Another of life’s irritations managed to try the soul of McClintock that morning. One of the more or less wild and untutored savages from the South Sea Island Village on the ocean side of the park came into the possession of a pint flask of the Demon Rum which had been washed up on the beach, and with no regard for the refined niceties of imbibing had swallowed the contents in a series of continuous gulps. The subsequent proceedings relieved the ennui and lethargy which always enfolded Jollyland in the morning hours before the gates were thrown open to the general public.

The savage gentleman—a thin, wiry person with wicked looking eyes from whose slit ear lobes, nose and lower lip there hung a choice collection of carved sea shells and brass rings, went into executive session with himself and proclaimed a Reign of Terror as the best means of establishing a dictatorship over the fellow members of his tribe, and the entire park as well. He started proceedings by invading his straw-thatched domicile and seriously damaging, with a well-directed blow, the facial contour of the companion of his joys. That lady, a most formidable party who had been taken unawares, retaliated in kind with such verve and energy that the self-constituted dictator left his domestic hearth with great suddenness and started on the rampage through the village street.

He seemed to have no carefully calculated plan of campaign and no particular objective. A general demolishment of all existing institutions, a comprehensive destruction of private property in general and a leveling of class distinctions appeared to be his vague aim. He leaped through a frame on which one of the natives was weaving a blanket, completely ruining the work of months; he overturned a shelf full of crude earthenware jugs which the potter of the establishment had contrived; and he playfully kissed the stout and principal wife of Mumbo Tom, the chief of the village. When that venerable worthy attempted to remonstrate in an outburst of outraged dignity, he tweaked the old fellow’s nose three times in rapid succession.

Passing out through the main gateway of the village into the esplanade he continued his ruthless assaults on organized society. Uttering weird and entirely unintelligible invocations to the spirits of his savage ancestors in a high-pitched voice, he vaulted on to the back of a patient-looking camel which was being groomed by a red-fezzed Egyptian from Greenville, Mississippi, preparatory to being ridden by visitors to the park at twenty-five cents per head. He dug his bare heels into the beast’s sides and emitted a wild whoop. The camel turned her head, surveyed him rather bewilderingly and started down the roadway on a brisk canter for about a hundred feet. Then she gave a little snort and heaved her humps convulsively. The social rebel from the South Seas shot through the air and landed in the direct center of a booth presided over by a gentleman from Nippon and devoted to what is known as the “Japanese ball game.” The results here were disastrous. When he picked himself from the clutter of broken china and glass with which he was almost entirely covered his head was bloody, but unbowed. He shook himself like some shaggy dog just emerging from a dip in the ocean, bounded over the counter and made for Antonio Amado’s wild animal show, pursued by a howling mob of attendants and special policemen who had gathered from the four corners of the park.

He burst through the entrance to the enclosure and ran along a passageway into the private office of Signor Amado himself. That ferocious looking worthy was, at the moment, delivering a philippic to his principal assistant, a pungent diatribe directed against the press, press agents, stupid park managements and the inherent injustice of mankind in general. At the sight of the wild-eyed and blood-stained visitor from an alien clime in the doorway, he passed in the middle of a sentence. His jaw dropped and his face turned ghastly white. He ducked behind a desk and mumbled a fervid appeal to the patron saint of his native village in Lombardy. The visitor looked around for something to destroy. His gaze encountered a half empty bottle of Chianti on a table and he sprang for it with the fierce avidity of a lion lea............