, flicking his great black boots with his riding crop and staring down at the midget Schmidt.

“I don’t know the game,” snarled Schmidt, “but you won’t live long enough to get anything on me!” And, so saying, he made a sudden motion at a drawer and Tommy found himself staring at a very large gun in a very steady hand. For an instant he was very nervous.

Then, “Go ahead and shoot. This is
your
body—if you want to mess it up that’s okay with me.”

Uncertainly the gun wavered down, inch by inch. Schmidt was comparing their respective statures while he racked his brain for some means to outwit Tommy and overcome him.

Before Schmidt could assert himself again, there came a sharp rap on the door. Schmidt made as though to open it, recollected himself and stood back. In the blank darkness of failure, he could think of only one course: to throw open the safe and snatch up the file cases. Cramming his pockets full of letters and notebooks, he backed hastily into the lavatory.

The impatient rapping continued and the knob was rattled. Without understanding what Schmidt was trying to get away with, for there certainly was no egress from the lavatory, Tommy heeded the anxiety of those knocks.

Betty flung herself into the room. Her face alternately burned and went cold with the intensity of her emotion. She stood against the closed door, as though blocking another out.

“Hermann,” she cried, “he’s coming! He saw me leave here this morning and he’s on his way now! He’ll tear this place apart!”

“Who?” said Tommy blankly.

“My husband! Hermann, for the love of heaven, don’t stand there staring! Give me my letters and let me go! My letters, do you hear? He’ll
find
them!”

Tommy looked dazedly at the lovely girl and then at the gutted safe. In the forward compartment of the wagon, Schmidt evidently had the required epistles. And because he had only a faint glimmering of what this was about, Tommy made no move to open the lavatory door until it was too late.

Another had entered the wagon.

Like a thundercloud which blankets the land in darkness, Mrs. Johnson dimmed the wagon. There was no hurry to her movements, only vengeful promise. She looked the terrified girl over from the toes of her slippers to the tip of her tinsel crown—and then, with curling lip, she took in the man she thought was Schmidt.

“If I interrupt your tryst,” said the governor acidly, “forgive me.”

“No, no!” cried Betty. “You don’t understand!”

“I am afraid that I do—entirely too well. This accounts for many things! At least
some
of my people are faithful to me. When they told me that you had come here, I did not want to believe. But now that I see it with my own eyes—”

Betty was staring wildly past her across the lot. She made an unsuccessful attempt to get by the older woman, but was thrown back.

“Let me go!” Betty moaned. “You don’t understand! He’ll kill me if he finds me here!”

“And quite fitting, too!” said Mrs. Johnson. “I shall make certain that I see it. Schmidt, you have five minutes to pack and leave this lot. And if you ever try to get a job with another circus, you’ll find that I am still respected in the business—if not by you, then by other companies.”

“Wait!” cried Tommy, all befuddled. “What’s happened? What have I done?”

The old harridan bared her teeth and perhaps would have made a scorching answer, had not she been thrust aside.

The only sound in the stillness was spots in the big top, for the show had already begun. And that gay blatting of brass was much out of place in this atmosphere of murder.

Jerry Gordon’s bronzed chest heaved and his great muscles corded and uncorded as he gripped his blank gun and his whip. In his eyes was the look of his own cats intent upon a kill.

Betty threw herself upon him with a sharp cry. “Jerry! Jerry, you don’t understand!”

He spurned her with his boot, never taking his eyes off the man he took for Schmidt.

Tommy had begun to sweat. In all his career he had stood undaunted before crowds, had given vent to mockery and sarcasm without
stint
. But at the slightest threat of physical pain, he had always shrunk away. And now, forgetting his own strength, forgetting that he was no longer thirty inches tall, he backed hastily away from the anger which blasted him.

Jerry Gordon moved ahead, cold intent plain in his every move.

At the door a man yelled, “Hey, Mrs. Johnson!” But the suspense in the room was too much for her to forsake it even with a glance.

“Mrs. Johnson!” cried another voice outside.

Impatiently she looked around at the clamor and saw two stakers who, between them, held a midget helpless in their strong grasps.

“We found ’im droppin’ out of a back window,” said a staker. “You said to watch this place, and this guy’s got a mitt fulla dough!”

Tommy, as Schmidt, was not paying much heed to what they were saying. All he saw was Jerry Gordon advancing with the full intention of making hamburger out of him, and there on the steps his own true self, wholly unmenaced by a whip, gun and brawn.

It was so automatic that he hardly had to think to do it. Just
zip!
and it was over. Tommy was standing on the steps, once more thirty inches tall, looking with keen relief upon an astounded Schmidt being advanced upon by Jerry Gordon. Let Schmidt get out of his own messes as best he could! Let him be expelled from the camp! To the devil with being a ringmaster, anyhow!