"But how do we know who is selling it, or where he is, or whether it's really a balloon or not?" asked Toodle, looking in his pocket to see if he still had the penny Grandpa Whackum had given him the night before.
"Well, we can look under the bridge;" said Noodle, "and find out. Any one who sells balloons—especially red ones—is sure to be kind and good. I'm going to take a look through the crack in the bridge. We have time before the last bell rings."
So Noodle peeked down through a crack in the bridge floor, and there sitting on a stone near the water was a little monkey-doodle boy, with one red balloon tied to a stick.
"Do you really want to sell that balloon for a penny?" asked Noodle. "We'll buy it from you if you do."
The monkey looked up and saw the beaver boys, and in an instant he had scrambled up on the bridge.
"It is my last balloon," said the monkey-doodle. "I am all sold out except this one, so I am going to let you have it for a penny. Circus time is past, and I want to go and take a long sleep. I don't need the balloon any more."
"Well, then, we'll take it," said Toodle, lifting the penny out of his pocket. "We can have fun flying it."
"Oh, I can tell you how to have more fun with it than that," said the monkey-doodle, as he got ready to go away down South where it is warm, for monkeys like it warm in the winter. "You can play football with that balloon, and football is a very nice game for cold weather. It warms you. You must get some leather and make a covering for the red balloon. Then, when you kick it, the balloon won't burst. Make a football of it, I say."
"I guess we will," agreed Toodle.
Well, the beaver boys went on to school, with their red balloon, and, in order that the teacher would not take it away from them in the class room, they tied it outside in a tree, the way Mary told her lamb to stay outside. But the lamb wouldn't stay outside, and neither would the red balloon-football.