“Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho!” laughed Billy Mink. “Ho, ho, ho! Ha, ha, ha!”
“What is it that is so funny?” snapped Grandfather Frog, for nothing makes him so angry as to be laughed at.
“Do you mean to say that anybody but Farmer Brown or Farmer Brown's boy could have cut down such a big tree as that?” asked Billy. “Why, that would be as hard as to drag the tree here.”
“Jerry Muskrat's big cousin from the North could do it, and I believe he did,” replied Grandfather Frog. “Now that we have found the cause of the trouble in the Laughing Brook and the Smiling Pool, what are we going to do about it?”
CHAPTER XIX: Jerry Muskrat Has A Busy Day
There was the strange pond in the Green Forest, and there was the dam of logs and sticks and mud which had made the strange pond, but look as they would, Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter and Jerry Muskrat and Grandfather Frog and Spotty the Turtle could see nothing of the one who had built the dam. It was very queer. The more they thought about it, the queerer it seemed. They looked this way, and they looked that way.
“There is one thing very sure, and that is that whoever built this dam had no thought for those who live in the Laughing Brook and the Smiling Pool,” said Grandfather Frog. “They are selfish, just plain, every-day selfish; that's what they are! Now the Laughing Brook cannot laugh, and the Smiling Pool cannot smile, while this dam stops the water from running, and so—” Grandfather Frog stopped and looked around at his four friends.
“And so what?” cried Billy Mink impatiently.
“And so we must spoil this dam. We must make a place for the water to run through,” said Grandfather Frog very gravely.