163 
American Agriculturist, September 6, 1924 
Androcles Jones- 
By Ellis Parker Butler 
{Copyright, McClure Newspaper Syndicate) 
A S a ma'tter of fact, his name was trained seals crazy. He was a little individual. I read a story some fellow 
not Androcles but Orley Jones, and fellow and about fifty years old, and his wrote and got published in a magazme 
and although he changed the names, any¬ 
body would know it was about Pink 
and Morris (we used to call him Grunt, he 
was always so complaining), and it had 
a lot of stuff about how Grunt lay under 
Hoggins-Weltz shows had an invariable rough-necks caught him just as he reached the big stick, crushed and holding Pink s 
method of hazing a 'newcomer—they the ground. Along in ’98 his hair began hand—you know, the “only a clown but 
" to come out, and he^wrote to an uncle of 1 rru " 4 ' 
S a ma'tter of fact, his name was trained seals crazy. He was a little 
not Androcles but Orley Jones, and fellow and about fifty years old, and his 
he was commonly called “Oily” for star stunt was to go away up in the top 
three reasons; “Oily” is not unlike Orley of the big top and fasten his little wisp of 
and made } a good substitute for it in hair to a pulley and slide down a long 
company where substitute names wire, hanging by the hair and whirling 
the rule. The old > hands of the around and around until a couple of 
a 
were 
called him out of his proper name. This 
had the effect of showing that the new 
hand was an unimportant bit of nothing- 
at-all and put him in his proper place at 
once. If his name was Mike they called 
him Algernon until he had writhed into 
a proper state of meekness or had ob¬ 
jected and been beaten into a right state 
of mind. Then his new handle was 
softened to Algy, and if he proved to be 
his in Vladivostok for some of this hair- 
oil. I guess it was one of the good old 
family remedies he knew about; anyway, 
it was so strong that if the Spaniards had 
heard about it in time they wouldn’t have 
had to invent garlic. 
The first time Yama Toy came into the 
big top doped up with the stuff, the eight 
trained seals were doing their stunt on the 
gave one whiff, said something that 
sounded like a seasick army and scooted! 
One of them went into a clown’s giant 
fake tuba like a snail into a shell, and he 
went in so far and so hard that we had to 
cut the tuba off him with a can-opener. 
His head was jammed into the funnel of 
the tuba so hard that one of us had to 
hold down one of the keys of the tuba so 
the seal could get a breath. Every time 
a good fellow, he might become Al, but stage between the two big rings. They 
never—as long as he was with the gave one whiff, said something that 
Hoggins-Weltz bunch—was he Mike 
again. 
Even Katie O’Hare, whose ring-name 
was Mile. Rosa Montmorency, w’as Susie 
to all connected with the show, and old 
Hoggins, safe in his office in the Metropoli¬ 
tan Tower in New York most of the time 
the show was on the road, was “Biff” 
Hoggins. The name had something to 
do with the fact that he had once owned 
a cheap Wild West show, a paltry imita¬ 
tion of Buffalo Bill’s outfit, and had thus 
won the distinction of being dubbed 
‘ Biffalo Bull.” 
The two other reasons for the name 
were that Orley Jones had a certain 
gentleness that might, by extreme stretch¬ 
ing, be called unctuous. “Orley, Hey?” 
said Codge Biggs, when he had asked the 
new man’s name. “Well, you look Oily, 
all right!” And the name clung, and it 
clung the tighter because Mr. Jones had 
a way—due to his New York birth—of 
saying “I had to get up oily this moinin’,” 
or “The oily boid gets the woirn.”. 
The little man, with his eyes set too 
close together and his general air of 
having served a long term as a sweep-out 
in a cheap barroom, joined the Hoggins- 
Weltz crowd at Davenport, Iowa. How 
he ever happened to be at Ddvenport 
was a mystery, but he was down on his 
luck and ready for any kind of meal- 
ticket, and when Codge Biggs, our can¬ 
vas-man, had knocked out three drunken 
rough-neck stakemen with one of the 
iron-capped blue tent-stakes, he took 
Oily and two other hungry-looking 
fellows to fill the vacancies. At Iowa 
City, Oily doubled with the camels, 
leading one of the tan-colored brutes in 
the parade, and the camel bit his arm. 
He had no luck with animals. If he 
stood in front of the cockatoo-cage for 
two minutes, the birds went crazy with 
rage. They seemed to take Oily as a 
personal insult of some sort, and screamed 
their heads half off. 
human after all” stuff. That story 
would make a horse weep, but it wasn’t 
any of it so. The big stick hit him on the 
head and he never knew what hit him. 
