"And will I ride men on my head?" asked Umboo.
"Yes, you will learn to do that, and many things more," said Chang. But even he did not know all the wonderful things that were to happen to Umboo, nor how he was to go in the circus.
CHAPTER XII
UMBOO IS SOLD
Umboo, the big elephant boy, did not at once begin to learn the teakwood log-piling lesson. Just as in school you do not learn to read the first day, so it was with Umboo. He had to be trained by his keeper and the keonkies, or tame elephants.
And, after the first feeling of being sorry at having been taken away from his mother, Umboo grew to like the new life. His mother was sent to another big stable, farther away, though Umboo saw her once in a while. With him, however, were many of the wild elephants he had known when the herd was in the jungle. Keedah was one of these elephants.
"I don't like it here at all!" snarled Keedah, when he had been led up beside Umboo, a few days after they had all been caught in the trap. "I don't like it, and I'm not going to stay!"
"What are you going to do?" asked Umboo.
"I am going to run away," said the elephant boy, whom Umboo had once, in fun, knocked into the river. "I am going to run away, and go out in the jungle."
"Oh, no. I wouldn't do that if I were you," quietly said one of the tame elephants, coming up behind Keedah just then, and the half-wild elephant was so surprised that he nearly dropped a wisp of hay he was eating.