“Didn't you ever hear any of them speak a word?”
“Never. I've been in a circus, man an' boy, nigh on to forty years, an' I never seen nothin' in a monkey more 'n any other beast, except their awful mischiefness.”
“Well,” said Toby, still unconvinced, “I believe Mr. Stubbs knows what I say to him, anyway.”
“Now don't be foolish, Toby,” pleaded Ben. “You can't show me one thing that a monkey ever did because you told him to.”
Just at this moment Toby felt someone pulling at the back of his coat, and, looking round, he saw it was a little brown hand, reaching through the bars of the air hole of the cage, that was tugging away at his coat.
“There!” he said, triumphantly, to Ben. “Look there! I told Mr. Stubbs if he wanted anything more to eat, to tell me an' I would give it to him. Now you can see for yourself that he's come for it.” And Toby took a doughnut from his pocket and put it into the tiny hand, which was immediately withdrawn.
“Now what do you think of Mr. Stubbs knowing what I say to him?”
“They often stick their paws up through there,” said Ben, in a matter of fact tone. “I've had 'em pull my coat in the night till they made me as nervous as ever any old woman was. You see, Toby my boy, monkeys is monkeys; an' you mustn't go to gettin' the idea that they're anything else, for it's a mistake. You think this old monkey in here knows what you say? Why, that's just the cuteness of the old fellow—he watches you to see if he can't do just as you do, an' that's all there is about it.”
Toby was more than half convinced that Ben was putting the matter in its proper light, and he would have believed all that had been said if, just at that moment, he had not seen that brown hand reaching through the hole to clutch him again by the coat.
The action seemed so natural, so like a hungry boy who gropes in the dark pantry for something to eat, that it would have taken more arguments than Ben had at his disposal to persuade Toby that his Mr. Stubbs could not understand all that was said to him. Toby put another doughnut in the outstretched hand, and then sat silently, as if in a brown study over some difficult problem.