CHAPTER XV
THE ELEPHANTS ARE ENRAGED AT THE GOATS
illy Junior, Daisy and Nannie visited the cages of all the animals, and gave no more thought to the runaway Twins until hour after hour went by and the Twins did not come back. Neither had they seen them playing in the Park and Daisy began to grow nervous about them. At last she said to her husband,
"Billy, I can't stand this suspense any longer. I am beginning to fear that something has happened to the Twins. You know they might have wandered over to the lake and been drowned. You and Nannie may go on calling on the different animals, but I am going to hunt for the kids."
"You are quite right," said Nannie. "I have been uneasy about them for some time, but did not like to mention it for fear of alarming you. We will go with you and help hunt for them."
"Yes," agreed Billy Junior, "it is high time we were finding them. There is no knowing what they might do, they are so daring and mischievous. We'll outline a systematic plan for the hunt. Each one will go in a different direction and scour all the paths in that section of the Park, looking around every cage that we see. Then when the clock strikes twelve we will meet in front of the yard where the elephants are kept."
Billy Junior went to the south, Nannie to the east and Daisy to the north.
Every step Daisy took, she grew more worried, and when she passed a cage of ferocious tigers and panthers who she knew lived on kid meat, she shivered to think that perhaps they were licking their chops because they had just finished eating one of her darlings who in some way might have squeezed between the iron bars of their cage.
On, on she went, her knees knocking together from fear and fatigue, when she thought she heard their voices calling, "Mamma! Mamma!"
She hastened in the direction from which the sound came and there, sure enough, shut up in a yard with other goats she saw her two darling babies. There was no mistaking them as they were the handsomest kids you ever saw, one being white as snow like Daisy and the other black as night like its father, Billy Junior.
"Oh, my darlings, my darlings!" she called when she saw them, and both kids came running to the fence to be kissed on the ends of their saucy little noses which they stuck through the bars of the iron fence. "Where have you been and how does it come you are shut up here?"
"Oh, mamma, get us out for we are afraid of that big, horrid black goat over there with the great horns. He said if we did not stop calling for you, he would hook us over the moon with his big horn."
"Who said they would hook you?" asked Billy Junior, who had just come up to the fence with Nannie.
"That old fellow over there asleep by the house," said one Twin.
"I should like to see him try to do it. If he did, he would see himself flying over the moon," said Billy angrily.
While the goats had been talking to the kids, several men with rakes and pitchforks in their hands had come up behind them and formed in a semicircle. Hearing a crunching of the gravel on the walk behind him, Billy looked around and knew in a second that they were trapped. There was no use of trying to fight men armed with pitchforks, so when they began to drive them toward an open gate that led into the pen where the kids were, Daisy, Nannie and Billy Junior showed no fight, but went quietly as lambs. After the men had left, Billy Junior said,
"Well, this is a pretty how-de-do! Here we are locked up and father coming to see us after being away two years. Now we can't greet him except through the bars of a fence! It really is too bad. We should have had sense enough to leave the kids at home, knowing as we do how mischievous they are."
They were shut in this pen three days and were growing heartily sick of the monotony of walking around their small yard in the daytime and being shut in a stuffy little room at night with the other goats who paid little attention to them.
"If that fence were not so very high, I could jump it," said Billy Junior. "But should I try and fail, I might fall back on the long, sharp spikes and hang there."
"Or if only the bars were not so close together, we would starve ourselves and squeeze through," remarked Daisy.
"Or dig under," suggested Nannie, "if the bars did not go down into the ground so far."
"Oh my, oh my, oh me! Isn't this life awful, with nothing to do but wander around this old yard where the grass is all tramped down and burnt by the hot sun, with people walking by and looking at you all the time? Only an occasional kind-hearted person gives you a peanut or the core of an apple," grumbled Billy Junior.
"I wish your father were here," said Nannie. "When everything looked hopeless, he always found a way out."
"So do we wish he was here," chimed in Daisy and Billy Junior.
"Mercy sakes alive!" exclaimed Daisy the next moment. "See where those kids are! In the elephant yard!" and she jumped to her feet and ran to the fence which separated the yard where the goats were confined from that of the elephants. "How did you two get over there?" she asked severely. "Come straight out of that yard! The elephants may not like kids and kill you."
"You are perfectly correct, madame," said an elephant. "I dislike goats of all kinds, and so would you if in my place. Forced to live month in and month out next to a goat pen where the disagreeable odor all goats have is carried to my nostrils until I am sick from it and cannot eat is far from pleasant."
"Did I hear you say," said Billy Junior, stepping up beside his wife, "that you do not like the smell of goats?”
"That is exactly what I did say," replied the elephant. "And I will repeat it if you wish me to do so."
"Oh, don't take the trouble! Saying it once is enough. But allow me to inform you that the odor of a goat is as sweet to the nostrils as roses and lilies compared to the odor from an elephant. That resembles the smell from a garbage pile!"
Now Billy Junior had done it! The elephant became enraged and tried to break down the fence between them. When he found he could not do this, he trumpeted and pawed the earth, throwing great clods of dirt all over them.
"Come out of there! Come out of there!" called Daisy to the kids. "He will kill you!"
But the Twins could not get out as the elephant was between them and the hole through which they had crawled. Seeing them, he charged but he was so big and they so small that they simply ran between his legs when he tried to catch them up with his trunk.
Daisy, Nannie and Billy Junior all stood panic-stricken at the chances the kids took. First they would run under his body from side to side, then between his hind legs. Had he moved a foot, they would have been crushed between his great legs. There being two of them and both so small and frisky, they confused the beast so he did not think as quickly as usual. He had been out of the jungle for years where he had had to think fast, and now he found himself rusty and unable to cope with frisky little pests like these two kids.
