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"Why, I am Mappo, the merry monkey," was the answer, as he curled his long tail around a stick of wood. "But I don't need to ask who you are. You are a pig, I can see that, for we have one in our circus, and the clown rides him around the ring, and it is too funny for anything." "Ha, so you are a monkey?" asked Squinty. "But what do you mean by a circus?"
Mappo had only lived in the jungle where men very seldom came, and those men were brown or black men. But men knew monkeys were in the woods, and men wanted the monkeys for circuses, for menageries and for hand-organs. That is the reason men try to catch monkeys. Mappo looked all around the forest from the top of the tree where he had come to rest. He saw no signs of danger.
"What happened?" asked Sharp Tooth, the tiger, of Tum Tum, as the elephant went past the cage of the striped beast. "Where did you go a little while ago?" "Out looking for Mappo, the monkey," answered Tum Tum. "Did he run away?" asked the tiger. "Yes, I guess he was afraid you would bite him." "And so I would, if I could get him," snarled the tiger.
He broke off the branch, and with the sharp point he soon had torn a hole in the outer husk of the cocoanut. He pulled the round nut out. "I have it!" he chattered. "Yes, but it isn't good to eat yet," said Bumpo. "How are you going to open the rest of it?" Mappo did not know. Once more he tried to bite a hole, but he could not.
The more he thought of the tiger getting loose and biting him, the more frightened he became. And that day, as Mappo was riding along in his own cage in the circus wagon, he thought he heard the tiger getting loose from the big cage. "Oh, he'll get me, sure!" cried Mappo. He looked up. The door of his cage was open the least little bit.
"Don't be afraid," said Mrs. Monkey. "The tiger is not there now. He has gone, or else I shouldn't have let you try to open the cocoanut, Mappo. Go on and get it; don't be afraid." So Mappo went on down to the ground. And, when he reached it, he saw something that was very strange to him. "Oh, Mamma!" cried Mappo. "The cocoanut is all broken to pieces. I can pick out the white meat now.
Mappo's cage, with a number of others, was finally put into a big barn, where it was nice and warm. On the earth-floor of the barn was sawdust, and Mappo saw many men and horses, and many strange things. Finally a man came up to Mappo's cage. "Ha! So these are some of the monkeys I am to teach to do tricks, eh?" said the man. "Well, they look like nice monkeys. And that one seems a little tame.
Sometimes he would climb up on the gas chandelier and hang by his tail. This always made the boy laugh. "See, my monkey can do tricks!" he would cry. Then, one day, something sad happened. Mappo was sitting near the dining-room window, which was open, and he was half asleep, for the sun was very warm.
"A lion!" cried Mappo, springing away. "He'll get me!" In the jungle he and his brothers and sisters had been taught to run and hide when a lion roared, and, for the moment, Mappo did just as he had been used to doing in the jungle. Then he sort of laughed to himself, in a way monkeys have, and he said: "Ha! Ha! That lion can't get at me! He is locked in his cage. I'm not afraid."
"To travel from town to town, as all circuses do. We shall soon be living in tents," the elephant answered. "I'll like that," said Mappo. "I am getting rather tired of staying here so long." And, surely enough, a few days later, the circus started out "on the road," as it is called. The big red, golden and green wagons were drawn by many horses, and rumbled up hill and down.
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