My own voice wuz tremolous with fear, and Alice see it, and cried harder than ever. And Martin sez—
“You ought to have heard the terrific screams the thing gave if you want to be scared—seeing it isn’t nothing at all to hearing it.
“And,” sez he, “I’ll go and call up the hotel-keeper and find out what it is. Maybe it is a lunatic broken out of some asylum. I am going to know something about who and what it is.”
But jest at this minute the creeter broke out in one of its wild cries, and Martin and Alice shuddered, and sez he, “Did you ever in your life hear anything so awful?”
And Alice sez, “I cannot bear it, Aunt Samantha. It is too terrible.”
But there wuz to me sunthin’ familiar in the sound, and I lifted the sash, and the words come in plain—
“Bind with a chain!
The tiger’s cub I’ll bind with a chain
And the wild gazelle”—etc., etc.
Sez I, “It is my own pardner with his dressin’-gown on, and a-singin’.”