Mr. Munchausen <br />Being a True Account of Some of the Recent Adventures beyond the Styx of the L by John Kendrick Bangs (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📖

“And what did you do with the moose’s antlers?” asked Angelica. “I hope you brought ’em home with you, because I’d like to see ’em.”

“I wanted to,” said the Baron, stroking the Twins’ soft brown locks affectionately. “I wanted to bring them home for your father to use as a hat rack, dear, but they were too large. When I had removed them from the dead animal, I found  them so large that I could not get them out of the forest, they got so tangled up in the trees. I should have had to clear a path twenty feet wide and seven miles long to get them even as far as my friend’s hut, and after that they would have had to be carried thirty miles through the woods to the express office.”

“I guess it’s just as well after all,” said Diavolo. “If they were as big as all that, Papa would have had to build a new house to get ’em into.”

“Exactly,” said the Baron. “Exactly. That same idea occurred to me, and for that reason I concluded not to go to the trouble of cutting away those miles of trees. The antlers would have made a very expensive present for your father to receive in these hard times.”

“It was a good thing you had that watch,” the Twins observed, after thinking over the Baron’s adventure. “If you hadn’t had that you couldn’t have killed the moose.”

“Very likely not,” said the Baron, “unless I had been able to do as I did in India thirty years ago at a man hunt.”

 “What?” cried the Twins. “Do they hunt men in India?”?

“That all depends, my dears,” replied the Baron. “It all depends upon what you mean by the word they. Men don’t hunt men, but animals, great wild beasts sometimes hunt them, and it doesn’t often happen that the men escape. In the particular man hunt I refer to I was the creature that was being hunted, and I’ve had a good deal of sympathy for foxes ever since. This was a regular fox hunt in a way, although I was the fox, and a herd of elephants were the huntsmen.”

“How queer,” said Diavolo, unscrewing one of the Baron’s shirt studs to see if he would fall apart.

“Not half so queer as my feelings when I realised my position,” said the Baron with a shake of his head. “I was frightened half to death. It seemed to me that I’d reached the end of my tether at last. I was studying the fauna and flora of India, in a small Indian village, known as ah—what was the name of that town! Ah—something like Rathabad—no, that isn’t quite it—however, one name does as well as another in India. It was a good many  miles from Calcutta, and I’d been living there about three months. The village lay in a small valley between two ranges of hills, none of them very high. On the other side of the westerly hills was a great level stretch of country upon which herds of elephants used to graze. Out of this rose these hills, very precipitously, which was a very good thing for the people in the valley, else those elephants would have come over and played havoc with their homes and crops. To me the plains had a great fascination, and I used to wander over them day after day in search of new specimens for my collection of plants and flowers, never thinking of the danger I ran from an encounter with these elephants, who were very ferocious and extremely jealous of the territory they had come through years of occupation to regard as their own. So it happened, that one day, late in the afternoon, I was returning from an expedition over the plains, and, as I had found a large number of new specimens, I was feeling pretty happy. I whistled loudly as I walked, when suddenly coming to a slight undulation  in the plain what should I see before me but a herd of sixty-three elephants, some eating, some thinking, some romping, and some lying asleep on the soft turf. Now, if I had come quietly, of course, I could have passed them unobserved, but as I told you I was whistling. I forget what the tune was, The Marsellaise or Die Wacht Am Rhein, or maybe Tommie Atkins, which enrages the elephants very much, being the national anthem of the British invader. At any rate, whatever the tune was it attracted the attention of the elephants, and then their sport began. The leader lifted his trunk high in the air, and let out a trumpet blast that echoed back from the cliff three miles distant. Instantly every elephant was on the alert. Those that had been sleeping awoke, and sprang to their feet. Those that had been at play stopped in their romp, and under the leadership of the biggest brute of the lot they made a rush for me. I had no gun; nothing except my wits and my legs with which to defend myself, so I naturally began to use the latter until I could get the former to work. It was nip  and tuck. They could run faster than I could, and I saw in an instant that without stratagem I could not hope to reach a place of safety. As I have said, the cliff, which rose straight up from the plain like a stone-wall, was three miles away, nor was there any other spot in which I could find a refuge. It occurred to me as I ran that if I ran in circles I could edge up nearer to the cliff all the time, and still keep my pursuers at a distance for the simple reason that an elephant being more or less unwieldy cannot turn as rapidly as a man can, so I kept running in circles. I could run around my short circle in less time than the enemy could run around his larger one, and in this manner I got nearer and nearer my haven of safety, the bellowing beasts snorting with rage as they followed. Finally, when I began to see that I was tolerably safe, another idea occurred to me, which was that if I could manage to kill those huge creatures the ivory I could get would make my fortune. But how! That was the question. Well, my dearly beloved Imps, I admit that I am a fast runner, but I am  also a fast thinker, and in less than two minutes I had my plan arranged. I stopped short when about two hundred feet from the cliff, and waited until the herd was fifty feet away. Then I turned about and ran with all my might up to within two feet of the cliff, and then turning sharply to the left ran off in that direction. The elephants, thinking they had me, redoubled their speed, but failed to notice that I had turned, so quickly was that movement executed. They failed likewise to notice the cliff, as I had intended. The consequence was the whole sixty-three of them rushed head first, bang! with all their force, into the rock. The hill shook with the force of the blow and the sixty-three elephants fell dead. They had simply butted their brains out.”

