The
truth is, he had yielded to temptation when common sense had warned him
not to. So he had no one to blame for his present difficulty but
himself, and he knew it.
At first he had been in a terrible rage and had bitten at the wires
until he had made his mouth sore. When he had made sure that the wires
were stouter than his teeth, he wisely stopped trying to get out in that
way, and made up his mind that the only thing to do was to watch for a
chance to slip out, if the door of the cage should happen to be left
unfastened.
Of course it hurt his pride terribly to be made fun of by those who
always had feared him. Happy Jack Squirrel was the first one of these to
see him. Farmer Brown's boy had put the cage down near the foot of the
big maple tree in which Happy Jack was living, because Shadow had driven
him out of the Green Forest. As soon as Happy Jack had made sure that
Shadow really and truly was a prisoner and so quite harmless, he had
acted as if he were crazy. Perhaps he was--crazy with joy. You see, he
no longer had anything to be really afraid of, for there was no one but
Shadow from whom he could not get away by running into his house.
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