I call the black dogs Tip and Top, for they were really the missing poodles, and I will explain how it was their color was changed.
No sooner did Ted and Janet call the black poodles to them than Professor Montelli grew very angry indeed. He jumped down off the platform, and, going to where the Curlytops stood at their seats, with the dogs frisking around them, the trainer cried:
"Here! What do you mean by calling my dogs away when I am making them do tricks? What do you children mean?"
"These aren't your dogs—they're ours!" declared Ted.
"Yours! Nonsense!" blustered the trainer. "These are my dogs. I have had them a long while!"
"Not both of them!" said Janet, who remembered what the man had said. "You told us you hadn't had Emperor very long."
"Well, I have the other! They are both my dogs!" cried the angry man. "If you have lost any dogs you had better look somewhere for them. Get out of my tent and give me back the poodles!"
He made a move to thrust Ted and Janet to one side and pick up the poodles, but a man in the audience said:
"Not so fast, Professor. It seems to me that by the way these dogs came to this girl and boy when called that there may be something in their claim. Did you lose two dogs?" he asked Ted and Janet.
"Yes, sir," they answered. And then Ted told how Tip was taken out of their automobile some weeks before, while Top was stolen from their barn a night or two previous.