Runaway Ralph (2 page)

Ralph soon found that pushing the motorcycle along the bare floor at the edge of the hall was easier than pushing it through the carpet. Up and down the hall he trudged with one little mouse after another, while he longed to be riding off into the kitchen where the linoleum made
the best speedway in the hotel.

Up and down the hall plodded Ralph with brothers, sisters, cousins. He grew more and more rebellious as the stars outside the hotel grew dim above the pine trees. The motorcycle was his. It was given to him by a boy to ride, not to use as a kiddy car for a lot of wiggly, squirmy little mice. A motorcycle was not a toy. Why couldn't his mother and Uncle Lester understand? Because they were too old to understand. Too old and too timid, that was why.

Ralph felt sorry for himself, caught as he was between two generations of mice. (Most of his own litter had died from eating poisoned grain put out by a particularly disagreeable cook.) There was the older generation of mice, who worried about safety and being able to scrounge enough crumbs to tide them over the lean months between the summer season and the ski sea
son. Then there was the younger generation of silly little mice, who were always busy wiggling, climbing all over one another, and gobbling up crumbs as fast as they were brought to the mouse nest. Nobody understood Ralph, which was his whole trouble.

Night was fading and the chirp of a bird out in the pines told Ralph that the hotel was about to come to life. The night clerk soon would awaken and close his book, and the cook soon would be rattling pans in the kitchen.

A cousin, braver than most, came running down the hall where Ralph was wearily pushing the motorcycle. “You aren't fair,” he scolded. “You've given him three rides and some of the others two and me only one.”

Ralph stopped in his tracks. “Do you mean to stand there and tell me some of you have had more than one ride?”

“Yes,” was the answer. “And I'm going to
tell Uncle Lester on you. Then you'll really catch it.”

Ralph was too angry to squeak. He snatched his helmet from the head of his passenger, tipped him off onto the floor, and mounted his motorcycle while taking a deep breath.
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. Ralph shot down the hall into the lobby.

The first pale rays of morning sun filtered through the pines, which now were filled with joyously chirping birds. The night clerk stirred. All the little mice looked frightened and scuttled toward the stairs and the safety of their nests of shredded Kleenex. The night clerk sat up, yawned, stretched, and scratched his chest, giving Ralph just enough time to garage his motorcycle in the dark corner under the television set before the last shadow of night faded from the old hotel.

Ready to rest and filled with bitter thoughts, Ralph set his crash helmet on the
dusty carpet and sat down with his back resting against the front wheel of his motorcycle. The grown-up mice should not make him use his beautiful motorcycle as a toy to amuse a lot of squirmy, ungrateful little relatives, who were growing up and soon would insist on riding by themselves. And Uncle Lester would insist that Ralph let them. Well, he wouldn't. Never again would he use the motorcycle as a toy. He did not care what Uncle Lester or anyone said.

Ralph did not want to grow up to be a crumb-scrounging mouse like Uncle Lester. He did not want to settle down in a nest of shredded Kleenex behind the baseboard of the linen room. He wanted a life of speed and danger and excitement. He wanted to be free—free to do as he pleased and go when he pleased on his shiny red motorcycle.

The clock struck six, and in the distance Ralph heard the notes of the distant bugle,
this time lively notes that seemed a summons to excitement and adventure and, now that he knew where the notes came from, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Before the notes had died away, Ralph heard the laughter and shouts of medium-sized boys and girls who must be about the age of Keith, the boy who had understood mice and who had given Ralph the motorcycle.

The rousing notes of the bugle and the laughter and shouting increased the feeling of rebellion within Ralph. As the last strains of the bugle call hovered in the clear mountain air, Ralph made up his mind. He knew now what he was going to do. He was going to run away.

T
oo excited to hide under the grandfather clock where he could watch television, Ralph spent the day beside his motorcycle under the television set watching life in the lobby and waiting for night to come. Luggage was set down with a thump. Guests complained that there were not enough towels in their rooms, and when the guests had gone, the desk clerk said to Matt,
“What do they think this is? The Waldorf?”

Ralph listened as the manager of the hotel spoke sharply to the housekeeper about the cigarette ashes on the carpet. The housekeeper spoke even more sharply to the maid, who ran the vacuum cleaner so carelessly that Ralph was not even frightened. He was too busy thinking of the night that lay ahead. When the boy called Garf clumped across the lobby in his new cowboy boots on his way to Happy Acres Camp, Ralph longed to follow him out the front door and down the steps.

Late in the afternoon new guests straggled into the hotel. Some looked at the shabby furniture and dusty deer heads and left. Others, too tired from driving to look further, stayed. When the television set was turned on, Ralph polished the chrome on his motorcycle with his paws. When the set was silent, he napped, too excited to sleep
soundly. At last the bugle in the distance played its slow sad notes, and old Matt left the front door open as he went out on the porch to look at the stars.

