“I hope I get a lot of eggs to-day,” said Tom, speaking aloud to himself, as he stopped whistling. “Maybe I can get a whole basket full. I’ll look in the hay for them. Hens like to lay their eggs in the hay. It’s a good place for them to hide.”
Now, if that farmer boy had only known it, there was something else hidden in the hay besides hens’ eggs. There was Tamba, the tame tiger. Tamba had worked himself down into a regular nest in the dried grass, and only his eyes peered out. They were very bright and shining eyes, and they watched every move of the farmer boy.
Tamba saw the basket which the boy carried in his hand so he might put the eggs in it, and, seeing this basket, the tame tiger thought to himself:
“Well, if he expects to take me back to the circus in that little basket he’s very much mistaken. Why, it wouldn’t hold two of my paws!”
And then Tamba took a second look, and he saw that the boy was not one of the circus keepers, as the tiger had at first supposed.
“But he whistles just like one,” thought Tamba. “I wonder what he wants.”
So the boy, not knowing anything about the tiger in the hay, walked right toward Tamba, hoping to gather eggs.
In another moment, just as the boy began poking his hand down in the loose hay, hoping to find a hen’s nest full of eggs there, Tamba made up his mind it was time for him to do something.
“I’ll give this fellow, whoever he is, a good scare!” said Tamba to himself. “I’ll teach him to come looking for me with a basket! Look out now, you whistling chap!” said Tamba to himself.
Then he gave a loud growl――one of his very loudest――and he raised himself from his nest in the hay, and stuck his head out.
Now if you had gone hunting hens’ eggs in your father’s barn, and had, all of a sudden, seen a great, big, striped tiger jump out at you from the hay, giving a loud growl, I believe you would have done just what this boy did. And what he did was this.
He dropped his basket, gave one look at Tamba in the hay, and then uttered such a yell that his father and mother in the farmhouse, quite a distance off, heard him. And then that boy ran out of the barn as fast as he could run. That’s what this boy did, and I think you would have done the same.