If he had known, his last words would 
have been “Sue the show! We can get 
damages for this!” 
As I said. Grunt Morris was a good- 
enough clown, but he was not much of a 
husband. Pink gave him all the weeps 
he deserved, and I guess she didn’t think 
much of marrying again until Oily Jones 
began to make up to her. Now, there’s 
another thing not many people know or 
think about. The kind of man that 
makes the big hit with the innocent birds 
and beasts, like I mentioned, don’t stand 
one-two-three with the ladies, as a 
general rule. You can take that or leave 
it, but it is so. Maybe the dames have 
an inside liking for killers—soldiers and 
Another Butler Story, by Request! 
E LLIS PARKER BUTLER, one of the best known American 
humorist writers, made a hit with A. A. readers recently 
when they read his story “The Cave Men.” “Give us more 
Butler!” came the request from our subscribers, so we have 
succeeded in securing another characteristic Butler story, 
this time of life in the circus. You all remember how the old 
Greek Androcles earned the friendship of a lion by drawing 
a thorn from his paw. The hero of this story tries the same 
experiment, but the result is not, perhaps, quite so satisfac¬ 
tory. You will find as many laughs in this as in “The Cave 
Men.” 
Some days one cat will be cross and all 
the rest will behave like little angels; 
another day they will all be cantankerous; 
another day they will all be good. Once 
in a while you’ll find a cat that is good all 
the time. 
1 REMEMBER when I was a kid on my 
father’s farm we had a bull that was 
so sweet-tempered a chipmunk could push 
it out of the way. Pink had one cat like 
that. It was a big he-lion with a mat of 
beard and mane and big yellow eyes and 
the sweetest temper any brute ever had. 
I’ll tell you what he was like: he was like 
one of those big, heavy-haired orators 
they grow out West, who stand up on a 
platform and shake their manes and howl 
and look grand and ferocious and then go 
home and eat half a soup-plate of milk 
toast and call it a full meal. That was 
like old Leo. He was a star poser. He 
was the noblest cat I ever saw, did the 
lion-rampant act to perfection, yowled 
like a bloodthirsty hyena, and never even 
acted annoyed except when he had eaten 
too many chocolate creams and felt 
satiated. I believe that if he hadn’t been 
ashamed to be seen doing it, he would 
have eaten hay instead of meat. 
All this did not make Pink dislike Leo. 
He was the darling of her heart. You 
don’t require a collie dog to be ill- 
tempered in order to love it, and neither 
was it necessary for Leo to be ferocious to 
keep Pink’s love. She just about wor¬ 
shipped that dear old lion. She used to 
call him her big boy and her big baby and 
other pet names, and she always said that 
when she retired from the sawdust ring 
she would take Leo with her, no matter 
what happened to her other big cats. I 
told her a couple of things about Man¬ 
hattan janitors and what they would 
think of a lap-dog like Leo, who was as big 
as a pony and looked as fierce as he wasn’t, 
but Pinky said she had about as much use 
for a flat in Manhattan as for a sub¬ 
marine, and that when she retired she 
meant to have a nice little farm on a 
; Catskill hillside with a good timber-lot 
where Leo could roam around—and eat 
beech-nuts, I suppose and lie down with 
T here must 
have been something 
about Oily Jones that had this effect on 
all the birds and beasts. I don’t know 
what it was, and neither did Oily. Later 
on we tried every way possible to dis¬ 
cover what it was; but that comes later 
in this storv. It wasn’t sophisticated 
Y OU may have read of men who can go 
into the woods and sit down, and in a 
few minutes squirrels come up and kiss 
them, and dicky-birds come and roost on 
their shoulders, and beavers and badgers 
and things come and purr against their 
legs. Oily was just as different from this 
as he could be. Even pink-eyed rabbits 
tried to bite him. They say the reason 
some men make such a hit with animals 
is because they are innocent of heart and 
mind. If that is so. Oily must have been 
the toughest kind of a sophisticated 
criminal. 
the seal drew a deep, frightened breath big-game tote, and sueh always 
Mow the Si"whoever Fhear tot gfveTt u'p* I've got other things to figure fierce fo^ company teltofa .-M tat! 
note now I can smell Yama Toy's hair-oil. out, at atow-season when gjf £ It^h 
times twice, and then some. 
