"Forepaugh had eminent scientists examine the beast."
"Forepaugh was to open in Philadelphia, so I shipped our fake over there, and when they had their street parade I followed right behind it with our bleached animal on a truck which was liberally placarded. The notices called attention to the fact that Forepaugh's alleged sacred elephant was simply painted and that the men who did it were bunglers at the business. 'Look at This One!' read our largest placard. 'We TELL YOU that it is a FAKE! So is Forepaugh's, but he won't tell! This is A BETTER JOB BY A BETTER ARTIST!' That made the Forepaugh people hot, and they replied with a new bunch of affidavits and expert opinions from a lot of University of Pennsylvania professors. That couldn't offset our show-up, though, and the whole situation had become so mixed that the public thought all of the elephants were fakes. We had the only genuine one and the best fake also, but they were a pair of white elephants in every sense of the term, and a losing proposition. The one which we had bleached would only keep white for about two weeks, and as each treatment cost seven hundred dollars Barnum called me off. The Forepaugh bunch was trying to poison it, and as the whole thing was dead as a money-making venture and white elephants a drug in the market, we let this one regain its natural color. When the great herd was broken up it was sold off, and I never saw it again until to-night."
"But what was the inside history of the Forepaugh white elephant?" asked one of his companions, and the Colonel smiled as he lighted a fresh cigar.
"I never knew it until this year, when one night over a friendly drink Sam Watson, who is now a clown with the Big Show, confessed the whole thing. Forepaugh is dead and the shows have been consolidated, so there is no further object in keeping the thing quiet. It seems that Forepaugh's agents found out that Barnum had purchased the elephant from an impecunious Indian Rajah; in fact, he had purchased two, the first one having died on its way to England. It was the misdirection of a cable announcing the death and ordering another at any cost which put them wise to the fact that Barnum had a rarity. Watson had never heard of a sacred elephant, but he started out to get one when he read that cablegram. They were scarce articles, and Barnum had bought the only two which were to be had for love or money in all India, so he and Cross got their heads together and started out to manufacture a bogus one in Liverpool.
"They prepared a closed stall, which was always kept locked, and put an elephant in it—just a common, or garden, elephant. Then Sam and his groom, Telford, proceeded to get busy with bath bricks, pumice stone and a barrel of white aniline dye. I imagine they had a pretty hard winter's work and it was certainly a tough period for the elephant, because they had to scrape about half the skin off the poor brute before the dye would take hold. They finally succeeded in getting him several shades lighter than normal, all except about eighteen inches at the end of the trunk. They could do nothing with that on account of the habit of the beast, which was always mussing around in its bedding, searching for stray peanuts.
"Then Sam and his groom, Telford, proceeded to get busy."
"They kept in touch with the London Zoo and found out when we were to ship the genuine one, and then got their fake on a steamer which would land it in New York a few days ahead of us. Of course, they had to keep working at it all the way over, but they kept it quiet and no one caught on. When the scientific sharps came to examine it, Sam would hoist the trunk up in the air while he drew their attention to the marvelous whiteness of the under side, and no one caught on to the fact that the end of the trunk was the natural color.