“Well,” said the policeman at last to the man whose wife had screamed so at the first sight of Tamba, “I guess you made a mistake, my friend. You didn’t see any tiger at all. You dreamed it.”
“I’m sure I didn’t dream,” said the man. “I wasn’t asleep. I saw that tiger come into this subway as plain as anything.”
“Well, then he must have run up the steps on the other side,” said the policeman. “He could have done that before we got here. At any rate the tiger is gone, and we may as well go out and look for him somewhere else. He isn’t here!”
The excitement soon quieted down, the searchers went upstairs, and Tamba was left to himself in his hiding place beneath the newspaper and candy stand.
He could hear people walking up and down on the stone platform, and he could hear them talking. They were talking about him, as it happened, for the news of a tiger being loose somewhere in that part of the city had spread. But Tamba, of course, did not know what the men and women subway passengers were saying. He could hear the rumble and roar of the subway trains, and they sounded something like the trains on which the circus traveled from town to town. But Tamba did not come out of his hiding place to look at them. He stayed quietly in the cubby-hole under the stand.
[But the man was asleep and did not see the tiger.]
After a while, as the hours passed, it became quieter in the subway. There were fewer trains, and hardly any persons were traveling now. At last, along about three o’clock in the morning, no trains ran at all. The agent at the station went to sleep in his little booth, and the newspaper boy had gone home long ago. Tamba thrust his head out of his hiding place. He heard nothing and saw no one.