Pa Was Blackmailed and Scared Out of Lots of Money—Pa Teaching the
Natives to Speak English—Pa Said the Natives Acted Like Human
Beings—Pa Buys Some Animals in the Jungle.
We thought when we came to Africa we would be near to nature, where the
natives were simple and honest, but Pa has found that the almost naked
negroes can give white men cards and spades and little casino and then
beat them at the game.
Pa has been blackmailed and scared out of his boots and a lot of money,
by an injured husband, as natural as he could have been flimflammed in
New York.
We noticed that Pa was quite interested in a likely negro woman, one of
twenty wives of a heathen, to the extent of having her wash his shirts,
and he would linger at the tent of the husband and teach the woman some
words of English, such as, “You bet your life” and “Not on your life,”
and a few cuss words, which she seemed to enjoy repeating.
She was a real nice looking nigger, and smiled on Pa to beat the band,
but that was all; of course she enjoyed having Pa call on her, and
evidently showed her interest in him, but that seemed only natural, as
Pa is a nice, clean white man with clothes on and she looked upon him as
a sort of king, until the other wives became jealous, and they filled
the husband up with stories about Pa and the young negress, but Pa was
as innocent as could be. Where Pa made the mistake was in taking hold of
her hand and looking at the lines in her palm, to read her future by the
lines in her hand, and as Pa is some near sighted he had to bend over
her hand, and then she stroked Pa’s bald head with the other hand, and
the other wives went off and left Pa and the young wife alone, and they
called the husband to put a stop to it.
Well I never saw a giant negro so mad as that husband was when he came
into the tent and saw Pa, and Pa was scared and turned pale, and the
woman had a fit when she saw her husband with a base ball club with
spikes on it. He took his wife by the neck and threw her out of the
tent, and then closed the tent and he and Pa were alone, and for an hour
no one knew what happened, but when Pa came back to our camp, wobbly in
the legs, and with no clothes on except a pair of drawers, we knew the
worst had happened.
Pa told Mr. Hagenbach that the negro acted like a human being. He cried
and told Pa he had broken into his family circle and picked the fairest
flower, broken his heart and left him an irresponsible and broken man,
the laughing stock of his friends, and nothing but his life or his money
could settle it.
[Illustration: “Dad started to run for the fence.”]
Pa offered to give up his life, but the injured husband had rather have
the money, and after an hour Pa compromised by giving him sixteen
dollars and his coat, pants and shirt, and Pa is to have the wife in the
bargain. Pa didn’t want to take the wife, but the husband insisted on
it, and Mr. Hagenbach says we can take her to America and put her into
the show as an untamed Zulu, or a missing link, but he insists that Pa
shall be careful hereafter, with his fatal beauty and winning ways, or
we shall have more negro women to bring back than animals in cages.
Talk about your innocent negroes, they will cheat you out of your boots.
Pa went off in the jungle to buy some animals of a negro king or some
kind of a nine spot, and he found the king had in a corral half a dozen
green zebras, the usual yellow stripes being the most beautiful green
you ever saw. The king told Pa it was a rare species, only procured in a
mountain fastness hundreds of miles away, and Pa bought the whole bunch
at a fabulous price, and brought them to camp. Mr. Hagenbach was tickled
to death at the rare animals, and praised Pa, and said there was a
fortune in the green and black striped zebras. I thought there was
something wrong when I heard one of those zebras bray like a mule when
he was eating hay, but it wasn’t my put in, and I didn’t say anything.
That night there was the greatest rain we have had since we came here,
and in the morning the green and black striped zebras hadn’t a stripe on
them, and they proved to be nothing but wild asses and assessess, white
and dirty, and all around the corral the water standing on the ground
was colored green and black.
Mr. Hagenbach took Pa out to the corral and pointed to the wild white
mules and said, “What do you think of your green zebras now?” Pa looked
them over and said, “Say, that negro king is nothing but a Pullman
porter, and he painted those mules and sawed them onto me,” so we had to
kill Pa’s green zebras and feed them to the negroes and the animals. Mr.
Hagenbach told Pa plainly that he couldn’t stand for such conduct. He
said he was willing to give Pa carte blanche, whatever that is, in his
love affairs in South Africa, but he drew the line at being bunkoed on
painted animals. He believed in encouraging art, and all that, but
animals that wouldn’t wash were not up to the Hagenbach standard.
Pa went off and sulked all day, but he made good the next day.
Our intention was to let elephants alone until we were about to return
home, as they are so plenty we can find them any day, and after you have
once captured your elephants you have got to cut hay to feed them, but
Pa gets some particular animal bug in his head, and the managements has
to let him have his way, so the other day was his elephant day, and he
started off through the jungle with only a few men, and the negro wife
that he hornswoggled the husband out of. Pa said he was going to use her
for a pointer to point elephants, the same as they use dogs to point
chickens, and when we got about a mile into the jungle he told her to
“Hie on,” and find an elephant. Well, sir, she has got the best elephant
nose I ever saw on a woman. She ranged ahead and beat the ground
thoroughly, and pretty soon she began to sniff and sneak up on the game,
and all of a sudden she came to a point and held up one foot, and her
eyes stuck out, and Pa said the game was near, and he told her to
“charge down,” and we went on to surround the elephant. Pa was ahead and
he saw a baby elephant not bigger than a Shetland pony, looking scared,
and Pa made a lunge and fell on top of the little elephant, which began
to make a noise like a baby that wants a bottle of milk, and we captured
the little thing and started for camp with it, but before we got in
sight of camp all the elephants in Africa were after us, crashing
through the timber and trumpeting like a menagerie.
[Illustration: Pa Made a Lunge and Fell on Top of the Little Elephant
Which Began to Make a Noise Like a Baby.]
Pa and a cowboy and some negroes lifted the little elephant up into a
tree, and the whole herd surrounded us, and were going to tear down the
tree, when the camp was alarmed and Hagenbach came out with all the men
and the negroes on horseback, and they drove the herd into a canyon, and
built a fence across the entrance, and there we had about fifty
elephants in the strongest kind of a corral, and we climbed down from
the tree with the baby elephant and took it to camp, and put it in a big
bag that Pa’s airship was shipped in, and we are feeding the little
animal on condensed milk and dried apples.
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.
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