"I'll fix them," he said to himself, and he walked over to where his tub of drinking water stood, and filled his trunk. Then he charged down on the Twins where they stood in one corner, waiting to see what he would do next. The little rascals were enjoying the rage of the elephant very much and were not afraid of him at all as they thought they could trust to their wits to save themselves.
The elephant walked up to within five feet of them. Then he stopped and squirted the water at them with such force that it knocked one of them over when it hit him broadside. The other kid it blinded so he could not see where to run. Then they heard a bellow of rage and pain. Shaking the water from their eyes, they saw a big white goat run under the elephant's stomach and scratch the skin with his short horns so badly that it made the monster cry out with pain and turn to see what had attacked him so suddenly. When he faced about whom should he see but old Billy Whiskers himself in front of him. At the same moment he felt a cat on his back and a dog snapping at his heels.
But what had changed the enraged elephant so quickly? For now he was as docile as a lamb, and the kids saw him go up to Billy and wind his trunk around Billy's beard and playfully pull it, at the same time saying,
"Billy Whiskers! My old friend Billy Whiskers of the circus! Where by all that is wonderful did you come from? I supposed you were dead long ago."
Elephants live to be over a hundred years old, but goats not so long, and as it had been many years since these two had traveled and performed in the same circus, the elephant had taken it for granted that Billy was dead.
"Excuse me a minute until I throw out these smelly young kids. I can't stand their odor," said the elephant.
"If you don't mind, I will put them out myself, as I think I can do it more gently than you could, and I happen to have an interest in those particular kids as they are my well beloved grandchildren whom I have not seen for two years," replied Billy.
"Your grandchildren!" exclaimed the elephant. "I beg your pardon. Had I known they were related to you in the most distant manner, I would not have harmed a hair of their skin. I do hope you will forgive me!"
"Certainly I will forgive you. And perhaps they were annoying you and deserved being punished, for as I remember them they were pretty mischievous kids."
"Take after their grandfather, eh?" said the elephant.
"I guess so," said Billy.
"Baa, baa, baa!" came a voice as sweet as music to Billy's ears and turning he saw his darling wife looking through the fence.
"How did you get shut in there?" he asked. "I'll be with you in a minute!" But though he looked and looked he could find no opening leading into the yard where Nannie was confined. He had gotten into the elephant's yard by jumping through an open window in the elephant's house and running out the door that led to the yard, and Stubby and Button had followed him. Billy had recognized the kids, and seeing them in danger he had not stopped to figure how they got there, but had rushed to their rescue immediately. He and Stubby and Button had just arrived in the Park after their long journey from New York State, and were looking for the family when they chanced to turn a corner in the path and came upon this scene.
The kids slipped back into the goat yard the way they had left it, while Billy, Stubby and Button stood and talked to Nannie, the fence between them.
"Oh, if I could only find a way to get over into your yard," baaed Billy to Nannie.
"I have it!" said the elephant. "I can get you all over there if you don't mind being dropped a few feet."
"Certainly we don't, but how are you going to do it?"
"I'll just pick you up with my trunk and drop you on the other side of the fence."
"You can't do it," said Billy. "I am too heavy."
"Indeed, I can do it! I guess you are no heavier than the mahogany logs I used to lift and put in high piles when I lived in Siam. Come here and let me try."
The elephant encircled Billy's body with his trunk and lifted him up from the ground and over the fence as easily as if he had been a feather. When he had raised Billy to the top of the fence, he unwound his trunk and dropped him over into the next yard where his family awaited him.
When the elephant turned to get Stubby and Button to put them over the same way, he found they had crawled through the hole the kids had used.
Such a smelling of noses, and licking of faces you never saw as when the Billy Whiskers family and their friends were once again reunited after this long separation while Billy had been in the war in Europe.
"Isn't it too bad, my dear," said Nannie, "that we are all shut up in this yard with no hopes of getting out? And I was just saying to Daisy that if you were here, you would soon find a way to secure our freedom."
"And I shall, my dear. I shall just wait until the keeper comes in through the gate to look after the goats. Then I shall either butt him over as he comes in or butt down the gate when he takes the padlock and chain off. Anyhow, I shall find a way to get us out of here very soon, I am sure. Now we will think only of the present and enjoy every minute of being together. What fine kids the Twins have grown to be! But I imagine they are just as mischievous as ever."
"Can you wonder at it when you stop to consider who their father and grandfather are?" said Nannie.
"Gracious! What can be causing all that commotion over in the farther corner of the yard, I wonder?" said Daisy.
"Where are the Twins?" asked Billy Junior.
"I don't know," answered their mother.
"Then I guess you will find that they are at the bottom of the fracas over there. I'll go see," said their father, and off he trotted to find out if the kids were in mischief.
Presently he came back, driving both kids before him. But what had happened to them? They were as dirty as dirty could be and both were crying.
"Oh, my precious darlings!" exclaimed Daisy. "Who has been hurting you?"
"No one has been hurting them. They need a good spanking! Where do you think I found them? In the middle of a ring of Angora goats, having a fight with two kids about their own size. It would have been all right to have had a boxing match, but they did not play fair. They lost their tempers and when they got the other kids down, they hooked and tramped them unmercifully. I don't like that! They must fight fair and keep to the rules of boxing, and not beat up their adversaries when they are down."
"Come here, kids," said their grandfather. "If you will promise to be good all the rest of the day, I will tell you a story of the Great War and of some of the things that happened to Uncle Stubby and Uncle Button and myself when fighting in the army.”
