WHEN THE LION ROARED
At daybreak on September 26, if I remember aright, we started to drive
from the old farm to Portland with eighteen live hogs. There was a crisp
frost that morning, so white that till the sun rose you might have
thought there had been a slight fall of snow in the night.
We put eight of the largest hogs into one long farm wagon with high
sideboards, drawn by a span of Percheron work horses, which I drove; the
ten smaller hogs we put into another wagon that Willis Murch drove. By
making an early start we hoped to cover forty miles of our journey
before sundown, pass the night at a tavern in the town of Gray where the
old Squire was acquainted, and reach Portland the next noon. Since we
wished to avoid unloading the hogs, we took dry corn and troughs for
feeding them in the wagons and buckets for fetching water to them. The
old Squire went along with us for the first fifteen miles to see us well
on our way, then left us and walked to a railroad station a mile or two
off the wagon road, where he took the morning train into Portland, in
order to make arrangements for marketing the hogs.
Everything went well during the morning, although the hogs diffused
a bad odor along the highway. Toward noon we stopped by the wayside,
near the Upper Village of the New Gloucester Shakers, to rest and
feed the horses, and to give the hogs water. About one o'clock we
went on down the hill to Sabbath Day Pond and into the woods beyond
it. The loads were heavy and the horses were plodding on slowly, when,
just round a turn of the road in the woods ahead, we heard a deep,
awful sound, like nothing that had ever come to our ears before. For
an instant I thought it was thunder, it rumbled so portentously:
_Hough--hough--hough--hough-er-er-er-er-hhh!_ It reverberated through
the woods till it seemed to me that the earth actually trembled.
Willis's horses stopped short. Willis himself rose to his feet, and it
seemed to me his cap rose up on his head. Other indistinct sounds also
came to our ears from along the road ahead, though nothing was as yet in
sight. Then again that awful, prolonged _Hough--hough--hough!_ broke
forth.
Close by, lumbermen had been hauling timber from the forest into the
highway and had made a distinct trail across the road ditch. While
Willis stood up, staring, the horses suddenly whirled half round and
bolted for the lumber trail, hogs and all. They did it so abruptly that
Willis had no time to control them, and when the wagon went across the
ditch, he was pitched off headlong into the brush. Before I could set my
feet, my span followed them across the ditch; but I managed to rein them
up to a tree trunk, which the wagon tongue struck heavily. There I held
them, though they still plunged and snorted in their terror.
Willis's team was running away along the lumber trail, but before it had
gone fifty yards we heard a crash, and then a horrible squealing. The
wagon had gone over a log or a stump and, upsetting, had spilled all ten
hogs into the brushwood.
Willis now jumped to his feet and ran to help me master my team, which
was still plunging violently, and I kept it headed to the tree while he
got the halters and tied the horses. Just then we heard that terrible
_Hough--hough!_ again, nearer now. Looking out toward the road, we saw
four teams dragging large, gaudily painted cages that contained animals.
The drivers, who wore a kind of red uniform, pulled up and sat looking
in our direction, laughing and shouting derisively. That exasperated us
so greatly that, checking our first impulse to run in pursuit of the
horses and hogs, we rushed to the road to remonstrate.
It was not a full-fledged circus and menagerie, but merely a show on its
way from one county fair to another. In one cage there was a boa
constrictor, untruthfully advertised to be thirty feet long, which a Fat
Lady exhibited at each performance, the monster coiled round her neck.
In another cage were six performing monkeys and four educated dogs.
When we saw them that day on the road, the Fat Lady, said to weigh four
hundred pounds, was journeying in a double-seated carriage behind the
cages. Squeezed on the seat beside her, rode a queer-looking little old
man, with a long white beard, whose specialty was to eat glass tumblers,
or at least chew them up. He also fought on his hands and knees with one
of the dogs. His barking, growling and worrying were so true to life
that the spectators could scarcely tell which was the dog and which the
man. On the back seat was a gypsy fortune teller and a Wild Man, alleged
to hail from the jungles of Borneo and to be so dangerous that two armed
keepers had to guard him in order to prevent him from destroying the
local population. As we first saw him, divested of his "get-up," he
looked tame enough. He was conversing sociably with the gypsy fortune
teller.
But for the moment our attention and our indignation were directed
mainly at the lion. He was not such a very large lion, but he certainly
had a full-sized roar, and the driver of the cage sat and grinned at us.
