The Pressman jotted down, breathing heavily. “Deck-swab soaked in eau-de-Cologne....” he muttered. “Must have cost slathers of money, I reckon——”
“No expense was to be spared,” the Second Officer reminded him gently. “As for the brandy, Martell’s Three Star, he must have put away a dozen bottles a day.”
“No blamed wonder his head ached!” said the Pressman, moistening his own dry lips.
“Except an occasional bucket of arrowroot with port wine and a tin or so of cuddy biscuits, the animal would take no other nourishment whatever,” continued the Second Officer. “As he grew weaker and weaker, it was touching to see the way in which he clung to Nurse Amy.”
“Clung to her?” the Pressman wrote, marking the words for a headline.
“Fact,” said the Second Officer. “He would put his trunk round her waist, and lay his head on her shoulder as she stood on a ladder lashed against the side of his cage. And he would hang out his forefoot to have his pulse felt, quite in a Christian style. Then when Nurse Amy wanted to take his temperature, the docile brute would curl up his fire-hose—I mean his trunk—and open his mouth, so that the instrument might be comfortably placed under his tongue.”
“By gings, sir, this story is going to knock corners off creation!” gasped the Pressman, pausing to wipe his face with a slightly smeary cuff. “An elephant that understood the use of the therm—blame it! that beast robbed some man of a fortune when he passed in his checks!”
“We lost so many of the ordinary kind of instrument in this way,” went on the Second Officer, almost pensively, “that at last Nurse Amy was obliged to fall back upon the large thermometer and barometer combined that usually hung in the first saloon. But it recorded, to our sorrow, no improvement. The mercury steadily sank, and it became plain to Nurse Amy’s professional eye that her patient was not long for this world.”
“Say, do you believe elephants have souls?” queried the Pressman. The Second Officer deigned no reply.
“She could not leave him a moment; he trumpeted so awfully when he saw her quit his side. I forgot to tell you that from the moment he first felt himself attacked by sea-sickness his bellows of rage and agony were frightful to hear. The other animals became excited by them; they roared and snarled without cessation.”