We have got a tame elephant that was bought to use on the wild elephants, to teach them to be good, and the next day, after we cut hay for the elephants, Pa was ordered to ride the tame elephant into the corral, to get the wild animals used to society.
Pa didn’t want to go, but he had bragged so much about the way he handled elephants with the circus in the States that he couldn’t back out, and so they opened the bars and let Pa and his tame elephant in, and closed the bars.
I think the manager thought that would be the end of Pa, and the men all went back to camp figuring on whether there would be enough left of Pa to bury or send home by express, or whether the elephants would walk on Pa until he was a part of the soil. In about an hour we saw a white spot on a rock above the canyon, waving a piece of shirt, and we watched it with glasses, and soon we saw a fat man climbing down on the outside, and after a while Pa came sauntering into camp, across the veldt, with his coat on his arm, and his sleeves rolled up like a canvasman in a show, singing, “A Charge to Keep I Have.” Pa came up to the mess tent and asked if lunch was not ready, and he was surrounded by the men, and asked how he got out alive. Pa said, “Well, there is not much to tell, only when I got into the corral the whole bunch made a rush for me and my tame elephant. I stood on my elephant and told them to lie down, and they got down on their knees, and then I made them walk turkey for a while, and march around, and then they struck on doing tricks and began to shove my elephant and get saucy, so I stood up on my elephant’s head and looked the wild elephants in the eyes, and made them form a pyramid until I could reach a tree that grew over the bank of the canyon, and I climbed out and slid down, as you saw me. There was nothing to it but nerve,” and Pa began to eat corned zebra and bread as though he was at a restaurant.
“Well, I think that old man is a wonder,” said the cowboy, as he threw his lariat over one of the wives of the chief negro and drew her across the cactus. “I think he is the condemdest liar I ever run up against in all my show experience,” said Mr. Hagenbach.
“Now,” says Pa, as he picked his teeth with a thorn off a tree, “tomorrow we got to capture a mess of wild African lions, right in their dens, ’cause the gasoline has come by freight, and the airship is mended, and you can look out for a strenuous session, for I found a canyon where the lions are thicker than prairie dogs in Arizona,” and Pa laid down for a little sleeping sickness, so I guess we will have the time of our lives tomorrow, and Pa has promised me a baby lion for a pet.
CHAPTER XV.
The Idea of Airships Is all Right in Theory, but They Are Never Going to Be a Reliable Success—Pa Drowns the Lions Out With Gas—The Bad Boy and His Pa Capture a Couple of Lions—Pa Moves Camp to Hunt Gorillas.
The idea of air ships is all right in theory, but they are never going to be a reliable success. The trouble is you never know what they are going to do next. They are like a mule about doing things that are not on the mnu. If you want to go due South, the air ship may decide to go North, and you may pull on all the levers, and turn the steering gear every way, and she goes North as though there was no other place to go.
We waited for weeks to get a new supply of powder that makes the gas, and finally it came. We got the bag full and Pa and the cowboy with the lasso and two others, a German and a negro, got on the rigging, and about fifty of us held on to the drag rope, and Pa turned the nose of the machine south towards where he had located a mess of lions in a rocky gorge, and he was going to ride over the opening to their den, and let the cowboy lasso the old dog lion, and choke the wind out of him, and drag him to camp by the neck, but the airship just insisted on going North, and it took the whole crowd to hold her, and Pa was up there on the bamboo frame talking profane, and giving orders.