“I’d like to catch a monkey,” said Bobby to himself, as he climbed into his bed in the next room. “Maybe he’d do tricks for me.”
In the morning Meg and Bobby were out in the kitchen before breakfast, getting from Norah the details of the monkeys’ escape.
“’Deed then, I hope they catch every one of 123 ’em––bad ’cess to ’em,” said Norah indignantly. “Thieving, sly, little torments! Didn’t they claw Mrs. O’Toole’s bonnet nigh off her head last night, to say nothing of scaring her into fits? Don’t say monkey to me!”
On their way to school the children found that the news of the overturned monkey cage was known to the whole town. Not a boy who didn’t hope to be able to catch a monkey or two.
“There’s a reward offered––five dollars for each monkey,” Palmer Davis reported when he met Meg and Bobby at the school door. “Yep––my cousin told me; and he’s in the Oak Hill Daily Advertiser office, and I guess he ought to know.”
The majority of the children in Miss Mason’s room stayed downstairs till the “warning bell” rang and then hurried to their room to put away their coats and hats in the cloak room. It was Miss Mason’s rule that they must be quietly in their seats, ready for the march to the assembly hall, when the nine o’clock bell rang.
“It’s too cold to hang around out here, so let’s go up,” suggested Palmer Davis on this morning. 124 “The warning bell will ring in a minute, anyway.”
Meg and Bobby were willing, especially as the air was sharp and chill, cold enough for snow Meg thought, though of course it never snowed so early in the fall, and they trooped happily upstairs. A number of boys and girls were already in the room and Miss Mason was working at her desk. Her hat was off and lay on one of the school desks, for she meant to carry it over to the teacher’s room as soon as she had worked out an example for the little girl who had asked her help.
Nina Mills pushed her way into the cloak room ahead of Meg and Bobby, and as the latter grasped the swinging door they heard Nina give a loud yell.
“Look out! Get away!” She came tumbling out of the cloak room, her face white with terror. “There’s a monkey in there!” she gasped.