CHAPTER XXI.
We Spend a Couple of Days at a Michigan Man’s Ranch in Darkest Africa—Pa and the Cowboys Take a Bath—After Smoking about 50 Cigars—Pa Told What Cowards Lions and Tigers Were—Pa Walked up to a Lion and Gave Him a Cut with a Whip.
We have spent a comple of days at the Michigan man’s ranch in Darkest Africa, where he has brought civilization right into the Jungle, and after spending six months with negro savages and wild animals, and menagerie people, it has been the most enjoyable two days I ever knew.
It is good sometimes to see ourselves as others see us, and not having looked into a mirror for half a year, we found that we were about the most disreputable looking tourists that ever came in sight of beds with linen sheets on, and pillows.
I noticed that the family of the Michigan man and the servants looked at us with suspicion, and turned up their noses at us, but I never realized what it was all about until they showed us to our rooms that night, when I saw myself in a mirror, and found that my face and hands were black with dirt and smoke, my clothes were greasy and patched with buckskin patches, sewed on with strips of rawhide, and my torn coat was pinned together with thorns. I could see Pa and the cowboy all the time, and knew that they looked like tramps, but I thought I was all right.
The Michigan man showed us to our rooms, after Pa and the cowboy had drank a few quarts of highballs, and they were going to go to bed with their clothes on, but I knew they would ruin the beds if they did, so I insisted that we all get in the bath tubs and take our semi-annual bath, and as the man left us he said we could find clothes to put on in the morning, in a closet, and to leave our clothes out in the hall and he would have a servant take them away with the tongs and burn them in the furnace.
That sobered Pa and the cowboy a little, and they decided to try the baths.
Well, we didn’t do a thing to the running water, and before we retired we had washed ourselves so clean, with real soap, the first we had seen since we left Germany, that Pa and the cowboy had to be introduced to each other, and I was so clean that I didn’t know myself, and we put on pajamas that we found in the room, and crawled into the clean beds and slept till morning, after putting all of our clothes out of the room, to purify the air.
In the morning we dressed up in the clothes the Michigan man told us we would find in the closet, and such a transformation was never seen before.