"Suppose you help me with the housework," suggested Mamma Kinkytail.
"After we get the breakfast dishes washed I"m going to make a cake and a pudding, and you may help me. But mind!" she said, shaking her tail at Jumpo, "you mustn"t let the eggs or the sugar or the milk fall out of the house, as you once did with the cocoanut."
"I won"t," said Jumpo, and then he and his brother helped dry the dishes and set back the chairs, and when their mamma had swept the bungalow they dusted the piano. Then came the making of the cake and pudding. Of course, there were some dishes with nice sweet batter, and sugar and chocolate icing left in them, and Jacko and Jumpo cleaned these out so clean that there was hardly any need of washing them. By this time it was the dinner hour, and Mr. Kinkytail came home from the hand organ factory where he worked at making music.
But in the afternoon it still rained harder than ever, and the monkey brothers stood at the window and looked at the splashing drops, and cried "Oh, Dear!" so often that finally their mamma said:
"I"m going to telephone over for the Wibblewobble children to come and play with you. Those ducks won"t mind the rain a bit, for it will run right off their backs. You can play in the house, and I can have some peace and quietness to get my mending done. I"ll telephone right away."
So Mrs. Kinkytail telephoned, and Mrs. Wibblewobble said the duck children could come right over. Jacko and Jumpo watched for them at the window and soon they saw Jimmie and his two sisters paddling through the mud puddles.
"What shall we play?" asked Jacko, when the visitors had shaken the water off their feathers, after having flown up into the tree-bungalow.
"Tag," said Alice Wibblewobble, as she looked to see if her hair ribbon was on straight.
"No, there isn"t room for that," spoke Lulu. "I think hide-and-seek would be better. We can play that, can"t we, Mrs. Kinkytail?"
"Oh, yes," said the monkey mamma as she mended one of Jumpo"s torn stockings.
"A ball game would be lots of fun," said Jimmy, the boy duck, "but then I s"pose we might break a window. It will have to be hide-and-seek." So they got ready to play.
First Lulu covered her eyes and she called out: "Ready or not I"m coming!" Then she went to find the others. She easily found Alice, who was standing up behind the flour barrel.
"I might have crawled under the barrel, only I was afraid of spoiling my new sky-blue-pink hair ribbon," said Alice.
Then Lulu found Jimmie hiding under the couch in the dining-room and Jumpo she discovered as he was trying to wiggle farther in behind an old looking-gla.s.s in the hall.
"Now if I find Jacko," said she, "I"ll have everybody, and it will be Alice"s turn to hunt for us. I wonder where Jacko can be?" She looked all over, taking care not to go too far away from "home," for if the red monkey got a chance he could run in and touch the table, which was "home," and then he would be "in free."
"I don"t know where he is," said Jimmie. Neither did Alice or Jumpo.
Jacko had gone off by himself, and he was well hidden. Lulu looked everywhere. She even looked inside the flour barrel, as if the red monkey would hide in there and get all white. And she took the cork out of the mola.s.ses jug, and tried to look down inside the sticky place, as if Jacko would go down there and get all stuck up.
"Oh, I"m going to give up," said Lulu at last.
"Oh, no, we"ll all help you look," said the other children, and they all joined in. But what had happened to Jacko, I suppose you are wondering.
Well, I"ll tell you. He had gone up to the attic and there he found a big empty trunk.
"This will be a fine place to hide," he said, so in he crawled, and closed down the lid. It snapped shut, but Jacko didn"t mind. He thought he could open it when he wanted to. However, after a while he got tired of hiding, especially when Lulu couldn"t find him, and he decided to come out.
Only he couldn"t. He tried to open the cover, but it was shut fast. Then Jacko became scared. He pushed and he pushed, but the trunk cover held tight. Then he called out as loud as he could, but the dust got up his nose, and his voice was very faint and far away. He even tried to put the end of his tail in the keyhole and open the lock of the trunk, but he couldn"t. He heard Lulu and the others come up in the attic to find him, and he called: "Here I am!" But they were laughing and shouting and making so much noise that they never heard him.
"Oh, I guess I"ll have to stay here forever!" thought poor Jacko. "Oh, if I could only get out!" Then he heard a little noise in one corner of the trunk, and he thought at first it was a fox. Then he knew a fox could never get in the trunk, and he looked and saw a little gray animal.
"I"ll help you out of the trunk," said the animal; and who was it but Jillie Longtail, the girl mouse. Quickly Jillie gnawed a hole in the trunk. At first it wasn"t large enough for Jacko to get out, but the mouse soon made it larger, and then the monkey boy could crawl out, and after thanking Jillie, he hurried down the stairs, glad enough to be free from the stuffy trunk.
