Freddy the Pied Piper (17 page)

But Jinx had gone up a tree.

“Jinx isn't very demonstrative,” said Freddy, trying to get back the breath that Willy had squeezed out of him. “Why don't you hug Leo and Mohammed?”

Willy said he made it a rule never to hug anybody with claws more than three inches long. “And as for that moth-eaten, knock-kneed, bilious old grouch, Mohammed …” He stuck out his forked tongue at the camel, who made an ill-tempered, bubbling sound and kicked viciously at him.

“Come on,” said Leo. “We're going to pay a call.”

Mr. Bleech's house is kind of hard to describe. It was just a small white house, neither pretty nor ugly, neither large nor small, neither very well kept up nor badly run down. It was just a house. Jinx went in to reconnoiter while the others hid down the road. Presently he came back to report that somebody was moving around inside the house, but all the doors and windows were shut up tight. It was decided that someone should go to the front door and knock, and then if Mr. Bleech opened the door, Willy, who would be hiding down beside the little porch, would whip in and grab him. Leo and Bill both volunteered to do the knocking, but Freddy said no, it was his money that had been stolen; and so while Willy slid up into position from the side, the pig walked straight up the front path.

But it didn't work out as they had planned it, for instead of coming to the door, Mr. Bleech threw up the window to the left of the porch, which was just above Willy, and the next thing the snake knew he was staring right down the barrels of a big double-barreled shotgun.

Freddy said afterwards that he never knew that a snake could glide backwards, but that's just what Willy did. He said: “Oh, excuse me; I guess I made a mistake,” and he backed right down the path and out the gate. And when Mr. Bleech swung the gun towards Freddy and just said: “Git!” Freddy backed right after him.

When they got down to where their friends were hiding, Jerry was pacing up and down snorting, and madder than ever, and he said: “Look, Freddy, I'm going to handle this guy,” and he went out into the road.

“No, no,” said Freddy. “Come back. It's no use attacking him directly. We've got to use our heads.”

“That's just what I'm going to use,” said the rhinoceros. And he put his big ungainly head down so that the heavy horn on his nose almost touched the ground, and charged the house.

Well of course he had his eyes shut, and he missed the house by about two feet. Bang! went one barrel of Mr. Bleech's gun, and then Bang! went the other barrel, but a rhinoceros has a hide two inches thick and I don't suppose the shot even tickled him. Out in back he hit a chicken coop, and he went on across a field in a cloud of feathers. He went quite a distance before it occurred to him to turn around and charge again from the other side.

“He's an awful poor shot,” said Leo. “He needs somebody to aim him.”

Mr. Bleech had slid two more cartridges into his gun, and as Jerry came thundering along he fired both barrels at once, but they had no effect. This time Jerry knocked apart a corncrib in the back, and he sheared off a sort of lean-to porch affair at the side of the house, but he still didn't get a direct hit.

“Well, he's whittling the guy's place down,” said Leo. “But I'll aim him this time.” So he stopped Jerry when he got to the road, and then he turned him around and pointed him and said: “Go!” And this time Jerry hit square between the two front windows. The bang of the gun was followed by a terrific crash and the tinkle of broken glass, and a yell from Mr. Bleech. A cloud of dust puffed up and hid everything; evidently the Bleech house hadn't been dusted or swept in a good many years.

There were a few smaller crashes as Jerry went through a couple of partitions and a sideboard and a kitchen stove before he split the rear wall and got out into the open again.

But as the dust cleared they saw Mr. Bleech. He had stepped out into the yard and was waving a grimy handkerchief. Bill went out to stop Jerry, and Freddy and Leo went forward.

“Just for your information,” Mr. Bleech drawled, “this house ain't mine: I rent it.”

“I want my money,” said Freddy. “Are you going to give it to me?”

“Money?” Mr. Bleech queried vaguely. “
Your
money?” He shook his head. “I ain't seen any money of yours, my friend.”

