“I—I tried to butt a trolley car off the tracks,” said the boy-goat. “I was eating some pasty paper off a tomato can that fell from an ash wagon, when the car came along. I wouldn’t get out of the way and—well, it knocked me into the ditch. Oh, dear!”
“I’m so sorry,” said Blackie sympathetically. “Come on up to the top of the rocks and you can roll in the soft grass. Maybe that will make you feel better.”
“No, I don’t believe I could climb to the top of the rocks now,” said Lightfoot. “I am too sore and stiff. I’ll just lie down here in the shade.”
“Do,” said the kind Blackie, “and I’ll bring you some nice brown paper I found.”
Goats love brown paper almost as much as they do the kind that has paste on it and that comes off cans. For brown paper is made from things that goats like to eat, though of course it is not good for girls and boys any more than is hay or grass.
“Well, what’s the matter with you, Lightfoot?” asked Grandpa Bumper, the old goat, as he came scrambling down the rocks a little later to get a drink of water from the pail near the kitchen door of the Widow Malony’s shanty. “What happened to you?”
“I got in the way of a trolley car,” said Lightfoot, and he told what had happened.
“Well, let that be a lesson to you,” said the old goat-man. “You are a strong goat-boy, and a fine jumper, but the strongest goat amongst us is not able to butt against a trolley car. I once heard of an elephant butting a locomotive with his head but he was killed. His name was Jumbo.”
“I wonder if he was any relation to Tum Tum,” said Lightfoot, who was beginning to feel a little better now.
“Who is Tum Tum?” asked Grandpa Bumper.