My! How surprised the others were to see him, for they were becoming much frightened, and Jacko"s mamma said he must never do a thing like that again. And he never did. Then they all had some bread and jam, and pretty soon it stopped raining.
So that"s all this story, but the next will be about Jumpo and Uncle Wiggily--that is, if the fish peddler doesn"t blow his horn loud enough to wake up the kittie cat who goes to sleep in the doll"s carriage every day.
STORY X
JUMPO AND UNCLE WIGGILY
It was almost time for school to be out, and nearly all the pupils were sitting quietly at their desks. The owl school teacher was just hearing the geography cla.s.s recite, and that was the last lesson of the day.
"Jacko Kinkytail," spoke the teacher, as she took up a piece of red chalk, "where do cocoanuts grow?"
"In our house," said Jacko very quickly.
"Why, the idea!" exclaimed the teacher. "I mean in what _country_ do cocoanuts grow?"
"Well, I"m sure they grow in our house," said the red monkey, "because I saw one there to-day. My mamma is going to make a cake of it."
Of course all the children laughed at that, and the teacher had to laugh also, though she didn"t exactly want to.
"Well, Jacko, you may go home," she said suddenly, "and so may all of you. School is out. Now be on time to-morrow, and, Jacko, you must take your geography, when you get home, and find out where cocoanuts really come from."
So when Jacko and Jumpo were walking home together the red monkey asked his green brother where he thought cocoanuts came from.
"The grocery store, of course," said the green monkey, quickly. "I should have thought you"d have known that. Didn"t you go to the store for some the other day, and didn"t the grocery man have a lot of them in a barrel? Cocoanuts grow in barrels in the store, of course."
"Oh, why didn"t I think of that?" cried Jacko. "I"ll tell the teacher to-morrow. But now let"s have a race, and we"ll see who"ll be the first to get to the old black stump where the giant used to eat his dinner."
"All right," agreed Jumpo. So off they started. First Jacko was ahead, and then he accidentally got a stone in his shoe and had to stop to take it out, so Jumpo got ahead. And then, as the green monkey was going through a dark part of the woods, he saw something crawling under the leaves.
"Oh, maybe it"s a snake!" exclaimed Jumpo. "I"m going to wait until Jacko catches up to me." So he waited and waited, but no Jacko came. In fact, Jacko had got tired of playing the racing game, and he had gone home another way. Then Jumpo thought he would be brave, and go over by himself to see what was moving under the leaves. And, if you will believe me, it was nothing but a harmless snail, crawling along with his sh.e.l.l house on his back.
"How silly of me to be frightened!" cried Jumpo, with a laugh. "After this I"m first going to see what it is, and get frightened afterward; that is, if there is anything to scare me." So he said "How-de-do" to the snail, and then the monkey boy went on toward home.
Over the hills, up and down, among the trees, hopping across little brooks he went, until pretty soon, just as he was coming out of the woods he heard a loud, banging noise.
"That"s a gun!" cried Jumpo. "A gun, and some one is out shooting. Oh, I must be careful or I"ll be shot."
So the poor monkey boy hid down behind a rock and waited. And then, all of a sudden, there came another bangity-bang-bung noise and some one shouted out loud:
"My, I nearly got it that time!"
"Worse and worse!" thought poor Jumpo, shivering. "They are coming after me." Then he saw something moving behind a stump, and a big, ugly fox looked out at him.
"Oh, this is terrible!" cried the green monkey. "I can"t stay here or the fox will get me, and if I go out of the woods the man with the gun will shoot me. What shall I do? Perhaps the man may be kind, and let me go. I think I"ll go out so the fox won"t eat me."
And Jumpo leaped out only just in time, for the fox saw him then, and made a jump for him. And there came another bangity-bung-bang noise, and Jumpo shivered again.
When he got out in the field, just beyond the woods, he looked for a man with a gun, but he could see no one. Down the road, however, he did see a friend he knew, and it was no one else than Uncle Wiggily Longears, the old gentleman rabbit. And Uncle Wiggily was standing beside something with four big wheels and a black front on it, and it had a wheel up by the seat, and a lot of shiny things on it, and there was a smell like gasoline coming from it.
"My! I wonder what it is that Uncle Wiggily has?" thought the green monkey. "It looks like a carriage, but there is no horse to it. However, I"m going to ask him to save me from the man with the gun."