CHAPTER XXX A PRISONER WITHOUT FEAR A bad name is easy to get but hard to live down . Happy Jack . Shadow the Weasel was a prisoner . He who always had been free to go and come as he pleased and to do as he pleased was now in a little narrow cage and quite helpless . For once he had been careless , and this was the result . Farmer Brown 's boy had caught him in a trap . Of course , he should have known better than to have visited the henhouse a second time after killing three of the best pullets there . He should have known that Farmer Brown 's boy would be sure to do something about it . 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 . Billy Mink was the only other one who could follow him there , and Billy was not likely to come climbing up a tree so close to Farmer Brown 's house . So Happy Jack raced up and down the tree in the very greatest excitement , and his tongue went quite as fast as his legs .
He wanted everybody XXXXX know that Shadow was a prisoner at last .
At WITHOUT about as because from of than that to