The man uttered an ejaculation of amazement and ran to the window, releasing his hold on Ike, and our hero improved his opportunity by darting from the room. The man turned to say something and saw that the boy had “skipped.”
“Well, hang it, he told the truth, and I must get rid of those infernal cats, or not a wink of sleep will I have to-night.”
The man crawled through the window and looked all over, but the cats had disappeared.
He crawled back with the remark:
“I reckon they have been scared off, but it is very singular, I never heard any cats around here before. Some one must have chased them on to that roof.”
Meantime Ike had made his way downstairs, and when he gained the street he laughed heartily and said:
“There’s tricks in all trades but ours; by joky poky, won’t that always be a mystery to that old fellow in that room? He doesn’t know that I carry a whole menagerie in my throat.”
Ike was a wonderful ventriloquist, equal to any one who ever attempted vocal deceptions, and far better than a majority of public performers, and when it came to imitating animals and locating their growls, barks and hisses at a distance, he could in that direction beat any one in the world.
He did not walk off. He had gotten on to something immense, as he expressed the initial steps in a great crime, and he regretted that he did not have an opportunity to overhear all the details, and the outcome of the man’s proposition to the two abductors.
“I’ve heard enough,” he muttered. “I’ll bet a big apple I can locate the house on Long Island, so if any one is missing I will be able to trail down to his prison, and what is more, I’ve seen all the three men. I can identify every one of them, and I am not through with them yet.”