181 
American Agriculturist, September 13, 1924 
Androcles Jones 
By Ellis Parker Butler 
( Copyright, McClure Newspaper Syndicate ) 
{Continued from last week ) 
Orley Jones, nicknamed “Oily ” by the circus 
folk, is for some reason much disliked by all 
animals. This stands in Oily’s way when it 
comes to marrying the beautiful lion-tamer 
“Pink,” who is especially devoted to one old 
lion named Leo. She has insisted that the 
ceremony take place in the cage with all her pets. 
/“\ILY poked at the sawdust with his toe. 
v-' “Say, Mack,” he said, “she knows a 
preacher who thinks he’s a regular 
Daniel. The beasts and birds all love 
him to that extent that they cry for him 
at night. He’s willing to be inside the 
cage when he ties the knot. Nice little 
party, ain’t it? Me and Pink and the 
cats and the preacher all caged up and 
saying the till-death-us-do-part stuff!” 
He smiled a sickly smile. “Say, Mack, 
you know how them cats love me, don’t 
you? Death would us part just about 
the minute I stepped into that cage with 
them cats!” 
“You let me talk to that Pink person. 
Oily,” I said. “She’s a reasonable 
creature, for a woman, and I guess I can 
fix this up for you.” 
He almost kissed my hands. 
I had a long confab with Pink. She 
was a reasonable creature, as I had said, 
and before I had talked half an hour, she 
began to see that the marriage wouldn’t 
amount to much in the end if the big cats 
ate Oily before he had time to say “I do! ” 
“I’ll tell you, Mack,” she said; “I’m 
not pig-headed. I’ll say right now that 
when the tent-pole caved in Morris’s 
head, I made a resolve that if I was ever 
fool enough to marry again, I’d be 
married in the ring-cage with all my cats 
right there as bridesmaids and ushers, but 
Pm no stubborn jade. I like Oily too 
well to chuck him just because he don’t 
like my cats. Some of ’em are nasty 
brutes, Mack.” 
“All cats are,” I said. 
“Not Leo, Mack!” she said reproach¬ 
fully. 
“Well, I wouldn’t hardly call him a 
cat,” I said. “I’d call him a cottage 
cheese, except that that’s a rather wildish 
thing to call Leo.” 
“You mean thing!” she said, pre¬ 
tending to pout. “I ought to spat your 
face for that, but I won’t. Now about 
Oily: I’ll give up the cat idea.” » 
“Pink,” I said, “you are just as white 
as they make them these days, you are!” 
OHE smiled. 
^ “I know I am. Mack,” she said. 
“Maybe I like Oily, too. Maybe that 
has something to do with it. I don’t 
suppose,” she added as I was turning to 
hurry away and tell Oily, “that Oily 
would mind being married in the ring- 
cage if I had no cats in the cage? ” I 
I stopped short and looked at her. She 
was as sober as a judge. 
“Why, no!” I said. “Why should he? 
The cage won’t bite him, will it?” 
“Then it is all settled,” she said gayly. 
“We’ll be married in the ring-cage in the 
big top any night performance Oily 
chooses, just before the big cats are let 
into the cage. You can tell him.” 
I turned to go again. I was half-way 
out of the tent. 
“Mack!” she called. 
I turned back. 
“Of course,” she said, hanging onto 
the words as if she hated to let them slip 
from her, “Oily won’t mind having a 
cottage cheese in the cage.” 
“A—a what?” I cried, and then I 
remembered what I had called Leo. I 
went right back to where Pink was stand¬ 
ing. “Now, see here, Pink,” I said 
severely, “a joke is a joke. You know 
as well as I do that that is all that old Leo 
cat is—a hunk of cottage cheese, if that’s 
what you want him called; but you don’t 
want to worry the life out of Oily just 
because I called that brute of a Leo a 
fancy name. Leo may be cottage cheese 
to me, but he’s not that to Oily. He’s a 
lion to Oily—a king of beasts.” 
I saw then I had offended her, right 
enough, by calling the old animal a 
cottage cheese. It was one case of calling 
by a fake name that was a bad mistake. 
