CHAPTER II. FIDO TO THE RESCUE.

Despite my narrow escape from a watery grave, my larder for adventure was not dampened in the least, and so, with my little dog percolating at my heels, I tramped onward throughout the remainder of that night, with my face set toward Boston.

Morning came at last. I was far from home when dawn broke across the wold. (I use the word “wold” instead of world because it sounds more poetic, and I am naturally of a highly poetic extinction.) Little birds began to carol in the wayside thickets, crickets cricked in the grass, in a near-by marsh frogs were celebrating morning mass in a masterly manner, and eventually the sun rose into a sky as blue as a poker player who has bet his last blooming chip on four kings and found that some other crook at the table holds four aces.

It was a beautiful morning, but, having been born with a decided _penchant_ for food, without which I have unfortunately, up to the present date, found it quite difficult to subsist, I had no eye for the beauties of the universe scattered around me. My stomach was hollow.

I knew that little Fido must also be hungry, although he had bravely refrained from saying so.

I knocked at the door of a house, and a kind lady came out and asked me what I wanted. I told her I was that flemished that I knew I could find nutriment even in the hole of a doughnut, which I would demonstrate to her satisfaction if she had a few doughnut holes to spare.

At first the lady was somewhat suspicious. She asked me for my name and pedigree. I told her my name was Johnny Jones, but that I had carelessly mislaid my pedigree, and lost the blame thing. In order to allay her suspicions, I related a pathetic tale about a great-grandmother who was dying in Boston, and whose bedside I hoped to reach before the doctors could finish her.

She was touched. She told me she was a widow, and I congratulated her on the spur of the moment. She promised refreshments for me and my dog if I would perform some slight manual labor by sawing a cord of wood or so for her. The wood was in the woodshed. I inspected it with a sad and regretful eye. It never did agree with me to saw wood, and I offered to shovel the sunshine off the widow’s front walk.

But she was impervious to my argument, and so, peeling off my coat, I seized the bucksaw and went at it. The saw needed honing, and I must admit that I was greatly discouraged by the time I had amputated the first stick or two. I knew I’d never last to finish the job on an empty stomach, and this led me to set my colossal intellect at work on the problem.

The widow had gone into the house to get breakfast. I paused and pondered. A scheme came to me. I made an effort and found that by zizzing my breath through my teeth and lips I could produce an excellent imitation of a dull bucksaw cutting through a stick of wood. For the next half hour or more I sat on the chopping block zizzing with consummate industry, lifting and dropping a stick of wood at regular intervals, so that it would fall with a thud loud enough to be heard in the kitchen.

As soon as I dared, I put on my coat and strolled into the kitchen, pretending to wipe beads of perspiration from my alabaster brow, and betraying every skymptom of excessive exhaustion.

“Goodness!” exclaimed the widow, in surprise. “Did you saw the whole of that wood as soon as this?”

“Yes, madam,” I answered, “I saw the whole of that wood.”

Then she regaled me with a sumptuous breakfast of ham and beans and corn bread and coffee, and by the time little Fido and I were eternally satiated the table looked as if it had been keeping a date with a Kansas cyclone.

“You were indeed hungry,” said the kind widow. “You are very young to be walking all the way to Boston to reach the bedside of a dying great-grandmother. Now, your parents----”

“Are both dead,” I sighed.

“Oh,” said she, “you’re an orphan. Have you been so----”

“Not often,” I answered. “I believe I may truthfully say this is my first offense.”

“Your great-grandmother--is she very old?”

“That is the sad part of it,” I moaned, bursting into tears. “It is terrible for one to die so young. She is only thirty-five.”

The widow seemed surprised.

“Only thirty-five!” she exclaimed; “and your great-grandmother? You are at least sixteen or seventeen. It is impossible for you to have a great-grandmother who is only thirty-five!”

I perceived the necessity of side-stepping at once.

“Pardon me, madam,” I said. “The lady is my grandmother, but she weighs at least two hundred and ninety pounds, so I call her my _great_ grandmother.”

And I got away with it. She was so relieved to find me strictly truthful that she did not question the possibility of my having a grandmother of that age. Had she done so, I should have explained that doubtless in my haste I got the figures reversed, and that my grandmother was fifty-three instead of thirty-five. Not being particularly strong in mathematics, I sometimes make these little _fox paws_ with figures.