"You've no right to be on the road with a lion roaring like that!"
Willis shouted severely.
"Wal, young feller, you've no right to be on the road with such a hog
smell as that!" the driver retorted. "Our lion is the best-behaved in
the world; he wouldn't ha' roared ef he hadn't smelt them hogs so
strong."
"But you have damaged us!" I cried. "Our horses have run away and
smashed things! You'll have to pay for this!"
Another man, who appeared to be the proprietor, now came from a wagon in
the rear of the cavalcade.
"What's that about damages?" he cried. "I'll pay nothing! I have a
permit to travel on the highway!"
"You have no right to scare horses!" Willis retorted. "Your lion made a
horrible noise."
"His noise wasn't worse than your hog stench!" the showman rejoined
hotly. "My lion has as good a right to roar as your hogs have to squeal.
Drive on!" he shouted to his drivers.
The show moved forward. The Fat Lady looked back and laughed, and the
Wild Man pretended to squeal like a pig; but the gypsy fortune teller
smiled and said, "Too bad!"
Having got no satisfaction, we returned hastily to chase our runaway
team. We came upon it less than a hundred yards away, jammed fast
between two pine trees. Parts of the harness were broken, the wagon body
was shattered, and ten hogs were at large.
For some minutes we were at a loss to know what to do. How to catch the
hogs and put them back into the wagon was a difficult matter, for many
of them weighed three hundred pounds, and moreover a live hog is a
disagreeable animal to lay hands on. But, taking an axe, we cut young
pine trees and constructed a fence round the wagon to serve as a hogpen.
Leaving a gap at one end that could be stopped when the hogs were
inside, we then set near the wagon the troughs we had brought, poured
the dry corn into them and called the hogs as if it were feeding time.
Most of them, it seemed, were not far away. As soon as they heard the
corn rattling into the troughs all except three came crowding in.
Presently we drove two of the missing ones to the pen, but one we could
not find.
None of the wagon wheels was broken, and in the course of an hour or
two, Willis and I succeeded in patching up the shattered body
sufficiently to hold the hogs. But how to get the heavy brutes off the
ground and up into the wagon was a task beyond our resources. When you
try to take a live hog off its feet, he is likely to bite as well as to
squeal. We had no tackle for lifting them.
At last Willis set off to get help. He was gone till dusk and came back
without any one; but he had persuaded two Shakers to come and help us
early the next morning--they could not come that night on account of
their evening prayer meeting. One of the Shaker women had sent a loaf of
bread and a piggin half full of Shaker apple sauce to us.
The lantern and bucket that went with Willis's wagon had been smashed;
but I had a similar outfit with mine. So we tied the horses to trees
near our improvised hog pound, and fed and blanketed them by lantern
light. Afterwards we brought water for them from a brook not far away.
It was nine o'clock before we were ready to eat our own supper of bread
and Shaker apple sauce. The night was chilly; our lantern went out for
lack of oil; we had only light overcoats for covering; and as we had
used our last two matches in lighting the lantern, we could not kindle a
fire.
The night was so cold that we frequently had to jump up and run round to
get warm. We slept scarcely at all. The hogs squealed. They, too, were
cold as well as hungry, and toward morning they quarreled, bit one
another and made piercing outcries.
"Oh, don't I wish 'twas morning!" Willis exclaimed again and again.
Fortunately, the Shakers were early risers, and long before sunrise
three of them, clad in gray homespun frocks and broad-brimmed hats,
appeared. They greeted us solemnly.
"Thee has met with trouble," said one of them, who was the elder of the
village. "But I think we can give thee aid."
They proved to be past masters at handling hogs. From one of the halters
they contrived a muzzle to prevent the hogs from biting us, and then
with their help we caught and muzzled the hogs one by one and boosted
them into the wagon. The good men stayed by us till the horses were
hitched up and we were out of the woods and on the highway again. I had
a little money with me and offered to pay them for their kind services,
but the elder said:
"Nay, friend, thee has had trouble enough already with the lion." And at
parting all three said "Fare thee well" very gravely.
We fared on, but not altogether well, for those hungry hogs were now
making a terrible uproar. We drove as far as Gray Corners, where there
was a country store, and there I bought a bushel of oats for the horses
and a hundred-pound bag of corn for the hogs. The hogs were so ravenous
that it was hard to be sure that each got his proper share; but we did
the best we could and somewhat reduced their squealing.