Anyway, Oily seemed to stand in 
pretty well with all the dames in the 
show—Pink, especially. Come to think 
of it, he must have stood in with me 
pretty well, too, although I never thought 
of that until this minute! Come to think 
criminality. ' Along about the time when of it I did push him along pretty fast 
Oily was dying of love, and when he used rushing him up from canvas-man to what a tat She tad a .Mg lotot Drown n 
to tell me all his troubles he told me with you might call my «■«! » ^tlTon top P Tit tot made her 
tears m his eyes he had never done a halt a season, out uuy was a nanay & - r - - , , 
naughty deed, and I believe him. Maybe man, and he could get things done. He 
it was just that the animals did not like was oily, that way. He had a brain, and 
his looks. Perhaps they did not like his he greased the trouble-paths with it so 
eyes. We tried to figure out that it was things slid easily. 
’ ‘ ’ ’ I’ve got to drive around the block like, 
and get back to Pink Morris. Maybe 
you’ll bring her to mind without my 
telling you any more if I say her ring 
name is Princess Cara. Yes, I thought 
his scent—every man and animal has a 
distinctive one, as bloodhound-owners 
know. And we tried diet. Oily was 
fond of onions, and we thought. maybe 
that was it. He went without onions for 
weeks, and it made no difference. We 
tried rubbing cotton on Oily and then 
performance was all it was cracked up to 
be on the big posters. She had all the 
big-cat stunts and some she had invented 
on her own hook, and when she stepped 
into the cage in her short spangled skirt 
and her ribboned sandals, with her short 
bull-whip in one hand and a reliable 
forty-four in the other, she always made 
a hit. She had a big lot of brown hair and 
look like a real queen of beauty, and she 
was all that and more. She had a heart 
of solid gold. 
I don’t know just when Oily made 
himself prominent in her notice first. I 
think the first she ever thought of him 
was with annoyance. He worried her 
Leo terribly. Leo had the same feelings 
toward Oily that every other animal had. 
you'd remember her! She was just to 
best little handler of the big cats we ever 
putting the cotton in the cages with the had, and one of the best the world has 
brutes. You know how a dog or a cat 
or any other animal will go for anything 
scented with a scent they don’t like. 
That was one reason Oily was assigned Well, they paid no attention to cotton 
Nothing makes such scented with Oily. They just did not 
to the animal-tent, 
a hit with the crowd as to have the 
animals ,yowl and jump at the cage-bars 
and show meanness, and all Oily had to do 
was to walk around inside the tent to 
have a wave of yowls follow him. Even 
the guinea-pigs in the Happy Family 
would try to bite the cage-bars when they 
saw Oily. And it takes something to 
make a guinea-pig show ferocity. Oily 
was the only thing I ever knew that could 
do it. 
We had a Jap with the show once who 
used a kind of hair-oil that drove the 
like him. During those days Oily just 
moped around the show and didn t care 
whether he lived or died. It was on 
account of Pink. 
This Pink person was a widow, and a 
young one, and one of the finest girls with 
the show. I knew her before she married 
Morris, who was her first husband and 
who was killed in the big blow-down in 
Kansas in ’ll, and she always was just 
about as fine as they make them. Morris 
I had never cared much for. He was a 
good enough clown but a sour-tempered 
produced. There’s a lot of bunk about 
handling the big cats, and there s a lot 
that isn’t bunk. Those who think any¬ 
one like Pink is in mortal danger every 
minute she is in the big cage have it all 
wrong, and those who think the trainers 
are as safe in the cage with the big cats 
as they would be at home in bed are just 
as wrong. You get one of the trainers to 
strip—get any of them to strip—and you 
won’t find one that is not scarred up. 
The reason Pink wears her fleshings to her 
wrists is because one arm is so marred the 
public would turn sick to see it. One of 
the cats clawed her there. The truth 
is that the cats have their days. Some 
days they are as sweet as pigeons, and 
again they are as mean as rattlesnakes. 
dear old thing would just yowl with rage. 
He would bounce around the cage and 
yawp and carry on in an awful manner. 
He would jump at the bars and bite them 
and get all worked up and nervous. He 
would get so mad he would fairly weep 
and the tears would run down his jowls, 
and Pinky said it upset him so that he 
would be like another lion for an hour 
afterward. 
All this had one effect; it made Pinky 
notice Oily. They had one big row over 
it, and then Oily came and begged her 
pardon like a little man. From then on 
they were together a lot. Probably Oily 
fell in love when she gave him that rake- 
over. At any rate, we all knew, before 
long, that Oily was head over heels and 
that Pinky was favorably inclined. We 
{Continued on page 165 ) 