The moment had come! Ralph snapped his crash helmet in place. He grasped the handlebars and pushed his motorcycle out from its hiding place, avoiding the attention of the night clerk by guiding it along the edge of the baseboard to the front door. On the porch he mounted and with a vigorous
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rode across the cracked concrete to Matt's feet at the top of the steps.

“Hi,” said Ralph, who was able to talk to animals and to any human being who loved speed and motorcycles and who understood that the only way to make a miniature motorcycle go was to make a sputtering noise that sounded like a big motorcycle.

“Why, hello there, young fellow,” said Matt. “Just where do you think you're going?”

“I'm running away,” said Ralph. “On my motorcycle.”

“You don't say!” exclaimed Matt.

“Yes. I've had enough of this place,” said Ralph. “I'm going someplace where I can be free.”

“You want to get away from your family,”
said Matt, grasping the situation at once. “You want to be independent.”

“That's right,” said Ralph. “I'm tired of being bossed around by my mother and Uncle Lester. I'm fed up with my pesty little brothers and sisters and cousins. I don't want to grow up to be another crumb-scrounging mouse. I want adventure and excitement, and I'm going to ride off on my motorcycle and find it.”

“Sounds good,” observed Matt. “I wish I could do the same. Just ride off into the night on a motorcycle. I always wanted a motorcycle, but I never could afford one. When I was young I had to help my folks, and then I had a family of my own to take care of. Now that my family has grown up and gone away, I'm too old for a motorcycle.”

The mouse and the man were silent a moment before Ralph said, “Well, I guess I'd better be going.”

“So long,” said Matt. “Good luck. I'm going to miss you. It always cheered me up to see you tearing around the halls like a little daredevil. Made the suitcases seem lighter somehow.” With that parting comment he turned and started back toward the door of the hotel.

“Hey, wait!” squeaked Ralph.

Matt turned. “You want something?”

For some reason Ralph hesitated before he said, “I was wondering if you would lift my motorcycle down the steps for me.”

“And I was wondering how you were going to manage,” remarked Matt, but he did not move to help Ralph.

“Uh…I'd like to get started,” said Ralph. “I have a long way to go tonight.”

“Sorry, I can't help you out,” said Matt.

Ralph was astounded. For a grown-up human being, Matt always had been cooperative. “How come?” he demanded.

“If I lifted your motorcycle down the steps, you would be depending on me,” said Matt, “and depending on others is not being independent.”

Ralph was bewildered. “But how am I going to get my motorcycle down the steps without breaking it?”

“I don't know,” admitted Matt. “I just hope I don't have to come out here in the morning and sweep up pieces of red motorcycle.” He turned then and went back into the hotel, closing the door behind him.

“Well, how do you like that!” said Ralph to himself. “And all the time I thought he was my friend.”

Off in the distance an owl hooted. The night suddenly seemed vast, and a mouse a very small creature indeed. The row of empty chairs rocking in the breeze made Ralph nervous. He could not get over the feeling there were unseen people sitting in
them, ghosts who might at any moment chase him and steal his motorcycle. He looked down at the three concrete steps and the curve of the driveway below them. His motorcycle was a good sturdy vehicle, but it would never survive three bounces on concrete. It would be smashed to bits—bits for Matt to sweep up in the morning.

Suddenly Ralph was angry. He was furious at the way his old friend had treated him. He would show Matt that he could manage without help. Matt would come out in the morning expecting to find Ralph waiting to be let in, but Ralph would fool him. He wouldn't be waiting, and there wouldn't be any broken motorcycle at the foot of the steps either.

Ralph set about finding a solution to his problem. He looked at the ghostly rocking chairs, the cracked concrete porch, the steps, and the asphalt driveway below. Once Ralph
had taken the trouble to look, the solution to getting his motorcycle down the steps seemed surprisingly easy. About three inches below the porch on either side of the steps was a sloping section of concrete, a sort of ramp intended as an edge to the steps. The two ramps were about ten inches wide and each sloped down to a flat section. Below each flat section was a shrub that had been pruned into a somewhat lopsided ball of leaves.

All Ralph had to do was ride his motorcycle over the edge, down the slope, and into the shrub, which would break his fall and let him slide gently through the leaves to the ground. The only problem was that terrifying three-inch drop from the porch to the slanting concrete, but Ralph was sure that with a cool head and steady paws he could manage. He would show old Matt a thing or two!

Ralph wheeled his motorcycle back from the edge of the porch but in line with one of the concrete ramps. High speed would be best, he decided, speed fast enough to carry him over the edge without wobbling so that he would land on the ramp on both wheels. Ralph's heart was pounding as he mounted his motorcycle, but his head was cool and his paws steady on the handle grips.

