“I wish,” said the farmer, “I could find out what drove those Rats over here. Then perhaps I could use the same means to drive them out of the house.”
“I wish you could,” replied his wife. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. Those Rats are getting so bold that they don’t pay any attention to me at all. They run across the pantry floor in broad daylight. The only way I can keep food safe from them is in tin cans or earthen jars with covers, and they have even managed to get the covers off of some of these. They get in the flour barrel. They have spoiled the milk. They have stolen the eggs. In fact, there isn’t anything they haven’t gotten into. They keep me awake nights by their squealing and racing about through the walls. They’re getting so bold that I am afraid of them.”
So the farmer set all his traps. He set traps in the attic and in the pantry and in the woodshed. He put poisoned food where he was sure the Rats would find it. But it was all in vain. Those Rats had learned all about traps, and the gray old leader of them had learned to be suspicious of food left where it was easy to get. He warned the other Rats not to touch this food. The farmer blocked up the holes in the pantry walls, but as fast as he blocked them up, the Rats gnawed new ones.
So it was that the farmer and his wife were in despair. Do what they would, they couldn’t get rid of those Rats. The Rats got into the cellar and stole the vegetables. It got so the farmer’s wife didn’t dare go down cellar. She was afraid of being bitten by a Rat, and you know the bite of a Rat often is poisonous.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE RATS START A FIRE
A tiny spark, once it is free,
An awful thing may grow to be.
Billy Mink.
Rats are born thieves. They not only steal food, but they carry off many other things, things for which they really have no use at all. Now it happened that one of the young Rats in the farmhouse found some matches and took them to his nest under the floor of the shed. There, having nothing else to do, he nibbled at them to see what the queer stuff on the ends of them might be. His sharp teeth caused one of them to light, and of course that instantly lighted all the rest of them. With a squeak of fright the Rat ran away, for like all the little people of the Green Forest and the Green Meadows, a Rat fears the Red Terror, which we call fire, more than anything else.
Now that Rat’s nest was made chiefly of chewed-up paper and old rags. Nothing could have been better for the Red Terror. It blazed up instantly. The floor just above was of very, very dry wood, for the boards of that floor had been there many years. In no time at all that shed was afire.