The animal had been lifting her feet uneasily for some moments. Now she gazed out through the door where the horses had disappeared and moaned pitifully. With the sagacity of a veteran she seemed to sniff the fact that her master was not on the premises. To assure herself she raised her trunk and began to trumpet the call that he had always answered. After each echoing roar she hearkened. No reply came, and each succeeding appeal was more insistent and more frantic. Avery backed to the door with considerable precipitancy. The elephant began to crouch and strain at her chains. The old beams creaked more ominously and there were crackings. “I was only foolin’ you, Imogene,” Avery faltered. “He ain’t gone at all.” The elephant stood up on her hind legs and tugged at the chains that confined her fore feet. One of them snapped. “Honest to Gawd!” shouted “Figger-Four.” The situation frightened him. Palermo with a wild elephant rampant in it would hear of his visit to the barn and would suspect and blame him. Imogene thrashed about more viciously. “There ain’t a word of truth in what I said about him. He’s right handy.” But when she snapped one of the hind-leg chains he quavered, “He was lyin’ to me! She don’t understand what you say to her!”’ He ran out to see where the horses were, thinking that their return might reassure the great beast. But they were far down in the field, scampering about. There was the “yawk” of drawing nails within, and the side of the barn shivered. “She’s a-goin’ to get loose! She’s goin’ to rip us all to pieces!” He hopped around to the front of the barn in the frantic hope that some kind of aid would present itself. “Hard-Times” Wharff, with an instinct that never failed when there was trouble on, stood across the road, his gaze on the barn. Then came an inspiration to “Figger-Four.” Since Imogene had settled in Palermo he had taken especial interest in all literature relating to elephants. He suddenly remembered an item he had seen in the miscellany of the county _Oracle_. It was stated there that elephants were singularly susceptible to the soothing influence of music. “Have you got your flute along, ’Quarius?” squalled Avery. The human weather-vane pulled it out and waved it. “Then, for the Lord’s sake, hurry acrost here with it. You may save lives and property.” It was at that moment that Squire Phin realised that something out of the ordinary was occurring on his premises. He came out of the kitchen-door just in time to behold “Figger-Four” and “Hard-Times” hustling around the corner of the barn. A moment later he heard the melancholy and wavery notes of the flute, and hurried into the barn by the way of the tie-up door just in time to witness the climax of Avery’s attempt at elephant-taming.