XXIIIA PLAN GOES WRONG
Turkey Proudfootwas terribly angry when Mistah Mule laughed at him.
“Why did you do that?” he demanded.
“’Cause you thinks you’s the boss ’round here,” said Mistah Mule. “But you has to do just as Farmer Green tells you.”
“I don’t believe you’ve ever seen me fight,” Turkey Proudfoot retorted. “I can whip all the other gobblers on the farm.”
“Maybe! Maybe!” Mistah Mule replied. “But kin you whip Farmer Green?”
“Can you?” Turkey Proudfoot asked.
“I kin kick him plumb across the barn floor,” Mistah Mule chuckled. “Kin you do that?”
Turkey Proudfoot knew that he couldn’t. But he wouldn’t actually say so.
“I could make Farmer Greenrun,” he remarked, “if only he would fight fairly. But he won’t. He fights with a stick.”
“Sho!” Mistah Mule exclaimed. “Do he?” And then Mistah Mule hung his head in thought. Soon he raised it again, however. And to Turkey Proudfoot he began to say something in a low voice. Whatever it was, Turkey Proudfoot did not seem to think well of it. He kept gobbling protests and crying, “No! No! No!”
But in the end Mistah Mule won him over. For Turkey Proudfoot agreed to do what Mistah Mule suggested.
“Good!” Mistah Mule brayed. “Do just as I tells you and you’ll make him run sure.”
Then Turkey Proudfoot gave a run and a leap and a flap of his wings, all of which carried him to the top of the fence and thence into the farmyard. He began to strut back and forth between the house and the barns, keeping a sharp eye upon the woodshed door.
In a little while Farmer Green appeared in the doorway, carrying a pail, and started to walk to the pigpens.
Turkey Proudfoot gave a loud gobble and rushed at him. There was no stick anywhere in sight which Farmer Green could snatch up. Turkey Proudfoot had made sure of that.
“Go ’way, you old gobbler!” Farmer Green shouted.
But Turkey Proudfoot came on and on.
Farmer Green was carrying something in his pail. It was sour milk for the pigs. And when Turkey Proudfoot was almost upon him, Farmer Green showered the sour milk all over him.
The proud ruler of the farmyard turned tail and ran. He looked like a white ghost as he scuttled, dripping, around a corner of the barn where nobody could see him.
Mistah Mule had watched everything as he stood with his head over the fence. And he again burst into his fiendish laughter.
“I reckon that ole Turkey done brag his last brag to me,” he chuckled.
Later, Turkey Proudfoot warned all the flock to have nothing to do with Mistah Mule.
“He’s a trouble-maker,” declared Turkey Proudfoot.