“I am a ’ittle worm, an’ I crawled in here on my tummy-tummy,” he said.
“Well, I must get them out,” observed Grandpa Martin.
“Will you have to tear down the barn? Or maybe send for the firemen?” asked Jan, thinking of the poor cat.
“Oh, no. If I were smaller I’d crawl under the barn myself, and pull Ted out by his heels,” said Grandpa Martin. “I expect he wiggled under a beam where he is a pretty tight fit. That happened to me when I was a boy.
“I’ll go inside the barn, take up a board in the floor, right over where Ted and Trouble are lying, and then they can crawl up that way. Don’t worry, Jan. They’ll be all right.”
And so they were. When the floor board was lifted up, right above where Ted lay stretched on the ground under the barn, he could get out, and so could the little “worm,” Trouble.
As Grandpa Martin had said, Ted had tried to crawl under a place where a beam, or a big piece of wood, made such a narrow place that even a cat would have had hard work to get under. But Ted was not hurt, nor was Trouble, and when they had reached down and lifted out the eggs, and the hay and straw had been brushed from Ted and his little brother, they only laughed.
The rest of the eggs were soon gathered, and then came a fine supper with plenty of rich milk for the Curlytops, to give them rosy cheeks as well as curling hair.
The next day Jan and Ted went off in the goat wagon again. They rode to the field where they had seen the lame boy, and there he was once more, waiting for them with smiling face.
“I couldn’t come back that afternoon,” Hal said. “The doctor had to do something to this foot of mine.”