1 Scaredy-Cat A train approached the city from the west The steam engine’s giant wheels turned as smoke trailed behind blacker than the night sky It was May 15 1925 The train had pulled out of Buffalo New York fourteen hours late due to a faulty hitch between the last two cars A new hitch was supposed to arrive but it never did So the train’s owner Josiah Wasserman insisted that the faulty one be welded together so that the circus could move on Josiah Wasserman was the proprietor of Wasserman’s Spectacular Circus and Animal Menagerie The performers had finished in Buffalo and were supposed to move on to Toronto But because of the delay Mr Wasserman had decided to skip the city and head to the next destination Montreal The people of Toronto would be deprived of the Wasserman circus with its acrobats clowns elephants bears and other exotic beasts The stationmaster at Union Station had already been notified that the train would not stop The steam engine did not need to slow down much as it approached Most of the circus employees were asleep in their bunks But the animals which had been confined too long and had missed a feeding whined and howled in their cages One employee couldn’t sleep His name was Sam Hibbins the
assistant animal trainer He had once been the head trainer but the owner felt that Sam was too soft on the animals and so he demoted him Besides Sam was getting old Now he lay on a straw mattress that he had taken from his bunk his dachshund Daisy beside him He had placed the mattress beside a cage in the last car of the train After this car there was only the caboose Sam never slept well anyway but on this particular night he was worrying about the lion in the cage next to him This male lion was the youngest of five owned by the Wasserman circus He was just about grown with a magnificent and nearly full mane a handsome face and a powerfully muscular if still slim body He looked every inch the king of the beasts In fact he was a scaredy-cat The lion had been born at the circus’s winter home in Florida only to be rejected by his mother Sam had brought the tiny cub into his own bed to keep warm He sang to him and held a baby’s bottle to his hungry mouth The cub was a particularly sweet-natured animal so Sam named him Sunshine or Sunny Not surprisingly Sunny became attached to the old trainer so attached that he wouldn’t let another human come near That included the lion tamer called Fearless Fotham a sour-tempered man with a handlebar moustache and a drinking problem Sunny was even more afraid of other lions When Sunny was old enough Fearless Fotham brought him into the ring cracking his whip over the young lion’s head to make him rise up But Sunny jumped off his stool in fear banging into the mature male lion next to him who bit Sunny on the ear Sunny howled The other lions began to roar Fearless Fotham
smacked Sunny on the thigh with his club Sunny dived to the ground causing the lions on either side to snarl as they swiped at him with their claws The scene might have ended in bloodshed if Sam Hibbins hadn’t risked his own life by jumping into the ring and separating the lions with stern words He led Sunny out of the ring while Fearless Fotham cursing loudly used his whip to keep the others in place This near-catastrophe happened in Buffalo and it was the reason that Sunny was traveling in his own car Josiah Wasserman was threatening to sell the animal to a zoo in Ohio Sam didn’t want Sunny to languish in some dismal cage for the rest of his life so he asked for another chance He had a bed for himself and Daisy in the same car so that the animal would stay calm As the train approached Toronto Sam opened the car door to let in the early summer air The dachshund yawned and shuddered in her sleep But the lion poor creature paced in the swaying cage moaning unhappily What thought Sam was he going to do with Sunny Just then came the high whine of metal under stress and then a sudden lurch What the Sam said The faulty hitch had broken again The train was less than ten miles from Toronto’s downtown Union Station The weld cracked the hitch broke in two and the last car along with the caboose was released from the rest of the train The steam engine surged forward while the separated car and caboose began to slow down The car tilted and the wheels jumped off the
