“Come on, Wango!  Come down!” cried Mr. Winkler, but the monkey would not leap down from the high shelf.

“Guess you’ll have to climb up and get him yourself, Jed,” suggested Mr. Reinberg, who kept the drygoods store next door.  He had run in, together with other neighboring shopkeepers, to see what the excitement was about.

“I could get him down if I had something to coax him with,” returned the old sailor.

“I promised him a cookie,” said Mr. Raymond.

“He’d rather have a piece of cake—­cocoanut cake would be best,” went on Mr. Winkler.

“I’ll go home and get some,” offered Bunny Brown.  “My mother baked a cocoanut cake yesterday, and I guess there’s some left.”

“You don’t need to go all the way back to your house after the cake,” said Mrs. Nesham, who kept a bakery across the street from the hardware store.  “I’ll get one from my shelves.”

She hurried across the way, and soon came back with a large piece of cocoanut cake.

“If the monkey doesn’t take it I wish she’d give it to me,” said Tom Milton.

“Oh, Wango will take this all right,” said Jed Winkler.  “Here you are, you little rascal!” he called to his pet.  “Come down and see what I have for you.”  He held up the piece of cake.  Wango saw it and this seemed to be just what he wanted.  He dropped the egg beater, which fell to the floor with another clatter and clang, and then the monkey began climbing down the shelves.

He had almost reached the old sailor, his master, when the front door of the hardware store opened to allow a new customer to come in.  Whether this frightened Wango, or whether he thought he had not yet had enough fun, no one knew.  But instantly he snatched the piece of cake from Mr. Winkler’s hand, and, holding it in his paw, skipped out the door.

“There he goes!” cried Bunny Brown.  “He’s loose again!”

“And he’s up in a tree out in front!” added Tom Milton, who had rushed out ahead of the others in the store.

Surely enough, when the crowd got outside, there was Wango perched high in a big, leafless tree, eating cake.

  [Illustration:  There was Wango perched high on A big tree.
    Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Giving a Show. Page 42]

“Well, how are you going to get him down out of there?” asked Mr. Snowden.

“Looks as if I’d have to climb after him,” said Mr. Winkler.  “When I was a sailor on a ship, and had Wango for a pet, he used to climb up the mast and rigging and I’d go after him.  That was when I was younger.  I don’t believe I could climb that tree and get him now.”

“Do you want me to do it for you, mister?” asked a new voice.

Bunny, Sue, and the other children turned to see who had spoken.  They saw a boy about twelve years old, with bright, shining eyes standing beside Mr. Winkler and pointing up at the monkey in the tree.  The strange boy seemed to have arrived on the scene very suddenly.