“You!” exclaimed Watch. “You must be as crazy as a chickadee! Has any thing bitten you?” You know dogs are terribly afraid of being bitten by a crazy beast—it makes them go mad, too.
“No. But—but I promised the White Cow that I wouldn’t come back to the barn while Silvertip was alive to chase into it after me—and I won’t stay away from the Red Cow’s baby for ever and ever. Something’s got to happen to Silvertip.”
“I wouldn’t want him chasing me if I were you,” Watch agreed. This sounded more sensible. “But I don’t see what the White Cow has to do with it.”
“She says Silvertip is really a wolf,” Nibble explained, “and if Tommy Peele lets wolves come right into his barn, whether it’s calves or rabbits they’re hunting, the cows will have to go wild again. That’s in the compact between cows and man in the First-Off Beginning.”
“Wurr-r-r!” Watch growled thoughtfully. “So it is. But that’s my trouble, and the cow’s and Tommy’s. It hasn’t anything to do with you.”
Suddenly Nibble remembered something and quoted:
“By dusk and by dawn you shall travel alone.
And all troubles are yours excepting your own.
That’s my fortune. The stars told it to Doctor Muskrat the day I left home.”
“I understand,” Watch nodded wisely. “Well, the trouble about all this is that I can’t explain it to Tommy. And we need him. What can you do to Silvertip—except give him a stomachache from eating too much rabbit, eh?”
“I can see where he is and what he does. I know how he gets into the chicken coop and where he hid the pullet he stole this morning and the feathers from all the rest he’s been stealing.”