“Oh, he’ll fall and be killed!” exclaimed Janet.
“Cock-a-doodle-do!” crowed the rooster himself, while below him, running about on the ground, the hens clacked and clucked, wondering what it was all about, and thinking, perhaps, that a big hawk had carried off their friend.
“Stop, Ted! Stop!” Jimmie finally cried. “That’s my father’s best rooster and he wouldn’t want him hurt. Stop!”
Not until then did the Curlytop boy turn around to see what was the matter. Then he saw the rooster dangling in the air from the weed that was on the end of the kite tail.
“Oh, my!” cried Ted. “How did it happen?”
Without waiting for anyone to answer him he stopped running. The kite, no longer being pulled against the wind, began to fall, especially as the rooster was heavy. If it had not been such a big kite it never would have gone up with its long tail and the rooster also.
But kites, in a strong wind, can lift heavy weights. Ted had been told this by his father, and that is why he and Jimmie made such a large flier. But they never expected it to lift a rooster.
“The string and the weed on the end of the tail got tangled around Mr. Rooster’s legs,” said Jimmie, when he and Ted went to where the kite had fallen to look at it. “He couldn’t get loose.”
And that is exactly what happened. The rooster had been quietly feeding with the hens when the weed, which Jimmie had pulled up, roots and all, had flopped down on him as the kite made a dive through the air, and then had come the sail upward, the rooster getting a free ride.
With many a crow, and other queer noises, the ruffled fowl ran away as soon as Jimmie had untangled him. And such a cawing and cackling as there was among the hens! If chickens talk, as some people think they do, they must have had lots of questions to ask old Mr. Rooster about what had happened to him when he was ballooning.