Lloyd ran back to the stables and the showman slipped into the tent, where his wives were debating in their personal sign language and the Ambassadors from Mars were clicking wildly. “Well,” Mulrooney told himself. “At least the boy will be safer with me than roaming the streets.”

Lloyd returned that afternoon as ordered. In but an hour he mastered the speech the showman had composed and a host of variations, all the intricacies of the mind-reading code, and some simple ways of integrating his calculating and spelling abilities-along with various musical improvisations on the mouth organ, squeezebox, and an old dimpled bugle that the showman had kept from his own boyhood. Lloyd had not had much direct exposure to music; he had been too busy with his inventions. But he quickly, intuitively grasped the system of music, and if his instrumental technique was raw that actually worked in his favor as far as performance theatrics went-or so Mulrooney thought. On the squeezebox, he became an imp of melody with astounding rapidity. “Damn me if that boy couldn’t be a musical genius if he turned his mind to it,” Mulrooney told his wives.

Then Lloyd had to decant a large cask of transparent liquid that gave off fumes that brought tears to his eyes into a series of little bottles with corks in the end. The magical-memory and mind-strengthening tonic was 140-proof alcohol laced with juniper and spearmint and could not have been more effective at clouding memory, although Mulrooney dubbed it LUCID! (He was particular about the exclamation mark.)

While working to fill the bottles, Lloyd listened to Urim and Thummim, and the more certain he became that, as freakish as they were, there was something about their language that was beautiful and subtle.

The showman retained his reservations about putting the boy “up on the stump,” and if Mabel Peanut, Lloyd’s sometime teacher back in Zanesville, could have seen him in St. Louis, performing on the medicine-show wagon, she would have felt confirmed in all her predictions about the family’s errant ways.