f-follows on till he
comes up inside the slats. Then he g-g-gets so excited that he just runs
around and around, tryin' to p-p-poke his old head through the bars, and
never once rememberin' that he came up in the m-m-middle!"

"Well, now, that wasn't a halfway bad idea of yours, Toby, to bait a
line with the nut meat, so's to coax Link to come closer," Steve
ventured to say, after listening patiently to Toby's staggering
explanation; "but tell us how you expect to trap the monk after you've
got him close in? I take it that's goin' to be the job that'll make us
think we're up against a stone wall."

"I saw Toby practicing with a piece of old rope this afternoon,
throwing a lariat, and I bet you now he's meaning to try and drop a loop
over the head of that Link," Bandy-legs asserted.

Max shook his head as though the idea did not find much favor with him.

"A regular cow-puncher might manage to do it," he remarked, "but no
bungler like any one of us would be. That trick monkey is too quick and
smart to let a noose fall over his head while he's awake. You'd see him
duck every time, and slip off, chattering like a parrot. You'll have to
try something better than a lariat, Toby, if you hope to trap a
wideawake monkey."

"Oh! well, I've been, h-h-hammering my h-h-head all the while," Toby
explained, "and I've fixed up a lot of g-g-good schemes that I'd like to
try out. Once we g-g-get him to understand that there are n-n-nuts
around here, and he ain't goin' to desert us in a h-h-hurry; so I'll
have a c-c-chance to sample 'em all."

"How about to-night; think it'll pay to rig that rope snare again, and
bait it with some of the nuts?" asked Steve, who was rapidly becoming
quite interested in the game, which appealed to his sporting instincts
more and more the deeper he allowed himself to be drawn into it.

"I expected to," admitted Toby.

"We might set a number of the rope snares," suggested Bandy-legs, "so
that if he missed connections with one he'd get stuck in another. They
could all be connected with that stout hickory stick; or mebbe we might
find others just as full of spring."

Max agreed that at least it would do no harm.

"All the same," he went on to tell Toby, "if I was you I wouldn't expect
too much from that spring trap, no matter how many snares you set. If
that smart monkey really put that stick in the noose, and set it off for
fun, or in spite, chances are you'll never trap him that way. He knows
too