“Wasn’t it fun!” cried the red-coated dragoon as the two of them entered the tunnel.
“Fun!” answered Dan, “why it’s more than that—it’s a story! What a tale I shall have to tell when I get back to the menagerie tent! But, now that I have my story, I suppose I should be returning to the corn patch where we first met, for it may be that the Pretty Lady will be waiting to carry me back to Spangleland.”
“Then we will take this passage to the left,” said Beader. “It will bring us out but a few steps from there.” So the two pressed forward with no light to guide them save the wee lamp that the dragoon wore in his cap. Suddenly Beader stopped.
“I heard it, too,” chimed Dan. “It was a neigh! The White-White Horse must be near the mouth of the passage. Come, let us hurry.”
Soon they were standing in the moonlight and there, sure enough, was the one with the Blue-Blue Eyes.
“I knew you were coming,” she said. “I could hear your voices under the ground. But now you must bid Beader farewell, else we will never reach the circus by dawn.”
“A good-by and no end of thanks to you, Friend Beader,” exclaimed Dan.
“A good-by to you, Diggeldy Dan,” the dragoon cried warmly, as the clown sprang to his seat. “And do come and visit us again some day.”
“Indeed, I shall try,” called Dan in return as the White-White Horse started off down the slope. And looking back he could see that Beader had mounted to the top of a cornstalk. There he stood, waving his plumed cap over his head, his red coat a bright spot in the moonlight.
Soon the hoofs of the White-White Horse began to play a soft tattoo on the turf and the Pretty Lady’s laugh to ring merrily in tune with it. But these sounds could not shut out another that Dan fancied still filled the air. It seemed to come from the fast receding valley, growing fainter and fainter and fainter, yet still saying, “Tick-took, tick-tock, tick-took.”
So we will leave Dan here—leave him as he is being carried back to the great menagerie tent where (you may be very sure) he told every wee bit of the tiniest part of his adventure to the animals who awaited his coming. “And, after that?” you no doubt are asking, “did he return to see Beader? Or ever again go adventuring with Gray Ears, the Elephant? And the Pretty Lady with the Blue-Blue Eyes; did she carry more of the animals into the wide wide world on the White-White Horse? And did Dan—”