The hastily repaired wagon body had also given us trouble, for it had
threatened to shake to pieces as it jolted over the frozen ruts of the
road; but we bought a pound of nails, borrowed a hammer and set to work
to repair it better, with the hogs still aboard--much to the amusement
of a crowd of boys who had collected. It was almost noon when we left
Gray Corners, and it was after three o'clock before we reached
Westbrook, five miles out of Portland. Here whom should we see but the
old Squire, who, growing anxious over our failure to appear, had driven
out to meet us. He could not help smiling when he heard Willis's
indignant account of what had delayed us.
He thought it likely that we could recover the missing hog, and that
evening he inserted a notice of the loss in the _Eastern Argus_. But
nothing came of the notice or of the many inquiries that we made on our
way home the next day. The animal had wandered off, and whoever captured
it apparently kept quiet. Instead of blaming us, however, the old Squire
praised us.
"You did well, boys, in trying circumstances," he said. "You do not meet
a lion every day."
After what had happened, Willis and I felt much interest the following
week in seeing the show that had discomfited us. It had established
itself at the county fair in its big tent and apparently was doing a
rushing business. Buying admission tickets, Willis and I went in and
approached the lion's cage for a nearer view of the king of beasts. We
hoped he would spring up and roar as he had done in the woods below the
Shaker village; but he kept quiet. After all, he did not look very
formidable, and he seemed sadly oppressed and bored.
I think the proprietor of the show recognized us, for we saw him
regarding us suspiciously; and we moved on to the cage in which the Wild
Man sat, with a big brass chain attached to his leg--ostensibly to
prevent him from running amuck among the spectators. Two of his keepers
were guarding him, with axes in their hands. He was loosely arrayed in a
tiger's skin, and his limbs appeared to be very hairy. His skin was dark
brown and rough with warts. His hair, which was really a wig, hung in
tangled snarls over his eyes. He gnashed his teeth, clenched his fists,
and every few moments he uttered a terrific yell at which timid patrons
of the show promptly retired to the far side of the tent.
When Willis and I approached the cage, a smile suddenly broke across the
Wild Man's face, and he nodded to us. "You were the fellows with the
hogs, weren't you?" he said in very good English. I can hardly describe
what a shock that gave us.
"Why, why--aren't you from the wilds of Borneo?" Willis asked him in low
tones.
"Thunder, no!" the Wild Man replied confidentially. "I don't even know
where it is. I'm from over in Vermont--Bellows Falls."
"But--but--you do look pretty savage!" stammered Willis in much
astonishment.
"You bet!" said the Wild Man. "Ain't this a dandy rig? It gets 'em, too.
But don't give me away; I get a good living out of this."
Just then a group of spectators came crowding forward, and the Wild Man
let out a howl that brought them to an appalled halt. The keepers
brandished their axes.
"Well, did you ever?" Willis muttered as we moved on. "Doesn't that beat
everything?"
The Fat Lady was ponderously unwinding the coils of the boa constrictor
from round her neck as we paused in front of her cage, but presently she
recognized us and smiled. We asked her whether she wasn't afraid to let
the snake coil itself round her neck.
"No, not when he has had his powders," she replied. "Sometimes, when he
is waking up, I have to be a little careful not to let him get clean
round me, or he'd give me a squeeze."
The old man and the educated dogs had just finished their performance
when we came in, and so we went over to the platform on the other side
of the tent, where the gypsy fortune teller was plying her vocation.
"Cross me palm, young gentlemen," she droned. "Cross me palm wi' siller,
and I'll tell your fortunes and all that's going to happen to you." Then
she, too, recognized us and smiled. "Did you find your hogs?" she asked.
"All but one," Willis told her.
"It was too bad," she said, "but you never will get anything out of the
boss of this show. He's a brute! He cheats me out of half my contract
money right along."
"Where do you come from?" Willis said with a knowing air. "You are no
gypsy."
"No, indeed!" the girl replied, laughing, and, rubbing a place on the
back of her left hand, she showed us that her skin was white under the
walnut stain. "I'm from Albany. I live with my mother there, and I'm
sending my brother to the Troy Polytechnic School."
"Well, did you ever!" Willis said again as, now completely
disillusioned, we left the tent.