But he didn’t fool Tommy’s dog. Watch said: “Tad Coon, what have you been doing?”
“I was just burying that bug. You can hear it making a noise inside the hard case Tommy’s dug up again,” owned Tad. “It would come out if he’d let me take care of it.”
By this time the dog could see the shiny, noisy watch ticking away on the end of its jingly chain. “You silly thing!” he barked. And he made so much noise that Louis Thomson let his cows go up to the barn alone and came to the fence to see what was happening. He didn’t come over it because Tommy Peele wouldn’t let him. But he climbed up on top of it, and saw Tad Coon grabbing at Tommy’s shiny watch.
“There is a bug inside,” Tad was saying. “Stripes says so, too, don’t you, Stripes?”
“It sounds like one,” answered Stripes, cocking his ears, and Nibble and Doctor Muskrat both agreed that it didn’t seem like anything else they had ever heard.
But Tommy’s dog just jeered. “Bug! It was doing that when the deep snow was all over the ground and there wasn’t a bug stirring.”
Tad Coon wouldn’t believe him. He turned it over in his handy-paws and sniffed and listened again. “It is, too, a bug,” he insisted. “And it’ll come out very soon. I can see the crack it’s making.” He meant the place where the back comes open.
By this time Tommy Peele could see what he wanted; so he opened his watch and showed Tad the little wheels that made all the ticking. And then wasn’t Tad Coon more puzzled than before. It certainly wasn’t a bug—but what was it?
Even Tommy’s very own dog didn’t know that. “It talks all the time,” he explained. “I can’t ever hear it say anything different, but it seems to tell Tommy to go and do something.”
Sure enough, Tommy Peele looked at his watch and whistled. “Hey,” said he, “I didn’t know it was so late. We ought to go up and do our milking.”