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At last Paddy decided that he would go over to his aspen trees and look them over to decide which ones he would cut the next night. He slid down one of his long halls, out the doorway at the bottom on the pond, and then swam up to the surface, where he floated for a few minutes with just his head out of water. And all the time his eyes and nose and ears were busy looking, smelling, and listening for any sign of danger. Everything was still. Sure that he was quite safe, Paddy swam across to the place where the aspen trees grew, and waddled out on the shore.

Paddy looked this way and looked that way. He looked up in the treetops, and he looked off up the hill, but most of all he looked at the ground. Yes, Sir, Paddy just studied the ground. You see, he hadn’t forgotten the fuss Sammy Jay had been making there, and he was trying to find out what it was all about. At first he didn’t see anything unusual, but by and by he happened to notice a little wet place, and right in the middle of it was something that made Paddy’s eyes open wide. It was a footprint! Someone had carelessly stepped in the mud.

“Ha!” exclaimed Paddy, and the hair on his back lifted ever so little, and for a minute he had a prickly feeling all over. The footprint was very much like that of Reddy Fox, only it was larger.

“Ha!” said Paddy again. “That certainly is the foot print of Old Man Coyote! I see I have got to watch out more sharply than I had thought for. All right, Mr. Coyote; now that I know you are about, you’ll have to be smarter than I think you are to catch me. You certainly will be back here tonight looking for me, so I think I’ll do my cutting right now in the daytime.”

CHAPTER XV. Sammy Jay Makes Paddy a Call.

Paddy the Beaver was hard at work. He had just cut down a good- sized aspen tree and now he was gnawing it into short lengths to put in his food pile in the pond. As he worked, Paddy was doing a lot of thinking about the footprint of Old Man Coyote in a little patch of mud, for he knew that meant that Old Man Coyote had discovered his pond, and would be hanging around, hoping to catch Paddy off his guard. Paddy knew it just as well as if Old Man Coyote had told him so. That was why he was at work cutting his food supply in the daytime. Usually he works at night, and he knew that Old Man Coyote knew it.

“He’ll try to catch me then,” thought Paddy, “so I’ll do my working on land now and fool him.”

The tree he was cutting began to sway and crack. Paddy cut out One more big chip, then hurried away to a safe place while the tree fell with a crash.

“Thief! thief! thief!” screamed a voice just back of Paddy.

“Hello, Sammy Jay! I see you don’t feel any better than usual this morning,” said Paddy. “Don’t you want to sit up in this tree while I cut it down?”

Sammy grew black in the face with anger, for he knew that Paddy was laughing at him. You remember how only a few days before he had been so intent on calling Paddy bad names that he actually hadn’t noticed that Paddy was cutting the very tree in which he was sitting, and so when it fell he had had a terrible fright.

“You think you are very smart, Mr. Beaver, but you’ll think differently one of these fine days!” screamed Sammy. “If you knew what I know, you wouldn’t be so well satisfied with yourself.”

“What do you know?” asked Paddy, pretending to be very much alarmed.