The Leopard Man's Story

Jack London

He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent voice, gentle-spoken as a

maid's, seemed the placid embodiment of some deep-seated melancholy. He was the

Leopard Man, but he did not look it. His business in life, whereby he lived, was to appear in

a cage of performing leopards before vast audiences, and to thrill those audiences by certain

exhibitions of nerve for which his employers rewarded him on a scale commensurate with

the thrills he produced.

As I say, he did not look it. He was narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered, and anaemic, while

he seemed not so much oppressed by gloom as by a sweet and gentle sadness, the weight of

and rushed with his head down, why, the thing to do was to stick out your leg. When he

grabbed at the leg you drew it back and hit hint on the nose again. That was all.

With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he showed me his scars.

There were many of them, and one recent one where a tigress had reached for his shoulder

and gone down to the bone. I could see the neatly mended rents in the coat he had on. His

right arm, from the elbow down, looked as though it had gone through a threshing machine,

what of the ravage wrought by claws and fangs. But it was nothing, he said, only the old

wounds bothered him somewhat when rainy weather came on.

Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as anxious to give me a

story as I was to get it.

grew old. And at last one day, sitting in a front seat, he saw what he had waited for. The

lion crunched down, and there wasn't any need to call a doctor."

The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which would have

been critical had it not been so sad.

"Now, that's what I call patience," he continued, "and it's my style. But it was not the style

of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin, sawed-off, sword-swallowing and juggling

Frenchman. De Ville, he called himself, and he had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and

used to dive from under the roof into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as you

please.

"De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as quick as the paw of

a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called him a frog-eater, or something like that and

maybe a little worse, he shoved him against the soft pine background he used in his knife-

throwing act, so quick the ring-master didn't have time to think, and there, before the

audience, De Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking them into the wood all

had the self-same trick of putting his head into the lion's mouth. He'd put it into the mouths

of any of them, though he preferred Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always

be depended upon.

"As I was saying, Wallace--'King' Wallace we called him--was afraid of nothing alive or

dead. He was a king and no mistake. I've seen him drunk, and on a wager go into the cage

of a lion that'd turned nasty, and without a stick beat him to a finish. Just did it with his fist

on the nose.

"Madame de Ville--"

At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was a divided cage, and a

monkey, poking through the bars and around the partition, had had its paw seized by a big

"--looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De Ville looked black.

We warned Wallace, but it was no use. He laughed at us, as he laughed at De Ville one day

when he shoved De Ville's head into a bucket of paste because he wanted to fight.

"De Ville was in a pretty mess--I helped to scrape him off; but he was cool as a cucumber

and made no threats at all. But I saw a glitter in his eyes which I had seen often in the eyes

of wild beasts, and I went out of my way to give Wallace a final warning. He laughed, but

he did not look so much in Madame de Ville's direction after that.

"Several months passed by. Nothing had happened and I was beginning to think it all a

scare over nothing. We were West by that time, showing in 'Frisco. It was during the

afternoon performance, and the big tent was filled with women and children, when I went

looking for Red Denny, the head canvas-man, who had walked off with my pocket-knife.

"Passing by one of the dressing tents I glanced in through a hole in the canvas to see if I

waiting for his turn to go on with his cage of performing lions. He was watching with much

amusement a quarrel between a couple of trapeze artists. All the rest of the people in the

dressing tent were watching the same thing, with the exception of De Ville whom I noticed

staring at Wallace with undisguised hatred. Wallace and the rest were all too busy following

the quarrel to notice this or what followed.

minutes later I was in the big tent, where I had overhauled Red Denny. King Wallace was

doing his turn and holding the audience spellbound. He was in a particularly vicious mood,

and he kept the lions stirred up till they were all snarling, that is, all of them except old

"Finally Wallace cracked the old lion's knees with his whip and got him into position. Old

Augustus, blinking good-naturedly, opened his mouth and in popped Wallace's head. Then

the jaws came together, crunch, just like that."

The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the far-away look came into his

"And that was the end of King Wallace," he went on in his sad, low voice. "After the

"It . . . it was . . .?" I queried with halting eagerness.

"Snuff--that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old Augustus never meant to

do it. He only sneezed."

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