FOOLING TOM WILDCAT
Now it so happened that Jack Rabbit came over for an early breakfast of tender blue grass, and he met Doctor Rabbit just at the edge of the woods. Doctor Rabbit was certainly glad of this, because it was pretty dangerous for him to go far out on the Wide Prairie.
Of course Jack Rabbit was very much alarmed when Doctor Rabbit told him Tom Wildcat had planned to eat him.
“My goodness!” was all poor Jack Rabbit could say.
“Now listen!” Doctor Rabbit said. “I’ve a little scheme.” And then to make very sure that no one else heard, he went up close to Jack Rabbit and whispered in his ear for a time. Then they both laughed and danced a jig.
“Doctor Rabbit, you’re surely the smartest rabbit that ever was!” Jack Rabbit complimented his good friend.
Doctor Rabbit said they would have to hurry now, and they went straight to the big sycamore tree where Jack Rabbit generally lay down to sun himself.
There was a deep, wide hole under this tree, that Farmer Roe’s boy had dug for a playhouse a good while ago. Doctor Rabbit and his friend Jack Rabbit began gathering long, slim, dead sticks and laying them across this hole. All the time they kept laughing to themselves. The sticks were pretty rotten, and when they had a whole lot of them laid across the hole they covered them all over with dead leaves and grass. When they had finished, it looked as if there never had been any hole at all.