In a few minutes a voice called up the stairway again. “Is the Cricket chasing you?” it asked. It was Farmer Green, speaking to Johnnie.
“Don’t tease me!” Johnnie Green cried. “Come up and help me find him!”
So Farmer Green climbed the stairs and looked into Johnnie’s room and laughed.
“Maybe I ought to have brought the old shotgun,” he said. “I’d hate to have a Cricket jump at me.”
Johnnie managed to grin at that. He was so wide awake that he no longer felt like grumbling.
“The trouble with this Cricket is that he won’t jump,” he told his father. “I can’t tell where he is, because he keeps still whenever I move. But when the light’s out and everything’s quiet he makes a terrible noise.”
“That’s a trick Crickets have,” Farmer Green observed. “And I must say that if I were a Cricket I’d act the same way.”
Of course Chirpy Cricket heard everything that was said. And he couldn’t help thinking that Farmer Green was a very sensible person. “I dare say he’d be a famous fiddler if he belonged to our family,” Chirpy told himself. And for a moment or two he was tempted to play a tune for Farmer Green. But he thought better of the notion at once. He remembered that Farmer Green had climbed the stairs to hunt for him. And Chirpy squeezed himself further into the crack where he was hiding until he was so huddled up that he couldn’t have fiddled if he had wanted to.
Though they looked carefully, neither Johnnie nor his father could find him. And at last they had to admit that it was useless to search any longer.
“What shall I do?” Johnnie wailed. “As soon as I put out the light and get into bed he’ll begin chirping again.”