“Well,” thought Shaggo, “I don’t know anything about this book business, but if it will cure my aching shoulder the sooner I get in a book the better. I say!” he suddenly called to Tum Tum. “Who’s that funny animal with the long tail? It looks as if somebody got hold of it, stretched it away out long and that it stayed that way. Who is he?”
“That’s Mappo, the merry monkey,” was the answer. “He’s in a book, too,” went on the elephant, “and he has had many adventures.”
“Indeed I have,” said Mappo, with a laugh. “And let me tell you, Shaggo, that nobody stretched out my tail. It was always long that way, so I could swing by it from trees in the jungle. But now I only swing from this trapeze in my cage, or hang by a bar in the big tent when I do tricks, after the circus starts on the road. Watch me!”
As he spoke Mappo gave a jump across his cage, caught his tail on the bar of a swinging trapeze, and swayed to and fro like the pendulum of a clock.
“That’s quite a trick!” cried Shaggo. “I could never do that, though once I did give a big jump.”
[The buffalo was beginning to like it in the circus], and he told his new friends so.
“Oh, the fun here in the winter barns is nothing to what will happen when the circus starts out on the road and we show in a tent in a different city every day,” said Tum Tum. “I’m just waiting for that time to come!”
“So am I!” chattered Mappo, the merry monkey.
Sometimes Tum Tum, and again Nero or Mappo, would be taken out of the barn where they had been stationed near Shaggo. Then, in an hour or so, men would bring them back.
“Where have you been?” Shaggo would ask.