On a rare outing at the house with the children, Cecile had saved the Lunds’ youngest son from a runaway horse, chasing down the creature on her own horse and grabbing the boy by the belt just as the animal fled into a low patch of trees that would have surely decapitated the child. The couple had already lost two children, so Mrs. Lund was so grateful that Bertrand Lund rewarded Cecile for the heroic deed by giving her a job running his rather elaborate stables. Bertrand Lund hadn’t known his seamstress was such a keen horsewoman. Later, she purchased fifty acres from Lund and built a modest farmhouse, raising her daughter, Margot, alongside the Lund children.

In 1938, using the money she’d saved, Cecile left the employ of the Lund family and began a traveling equestrian show with her Chevrolet pickup truck and a trailer full of old horses. The horses had been a final gift from her employer and were either aging or misfits that Mr. Lund was planning on retiring or shooting. She let the word get out that she was looking to employ clowns and, later, trapeze artists, naming her enterprise Le Cirque Margot, after her daughter.

In those days, weeks before a circus arrived in towns like Charlottesville, Roanoke, Gainesville, Pensacola, Mobile, and Gaffney, posters went up using young Margot as the draw. The circus did two shows in a town—the afternoon matinee and the evening performance—before they broke down the tents and seats. Trailers doubling as ticket booths pulled up at the entrance of the “big top.” A ticket cost 75 cents; reserved seats were $1.25.

Thirteen when the circus was founded, Margot Cabot was becoming an expert horsewoman herself. Early posters in 1940 showed a teenage Margot Cabot hanging upside down on a white stallion, her right leg appearing to be the only thing connecting her to the animal’s back. The second wave of posters for the 1941 season featured Margot wearing a red leotard with a head of plumes, standing astride a white horse with the red lettering that would become the company’s logo: LE CIRQUE MARGOT.

The real Margot, however, made the circus look tame by comparison. A wild teenager who smoked and drank gin, Margot Cabot was also a great beauty. But the circus’s namesake never seemed to take to her birthright. At the age of seventeen, Margot left the circus—a turn of events that would have been funny since few people run away from the circus. She’d fallen in love with a driver on the demolition derby circuit, and nothing Cecile could say would stop her.

In the fall of 1944, after about a year on the road, things with the man she’d run off with seemed to go south. Abruptly, Margot returned to Kerrigan Falls and within the year had married Simon Webster, the founder of the Kerrigan Falls Express newspaper.