“I cannot imagine any man being 
coward enough to be afraid of being 
locked in a cage with a cottage cheese,” 
she said haughtily. “That’s my ulti¬ 
matum. You can carry it to Oily.” 
Well, I carried it and I give you my 
word it weighed a ton. I found Oily just 
where I had left him, and he looked up 
with hope in his close-set eyes. I had to 
blast it. I blasted as gently as I could. 
“Oily,” I said, “Pink is a fine girl. 
She’s going to give up the idea of having 
the dangerous cats in the cage with you.” 
Oily looked at me suspiciously. 
“She acted fine,” I hurried on to say. 
“There isn’t a mean bone in her body. 
Oily. All she wants now is to be married 
in the ring-cage—nothing in it but her and 
you and the minister and that old cotton¬ 
wool baa-baa lamb Leo.” 
“And I thought you were my friend. 
Mack!” Oily said in a tone that w r ould 
have made an iron hydrant weep. It 
made me rather hot. I had fought it out 
with Pink and argued with her and all, 
and this was what I got for my pains. 
I think Oily and Pink talked it over at 
full length after that. I dare say each 
was right from a personal point of view. 
Pink couldn’t see how happiness could 
result from the marriage if Oily was 
always to be in mortal fear of Leo, and 
pantomime, and he was the teacher; it 
was so good we gave him the big stage for 
his act and didn’t run anything else at the 
same time except the eight' elephants in 
No. 1 ring and the eight-stallion act in 
Ring 2. We had to keep the clowns off 
the hippodrome track while the stallions 
were in the ring, anyway, because the 
stallions are bad actors when the clowns 
are loose on the track. But Irish appre¬ 
ciated the stage privilege just the same, 
and he did all he could to build up his act 
and make it good. At the start he used 
any old property book in his act, but as it 
grew, he got particular about properties, 
and he dug up an old reading-book to use 
in the act. He was sitting in the dress¬ 
ing-tent one day reading this book when 
Oily dropped in. 
“Oily,” Irish said, “it’s a pity you 
came from the Bowery instead of from 
the desert. You might have pulled this 
stunt on old Leo.” 
“What stunt?” asked Oily. 
“What it says here about this old guy 
Androcles,” said Irish, and he tossed the 
book to Oily. 
1 SUPPOSE you know the Androcles tale. 
He was an old Greek fellow, and he went 
out into the desert, picking cranberries I 
suppose, and up came a lion with a thorn 
in its foot, and Androcles took out the 
thorn and off trotted the lion. Probably 
he forgot all about it, for some years later 
“. . . and started after Oily on the lope! ” 
she could not think of giving up Leo. 
The old cottage cheese Was almost like a 
brother to her, and I couldn’t blame her 
for feeling as she did about the old beast. 
If she did as she intended and took a 
farm in the mountains and expected Leo 
to roam around the place. Oily would 
have to get used to the lion or lead an 
unhappy and probably dismembered life. 
As Pink looked at it, it was up to Oily 
to learn to love Leo and live in harmony 
with him. As Oily looked at it the mar¬ 
riage in the ring-cage would be all right 
for Pink and the minister: Pink was the 
lion’s chum, and he would not hurt her; 
and the minister woidd be safe enough in 
the cage because Leo would be so busy 
rending Oily limb from limb that the big 
beast would have no time to pay atten¬ 
tion to the minister. But Oily felt he 
would have a disagreeable and blood- 
soaked time in that cage. 
That year we had one clown with us by 
the name of Sam Schmidt. His ring 
name was Shivers, and we called him 
Irish, and he had one act that was a 
hummer. It was a clown school, all 
he turned Christian and was pulled for it 
and the king said he had to be fed to the 
big cats on whatever was the Greek 
Fourth of July. So all the steady show- 
patrons crowded into the big top, and 
Androcles was slung into the arena, 
scared stiff, and the cage was wheeled in 
and a big lion pried out by the rough¬ 
necks. Mister Lion gave one yowl and 
started for Androcles, saying, “Here’s my 
breakfast-food all served on a china plate! ’ ’ 
But just when Androcles shut his eyes 
and got ready to be eaten in two bites, the 
lion stopped short, laughed a merry 
laugh and walked over and kissed An¬ 
drocles on both cheeks. -Tt was the lion 
Androcles had unthorned. Of course 
they tried to make the lion nibble An¬ 
drocles. They got pepper and salt and 
tried that, and then they tried to serve 
Androcles with powdered sugar. No use! 
