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The stranger and the unknown must

Be always looked on with distrust.

Billy Mink.

Of all the little people in the Green Forest there is none with sharper eyes and keener wits than Billy Mink. Nothing goes on along the Laughing Brook, from where it starts in the Green Forest to where it joins the Big River, that Billy Mink doesn’t know about. Billy is a great traveler. He is so full of life and energy that he cannot keep still very long at a time. Moreover, Billy is one of those little people to whom it makes no difference whether jolly, round, bright Mr. Sun is shining or gentle Mistress Moon has taken his place up in the sky, or the Black Shadows have wrapped everything in darkness. He takes a nap whenever he feels sleepy. Whenever he doesn’t feel sleepy he travels back and forth up and down the Laughing Brook.

In these little journeys back and forth nothing escapes Billy’s bright eyes and sharp ears and keen nose. Being such a slim fellow, he slips in and out of holes and hiding-places which no one save his cousin, Shadow the Weasel, could get into. Now it happened that one day Billy curled up in a hollow log under a pile of brush close to the Laughing Brook. In a jiffy he was asleep. Right in the very middle of the pleasantest of pleasant dreams he was awakened. Instantly he was wide awake. He was just as wide awake as if he hadn’t been asleep at all. Without stopping to think anything about it, he knew what had awakened him. Some one had just passed his hiding-place.

Noiselessly Billy crept out of the hollow log and peeped from under the pile of brush. Walking down the bank of the Laughing Brook was a man.

“I’ve never seen that fellow before,” muttered Billy to himself. “It isn’t Farmer Brown’s boy and it isn’t Farmer Brown. He seems to be looking for something. I wonder what he is about. I think I’ll watch him.”

So, as silently as a shadow, Billy Mink followed the man down the Laughing Brook, and the man didn’t once suspect it. You see, Billy can always find a hiding-place if it be no more than a heap of brown leaves. He just slipped from one hiding-place to another, always keeping the man in sight.

Billy became more and more interested and inquisitive as he watched that man. The man certainly did seem to be looking for something. He would examine every half-sunken log in the Laughing Brook. He searched carefully along each bank. He looked into every little hole. It didn’t take Billy long to discover that this man seemed to be especially interested in those places where Billy almost always went when traveling up and down the Laughing Brook.

Billy stopped and rubbed his nose thoughtfully. He was growing suspicious. “I wonder,” thought Billy, “if he is looking for me.”