Chirpy thanked his friend Kiddie Katydid for this valuable bit of news. And he said he’d be sure to remember it.
“Well,” Kiddie Katydid observed, “if you forget it when you meet Mr. Nighthawk you’ll forget it only once. For he’ll grab you quick as a flash.”
Chirpy Cricket pondered a good deal over the talk he had with Kiddie Katydid. It was clear that Mr. Nighthawk was a dangerous person. “Perhaps”—Chirpy thought—“perhaps if I could get him to take a greater interest in his music he wouldn’t be so ferocious. Yes! I feel sure that if I could only persuade him to practice that booming sound it would give Mr. Nighthawk something pleasant to think of. Who knows but that he might become as gentle as I am?”
Chirpy Cricket liked that notion so much that he thought of little else. He even began to consider making a journey to the woods where Mr. Nighthawk lived, in order to meet that gentleman and offer to train him to be a better musician. And at last Chirpy had even decided to go—as soon as the moon should be full. He spent much of his time listening for Mr. Nighthawk’s Peent! Peent! which now and then came faintly across the meadow, and the dull, muffled boom that often followed.
While Chirpy waited for the moon to grow full, one night an odd thing happened. The stars twinkled overhead. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Yet all at once a loud boom startled Chirpy Cricket and made him leap suddenly towards home.
“Goodness!” he cried to Kiddie Katydid, who happened to be near him. “Did you hear the thunder?”
“That wasn’t thunder,” Kiddie said. “And you’d better not jump like that again. Mr. Nighthawk is here. He made that sound himself.”