(Action Comics I #254) - Linda Lee spotted an army space rocket whose steering mechanism had malfunctioned, and after changing into Supergirl she righted it’s course. Miss Hart introduced the Midvale orphans to Mom and Dad Dale, who were looking for a child to adopt. Linda wasn’t ready to be adopted, fearing that if she was her new parents would find out she was Supergirl, and superman had given her orders to keep her existence a secret. The Dales chose Linda, and drove her to the traveling circus they operated. They had a strong girl act put together for Linda, and during her first performance she lifted a large barbell that was actually made of hollow wood and won a tug-of-war contest with an elephant thanks to an invisible thread from the rope being connected to a winch. Linda realized her act was in service of a grift; the Dales sold the excited crowd a Power Tonic they claimed would make them as strong as Linda. Linda tried to think up a plan to expose the Dales, and the next day the Dales’ elephant took a spill and would have crushed them if not for Linda quickly uprighting the beast. She claimed she’d gotten into the Power Tonic, and the Dales were convinced their chemist had accidentally concocted a real superstrength serum. They paid the chemist all their ill-gotten gains for the tonic recipe, but returned home to find the tonic was useless. They dared not go to the police because the chemist could expose their scam. Linda had actually gotten the chemist out of his office with a phone call and created a realistic puppet version of him that she made “talk” with super-ventriloquism, and afterwards she flew around the town, secretly returning money to every customer the Dales had tricked. The Dales, now broke, couldn’t afford to adopt Linda, and she returned to Midvale.

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