midnight
With a bound Zip was now on the chair , then on the table , snapping and barking , while the monkey was trying to hit him with the empty dipper , when the kitchen door unexpectedly opened and in the doorway stood Miss Belinda . Without a second 's thought Zip jumped past her and ran for dear life toward home , never stopping to look back even once until he was safe in his own barnyard , standing beside the watering trough preparatory to jumping in and washing the eggs off his coat . Again his encounter with the monkey had been unsatisfactory , and as for what poor Miss Belinda thought when she saw the mess in her nice clean kitchen it is beyond words to tell . About a week after Zip 's last visit to Miss Belinda 's , he was out on one of his midnight prowls , about which the doctor had scolded him time and time again . In fact , he had forbidden him to leave the yard at night , warning him that some day he would be shot while poking around in other people 's back yards , or that he would be poisoned by eating some meat that had been prepared purposely for stray cats or dogs . But Zip thought he was smart enough not to get caught , and he did not believe that anyone could put poison on meat and he not be able to smell it . So this night he went with a rat terrier , a friend of his , down into a poor quarter of the town , where they often went to kill rats , just for the fun of it and to see who could kill the most .