The sound that awakened Johnny Thompson to dull reality of a hapless yesterday was the braying of a burro. He had remained seated on his bench all night. At first he had not dared to sleep. At last, overcome by fatigue, he had fallen asleep.
At first, only half awake, he imagined himself in Belize. Burros were common enough there.
“No,” he declared, shaking himself, “I am not in Belize. This is the jungle. There are no burros. I was dreaming.”
Leaping to his feet, he shook himself free of the last vestige of sleep.
As if to deny his last assertion, there struck his ears, clear and defiant, a loud, laughing “He-haw!”
“Well, I’ll be a donkey myself!” he exclaimed, turning and racing down the path that led to the creek. The sound appeared to come from there.
When he had covered two-thirds of the distance, he paused in astonishment. Before him in the path was the skinniest, boniest, most dilapidated and dejected specimen of animal kind it had ever been his privilege to meet. Yet, it was unmistakably a burro.
At that moment, as if to proclaim his species, the creature stuck his nose in the air and brayed once again.
In spite of his great dilemma, Johnny sat down on a fallen mahogany tree trunk and rocked with laughter.
“Well now,” he exclaimed, his fit of laughter over, “where did you come from, and how? Did you walk or swim, or both?”
Without an attempt at an answer, the creature paused in the path, hung his head and put on such a droll and mournful look as set the boy off into another fit of laughter.
Johnny was once more regaining control of himself when he caught a yellow gleam through the branches. The next moment a huge bunch of bananas appeared, and beneath them was Pant.
“Johnny, meet my new friend Rip Van Winkle,” smiled Pant. “Call him Rip for short. He’s just slept twenty years down there by a deserted cabin. I woke him up and brought him along.”
“What a pity! Why didn’t you let him sleep?” grinned Johnny.
“Why should I? He was bound to wake up sooner or later. He’d been lonesome if there’d been no one around.
“But honest, Johnny,” Pant’s tone became serious, “what would you think of a native who would leave a poor old fellow like that to starve!”
“I’d think he was a pig of a dog. But how much better can we do? What’ll we feed him on? Bananas?”