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smell of food and beer from the tables down
     on the main floor made her hungrier. Next, there was a man who appeared to be drunk,
     and his antics on stage made even her laugh, and then the curtain opened on the magician
     himself.
    He was
nothing
like tat. Not the least bit shabby. In fact, he was a little terrifying. If she hadn’t
     known his Christian name, and been well acquainted with stage makeup, she’d have been
     perfectly ready to believe he was a genuine Turk. He looked powerful and fierce and
     quite prepared to cut his pretty assistant into any number of bits on the least provocation.
    And he did just that—he seemingly ran swords into her, sawed her in half, chopped
     her into six pieces, sent her from one cabinet to another across the stage, and finally,
     made her climb a rope he managed to levitate right up into the air, from which precarious
     position she waved at the crowd and vanished from full view, leaving the Turk to roar
     with impotent anger and rush off stage, presumably to search for her. It was quite
     the performance. Katie was captivated. But part of her had been paying attention to
     every little move that the assistant had made, and she had no doubt, no doubt at all,
     that she could duplicate what the other girl had done.
    Then came a lady dressed up as a man who sang some sentimental ballads, and the dancers
     came on again, then two performing dogs, a lady comic singer, a dancing couple, a
     clown, the dancers, and finally a man who led the entire theater in singing popular
     songs, then everyone came out, took bows, and the curtain came down. Katie waited
     for everyone to clear out of the gallery so she wouldn’t attract anyone’s notice by
     pushing in among them; as she stood, once again with her back to the wall, she realized
     once the magician had come on, she had quite forgotten that she was hungry. Now her
     stomach contracted painfully.
    Well, she had gone without food for longer than this before. There had been times,
     before her family joined the circus, that had been quite lean indeed, and those suppers
     gleaned from the woods had been all that stood between them and starvation. Sternly,
     she told her stomach to behave itself, and edged along the wall to the exit.
    She made her way carefully and quietly down the stairs, trying to keep from drawing
     attention to herself. It wasn’t hard; the people leaving were all happy, having had
     a grand time, and some were even singing scraps of the songs that the last performer
     had led them in.
    It had been near sunset when she first entered the theater; now it was full dark.
     The lobby was brightly lit with gas lamps, but outside the doors, there was nothing
     but dark and shadows. She got outside, waited a little more for the crowd to thin,
     then hurried back down the street to what she had been told was the “stage door.”
     She was a little nervous about entering a dark alley all alone, but as she turned
     the corner, she realized she need not have been. There was a bright gas light at the
     stage door, and the alley itself was actually crowded; a laughing group of women was
     just leaving, all in a surge of skirts and feathered hats, and it appeared there had
     been at least one young man—sometimes two or three—waiting for each of them. She flattened
     herself against the wall of the theater to let them pass, and made her way toward
     the door, where the one-legged man was waiting, peering anxiously into the darkness.
    His face cleared when he saw her, and he smiled. “Ah, well done! I was afraid you
     might have had second thoughts about the job. Lionel is fearfully anxious to audition
     you, would you feel prepared to perform for him right now?”
    Her heart jumped with nervous elation. But although before she had seen the performers
     here, she might have wondered
why
he was anxious to audition her, now she had no trouble imagining the reason. If the
     common sort of dancer in this hall was all he’d had to