Also they
scrub my skin to keep away the biting bugs. You will like it here,
Umboo, and soon you will go to school and learn how to pile the
teakwood logs."
"And will I ride men on my head?" asked Umboo.
"Yes, you will learn to do that, and many things more," said Chang.
But even he did not know all the wonderful things that were to happen
to Umboo, nor how he was to go in the circus.
CHAPTER XII
UMBOO IS SOLD
Umboo, the big elephant boy, did not at once begin to learn the
teakwood log-piling lesson. Just as in school you do not learn to read
the first day, so it was with Umboo. He had to be trained by his
keeper and the keonkies, or tame elephants.
And, after the first feeling of being sorry at having been taken away
from his mother, Umboo grew to like the new life. His mother was sent
to another big stable, farther away, though Umboo saw her once in a
while. With him, however, were many of the wild elephants he had known
when the herd was in the jungle. Keedah was one of these elephants.
"I don't like it here at all!" snarled Keedah, when he had been led up
beside Umboo, a few days after they had all been caught in the trap.
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