OF THE TICK IN TOMMY’S POCKET WHICH WASN’T A BUG AFTER ALL
Somebody’s always falling into Doctor Muskrat’s pond. Nibble Rabbit did
it the very first time he saw Doctor Muskrat. So did Tommy Peele, as I
have just told you—but Tommy didn’t care a bit. Only he didn’t want to
go home with his clothes all drippy, because his mother would make him
drink some yarrow tea, to keep him from catching cold, you know. And
it’s every bit as bad as the dose the old doctor gave Nibble. It doesn’t
“taste like more”; it tastes like “never again!” So he took off his
wettest things and hung them out in the sun to dry.
[Illustration: Tommy takes off his “skin” to dry]
You ought to have seen Nibble Rabbit and Stripes Skunk and Tad Coon all
stare at him. Even Doctor Muskrat was s’prised. “Here, Watch,” he said
to Tommy’s dog, “don’t let him skin himself—he’ll die!”
“Ho, that isn’t his skin,” laughed Watch; “that’s just his fur. He does
it every night. I know, because I sleep in his room—that’s a kind of a
cage he sleeps in—so I see him.”
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Doctor Muskrat. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” put in Nibble Rabbit. “Chatter Squirrel said he’d seen men this
way. He told me about them the night we were all in my little cornstalk
tent, hiding from the terrible storm. He said they had skin like a frog,
only tan, like my throat, or pink, like the inside of my mouth. Tommy’s
a little of both.”
So he was. He was getting a fine spotty sunburn. But he wasn’t nearly as
pink as he would have been if he’d gone swimming, like the boys Chatter
Squirrel had seen. Only you can’t swim and catch fish at the same time.
You scare them.
And Tommy was having such fun fishing, he wasn’t thinking about swimming
or anything else. He even forgot all about the big shiny watch he had in
his pants pocket. You know the kind—a big, cheap, noisy thing that took
much more than a ducking to stop it. And it was fastened to them with a
jingly chain.
Well, it was Nibble Rabbit’s long stick-up ears that heard it. My, but
that was a funny sound! It was Tad Coon’s handy-paw that went after it.
My, but that was a queer shaped, slippery-feeling thing! And it was
Stripes Skunk who guessed what it really was.
“It’s a bug,” said Stripes after he’d sniffed his pointy nose against it
and tried his teeth on it. “I never saw one just like it, but a bug it
is. Lots of them make that sort of a ticky noise when they’re ready to
bite open their hard cases and shake out their wings. This one must be
just about ready by the noise he’s making.” And he scrooched down his
ear to listen.
“I never heard them do that,” said Nibble Rabbit.
“Course not. They’re buried in the ground when they do it,” said Tad.
“We dig ’em up and eat ’em.”
“Maybe Watch will remember where Tommy found it,” Nibble suggested.
“He wouldn’t pay any ’tention if he couldn’t eat it or chase it,”
sniffed Tad. He was afraid Watch would take that shiny, noisy watch away
from them and he wanted it to play with. “Tell you what, Stripes. Let’s
bury it, and then when it comes out it’ll go right to laying its eggs,
and we’ll have lots more just like it.”
“Sure,” agreed Stripes, and he went to digging. Nibble helped a little,
too. He’d seen Tommy put a clam in his pocket—the one Tad Coon had given
him, you know—so he didn’t think this was at all out of the way.
Besides, if it was a bug and it did come out of its case in Tommy’s
pocket it might bite him. And believe me, that watch was big enough to
hold a mighty big bug.
They dug a nice hole and they buried Tommy Peele’s watch down in it and
patted the earth smooth. Then Tad Coon lay down right on top of it so
he’d be there when the thing that was making a noise inside of it came
out.
By and by the fish stopped biting and the mosquitoes began. Tommy could
hear Louie Thomson over in his own field calling his cows.
Well, Tommy thought he’d better look at his watch and see if it was time
to go home. He’d left it in his pants pocket, tied to them with a jingly
chain. His pants were on the ground beside Tad Coon, and Tad was
asleep—he never opened his eyes, he just squinched them tighter shut
than ever. When Tommy went to pick them up they wouldn’t come; because
they were tied to his watch with that jingly chain. And the watch wasn’t
in his pocket; it was buried right underneath Tad Coon.
When Tad saw Tommy was bound to have it he got up and looked around, as
s’prised as could be. “’Scuse me,” said he; “was I in your way? Are you
looking for something?” And when Tommy began to dig up the watch, Tad
dug, too, quite politely, as though he were glad to help him find it.
But he didn’t fool Tommy’s dog. Watch said: “Tad Coon, what have you
been doing?”
“I was just burying that bug. You can hear it making a noise inside the
hard case Tommy’s dug up again,” owned Tad. “It would come out if he’d
let me take care of it.”
By this time the dog could see the shiny, noisy watch ticking away on
the end of its jingly chain. “You silly thing!” he barked. And he made
so much noise that Louis Thomson let his cows go up to the barn alone
and came to the fence to see what was happening. He didn’t come over it
because Tommy Peele wouldn’t let him. But he climbed up on top of it,
and saw Tad Coon grabbing at Tommy’s shiny watch.
“There is a bug inside,” Tad was saying. “Stripes says so, too, don’t
you, Stripes?”
“It sounds like one,” answered Stripes, cocking his ears, and Nibble and
Doctor Muskrat both agreed that it didn’t seem like anything else they
had ever heard.
But Tommy’s dog just jeered. “Bug! It was doing that when the deep snow
was all over the ground and there wasn’t a bug stirring.”
Tad Coon wouldn’t believe him. He turned it over in his handy-paws and
sniffed and listened again. “It is, too, a bug,” he insisted. “And it’ll
come out very soon. I can see the crack it’s making.” He meant the place
where the back comes open.
By this time Tommy Peele could see what he wanted; so he opened his
watch and showed Tad the little wheels that made all the ticking. And
then wasn’t Tad Coon more puzzled than before. It certainly wasn’t a
bug—but what was it?
Even Tommy’s very own dog didn’t know that. “It talks all the time,” he
explained. “I can’t ever hear it say anything different, but it seems to
tell Tommy to go and do something.”
Sure enough, Tommy Peele looked at his watch and whistled. “Hey,” said
he, “I didn’t know it was so late. We ought to go up and do our
milking.”
He was just slipping it back into his pocket when Louie Thomson called
out, “Please, Tommy, let me come over and see your animals. Honest, I
won’t hurt ’em.”
Splash went Doctor Muskrat into his pond. Flick went Nibble into the
Pickery Things. Scratchy-scramble went Tad Coon up into a tree. Te-flap,
te-flap went Stripes Skunk for his hollow oak, his pigeon-toed feet just
slapping the ground and his long draggly tail trailing between them.
Nobody stayed but Tommy’s dog, and he was bristling and growling.
“Aw, gee!” said the bad boy. “I only wanted a look at that cute one who
was clawin’ at you. How’d you make ’em come to you?”
[Illustration: Tad Coon finds a new kind of bug]
“I don’t,” said Tommy. “Maybe it’s because I feed them.” You see he
didn’t know he’d made any compacts with them. Nobody could explain them
to him. But it didn’t matter, because he really meant to keep them.
“What do you feed them?” said Louie. “I wish they’d be like that with
me.”
“Gr-r-r!” growled Tommy’s dog. “It’s all sticks and no bones wherever
you are. You’d have a better chance of making friends if you’d say,
‘Wisht I’d be like that with them.’” But even Tommy didn’t understand
him.