“Your poor father and mother,” murmured the widow; “were they people of a spiritual turn?”

“My father was,” I replied; “decidedly so. I have known him to go out with the parson for spiritual stimulation. They would go into a back room somewhere and sit down at an ordinary round table, and it would not be long before spirits appeared before them. When those spirits departed my father used to rap on the table, and more spirits would come. After a prolonged séance of this kind my father usually saw things.”

“Dear me!” said the widow. “How unfortunate to lose such a father. How old was he when he passed away?”

“He was only fifty-nine,” I answered, with criminal carelessness.

Immediately, if not sooner than that, I perceived that it was time for me to be wending my way onward, and I proceeded to wend, overloading her with such a burden of gratitude that she didn’t have time to get her breath before I was half a mile down the road.

Near noon I approached the hoop skirts of a large city. As I approached, I perceived posted on fences and the sides of old barns many carnivorous posters advertising a circus which was to appear in that town on that very date.

Entering the town, I lemonaded slowly down the principal street. Ere long my ears were saluted by a sound resembling a base libel on music, and soon the circus band at the head of a long procession made its appearance.

Both sides of the street were lined with gaping multitudes. It seemed that everybody in town and for miles around had assembled to witness that parade. Lawyers, doctors, storekeepers, clerks, stenographers, street laborers, everybody, in fact, had gathered upon the sidewalks to see the procession pass, and for the time being business in that town was placed _horse de tomcat_.

The music assassinators of the band were dressed in bright-red suits, and rode in a gilded chariot. Next in line, a short distance behind the band chariot, came the biggest elephant I have ever seen; certainly the creature must have weighed twelve or fourteen tons, more or less.

In the center of the city there was a wooden bridge spanning a deep, dark river. Unfortunately, this bridge was not of sufficient strength to sustain the weight of that huge elephant. Just as the monster reached the middle span of the structure there was a sudden cracking of timbers, and the bridge gave way, precipitating the immense creature into the water.

The excitement immediately became intense. Women shrieked, men shouted, and, to the relief of everybody, the circus band stopped firing. The splash of the elephant striking the surface of the river resembled a clap of thunder, and water was flung over the top of a five-story building near at hand.

Crowding to the nearest bank of the river, I perceived the poor beast floundering distressingly in the middle of the stream. Almost immediately I became aware that the creature could not swim, and was, therefore, doomed to be drowned unless some one could devise a means of its rescue. Right before the eyes of those helpless and horrified spectators the beast sank and rose and sank again.

The manager of the circus, who was likewise the owner, came tearing through the crowd, frothing at the mouth, and shrieking that he would pay a reward of five hundred dollars to any one who would rescue the elephant.

I saw my opportunity, and grappled with it.

“Clam yourself, sir,” said I. “I will relieve you of that five hundred. Your priceless treasure shall not perish.”

Then I called my faithful dog.

“Fido,” I cried, pointing toward the drowning mammal, “it’s up to you to get busy. We need the mazuma. Go fetch, Fido.”

Instantly my noble dog plunged into the river and swam swiftly toward the elephant. Just as the great beast was sinking for the third time, Fido seized it by one ear, and, holding the elephant’s head above the surface, turned and struck out for the nearest shore.

It was a fearful struggle. For a time the issue hung in the balance, or words to that effect. Once Fido, elephant, and all disappeared from view, and the crowd shouted in a high key. That is, most of the crowd; but, judging by the smell of the man’s breath next to me, the key he shouted in was whisky. I touched him gently on the shoulder, and admonished him to keep up his spirits. Hiccuping slightly, he assured me that it was frequently far more difficult for him to keep them down.

With folded arms, I serenely waited until little Fido reached the bank and dragged the elephant, limp and nearly drowned, but still alive, out upon dry ground.

The spectators cheered wildly, and the proprietor of the circus made a dastardly attempt to fall on my neck and kiss me, but I held him off.

“My dear boy,” he cried, “I owe you a thousand thanks.”

“No,” I answered; “you owe me five hundred dollars, and I’ll take it in frigid cash. Even a certified check will be scrutinized with suspicion.”