CHAPTER V

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.

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?”

“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.