“I haggled off one end of a steak,” said Tess. “I hope Mrs. Mac doesn’t notice it.”
“If she does,” chuckled Sammy, “tell her one of the cats did it.”
“There’s plenty of them around, but of course Dot and I don’t tell fibs,” declared Tess. “Now come on. Do the trick, Sammy.”
Sammy looked matters over before opening the box. The shreds of meat that Tess had placed on the table caught his eyes.
“Don’t leave ’em in such big chunks,” he advised. “Snapper will choke on ’em.”
“Is that what you call your alligator—Snapper?” asked Tess, as she proceeded to cut up the meat into smaller bits. She and her sisters had brought the scaly reptile back with them from Palm Island as a souvenir for Sammy.
“Snapper is his name, and my mother says snappish is his nature,” answered the boy. “But he only snaps when he wants things to eat. I guess those are all right,” he went on, as he looked at the bits of steak cut smaller by Tess.
Then he lifted out onto the table a small, tame alligator, at the sight of which the two girls broke into exclamations of:
“Oh, isn’t he cute! How did you ever do it! Oh, he looks just like a circus alligator!”
“Maybe I’ll put him in a circus,” said Sammy. “But it wasn’t easy to dress him up.”