“Mr. Coon, what’s a circus?”
He was never more surprised in his life than at the effect of his question on the tough and wicked old Coon, for no sooner had the word circus passed his lips than the Coon fainted dead away and dropped down in a limp heap with his head hanging out of the big knot hole which served as the door of his house. As Billy could not climb up the trunk of the tree to fan him or dash water in his face, there was nothing to do but wait for him to revive.
Pretty soon he began to show signs of returning life and finally pulled himself to his feet again. Billy was then not more astonished at what he said than at the awful expression on his horrified face.
“He looked,” as Billy said when he told the story years afterward, “as though he had seen forty ghosts with every last one of them after him.”
When the Coon began to speak, his voice was so cracked and squeaky that Billy wouldn’t have known that the bold old Coon was talking had he not seen his jaws wagging. This is what he said:
“William Whiskers, (he called him ‘William’) never mention that horrid name to me again. It wakes memories that I cannot endure. The very thought of them makes me faint and spoils my appetite for days. Years ago I was captured and sold to a circus and it was nine horrible months before I was able to escape. Ever since, the very thought of all I endured makes me weak and sick. Nights after eating too much, even of the tenderest chicken, I have the most awful nightmares when I see again those horrid monkeys who worried me until I was almost crazy. I hated them most of all. If the time ever comes when I catch a monkey alone, I’ll make mince-meat of him if it is the last thing I ever do. But the monkeys were not all. I can hear yet, in my dreams, the roars of the lions, the snarling tigers and wild-cats, can see the crowds of people and feel the canes that were shoved through the bars of my cage and punched into my ribs, and can hear and see that fool of a clown saying and doing the same silly things day after day. Oh, it was awful! It makes me faint to think of it.”
Billy thought he was going to keel over again, but he didn’t. Feebly waving his paw in farewell, he slowly withdrew from sight.
The story told by the old Coon made Billy very sober, and again he wondered if he had better not stay at home and take no risks, for he said to himself:
“What if the circus folks should take it into their heads to capture me and make me one of their attractions and I should have as bad a time as the old Coon? I’d wish then that I had stayed at home and minded my own business.”
After the day spent in fruitless inquiry, he went to bed saying that he would sleep over the matter and decide later what he had better do.