“What sort of a show was it?” inquired uncle; “a large menagerie?”
“No, I believe not,” was the answer; “only a few animals that some company had hired for the season—a tiger, a jaguar, a pair of leopards, and a few monkeys—that’s what they tell me. The steamer had a heavy cargo, and went down very suddenly.”
“And they think the tiger made for the woods, eh?” said uncle. “When did it happen, do you say?”
“Night before last—about five miles down the river. ’Twas a small steamer going up to Macon. There was no one lost, I hear.”
“Well,” remarked uncle, “a Bengal tiger would be an interesting neighbor, that’s certain; and I don’t believe he would be long in making his presence known. However, such stories generally require a good deal of allowance. As likely as not, there was no tiger aboard of the steamer, after all.”
“Oh, I reckon there was,” said the neighbor; “but then, of course, we can’t tell; people like excitement, and when such a rumor gets started it grows very fast.”
“Yes, that’s true; we shall have a whole menagerie ashore here before night. When I was a boy, in Maine, there was a story that a lion and an elephant had made their escape from somebody’s show and taken to the woods. And, dear me! it spread like the scarlet fever! The children ran all the way to school and all the way back; and the big girls actually cried in the entry, they were so frightened. Some of the mischievous boys would make ‘elephant tracks’ in the road, and this added to the panic. But we never could hear of any showman who had lost such animals, and all on a sudden the thing came to nothing. I guess the tiger story will end in the same way.”
“Why, father,” said Cousin Harold, the fourteen-year-old boy of the family, “I don’t see why it isn’t likely enough to be true. I almost hope there is something in it, though I shouldn’t want him to be killing people’s cattle and things. Just think of it—a big Bengal tiger, and right here in Georgia, too! How I should like to have a chance at him with my gun!”
“Why, Harold,” said his mother, “how you talk. If I believed such a creature to be anywhere in the neighborhood, I’d shut you up in the smoke-house rather that let you go into the woods.”
“What, and make bacon of a poor fellow?” replied the young lad, gayly.