And Nibble slipped over and ate his carrot. How good it tasted, now he was free!
Now don’t you forget that it was the greedy Red Cow who let Nibble out of his cage. She wanted his carrot so much that she pulled the wire door right off with her horn. And then she got scared and careered way down the Snowy Pasture with that door banging against her nose, getting madder and madder and madder.
Well, she finally scratched it off on to a prickly thorn bush that held up its arms to help her. And then she came back to the barnyard as fast as she could run. For she’d lost her temper entirely. And you know what happens when things do that. It happened to the Storm and to Mrs. Hooter, and to Silvertip the Fox, and to Chatter Squirrel, and Slyfoot the Mink, and Nature only knows how many more. It’s always something unpleasant.
[Illustration: Just then Watch barked to Tommy Peele, “Here he is. I’ve got him.”]
But she hadn’t forgotten that carrot, because she was so terribly greedy. She galloped up and sclooped her tongue around beneath the pile of hay in Nibble’s cage. No, there weren’t any more carrots at all. So she rolled her eyes around and saw Nibble just finishing up the sweet inside of it. “Moo-oo-oo!” she roared. And it didn’t sound a bit like the White Cow’s fluty voice. Moo! She tried to catch Nibble on her sharp horns or trample him with her big hard toes. But he was too quick. He just made two jumps and ran under the haystack.
Then she shook her horns at Chirp Sparrow, who was perched on a fence post. “You lied!” she roared. “You said there were lots of carrots here!” But Chirp just squawked rudely and flew into a tree, and she only banged her sore nose on the fence wire.
So the next one she took after was Tommy Peele, who hadn’t done anything to her at all. And you remember Tommy had on his tall rubber boots, so he couldn’t run very fast. Not fast enough to run away from the Red Cow.
And suddenly Nibble found he was dreadfully afraid of what might happen to Tommy Peele. Besides, it was all his own fault—excepting that Chirp really oughtn’t to have lied to her. So he bounced out under her very nose, calling: “I took the carrot! I took the carrot!”
But the Red Cow wanted someone she could catch and hurt—because she had lost her temper. She wanted Tommy Peele. Only she never got him.