“It was Tad Coon, all right,” Doctor Muskrat was answering. “No one but Tad would have known all those stories he told the baby about you, Nibble. Now we’ll get Tommy Peele’s dog Watch to take Tommy after him. Tommy can undo that cage door. You’d better hurry right off and find him. We can’t leave Tad there another hour!”
How had that baby bunny come home? Tad couldn’t imagine. But here she was, and here were all his friends planning to rescue him. He felt so happy, all of a sudden, that he grinned until the tips of his prick-up ears most met. He just danced up, like a skittish butterfly in a breeze, squealing, “I’m here! I’m here!”
“However did you get away?” gasped Nibble and Doctor Muskrat in the same breath.
“That awful boy opened the cage door and I just ran,” chuckled Tad. “How did the baby get away from him?”
“She didn’t,” Nibble explained. “He brought her back to the hop-toad’s stone. And she says he isn’t awful a bit. She isn’t scared of him.” He looked around for the bunny, but she’d scuttled into the Pickery Things the second she saw Tad Coon. Nibble had to call and call.
By and by she squeaked: “I’m not scared of that boy, but I’m awfully scared of that coon. He said he’d eat me.”
“Yes, I did,” Tad owned up. “I told her little rabbits mustn’t trust us coons. But I won’t eat you now. I’m not a bit hungry.”
“There’s something queer about this,” said Doctor Muskrat. “That bad Louie Thomson wasn’t bad to the little bunny.”
But if the Woodsfolk were wondering about Louie Thomson that morning, they wondered a lot more that afternoon. And they weren’t the only ones who wondered. Tommy Peele came down for some more fishing. Of course Doctor Muskrat and Stripes Skunk were interested in that, and Stripes’s three kittens sat still as still, with their toes tucked in like a pussy-cat’s, and the white tips of their tails twitching, because every other fish belonged to them. The bunnies were snoozing in the Pickery Things, Chatter Squirrel and Chaik the Jay were having an argument, and Tommy’s dog, Watch, was barking at them, and Tad Coon was down at the lower end of the pond, happy as a frog on a lily pad, full of mussels to his very chin. Suddenly he looked up and saw Louie Thomson looking through the fence--right at him.
Wow! But you ought to have seen him go! He bounced past Tommy Peele, splattering water all over him. Everybody hid, even Chatter Squirrel; everybody but Watch, who began growling and barking.