The Monkey That Would Not Kill by Henry Drummond (the dot read aloud txt) 📖

one tumble bunch, and flung them screaming with pain and surprise under the bed of the adjoining room. The other, who was directly responsible for the mischief, seeing that the only chance to save his house and himself was to get Gum outside, clutched the smoking monkey in his arms and rushed to the door. Quick as the movement was, it was not quick enough. Those inside heard a deafening report; the house was filled with smoke; the doorway became a heap of fallen timber, and the blackened body of a man lay groaning among the charred ruins. One of the robbers, their wives, and all the children were safe. But when the smoke cleared away, and the body by the door was examined, life was all but extinct. For weeks the robber hung between life and death. It forms no part of this story to tell what pains he suffered, or what agonies of mind he passed through, or how, when months after he was able to crawl from his bed and go out into the air it was to see never more the sunlight or the flowers with his sightless eyes. Certainly Donald's words had come true. When the miner heard that evening what had happened, although he had already sent off word to the nearest police-station with the names of the guilty men, he took no further action in the matter. God's punishment was quicker than man's.


CHAPTER VIII

Late that afternoon the monkey turned up at his old home. Donald found him lying at the door, an almost unrecognisable object. Thanks to the way the robber had carried him, one half of his body was untouched, but the other half was a pitiable spectacle, and the long curly tail, Gum's great ornament and plaything, was blown off by the root. The poor creature had swooned, but that he had lain there an hour or two in great pain was plain from the way the gravel was tossed about in all directions round him. Donald was greatly touched, and lifting him up in his arms as tenderly as if he were a child, placed him in his own bed and dressed his burns. After a long sleep it awoke, and Donald, who had sat silently by his side, bent over to allow it to lick his face. The moment it opened its mouth the miner sprang from his chair as if he had been shot. For there between his teeth the monkey held the nugget!

* * * * *


Five years have passed. Donald is the richest man in Silver Creek County, and his great mines are worked by hundreds of men. He lives in a great house, sumptuously furnished and full of precious things, which he delights to show to the many visitors who flock to see his mine. But of all these precious things, by far the most precious is Gum, the monkey without a tail, 'the finder of his first nugget, and the founder of his fortunes,' as he says to everybody. Then he tells how Gum found the nugget, and how it was stolen and once more brought back; and how when Gum got better, the two went back to the spot where the big lump was found, and searched and searched, and found lump after lump and nugget after nugget, until, in a few months, more gold was hidden below Donald's bed than had come from all the mines put together since they first were opened. Then the good man calls out a word in Gaelic, and the monkey without a tail jumps into his arms to be caressed, and Donald asks his guests to read the inscription on the golden collar round its neck:--

TO
FAITHFUL GUM
FROM
HIS GRATEFUL MASTER.

Made out of the first nugget--August 2nd, 1888.
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Publication Date: 05-18-2010

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