Well, when Uncle Wiggily Longears found that the elephant wouldn't get off his trunk—oh, listen to me! What I meant to say was, that when Uncle Wiggily saw those two boys running off with Fido Flip-Flop, the little trick dog, as I told you about in the story before this, the old gentleman rabbit was so surprised at first that he didn't know what to do.
"Won't you please come back with that little doggie?" begged Uncle Wiggily, but the bad boys kept right on. I guess they knew how smart Fido was, and they wanted to get up a show with him. Anyhow, they kept on running through the woods, holding him tightly in their arms .
"Oh, dear! This is terrible!" exclaimed Uncle Wiggily. "I'll never get any good fortune if Fido has such bad luck. And it was partly my fault, too, for if we hadn't been doing tricks, we would have heard these boys coming, and could have run away. Well, now I must save Fido."
So Uncle Wiggily sat down on a stump, and thought, and thought, and thought of all the plans he could think of, to save the doggie from the two boys, and at last he decided the only way to do was to scare them.
"Then they'll drop Fido, and run away," said the old gentleman rabbit. "Let me see, how can I scare them? I know, I'll make believe I'm a tiger!"
So what did that brave Uncle Wiggily do? but go to a mud hole, and with his crutch dipped into the mud, he made himself all striped over like a tiger that you see in a circus. Oh, he was a most ferocious sight when he finished decorating himself! Then he hid his satchel in the bushes, and he started off on a short cut through the woods, to get ahead of the boys. Faster and faster through the woods went Uncle Wiggily, and he looked so peculiarly terrifying that all the animals who saw him were scared out of their wits, and one old blue-jay bird was so frightened that he wiggled his tail up and down, and hid his head in a hollow tree.
Well, by and by, after a while, Uncle Wiggily got to a place in the woods where he knew those boys, with Fido Flip-Flop, would soon come by. Then the rabbit hid himself in the bushes, so that his long ears wouldn't show. For he knew that if the boys saw them, they would know right away he wasn't a tiger, no matter if he was striped like one.
In a few minutes along came the boys, and they were talking about what they were going to do to Fido, and how they would put him in a cage, and make him do lots of tricks. All of a sudden there was a rustling in the bushes, and Uncle Wiggily just stuck out his head and part of his body, laying his ears flat back where they could not be seen. But the boys could see the mud stripes, only they didn't know they were just mud, you understand.
"Oh! See that!" cried one boy.
"Yes, it's a tigery-tiger!" exclaimed the other boy.