“I’ll see!” offered the tall lad, scrambling out of his seat. He made a dash for the kitchen, getting there just as Ned and Bob reached it. They saw Katie standing on a chair, her skirts drawn tightly about her shoe tops, while, on his knees, poking with the fire shovel under the ice box, was Professor Snodgrass.
“What is it?” cried Jerry.
The professor turned to face the crowd now looking at him and mildly said:
“It’s a bug I’m after, that’s all. I came out here to get a drink, and, saw, crawling on the sink, a very fine specimen of a red ant. It is a variety for which I have long been searching, so I at once got a lump of sugar to bait the ant. It crawled on the sugar, but as soon as this young woman here saw what I was doing she screamed, jumped, hit my elbow, and the lump of sugar, with the ant on it, was knocked under the ice box. I am just trying to get it out.”
Jerry, as did the other boys, knew it would be useless to ask the professor to come away without his ant, so they resigned themselves with what patience they could summon, while he poked away with the fire shovel, meanwhile grunting somewhat on account of his cramped position.
“Katie, you shouldn’t have made such a fuss over a little ant,” chided Mrs. Hopkins.
“I—I thought it was a mouse he was after, and I can’t abide a mouse,” apologized the maid.
The boys laughed, Uriah Snodgrass paid no attention to them, and presently he cried:
“I’ve got it!”
He drew out on the shovel the lump of sugar with the ant still on it, and, uttering an exclamation of satisfaction, the little bald-headed scientist clapped his specimen into a bottle of cyanide and announced that he was ready to leave.