“You don’t say!” exclaimed the doctor. “Forgive my mistake, madam. If I’d seen the least trace of green scum, which is the usual sign of still water, I wouldn’t have put my paw in it, I do assure you.”
“Nor we our noses,” mooed the cow, still very politely.
“To be sure! To be sure!” nodded Doctor Muskrat sagely. “A sour drink makes sorry fur. But what’s to be done? And what will Tommy Peele think of me?” He was more embarrassed than ever when the little boy came squeezing in between the cows, as though he wanted a drink, too.
But Tommy had just noticed the cows weren’t drinking. It didn’t take him long to guess why, but he never thought of blaming his wild friend. “Why, Doctor Muskrat!” he exclaimed, as glad as Bobby Robin when he sees a worm, “whatever are you doing here?” And he knocked out the plug in the bottom of the trough and let the spoiled water go whirling and gurgling out through a hole. Doctor Muskrat’s eyes popped at that, I can tell you, but when Tommy turned on the tap and let fresh water come splashing in, the old fellow couldn’t understand it at all. He climbed up to examine it; he tried the pipe with his chisel teeth, and he licked the drops that splashed on his whiskers.
“Well!” he gasped. “I’ve seen maple sap drip from a twig in the spring, but this is no twig, and it’s no sap that’s dripping from it. What is it?”
But if Doctor Muskrat was excited about seeing the water run, you ought to have seen him when Tommy turned it off again. He bit it and he licked it and he squeezed it and he squinted up the hole, first with one eye, and then with the other. At last he sat down to watch it, like Tad Coon watches a mouse hole. He watched it till he got a crick in his neck, but still he wouldn’t take his eye off it. He was going to know about it the next time it began. He had an idea the rain was doing it—somehow or other. He couldn’t imagine a puddle that wasn’t made by the rain.
The stale water Tommy had let run out on the ground made a fine big puddle for the raindrops to patter in. But by and by the pattering grew into a splashing, and the splashing into a quacking. He just had to look away to see what that noise was. Three big white ducks were playing in it. “Quack!” one shouted. “I got a drowned earth worm!”
“Quawk!” called back another. “I’ve got a grain of corn and a daddy-longlegs!”
The third was silent for a moment over his beakful. Then he spit it out and said quite cheerfully: “I had a nice round pebble, but I guess it’s too big to swallow. Flapper wins this time.”
“Hooray!” shouted Flapper, standing up on his toes and beating the air with his wings as though he were going to fly. But he didn’t. He just settled down on his feet again, gave a shake of his tail and would have waddled right off if he hadn’t caught sight of Doctor Muskrat’s shiny black eyes staring at him. “Who’s that?” he asked in duck talk. And they all stared at the brown, furry beast.