He went stamping into the kitchen and she foh lowed him with some apprehension. Five minutes later he trotted at his best gait across the field along the trail of Imogene and her pursuers, munching ham sandwiches and scattering crumbs upon the breeze.
A stern chase is always a long one, and after Hiram had crossed the woodlot he found himself on a parallel road where there were still other indignant women and clamorous farmers to shake off when they hailed him as the presumptive owner of the fugitive elephant and sought to collect damages.
“A Kansas cyclone is a kitten beside of her,” he muttered as he surveyed one scene of devastation after another and hurried on.
“Them farmers must be aggravatin’ Imogene something awful to make her cut up this way. But I don’t blame her. If I had a trunk and weighed twenty-seven hundred pounds I’d smash down what she ain’t finished up. She and me agrees on farmers.”
So, scattering right and left profanity and promises to settle, he toiled on, his tall hat in his hand and the perspiration streaming down his face. There was no such thing as keeping the trail in a team. Through copses and meadows, down water-courses and valleys and across farm dooryards the animal had led her pursuers. The trail was devious, too, as though Imogene, harassed on all sides, had kept turning, either to attack or dodge. In one place a considerable array of various samples of trousers cloth fluttering from a barbed wire fence indicated that there had been a hasty retreat. Hiram stopped and surveyed this scene with grim satisfaction.
“You pocketed ’em in this corner, dum ’em,” he muttered. “Bully for you, old gal!”
The showman, in his many twistings and turnings along the trail, stopped taking note of his general direction of progress, and just before dusk, leg-weary and panting, found himself coursing down a hillock that was strangely familiar. He suddenly stopped in the midst of trampled, tattered and bedraggled cotton sheeting and stared about him. He had come’ back to the place where he had started on the chase and for a moment thought he had unconsciously crossed his own trail somewhere and had followed back. A woman’s voice, shrill with anger, hailed him from the ell window.
“’Tain’t enough, is it, for your tarnation old el’-phunt to hooroosh over our primises once, but she and her rag-tag must come back and slambang through again!”
The farmer came out of the barn, mopping his brow.
“They ain’t five minutes ahead of ye,” he said. “I should ’a’ kept right on chasin’, but I had to stop off and do my chores. I reckon they’ll catch her pretty quick. She’s about beat out.”