“I see you don't intend to give it back,” Freddy said. “So we will have to take other measures.” Just what those measures would be, however, he had no idea. Mr. Bleech still had his gun, and they couldn't fight him. Even Jerry was no use, for out in the open it would be easy to dodge the rhinoceros's rushes. There was nothing to do but retreat.

Mr. Bleech stood fingering his wispy beard as they turned and filed glumly out of the gate, and they heard him say, as if to himself: “Money? Whoever heard of a pig with money?”

Bill Wonks said: “That's the trouble, Freddy; if you go to the police, they'll never believe that a pig could have as much money as that.”

“I could prove I had it,” Freddy said. “Mr. Weezer counted it out to me.”

“But you couldn't prove that this Bleech took it. It's just your word against his. And no judge will believe a pig's word against a man's.”

“Sometimes,” Freddy said bitterly, “I wish I'd never
been
a pig!”

“Well, you are one,” said Leo, “so let's go on to Boomschmidt's.”

But Freddy shook his head. “Oh, golly, Bill; I can't go there now. Why that money was the whole point of my coming down here. I guess—gee, I guess we'd just better go home again, Jinx.”

“When you're right almost on his doorstep?” said Bill. “He'll feel terrible if you do that. Besides, he said if he won that two hundred at the races, he'd give us a big party, and he'd want you there.”

“I haven't any heart for it,” said Freddy gloomily.

“You don't have to be a partner in the circus, anyway,” said Jinx.

“I'd rather leave the farm for ten years,” said Freddy, “than to disappoint Mr. Boomschmidt like this.”

The cat sniffed. “Very noble of you!” he said sarcastically. He really felt pretty badly about it. himself, but cats don't like to show their feelings, and he expressed his disappointment and his anger at Mr. Bleech by picking on Freddy. Probably you can remember times when you've done the same thing yourself.

“I'm not noble at all!” Freddy snapped. “I'm just—” He broke off suddenly as a shadow swept across the road beside him, and he looked up to see the buzzard settling himself with a clumsy flapping of his big rusty wings on a bough overhead.

“Well, what do you want?” he said shortly. “We've got no more cookies for you.”

“Y'all don't need to be so mean,” said Phil. “I ain't askin' for anything. I got some right valuable information, if you want to trade.”

Freddy looked at him a minute. Then he said: “Oh, give him a cookie, Jinx.”

Phil gobbled the cookie, smacking his beak vulgarly over it; then he said: “That money of yours—it's in Mr. Bleech's right inside coat pocket. I was watching when he took it. I saw him put it there.”

“There's a cookie wasted!” said Jinx disgustedly, and Freddy said: “Well, thanks for nothing. We could have guessed that. We could also guess that he will probably sleep with it under his pillow.”

“He shore will,” said Phil, wiping a few crumbs off his beak with a grimy claw. “And all you got to do is sneak in that hole in the side of the house after he's asleep—”

“Listen,” said Freddy. “Hear that hammering? He's repairing that hole now. We can't sneak in through the side of a house. Or through locked doors and windows. No, we're licked, and we might as well admit it. Well, come on, animals. Let's go tell Mr. Boomschmidt and get it over.”

Leo looked at the pig curiously. “I never knew you to give up so easily, Freddy,” he said.

“I don't know that I've really given up,” Freddy said. “But there's no use staying here now. Maybe Mr. Boomschmidt will have some idea about how to get it back.”

“And in the meantime,” said Jinx, “Bleech will have hidden it somewhere.”

“No,” said Freddy; “he'll keep it on him; it's the safest place for it. Gosh,” he said, “I hate to tell Mr. Boomschmidt, though.”

It was a pretty disappointed lot of animals that took the road to Yare's Corners.

Chapter 14

The animals' reception at the Boomschmidt farm was just as warm and just as sincere as if they had brought ten times the amount of money they had lost.

