Black Betty

It started with a mama's worst fear, if not one of the oldest parental horror stories in the book: a young girl running off to join the circus.
Seduced by the four-eyed gaze of a two-headed woman, the seventeen-year-old born of bandito and "entertainer" became a performer, all dressed up in boy's suits and greasepaint. When she wasn't playing trick-rider, she was beneath the bleachers picking pockets. Five years of travel and trickery made for some of the most fulfilling years of the young scoundrel's life, if not the most lucrative. But her escape to a life in the limelight wasn't without danger. The more that circus grew, the greater its needs became. By day, "he" was Basilio the Bronco Buster. By night, she became Black Betty: a masked madwoman running with the rougher folk that worked behind the curtains, literally and metaphorically. The more they took, the more heat they had at their backs. Come the end of that fifth year, the curtain came crashing down at the Mexican border.