“Here! Come back with that!” he yelled. “Sure, the rats are getting very bold when they reach up and take your meat that way! Come back with it!”
The sailor leaned over the edge of the barrel, really thinking some bold rat had taken his meat, and then the sailor saw Tiger Tamba, with his glittering, green eyes, hiding down in the snug nest, chewing the meat.
“Oh, my! Oh, what do I see!” cried the frightened sailor. “Oh, ’tis a live tiger! Well, it serves me right for taking meat I’d no business to take! Oh, the tiger! The tiger!” and, shouting and yelling in fright, the sailor ran up on deck and never went down there again.
He did not dare tell the other sailors what he had seen, for then he would have had to tell about taking the meat, and he did not want to do this.
As no one but the frightened sailor knew that Tamba was on the ship, and this sailor was not quite sure himself, Tamba was not found out. The chunk of meat he took away from the sailor was rather large, and it saved Tamba from actually starving, though he was pretty hungry before the ship got across the ocean. But he managed to catch some big rats every day, and this helped out.
Aside from this, and the trick he played on the sailor, Tamba did not have many adventures on the ship. He had to keep pretty closely to the dark hold, not daring to come out.
Then one day the pitching and tossing came to an end. The ship reached the end of her voyage and was tied up at a dock, this time in far-off India. Tamba was very lucky that he had gotten on a vessel that took him right back to his own jungle-land, though he was still many miles from the place of the trees and tangled vines.
The night after the ship was tied up at the dock in India, Tamba watched his chance, and, when it was dark and quiet, he slipped up on deck from the dark hold, and looked about. He could see trees and houses, but there were not so many houses as in New York, and there were more trees. The air, too, had a different smell. It had more the smell of the jungle, and as Tamba sniffed it he said:
“My home can not be so very far away now. I will run down off this ship and find my jungle, and also my father and mother and my sister and brother. Then I shall be happy. No more circus for me!”