“I got nearer and nearer my haven of safety, the bellowing beasts snorting with rage as they followed.” Chapter IV.

Here the Baron paused and pulled vigourously on his cigar, which had almost gone out.

“That was fine,” said the Twins.

“What a narrow escape it was for you, Uncle Munch,” said Diavolo.

“Very true,” said the great soldier rising, as a  signal that his story was done. “In fact you might say that I had sixty-three narrow escapes, one for each elephant.”

“But what became of the ivory?” asked Angelica.

“Oh, as for that!” said the Baron, with a sigh, “I was disappointed in that. They turned out to be all young elephants, and they had lost their first teeth. Their second teeth hadn’t grown yet. I got only enough ivory to make one paper cutter, which is the one I gave your father for Christmas last year.”

Which may account for the extraordinary interest the Twins have taken in their father’s paper cutter ever since.

  V
THE STORY OF JANG

“Did you ever own a dog, Baron Munchausen?” asked the reporter of the Gehenna Gazette, calling to interview the eminent nobleman during Dog Show Week in Cimmeria.

“Yes, indeed I have,” said the Baron, “I fancy I must have owned as many as a hundred dogs in my life. To be sure some of the dogs were iron and brass, but I was just as fond of them as if they had been made of plush or lamb’s wool. They were so quiet, those iron dogs were; and the brass dogs never barked or snapped at any one.”

“I never saw a brass dog,” said the reporter. “What good are they?”

“Oh they are likely to be very useful in winter,” the Baron replied. “My brass dogs used to guard my fire-place and keep the blazing logs from rolling out into my room and setting fire to the rug the Khan of Tartary gave me for saving his life from a herd of Antipodes he and I were hunting in the Himalaya Mountains.”

 “I don’t see what you needed dogs to do that for,” said the reporter. “A fender would have done just as well, or a pair of andirons,” he added.

“That’s what these dogs were,” said the Baron. “They were fire dogs and fire dogs are andirons.”

Ananias pressed his lips tightly together, and into his eyes came a troubled look. It was evident that, revolting as the idea was to him, he thought the Baron was trying to deceive him. Noting his displeasure, the Baron inwardly resolving to be careful how he handled the truth, hastened on with his story.

“But dogs were never my favourite animals,” he said. “With my pets I am quite as I am with other things. I like to have pets that are entirely different from the pets of other people, and that is why in my day I have made companions of such animals as the sangaree, and the camomile, and the—ah—the two-horned piccolo. I’ve had tame bees even—in fact my bees used to be the wonder of Siam, in which country I was stationed for three years, having been commissioned by a British company to make a study of its climate with a view to finding  out if it would pay the company to go into the ice business there. Siam is, as you have probably heard, a very warm country, and as ice is a very rare thing in warm countries these English people thought they might make a vast fortune by sending tug-boats up to the Arctic Ocean, and with them capture and tow icebergs to Siam, where they might be cut up and sold to the people at tremendous profit. The scheme was certainly a good one, and I found many of the wealthy Siamese quite willing to subscribe for a hundred pounds of ice a week at ten dollars a pound, but it never came to anything because we had no means of preserving the icebergs after we got them into the Gulf of Siam. The water was so hot that they melted before we could cut them up, and we nearly got ourselves into very serious trouble with the coast people for that same reason. An iceberg, as you know, is a huge affair, and when a dozen or two of them had melted in the Gulf they added so to the quantity of water there that fifty miles of the coast line were completely flooded, and thousands of valuable fish, able to live in warm water only,  were so chilled that they got pneumonia, and died. You can readily imagine how indignant the Siamese fishermen were with my company over the losses they had to bear, but their affection for me personally was so great that they promised not to sue the company if I would promise not to let the thing occur again. This I promised, and all went well. But about the bees, it was while I was living in Bangkok that I had them, and they were truly wonderful. There was hardly anything those bees couldn’t do after I got them tamed.”

“How did you tame them, Baron,” asked Ananias.

“Power of the eye, my boy,” returned the Baron. “I attracted their attention first and then held it. Of course, I tried my plan on one bee first. He tamed the rest. Bees are very like children. They like to play stunts—I think it is called stunts, isn’t it, when one boy does something, and all his companions try