“Now is my chance to get away!” thought the tame tiger, who wanted to be wild again and live in a jungle. “Now I’ll get out of my cage!”
He surely thought the big wagon with the iron bars on two sides—the cage in which he traveled—had been broken so he could get out. But when he tried, he found that this was not so. The tiger’s cage was broken a bit, here and there, but it was so strong that it had held together, and when Tamba tried to force his way out he could not. He was still a circus tiger, much as he wanted to go to the jungle.
“Oh, this is too bad!” growled Tamba to himself, as he tried to break out, first through one side of the cage and then the other. “This is too bad! I thought, when the storm wrecked the circus, that I could get loose. Now I’ll have to wait for another time.”
But if Tamba had not got out of his cage when the great storm came, some of the circus animals had. Nero, the circus lion, got loose, and he had many adventures before he was caught again, as I have told you in the book before this one. But Tamba had to stay in his cage.
After a while, when the worst of the storm had passed, the circus men began going about, getting back on the road some of the cages, like that of Tamba, that had rolled downhill.
“Tamba’s all right,” said a trainer, as he saw the tame tiger. “He didn’t get loose, I’m glad to say. I want to teach him some new, funny tricks, now that his paw is well again.”
“No, Tamba didn’t get away,” remarked another man; “but Nero, the big lion, did. We’ll have to go out to hunt him.”
When morning came, and the circus was once more in order—except for the broken cages and the animals that had gotten away—Tamba felt, more than ever, that he would like to be back in his jungle.
“So Nero got away, did he?” thought the tame tiger, as he saw the lion’s broken cage, and noticed that Nero was no longer in it. “Well, I wish I were with him. Now he can go back to his jungle.”
But Nero did not do that, as those of you know who have read the book about him. I’ll just say, right here, that Nero had many adventures, but, as this book is about Tamba, I must tell about him, and the adventures the tame tiger had.