But she looked at him very doubtfully with her near-sighted eyes. “M-m-no-no,” she hesitated. “You haven’t forgotten that I tried to kill you when you hung that flapping thing on my horn.” She meant the door of his cage that she jerked off to get at the carrot Tommy Peele had given Nibble for breakfast. But she insisted on thinking that he had fastened the door to her. She was a very stupid thing.
“That’s all right,” he explained.
“You let me out of the cage, so we’re all fair and square.”
By this time she was so puzzled she couldn’t remember anything. But she could tell that Nibble wasn’t angry, so she followed him. And he showed her a fine dry spot on the top of a little hillock, all shut in by clustering thorns. For Nibble wouldn’t trust anything but the Pickery Things for even a cow to hide in.
There she stayed and there she slept very comfortably. Even the cold wind that came up with the sunset couldn’t reach her. And Nibble dug down a little way into the mud and ate the top off a mallow root and a couple of plantains for his supper. And then he had to lick himself very dry and clean before he popped into his own comfortable hole.
He slept late next morning because he’d stayed awake puzzling over that Red Cow’s doings the night before. But as soon as he had washed his face he set out to find her, for he’d thought of a lot more questions to ask. And there she was, crouched down close in her hiding-place, with her eyes bigger and starier than ever. “Hssh!” she snorted through her wide, windy nostrils. “There was a Man! But he didn’t see me at all!”
CHAPTER II
WHY TOMMY ’MOST LOST HIS TEMPER
“Nonsense!” said Nibble Rabbit. “There wasn’t any Man. They don’t come here. You must have had a bad dream.”
“No, I didn’t,” she insisted. “I was wide awake and I saw him as plain as plain.”
Nibble sniffed the air, but the wind had blown all the scent away, so he didn’t believe her. When he turned to her again she was trying to eat the twigs that she could reach with her long tongue. “Hey! Don’t you know better than that?” he demanded. “You’ll get pickers in your mouth, and, what’s much worse, you’ll feel awfully queer and sick inside of you. Doctor Muskrat says you should only eat that tree for medicine.”