"Why, yes!" Benny cried. "It's as plain as the nose on your face."
"I won't dispute you," said Mr. Coyote.
"You'd better not!" Benny Badger snapped. "You have been very careless. I don't believe you watched carefully enough. When I came up just now you had your eyes shut."
"I won't dispute you," said Mr. Coyote again. He was most polite—so polite, in fact, that Benny Badger was ashamed to appear rude or quarrelsome.
But Benny couldn't help being disappointed over losing the Ground Squirrel. And when, after he had dug to the end of three more tunnels that night, the same accident happened three times more, he decided that something would have to be done. It was clear that Mr. Coyote's eyes were not sharp enough. He was not nearly so helpful as Benny had expected him to be. "We'll have to change about," Benny announced at last. "You must dig, while I watch."
But Mr. Coyote promptly made a number of objections to that plan. He said, with something quite like a sneer, that he had much sharper eyes than any member of the Badger family that ever lived, and that he was quicker than a hundred Badgers put together. And as if he hadn't given reasons enough for disagreeing with Benny, he declared that he simply couldn't do any digging that night because he had a sore paw.
To prove his statement, Mr. Coyote held up one of his paws for Benny to see.
Benny looked at it. He couldn't discover that it was any different from Mr. Coyote's three remaining paws. And he had just started to say so, too, when Mr. Coyote interrupted him with an enormous yawn.
"I'm getting sleepy," Mr. Coyote remarked. "It will be daylight before we know it. And I'm going home to take a nap."
So saying, he sprang up and stretched himself. And then he trotted off. But he stopped before he had gone far and looked back at Benny Badger.