No one around the show even remembers his name. They only know that his loyalty and devotion in a strange friendship caused a soft-hearted circus owner to become far more interested in the workmen than ever before, almost to the point of sentimental solicitude. The recipient of that loyalty, incidentally, was rather grotesque,—Bon, the baby hippo, or, in circus language, “the blood-sweating behemoth of Holy Writ.”
Four men carried Bon to the show when he arrived, a fat aimless-appearing baby river hog from the Nile Country. The press agents properly exploited him. Which Bon didn’t seem to relish whatever, for all that the baby hippopotamus did was whine. One day the menagerie superintendent received an inspiration.
“That hip’s lonesome,” he announced to an assistant. “Round up one of them there ‘roughnecks’ and put him in with it—see if that does any good.”
The “roughneck,” known only as Mike, was obtained, and paid a few dollars extra a week for the discomfort of sleeping in the same cage with a hippopotamus. A silent, taciturn individual, he had told nothing of himself when he came on the show; his name had been plainly a makeshift, and the circus, with other things to think about, had made no inquiries.
The baby hippo ceased to whine. Gradually, it was noticed that the “hippopotamus nurse,” was taking more and more interest in his charge, pilfering bread for him from the cookhouse, or cutting fresh grass from around the circus lot, when he should have been resting during matinée hours. A month passed. The hippo seemed cured.
“Guess you can go back to your bunk now,” said the menagerie superintendent.
The “hippo nurse” nodded. But the next morning, the superintendent found him again in the behemoth’s den.
“Just thought I’d sneak out an’ see how he was gettin’ along,” came the explanation. “An’ he was whinin’—so I stuck with him.”
The superintendent winked—to himself. Two dollars a week extra is a fortune to a circus roughneck.
“Nix on that stuff,” came finally; “the pay’s stopped.”