“Here, Mr Severn! Mr Singh!” shouted the mathematical master. “This way! We are going back to the college.” But he did not go far.
“But I want to see the elephant brought out, sir,” replied Singh. “He oughtn’t to be left like this. He may do mischief.”
“Oh, now you’ve begun, have you?” yelped the proprietor, whose voice in his anger had gradually reached the soprano. “I suppose you would like to have a try?”
“Oh, I don’t want to interfere,” replied Singh coolly. “Where do you want the elephant to go?”
“Where do I want him to go? Why, home of course, before he does any more mischief. I wish he was dead; that I do! And he shall be too. Here, Jem, run back to Number One—here’s the key—and bring my rifle and the powder-flask and bullet-bag. I’m sick of him. He’ll be killing somebody before he’s done—a beast!—Tigers is angels to him, sir,” he continued appealingly to Morris. “He’s the wickedest elephant I ever see, and I’ve spent more on him in damages than I paid for him at first; but he’s played his last prank, and if I can’t drive him I can shoot.—’Member that lion, my lads, as killed the gentleman’s hoss?”
“Ay, ay, ay!” came in a low murmured growl.
“Got out, sir,” continued the proprietor, waving one hand about oratorically, and dabbing his bald head with his hand. “Here, some of you, where’s my yellow handkerchy? Oh, I know; I left it in that there apple-wood, and I’d lay sixpence, he’s picked it up and swallowed it because it’s yellow and he thinks it’s the skin of a big orange. Got out of his cage, he did, sir, that there lion—been fiddling all night, I suppose, at the bolts and bars—and we followed him up to where he got in the loose-box of a gentleman’s stable; and there was the poor horse down—a beauty he was—and that there lion—Arena his name was—lying on him with his face flattened out and teeth buried in the poor hoss’s throat, so that when I got to the stable door there he was, all eyes and whiskers, and growling at you like thunder. I knowed what my work was, sir,” continued the proprietor, addressing his conversation entirely to Morris, “and you can ask my men, sir; they was there.”
“Ay, ay, ay!” was growled.
“It warn’t the time for showing no white feathers when a lion’s got his monkey up like that. I brought my gun with me—fine old flint-lock rifle it is, and I got it now—and the next minute that there dead horse had got a dead lion lying beside him. But I sold his skin to a gent for a ten-pun note, to have it stuffed, and it’s in his front hall now, near Lungpuddle, in Lancashire.—Well, you, are you going to fetch that there rifle, or am I to fetch it myself?” he yelled at his man.
“Oh, I wouldn’t shoot him, guv’nor,” growled the man.