Billy Whiskers' Travels

by Frances Trego Montgomery

Billy sniffed at the two big cables at a point where they were very near together. They had a peculiar odor and Billy tasted them. He scarcely knew whether he liked the taste or not, but he kept on nibbling to find out, nipping and tearing with his sharp teeth until he had got down to the big copper wire on both cables; then he decided that he did not care very much for that kind of food and walked away. It was not yet dark enough for the dynamo to be started, or Billy might have had a shock that would have killed him.

Hunting further, he found over in a dark corner a nice bed which belonged to the engineer, and it looked so inviting that Billy curled up there for a sleep. When he awoke it was nearly midnight and there was a blaze of light in the basement. There was a strange whir of machinery and he could hear anxious voices. Billy, of course, did not know that he had been the cause of it but this is what had happened:

When the electric current passes through a wire, the wire becomes slightly heated and stretches a little bit. In stretching, the two cables where he had chewed them bare, came near enough together to touch each other once in a while, and that made the lights all over the big building wink, that is, almost go out for a second, and the engineer was very much worried about it.

What interested Billy more, however, was a small, wire-screened room that stood near to him. Presently a big cage, brightly lighted, came down in it with a man and a boy. It stopped when it got down into the basement, when the man and the boy stepped out, going down into the engineer's room. They were the proprietor of the hotel and his elevator boy. Billy, as curious as any boy could have been, walked into the little cage to see what it was like. The sides of it were padded with leather, there were mirrors in it that made it a place of light, and there was a seat at the back end of it. At the front side near the door a big cable passed up through it, and to this the boy who ran it had left hanging a leather pad with which he gripped the cable. Billy could barely reach it with his teeth and he pulled sharply on it. It would not come away so he hung his weight on it, and immediately the cage began to go up. Billy was in an elevator and he was taking a ride all by himself. It never stopped until it reached the top floor where a safety catch caught it. Luckily the door on the top floor had not been carefully closed, and Billy was able to slide it open with his horns and walk out into a narrow hall which had a thick velvet carpet upon it and from which opened many doors and other halls.

BILLY FELT HIS COURAGE COMING BACK.

Billy trotted along this hallway, liking the soft feel of the carpet underneath his feet. As he did so, all the lights about the building went out and everything was dark. The cables in the cellar had at last settled down so that they lay square across each other where Billy had chewed the covering off, thus making all the electric current which ran out of the machine on the one side come right back into it on the other, with the result of burning out the dynamo so that there could be no more lights from it that night. This did not worry Billy any. Light came in from the street at the far end of the hall where some white lace curtains fluttered in the breeze. It worried a great many people who were still awake in their rooms, however, and of course they opened their doors to see about it.

By this time Billy had reached the curtains and took a nibble at one of them, and, found that it was finished with the same starch, the taste of which he had liked so much in the laundry. He wanted it down where he could get a good bunch of it in his mouth, so he pulled hard, raising up on his hind feet and throwing his weight upon it. The curtain gave way at the top but it was not so convenient as he had expected, for the long, wide curtain came right down over his back. He tried to get out from under it and his horns ran through the open work. He tried to turn round and his hind feet ran through other open work places. He tried to back out of it and his forefeet got tangled in some more of it. The more he tried to get loose from his starched meal, the more tangled up he got, and at last, growing angry, he began to jump as high in the air as he could.

In the half darkness, he was a great white figure with a long trailing white robe behind him, and the first woman he met in the hall screamed like a steam calliope. Of course her screams brought others out into the hall and everybody, even the men, began to run when they saw this jumping white ghost coming toward them, every once in a while letting out a loud "baah!" Many ladies were so frightened that when they came to their doors, instead of running into their rooms, they started down the hall ahead of Billy, shrieking and screaming at the top of their voices.

The noise only confused Billy the more. The more confused he grew, the harder he jumped and struggled to get out of the curtain, until at the very end of the hall, he came to a stairway and went down it head over heels to the next floor.