“I’ll probably be in the immediate vicinity when things begin to break,” he cautioned, “but for the love of P. T. Barnum don’t make any signs of recognition.”
Chapter Seven
And so it came to pass that at the appointed hour Jimmy, nonchalantly strolling along the promenade near the great stone tower on the Manhattan side of the bridge, cast a wary glance down towards the roadway and observed the express wagon slowly jogging along directly underneath. The driver, covertly glancing to the right and the left, reached behind the seat with a quick movement, fumbled for an instant with the hasp and, after lifting back the lid of the box, resumed his two-handed control of the reins, perceptibly slowing up the speed of the wagon.
The next instant the mischievous and uncannily human looking head of a large-sized monkey appeared above the top of the box. He blinked for a moment in the strong sunlight, reassured himself that the driver was not watching him, leaped lightly to the roadway and made for the network of auxiliary cables which run from the main supporting cables of the great bridge. Following him came a procession of other monkeys of varying sizes and kinds—short-tails and long-tails, some with weird whiskers and others as devoid of facial adornment as a new-born babe—all of them chattering and gibbering, each one intensely alive and apparently determined on having the time of his or her young life as the case might be. There were fifteen of them in all and as they sprang out of the wagon, one by one, and started to join the venturesome leader of the expedition they attracted the attention of scores of pedestrians, chauffeurs and drivers.
“Hey, there, young fellow,” shrieked a man on the promenade. “You gosh-darned zoo is escaping.”
The driver stopped the wagon suddenly, turned around and proceeded to give a perfect imitation of a man in that particular frame of mind popularly known as a “blue funk.” He jumped to the roadway and tried to clutch the last of the escaping simians by the hind legs. That agile creature eluded his grasp and joined two of his brethren who were chattering gaily at the base of the labyrinthian maze of cables and supports. By this time the first dozen of the monkeys had clambered aloft and were surveying the constantly increasing crowd of joyous onlookers from points of vantage anywhere from twenty to a hundred feet in the air.
A policeman shouldered his way through the front ranks of the crowd and looked up at the galaxy of nimble apes. He was sputtering and fuming with rage.
“Come down out of that,” he yelled helplessly, shaking his club in an absurdly futile attempt to wield authority.
The crowd roared with delight. One of the monkeys still on the ground darted toward him, leaped on his shoulder and sprang from it to the nearest cable far above his head before he was conscious of exactly what had happened. He struck vainly at it with his stick. The crowd rocked with laughter. Two other policemen joined him, forcing their way with difficulty through the dense mass of pedestrians on the promenade.