22 TRAPPING WILD ANIMALS 
told him I could start the following Wednesday, 
July third. He asked me to see what connections 
T could make, to secure my passage for the following 
Wednesday and find out the shortest possible time I 
could make Bombay. 
Can my readers form an idea what an Asiatic 
elephant fourteen to fourteen and a half feet high, 
and probably weighing from seven to eight tons, 
would mean to a circus like the Barnum and Bailey 
Show? What a drawing power it would be! It 
would mean a million or more. No keener or more 
wonderful manager than Mr. Bailey lived, but, like 
many others, was often misled by wonderful tales 
of strange things. Immense amounts of money 
were spent in searching for. and trying to secure 
freaks and abnormal animals that never existed 
outside the minds of the showmen’s informants. 
As I said, money was no object. Get it! That 
was all there was to it. “Go get it!” sounds easy, 
eh? 
After looking up the sailings from London to 
Bombay, I saw that one of the P. & O. steamers 
leaving London on the fourth day of July was due 
in Bombay on the twenty-eighth day of that month, 
and told Mr. Bailey that if I left New York on the 
third of July, with luck, I would be in Bombay on 
the twenty-eighth. 
“Can you make it, Mayer? By gosh, that’s good 
time, but how are you going to do it? You have got 
to go to London first.” 
