“Yah!” exclaimed Danny.  “Mr. Smarty Know-it-all didn’t know so much, after all!”

“Mebbe you just can’t see it, but it’s there,” suggested Nora.

“That’s so,” Danny reluctantly admitted.  “A el’funt’s so big that when you stand right in front of it, its tail might not show at all, no matter how big it was.”

“A little tail wouldn’t,” Jerry said quickly.

“A big one wouldn’t either,” Celia Jane asserted, taking sides against Jerry.  “A el’funt’s enough bigger to hide its tail.”

“If it was very big it would show,” said Jerry.

“The el’funt I play is goin’ to have a tail all right,” Danny informed the children collectively.  “I ain’t goin’ to all the work of makin’ a tail and then not wear it.  I guess a el’funt’s got some kind of a tail, anyway.”

CHAPTER IV

JERRY LEARNS THAT O-U-T SPELLS OUT

The first and, as it turned out, the last performance of their circus took place that afternoon.  Jerry felt a thrill of expectancy as they began to don their costumes.  Once he thought he almost heard again that low, cheerful strumming that had seemed to beat upon his ears when he first saw the poster of the elephant jumping the fence.  He said nothing about it and soon lost all recollection of the rollicking strains in the anticipation of the circus joys that he was about to behold.

Chris and Danny got into their costumes in the woodshed while Celia Jane went into the house and put on her white dress, the one she wore on Sundays.  Mrs. Mullarkey had decided that Nora didn’t need any special costume to be a rope-walker and that all Jerry needed to be a trained seal was a sort of apron made out of a gunny sack to protect his clothes while he crawled about on his stomach.  He did not put this on at once but watched Danny getting into the skin of the elephant, wishing with all his heart that he might be the elephant, even if its tail was big and flat instead of being small like a rope.

It might have proved a mirth-provoking elephant to others had there been others present to see it, but to Jerry’s eager imagination there was nothing laughable about it.  The green wrapper hung most loosely about Danny’s small, slim figure, great folds almost touching the ground, while the brown trunk and the blue, beaver-like tail waggled and wiggled about until they met between the front and hind legs of the elephant.

There was something about that awkward elephant that made Jerry feel all friendly inside and struck the chord of envy in his heart.  He was not at all inclined to laugh when the cap with the very floppy palm-leaf-fan-ears attached fell off, as Danny started to gallop around the woodshed on all fours to see if the costume was all right.

Celia Jane now came dancing out of the house in her white frock, her hair loose and flowing for the pony’s mane, while pinned to the back of her dress, at the waist line, was her mother’s switch to represent the pony’s tail.  The strands of gray in the black hair did not match with the brown of the pony’s mane, but that presented no difficulties to the imagination of the circus performers.