Ralph drew a deep breath.
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. His paws tightened on the handle grips. He rode smoothly toward the edge of the porch. He held his breath as he shot out into space as he had planned. There was a sudden heart-shaking drop before the tires hit the ramp.

At this point everything went wrong. Before Ralph realized what was happening, the motorcycle shot down the ramp, which was worn smooth by the many children who had slid down it. Ralph flew into the air and fell upside down into the shrub. He
lost his grip on the motorcycle and felt himself brushed by leaves and scratched by twigs until he came to rest wedged into the crotch of a small branch. His helmet had fallen off, one ear was scratched, and he was badly frightened, but he was not injured.

When Ralph had caught his breath and his heart no longer pounded against his ribs, he boosted himself up so that he was sitting in the crotch of the twig. The shrub was not the leafy cushion he had expected. From his perch in the center he could see that the leaves grew only at the tips of the twigs and that the bush, which had looked soft and springy from the outside, was on the inside leafless and spiky with dead twigs.

My motorcycle, thought Ralph frantically. Where is it? Then he saw it, far above his head hanging on a twig by its back wheel. His helmet, however, had bounced to the ground.

Ralph did the only thing he could do and that was climb up to his motorcycle and start chewing. The twig that held the motorcycle had a dry and dusty taste, but Ralph chewed until it snapped and the motorcycle slid down to the crotch of the twig below. Ralph climbed down, and when he could not free the motorcycle with his paws, he started chewing once more. No little cousin was ever going to say to him, What happened to your motorcycle, Ralph? Huh? What happened to your motorcycle?

Ralph chewed his motorcycle from one twig to the next, and the lower he went, the thicker the twigs became. By the time the motorcycle finally dropped to the ground beside the helmet, Ralph's jaws ached. He dragged the motorcycle across the weedy patch of lawn to the driveway and was about to mount when the door of the hotel unexpectedly opened and old Matt, in pajamas
and bathrobe, stepped out on the porch and looked around.

“The little fellow must have managed to get his motorcycle down the steps somehow,” Ralph heard Matt mutter to himself. “Now maybe I can get to sleep.”

I guess I showed you, thought Ralph grimly, as he mounted his motorcycle and sped off down the open road, off into the dark and scary night. So long, brothers, sisters, cousins! So long, Uncle Lester! So long, Matt! Ralph was on his way!

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. Ralph bounced along the uneven driveway to the mountain highway, where he quickly discovered that one of the ribbons of concrete pressed smooth by passing tires made a good highway for a mouse. He then made an even more exciting discovery—gravity. With a good fast start he could coast downhill with amazing speed. The halls of the Mountain View Inn were never like this.

Ralph sped through a night that fulfilled his dreams of freedom. It was a night of danger and adventure. Once when Ralph was frightened by the headlights of an approaching car, he swerved to the side of the road, where he and his motorcycle were caught in the back draft of the passing car and tumbled about like old gum wrappers and tossed into the weeds. Afterward Ralph was alert when he heard a car approaching and got off the road and clung to a weed until the car roared past. He was exhilarated by this test of his skill. Toward dawn logging trucks began to rumble down the mountain, shaking the earth as they came. Ralph never had seen anything so terrifying as those great double-tired monsters with logs lashed to their truck beds barreling down the center of the highway, and he knew the time had come to hide for the day. He ate some dusty weed seeds, drank dew, slept under a leaf, and started off once more at nightfall toward
the sound of the bugle.

Between cars and trucks Ralph tore along down the highway through the shadows of the night. This ride was the freedom he had dreamed of—speed without effort. Once the thought crossed his mind that if he should ever want to return to the Mountain View Inn, he could never make it back up the mountain under his own power. What a silly thought! Why should he ever want to go back to the inn when he could travel this way?

On the third night of Ralph's journey, as darkness faded and the pine trees gave way to scrub oak, Ralph found himself out in the open where there were no sheltering shadows. A milk truck rattled past on its way to the Mountain View Inn. Blackbirds greeted the dawn with bursts of gurgling song, and not far away a rooster crowed. A pheasant flew low across the road, startling
Ralph and causing him to collide with a piece of gravel. The road, which now followed an irrigation ditch, had leveled off, and Ralph had to produce his own power.

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. As Ralph putted along on his motorcycle, daylight made him uneasy. He was looking for a place to hide when the notes of the bugle, so close he felt as if they might shatter him, burst forth in the lively morning tune. Before they died away, laughter and shouts filled the air. Medium-sized boys and girls! peanut butter and jelly sandwiches! Ralph had reached his destination.

Ralph wished old Matt could see him as he rode off the road and bounced onto a gravel lane that crossed a small bridge over the irrigation ditch. Ahead lay a number of low, weathered buildings surrounded by lawn and shaded by walnut trees. Boys and girls were washing their faces in washbasins set on benches.