“A watermelon! Threw it down at me from on top of the car when I bent over to look at the journals.”
“But—why a watermelon?”
“Well, I guess it was all they had. Anyway, it was enough! It knocked me out. There are robbers on that car, I’m telling you. Heard ’em moving around. I probably butted into them—discovered ’em. Beating it out of town with a bunch of swag and I—.”
It was sufficient to hold the train. Almost anything can hold a circus train when a town decides there’s the faintest possibility of a thief aboard. A wild call went out for the town marshal, who responded from the loading crossing with six hastily summoned deputies. Then, revolvers drawn, accompanied by circus men with tent stakes and “laying-out pins” the marshal started down the dark lane beside the railroad cars in search of the robber band.
The posse reached the spot of the assault and called a command for surrender. There was no reply, save a queer sound as of tremendous things skating about inside one of the cars, and a continual sound of joyous crunching. Again was the command given, to no purpose. About that time, some one thought to press the button of a flashlight, and for a full moment thereafter, the posse could only stand and gawk.
Within the “bull car” eight elephants were having the time of their assorted lives. Here and there they skated and slipped and shambled, sliding about in a mass of crushed watermelons, their mouths jammed with the beloved fruit, their heads and shoulders sticky and wet with the juice, and the whole floor of the car as slick as a skating pond. A railroad representative arrived, became pompous, then made an announcement:
“There’ll have to be an arrest made for this, can’t have you circus men stealing watermelons from railroad property—.”
The boss animal man grinned.
“All right,” he said. “Go right ahead and do your arresting. But it ain’t circus men you’ll be takin’, it’s elephants.”
As if to prove the assertion, the trunk of the leader of the herd went forth, between the bars of the “bull car” and into the recesses of a watermelon car on the next track, to come forth a second later with another titbit, which was carried within the elephant car, thrown to the floor, skated upon in kittenish fashion by the rest of the herd as it rushed greedily forward, then devoured. Investigation showed that one of the elephants evidently had scented the watermelons in the opposite car, reached forth, broken the seal, then pushed open the door, thereupon inviting the rest of the herd to the feast. Evidently the arrival of the car-knocker had frightened one of the thieves, causing it to drop the melon it was purloining just at that instant on the head of the employee who had reported an attack by robbers.