“Gee Willikins!” exclaimed Billy. “If here isn’t the very circus I used to act in! Let’s stay over, Chums, and see if we can’t meet some of our old friends. It has been so many years that probably some of them are dead or sold to other circuses, but there are sure to be one or two of them left.”
“Charmed to stay over!” said Button.
“Delighted, I am sure!” replied Stubby.
So the four of them ran down the track after the train until it came to a halt at its unloading platform. Then they pushed forward to the cars that held the wild animals and waited for their cages to be run off the train. Of course their cages were all shut up tightly with only breathing places at the top, so the people could not see the animals unless they paid to get into the circus. But the elephants and camels were so big they had not shut them up, and who should Billy see walking off the train but his old, old friend Jumbo, the oldest and finest specimen of elephant in America. He must have been nearly two hundred and fifty years old, his keeper said. Elephants frequently live to be that age and sometimes three hundred. After Jumbo came Maggie, dear old complaining Maggie, the old maid camel of the flock.
When she saw Billy and Nannie, she gave a nervous cough, stretched her neck out as long as she could and squeaked out in her complaining cracked voice: “Billy Whiskers as sure as I am alive! I am really glad to see you, though the last time I saw you I remember I was so furious at you that I was ready to chew the hair off your back. But we will bury the hatchet and let bygones be bygones.” Just then a most terrific bellowing was heard coming from the elephants. Old Jumbo had spied Billy and was calling to him to come over where he was tied to a telegraph pole until the circus people had time to erect the tents.
So Billy hurried over to where he was and introduced Nannie, Stubby and Button to him. And while they were taking in his great size, he seized Billy round the middle of his body with his trunk and held him high in the air over his head, and then let out a trumpeting that nearly deafened poor Billy.
“If you don’t say you are as glad to see me as I am to see you, I will crush every bone in your body!” trumpeted the elephant. Then the good-natured beast set Billy on his feet and began asking questions by the yard, like this: How was Nannie? Where had he been since they last met? Had he seen anything of the war? until Billy called a halt by saying, “One question at a time, if you please, and for every question you ask me, I am going to ask you one.” Billy began by asking these questions as fast as he could: “Have you the same ringmaster that I butted into the mud puddle? Is that green parrot that hated me so still alive? Is it better or worse being with a circus these days than it was years ago when I was with you?”
“Why, Billy Whiskers, how did you ever happen to get here?” heehawed a little burro. And turning, Billy beheld his old friend Bettina, the smallest burro on earth possessed with the longest ears, it was said, and the loudest voice.
“Why, Bettina! Are you still with the circus? I thought you must be owned by some private party long ere this.”