“Why didn’t you wake me up?” asked Louie in a very surprised voice. The little boy could sleep right through all the racket of the alarm clock, even if Chaik Jay couldn’t. His father almost always called him to help with the milking.
“Oh, I just guessed you might as well sleep,” said his father. “You can feed the calf if you’ve a mind to.” He knew Louie liked to do that. It isn’t nearly as hard work either. “I kind of wish I had, though,” the big man went on. “I let your bird out. He was over in the barn this morning. Maybe we could catch him again, but I don’t know. He was flying pretty strong.”
“Hey?” asked Chaik, before Louie could even answer. He half guessed they would be talking about him—conceited thing!
“That was all right,” said the little boy. “I let him in again. He came back, just like my coon.”
Louie’s father stared at Chaik, sitting on the window sill with the window open behind him so he could go out and in. Then he peeked out and saw Tad Coon down below with his nose all wiggling because he smelled the bacon Louie’s mother was cooking. “Hm! Looks like we had company to breakfast,” was all he said.
But it wasn’t all he did. He gave Chaik some nice crisp bacon crumbs—he insisted it was just to see if the bird really would eat them. And Louie’s mother caught him right in the act of slipping a good slice out to Tad Coon. “Here,” she laughed, “there’s no need for you to feed that fellow. I’m frying up some cracklings for him and the cats.” She made a delicious mixture of odds and ends of bacon and bread and such things. But when Louie went to carry it out, the poor cats climbed up on the shelf in the shed and spat and whined because they hadn’t made any compact with any coon. So they said. Really it was because they were afraid of him.
Tad didn’t care. He wasn’t hungry, anyway. Only he liked the taste of new things. He ate his share on the cellar steps. And the mice, who had run away to hide because he was hunting them, all crept to the mouth of the holes and sat there sniffing until their whiskers trembled.
“I say,” thought Louie Thomson to himself as he started off to school, “I just must talk with Tommy Peele. He knows about the wild things.” Only Louie wasn’t thinking about a wild thing, but about his father who used to be crosser than Tad Coon in a cage.
CHAPTER IV
DOCTOR MUSKRAT’S ADVENTURES IN THE BARN
You needn’t think, just because you’ve been hearing about Chaik Jay’s foolishness, that he and Tad Coon had all the fun there was. Not a bit of it. Things were happening round Tommy Peele’s barn at the very same time.