When he had heard their story, Mr. Boomschmidt laughed and said: “Why, good gracious, what are you all so downcast about, eh? Money!—what's money? It's—it's … Well, Leo, don't just stand there! Tell me what money is!”

“It's the root of all evil, chief,” said the lion. “And boy, how you dig for it!”

“Why, I do not!” said Mr. Boomschmidt, looking embarrassed. “Well, maybe I do, but I don't really expect to find any.” He turned to Freddy. “Leo's talking about the money that's supposed to be hidden in the house—the money the former owner, Col. Yancey, is supposed to have hidden before he went off to war and never came back eighty years ago. We've taken up a few floors and knocked holes in a few partitions looking for it. Places Madame Delphine told us to look when she was telling our fortunes. But we didn't really expect to find it. It's just something to do in the long winter evenings.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Leo. “Well, it's funny you always acted so disappointed when there wasn't any money there.”

“Why, of course we did! That's part of the game! And then too, Madame Delphine would be upset if we didn't act unhappy: you know she really believes it, Leo, when she tells your fortune.”

“She told mine once,” said Freddy, “and part of it came true. She told me I was going to have a stroke of luck soon, and sure enough, two days later I found a nickel.”

“Well, my gracious, some of the things have to come true,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “She's told our fortunes hundreds and hundreds of evenings. She couldn't guess wrong about everything all the time.”

Mr. Boomschmidt always sounded rather confused and sometimes sort of simple-minded, but he was really a very clever man. All this talk about the hidden treasure was really just to steer the conversation away from Freddy's loss, and to make him feel that though he had lost a large sum of money, Mr. Boomschmidt too had had almost the same kind of bad luck, in not finding Col. Yancey's hoard. It was pretty nice of him.

Indeed he only made one more reference to their loss. That was when Jerry tried to tell him how ashamed he was of being so stupid as to let Mr. Bleech open the saddlebags. He whacked the rhinoceros on the back. He had to whack pretty hard on Jerry's insensitive hide so that the rhinoceros would know he was being petted.

“Oh, forget it, Jerry,” he said. “It's an ill wind that … oh, dear, I can't remember it! What is it that an ill wind does, Leo?”

“Blows nobody good, chief,” said the lion.

“Blows nobody good?” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “That doesn't sound right. How can you blow
nobody
good? You can blow your nose good, and you can blow a horn good, but—”

“Skip it, chief,” said Leo. “You're just mixing Jerry up. What you meant was that every cloud has a silver lining, wasn't it?”

“That's it—every cloud has a silver lining!” Mr. Boomschmidt exclaimed. “Now why didn't I say that in the first place?”

“Because you said something else,” said Leo.

“Right,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “Well anyway, what I meant, Jerry, was: if this Bleech man hadn't stolen the money, we'd have had to do a lot of work. Getting the show organized and on the road, and all that. But now—well, we can sit back and enjoy ourselves. No work to do, nothing to worry about—I tell you, Jerry, I don't feel sorry a bit.”

So Jerry felt better. Of course he wasn't very bright or he wouldn't have been taken in by such an argument. But all Mr. Boomschmidt wanted to do was keep him from being unhappy about it.

Mr. Boomschmidt gave them a party that night. They danced and sang songs, and Mr. Boomschmidt's mother baked them a big cake with “Welcome” on it in pink icing. Mrs. Boomschmidt was so happy that she cried nearly all the evening.

There wasn't any pigpen on the place, but there was a lot of unoccupied barn space, because so many of the circus animals had left, and Freddy slept in a cage where Rajah, the tiger, had lived. He slept late, and when at last something disturbed him and he opened his eyes, it was to see Jinx and Leo and Willy standing in front of the cage and whispering and giggling.

When Jinx saw that Freddy was awake he nudged Leo, and then pretending not to know that the pig could hear him, he said: “My, my; what a ferocious animal! I certainly am glad that there are good strong iron bars between us. What did you say he was?”