CHAPTER X.—CAPTURING THE ELEPHANT.
For the moment it looked as if the mad elephant would crush a dozen or more of the audience.
He was making straight for the crowd, which tried in vain to clear a path for him to pass.
The uproar was terrible, but it was nothing compared to the trumpeting of the gigantic beast.
Several attendants rushed toward the elephant with prods, but he was too angry to notice them.
“Turn him back!”
“He’ll walk right over the crowd!”
“Lasso him!”
“Shoot him!”
And so the cries went on.
The uproar had caused Leo to stop his performance; indeed, it had stopped everything but the stampede of the audience.
Suddenly the elephant ran directly under the young gymnast.
As he did so there came another crash of thunder.
The elephant raised up on his rear legs, and his trunk went up to where Leo swung.
And then a startling thing happened.
Leo dropped directly upon the beast’s head. With remarkable rapidity he slid back on to the neck.
“Throw me a rope!” he yelled to the nearest attendant, and the fellow did so.
Then the end of the elephant’s trunk came up angrily. He intended to catch hold of the young gymnast and hurl him to the earth, there to trample on him.
But Leo slipped further back, and at the same time threw the noose of the rope over the uplifted proboscis.
He hauled it taut, and with the end of the rope in his hand, sprang down and ran at lightning speed to the nearest centerpole.
Around this he went half a dozen times.
“Now keep him back with your prods!” he sang out.
More enraged than ever, the elephant tried to pull himself free.
But the rope held, and he was forced on his knees, roaring with pain, for an elephant’s trunk is his most sensitive organ.
A shout of approval went up, and the crowd paused in its hasty flight.
But the elephant was not yet a prisoner. He pulled and tugged, and had the centerpole not been so strong and so deeply set in the ground, he would surely have either broken it off or pulled it up.
But now he hesitated, and in that moment more attendants came up. One began to soothe him, while the others slipped a leather and iron harness over him. Soon he was a complete prisoner, and realizing this, he shambled back to the menagerie tent as mildly as a lamb.
The rain was now coming down in a perfect deluge, and the audience would not remain. In less than a quarter of an hour the circus grounds were deserted, saving for those who had to remain on duty, and the performers in the dressing-tents.
Every one praised Leo for what he had done; every one, that is, but Snipper. He had not a word to say, but looked more morose than ever.
Leo did not wait, however, to hear all that the others had to say. He donned his regular clothing just as quickly as he could, and with Natalie Sparks rode from the grounds to the hotel at which they were stopping.
Barton Reeve was nowhere around. He had gone off to Hopsville to see Nathan Dobb.
He came in about half-past ten, and then Leo and he had a long discussion concerning the boy’s past and future.
“The squire is a sly one,” said the menagerie manager. “It was about as easy to get information out of him as it is to get milk out of a stone.”
“Then you learned nothing?” returned Leo, much disappointed.
“I did and I didn’t. He admitted that your folks were once wealthy; but he said the money was lost in speculations before you were left an orphan.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Nor I. I asked him for some proofs, but he would give me none. Then I asked him flatly how much there was coming to you when your folks died, and he said not more than a couple of hundred dollars. I wanted to see the papers, but he wouldn’t show them.”
“Didn’t you tell him we would take the matter to court?”
“I did, and it worried him a good bit. That is what makes me think there is considerable at stake. If he had nothing to hide, what is he so scared about?”
“Just wait till I have money enough, I’ll stir him up!” cried Leo.
He had not yet forgotten how Nathan Dobb and Daniel Hawkins had mistreated him.
“We’ll both stir him up, Leo. But I guess before we go much further we had better get a lawyer’s advice. In a few weeks the circus will make two three-day stops and that will give us a little time, certainly more than we get when we go to a new town every day.”
They talked the matter over for some time longer, and when Leo went to bed it was with the fixed determination to make Squire Dobb “toe the mark.”
And while the young gymnast was meditating thus, Nathan Dobb was walking up and down his office, his face dark and full of cunning.
“The boy’s getting too big and he’s making too many friends,” he muttered to himself. “Why couldn’t he remain a simple farm hand, without trying to rake up the past and make a place for himself?” He took a turn or two and clenched his bony hands. “I wish I had stuck to my original idea and sent him to Africa on that freight steamer without a cent in his pocket.”
Then Nathan Dobb dropped into the chair beside his safe, and from the strong box took a package of documents. These he looked over for nearly half an hour.
“Ten thousand dollars!” he muttered. “It would be a fortune to him! But he shan’t have it. I’ve worked too hard for it to have it slip through my fingers at this late day. I had better burn all these papers and then concoct some scheme for getting him out of the way.”
Nathan Dobb’s soliloquy was interrupted by a crash in the rear of the house. Some one had broken into the kitchen, most likely a burglar.