“Because Tad’s just as bad as Silvertip the Fox,” snarled Watch. “He eats Tommy’s eggs and his chickens—and he eats rabbits, too, when he’s smart enough to catch them, you silly bunny. And you ought to see what he does to the green corn that’s sprouting in the Broad Field.”
“He doesn’t!” gasped Nibble. “He could have caught me a dozen times. I don’t believe it.”
But Tad Coon looked down his nose at his bad little handy-paws, he was so ashamed, and nodded. “Yes, I do,” he owned honestly. “After I’ve slept through the winter I come out in the spring so terrible starvation hungry. But I wouldn’t eat you. I’d rather dig grubs from a rotten log, even if we haven’t any compact.” And Nibble knew he meant it.
But Watch didn’t. “A lot of good that would do!” he snarled.
“That’s just what the cows said about their compact with you dogs in the First-Off Beginning,” interrupted Doctor Muskrat in his sober voice. “But you did keep it. Tad Coon isn’t one of the Things-from-under-the-Earth that Mother Nature herself can’t trust. Let’s all make a compact. Why fight unless you have to?”
Now this was very wise, because no dog likes to fight with a coon. “I’ll make this much of a compact,” said Watch. “I won’t bother Tad Coon as long as he behaves himself. If he doesn’t—Gr-r-rr!”
“All right,” Tad agreed cheerfully, for he meant to be very, very good. All the same, he floundered into the pond and brought up a clam to give Watch, just as though it were a regular compact. Watch didn’t eat it of course, but he did touch his tongue to it. “I s’pose you’d think it awfully funny if that shelly thing bit me,” he grinned, and he even wagged his tail. Then Nibble sniffed of it, and Doctor Muskrat—and of course Tommy was so puzzled he picked it up and put it in his pocket. He wanted to ask his father if there was anything the matter with it. But the beasts thought he was in the compact, too, so they were all happy.
Nobody dreamed that Bad One was hiding in the willows across the pond, listening to every word Watch had spoken and saying to himself: “It won’t take me long to start some trouble there.” And it didn’t.
CHAPTER VII
BLACK CRIME IN THE HEN HOUSE
The woods weren’t peaceful at all next morning. Watch came tearing down to Doctor Muskrat’s Pond with the bristles pricked up on his shoulders and his teeth snapping. “Where’s that coon?” he snarled. “Give me that coon. He’s broken his compact already. Now I will have to kill him, and you might just as well have let me do it yesterday.”