Lion wouldn’t eat Androcles. 
Well, Oily read the story three times, 
and then he tore out the page and carried 
it away with him and studied it. It 
made a big hit with him. He would sit 
across the tent from Leo and read that 
tale and then look at Leo and wonder how 
it would work. Finally he came to me. 
He gave me the tale to read and I read it. 
“What dp you think of it. Mack?” 
he asked eagerly. 
“Well, Oily,” I said, “I don’t know! 
It seems sort of phony to me. You don’t 
remember Bony Harger—he was with us 
before your time; he was the man that 
pulled the ulcerated tooth for the black 
panther when we were in winter quarters 
at De Soto. I never in my life knew a 
beast to suffer as that panther did with 
that tooth or to feel better than that 
panther did after the tooth was out. 
That should have been a grateful panther 
—but the first chance he got, he reached 
out of the cage and clawed all the meat off 
Bony’s face.” 
“Leo is a naturally good-natured 
animal,” said Oily. 
“Oh!” I said, getting the drift of his 
meaning. “So that’s it, is it? Well, 
Oily, to tell you the truth, I think this 
Androcles stuff is pretty steep. You can 
believe it, but I can’t just see it. If that 
cottage cheese—” 
“I’d rather you didn’t call Leo that. 
Mack,” said Oily gently. “Pink don’t 
like that. I just thought that if, maybe 
Leo should get a thorn in his foot and I 
pulled it out—” 
“Well, it wouldn’t hurt to try it, 
Oily,” I said doubtfully. “Maybe it 
would work.” 
So we tried it. We started with 
thorns. Oily would go out into the wood- 
lot nearest the show-grounds and get 
thorns—any kind he could get—and I 
scattered them in the cage. Then Leo 
would walk around on them and never 
know there were any thorns in the world. 
I suppose that treading the hard floor of 
the cage had toughened the old cottage 
cheese’s pads until they were like sole- 
leather. So then we tried tacks—carpet- 
tacks and Swedish iron upholstery tacks 
and any kind of tacks that were guaran¬ 
teed to have sharp points and to be 
tough and business-like—and old Leo just 
ramped around on them as if they were 
the flowers that bloom in the spring. 
O ILY was just worrying himself to 
death over it. A girl like Pinky isn’t 
like a nun in a nunnery when she is with a 
big show, and there were plenty of men 
around who were willing and eager to take 
the widow curse off her if she would give 
them a chance. Every time Oily saw one 
of those would-be husbands talking with 
Pink he would simply writhe in jealousy 
and rush out and buy a fresh paper of 
tacks. The old he-cat seemed to be punc¬ 
ture-proof. But he wasn’t. He stepped 
on a tack and got it between his toes 
along about ten o’clock on a night when 
we were showing at a little place in 
Kansas well toward the end of the 
season. 
Oily was worn down to almost nothing 
at all by that time, and he hardly cared 
whether he was alive or dead. Pink had 
put the big cats through their tricks 
about nine o’clock and had gone back to 
the bunk-car on the spur to get her 
beauty sleep, and when I heard Leo yowl, 
I guessed what had happened. The 
sides were up on his cage, and the men¬ 
agerie top was down and the cage out on 
the lot, but I hunted up Oily and rushed 
him to the cage. We took down the 
sides. 
Leo was sitting on his haunches holding 
up one fore-paw and licking it between 
yowls. When he saw Oily, he began 
bouncing around the cage on three feet, 
ten times as mad at Oily as he was at the 
tack in his paw. Oily was as white as a 
sheet. 
“Go to it!” I said. 
Love or something gave the little 
narrow-eyed man more nerve than I ever 
imagined he could dig up. He must have 
felt he was going to death or mutilation, 
but he walked right up to the cage. 
“Come here, you brute!” he said and 
{Continued on page 183) 
