It continued to soar for three days. Then Mamma Mary discovered that she could strain her muscles to such an extent that the machine could milk and milk and continue to milk without results. Which she did, and the machine went back to the dairy company. However, by this time, Baby Miracle had assumed a sort of don’t-care attitude and was willing to try anything once. The first was a bottle equipped with a regular “calf nipple” and filled with a combination of one pint of cow’s milk, mixed with condensed cream, topped off by a pint of rice gruel, fed by the pouring system. All of which, it was found, must be heated to a temperature of 85 degrees. It appears that even baby elephants have their tastes.
Again everything looked rosy, and after a week or so, an attempt was made to put the disowned child with the herd. But inasmuch as Mamma Mary again took a look at her child and knocked down two elephants in her attempts to murder it, other plans were decided upon. Baby Miracle was put into a padded cage where she got her bottle and her gruel every four hours, until she finally refused.
Somebody thought of goat’s milk, and two tuberculin tested goats were purchased. The goats were willing, but Baby Miracle wasn’t. So the goats were sold.
Then it was discovered that Baby Miracle liked ice-cream cones, and there was joy again. The milk in these would be nourishing, and with a pint or so of boiled rice, things might be better.
But they weren’t. After the menagerie superintendent had poured castor oil down the child’s throat for a day and a half in an attempt to bring it back to normalcy, he guessed that he’d better cut out the cones. There was only one thing left,—the advertised baby foods. All of which were tried, with results not so good. So, in desperation, Alispaw experimented again with the original concoction, and Baby Miracle responded.
All her previous dislike vanished, she was given a nurse from among the menagerie attendants, who took her for walks by day and slept in her cage by night. She learned to play with a rope, to amuse herself by wadding up a mass of hay and throwing it high into the air, while the watchful Lonnie, her keeper, pried open her jaws after each experiment to see that she’d gotten none of the nasty stuff in her throat. But it was all no use. Twenty-three weeks passed in which “the millionaire baby,” as she was called around the show, received every attention. Every possible thing was guarded against; the veterinary passed up other cases to watch the progress of Baby Miracle. Even her food was weighed, to see how much of it her stomach was assimilating. In reward for which, Baby Miracle showed up one day with a hacking cough and passed onward, perhaps the only elephant in captivity to live twenty-three weeks on a circus without having tasted the delights of a peanut.
Quite different was the story of Rusty. Baby Miracle weighed two hundred pounds, got every possible attention and finally was stuffed to grace the reception room of a big Western newspaper until a heartless mob came along and carried poor Baby Miracle away to an unknown resting spot. Rusty weighed about a pound and a half, but he had his own ideas about getting along in life. He was a tiny rhesus monkey, undersized even for that species, and the object of torment for the whole cage. His mother was tubercular; this disease causes the death of nearly ninety per cent. of the rhesus monkeys brought to this country. She was too weak to defend it. The result being that Rusty was picked on by every member of the big cage, bitten, twitted, tormented, even by its own father. Then, one day, the mother died.
The baby clung to the body of its sole protector until the menagerie men took the inanimate body away. Then, a tiny mite in the midst of a horde of ruffians, Rusty strove to stand his ground. In vain. His own father, one of the “cage bosses,” led in the ruffianism, pulling out his hair, snarling at him, biting him and slapping him. Rusty went from grating to grating, from trapeze to bar, while the rest of the cage followed him, with the exception of one, a female who a month or so before had lost her own baby. And Rusty, as he fled chattered to her, grinned at her, then when the tormenting reached its highest pitch, jumped straight for her, snuggling into her arms.
For a moment she did not respond. But Rusty chattered on. The “cage bosses”—every monkey house has three or four of these bullies who appear to take a delight in making life as rough as possible for the weaker ones—gathered about him, pulling and picking at him, and incidentally taking a few pokes at the babyless monkey who had allowed him to come to her arms. For just so long she stood it, her arms gradually tightening about the little orphan. Then, at last, the mother nature of her reached the ascendency.
That was a bad day for the bosses. She bit them until their sides were red with blood. Larger than ordinary and stronger, she knocked them from one side of the cage to the other, chased them to the trapezes, and clung by her teeth to any legs that happened to be trailing; finally she drove the whole outfit into a corner, there to chatter her defiance to them in a monkey harangue that evidently had some purpose—and wonderful results. Rusty never was bothered again. What is more, the stepmother accepted him as her own child, and affectionate mother and good son—as simians go—they still occupy the monkey house in peace.