“I’ll give this fellow, whoever he is, a good scare!” said Tamba to himself. “I’ll teach him to come looking for me with a basket! Look out now, you whistling chap!” said Tamba to himself.
Then he gave a loud growl—one of his very loudest—and he raised himself from his nest in the hay, and stuck his head out.
Now if you had gone hunting hens’ eggs in your father’s barn, and had, all of a sudden, seen a great, big, striped tiger jump out at you from the hay, giving a loud growl, I believe you would have done just what this boy did. And what he did was this.
[He dropped his basket], gave one look at Tamba in the hay, and then uttered such a yell that his father and mother in the farmhouse, quite a distance off, heard him. And then that boy ran out of the barn as fast as he could run. That’s what this boy did, and I think you would have done the same.
“Well, I guess he won’t come back right away,” thought Tamba. “But there may be others like him. If I stay here I may have to scare a whole lot of them. I guess I’ll find a new hiding place.”
So Tamba came out from his nest in the hay and began moving about in the barn, looking for a new place in which to snuggle, and perhaps find something to eat. And the first thing he knew he stepped right into a hen’s nest of eggs. Right down among the eggs Tamba put his paw.