Along towards night they came to camp dragging a cooked rhinoceros, and they turned in to eat it, and all those sixty females brought nice pieces of rhino, cooked by gasoline, to Pa, and wanted Pa to eat it, but Pa said he was dieting, and it was Friday, anyway, and he never ate meat on Friday.
Then we all sat up all night, and everybody made speeches glorifying Pa as the greatest hero that ever came to Africa, and that he had Stanley beaten a mile, and Pa blushed, and the women held him in their laps and said he was the dearest thing ever.
CHAPTER XIII.
Pa Was a Hero After Capturing Two Tigers and a Lion—Pa Had an Old Negro With Sixty Wives Working for Him—Pa Makes His Escape in Safety—Pa Goes to Catch Hippopotamusses.
Pa was a hero after capturing the two tigers and the lion after they had inhaled gas from the gas bag of the air ship, because the crowd didn’t know how it was done. Everybody thought Pa had scared the wild animals with the airship until they were silly, and then hypnotized them, and got them into cages, but when the animals came out from under the influence of the gas and began to raise the roof, and bite and snarl, the whole camp was half scared to death, and they all insisted on Pa going to the cages and quieting them by his hypnotic eye, but Pa was too wise to try it on wild animals, and he had to confess that it was the gas bag that did the work, and they made Pa fix up a gas bag under the cages and quiet the animals, and when the employees of the expedition found that Pa was not so much of a hero as he pretended, Pa was not so much of a king as he had been, except in the minds of the African negroes who were at work for us. That old negro who had sixty wives fairly doted on Pa, and the wives thought Pa was the greatest man that ever was, and the wives fairly got struck on Pa, and wanted to take turns holding Pa in their laps, until the giant husband of the sixty big black females got jealous of Pa, and wanted to hit him on the head with a war club, but Pa showed him a thing or two that made him stand without hitching.
The black husband had a tooth ache, and asked Pa to cure him of the pain, and Pa had him lie down on the ground, and he put some chloroform on a handkerchief and held it to the man’s nose, and pretty soon the negro was dead to the world, and the wives thought Pa had killed their husband with his mighty power, and they insisted that Pa marry the whole sixty wives. Pa kicked on it, but Mr. Hagenbach told Pa that was the law in that part of Africa, and that he would have to marry them.
I never saw Pa so discouraged as he was when the oldest wife took his hand and said some words in the negro dialect, and pronounced Pa married to the whole bunch, and when they led Pa to the man’s tent, followed by all the wives, half of them singing a dirge for the dead husband, and the other half singing a wedding hymn, and Pa looking around scared, and trying to get away from his new family, it was pathetic, but all the hands connected with the Hagenbach expedition laughed, and Pa disappeared in the tent of his wives, and they hustled around to prepare a banquet of roasted zebra, and boiled rhinoceros.
We went to the tent and looked in, and Pa was the picture of despair, seated in the middle of the tent, all the female negroes petting him, and hugging him, and dressing him in the African costume.
They brought out loin clothes that belonged to the chloroformed husband and made Pa put them on; they blacked his arms and legs and body with some poke berry juice, so he looked like a negro, and greased his body and tied some negro hair on his head over his bald spot, and by gosh, when I saw Pa transformed into a negro I looked at myself in a mirror to see if I had turned to a negro. I held the mirror up to Pa so he could see himself, and when he got a good look at the features that had always been his pride, he shed a few tears and said, “Booker Washington, by Gosh,” and when the wives were preparing to bring in the banquet Pa said to me, “Hennery, let this be a lesson to you. Don’t ever try to be smart, and don’t be a masher under any circumstances, cause you see what it has brought me to. When you get back to America tell Roosevelt that I died for my country.” Well, they brought in the wedding feast, and all the wives helped me and Pa and Mr. Hagenbach, and the cow boy that throws the lasso, and the foreman, and we ate hearty, and all was going smooth when there was a commotion at the door of the tent, and in came the former husband, who had come out from under the influence of the chloroform, and he was crazy and had a club.