“And a good riddance,” growled Jinx.
Chapter 6
The fourteen cats were pretty sleepy after the first good meal they had had in months, and they curled up in corners and on the dresser and in chairs and under the bed and slept peacefully all night. The chickadee, wet, but in his natural colors again, slept peacefully on the bathroom window sill over the radiator. And Freddy and Jinx slept peacefully in the big bed. It was the last bit of peacefulness any of them had for quite a while.
In the morning the waiter brought up a big breakfast. The cats hid under the bed again until he had left the room. After they had all eaten, and the chickadee had been sent off home, Freddy said: “Now you boys stay quietly here until Jinx and I get back. We’re going over to have a look at that lion. I’m going to lock the door, but it’s not to keep you in, it’s to keep other people from coming in and finding you here.”
There were quite a few people in the streets, but it was cold out, and nobody paid much attention to the little old woman and her black cat. They went around to Mrs. Guffin’s, but when Freddy tried the shop door it was locked, and there was no answer to his knock. Then Jinx walked around to the side of the house and came back to report that there were fresh footprints leading from the back door out to the sidewalk. “She’s probably gone downtown to do her shopping,” he said. “I tried to get a peek in that window where she feeds the birds, but the shade is down. Look, Freddy, how do we know it’s Leo she’s got in there? We don’t even know that it’s a lion; it might be a lynx, or just a bobcat. My goodness, she tintexed the birds; she might have tintexed an old sheep and put him in the window. It doesn’t seem to me that a big lion like Leo would be fooling around chasing a lot of chickadees.”
“Well, there’s one way to find out,” Freddy said. “The way Richard Coeur de Lion’s minstrel found out where Richard was imprisoned—remember?”
“How should I remember? I wasn’t there.”
“Well, you might have read about it.”
“Pooh!” said Jinx scornfully. “I’ve got better things to do than read a lot of musty old books.”
This was an old argument between them, but Freddy didn’t want to start it up now. “All right,” he said. “I’ll just point out that here’s one more example of something I read in a book that comes in handy. This minstrel didn’t know where Richard was imprisoned, and he wanted to find out, so he visited castle after castle, and under the windows he’d sing a song that Richard would recognize. And at last one day Richard’s voice answered him. He’d found him.”
Jinx wasn’t impressed. “I expect this minstrel had a good voice,” he said. “But if you start singing, this lion or whatever he is will just think it’s a fire engine siren, or maybe somebody having a fit, and he’ll just put his fingers in his ears.”
But Freddy went around and stood under the window and sang the first few lines of a song that he knew Leo would recognize. His voice wasn’t as bad as Jinx had pretended. It was a light tenor which had a tendency to squeak on the high notes, and he sang part of the Boomschmidt Marching Song which the circus animals used to sing when they were on the road. He sang:
“Red and gold wagons are coming down the street,
With a Boomschmidt, Boomschmidt, boom, boom, boom!”
He stopped, and for a minute there wasn’t any sound. And then inside the house a husky voice took up the song:
“With shouting and music and tramp of marching feet,
And a Boomschmidt, Boomschmidt, boom, boom, boom!”
The voice broke off, there was some thumping, and then the window shade flew up, a large tawny form was seen struggling with the window sash, and then it too flew up and the head of a big lion came out.
“Leo!” Freddy exclaimed. “It is you then!”
“Why yes, ma’am,” said Leo. “This is me. But—” He looked doubtfully at Freddy—“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure … Yet the voice is familiar …” And then as Freddy pulled the shawl away from his face, Leo let out a roar of delight. “Well, dye my hair if it isn’t Freddy! And Jinx! Boy, am I glad to see you!” Then his voice dropped. “But you’d better get out of here. If that Guffin woman catches you—”
“Listen, Leo,” Freddy interrupted. “You’re the one that’s got to get away from here. Can you climb out of the window?”
Leo shook his head. “I’m chained up. Big chain around my neck, and it goes down through the floor and around a big post in the cellar.”
“Can’t you pull it loose?”
“I might. But it would pull the insides right out of the house, and then how could I get away? Wherever I go I leave tracks in this snow, and the hunters would be after me again. I’m better off here, Freddy. And you’re better off anywhere else. That Guffin woman—well, she isn’t a, nice person, Freddy.”
“I talked to her yesterday,” Freddy said. “She thinks I want to buy you.”
Leo said: “Yeah. She’s been dickering with a couple of zoos. She wants at least a hundred dollars for me.”
“Oh, my land!” Freddy said. “I only brought a dollar and a quarter with me and I’ve spent fifty cents of that.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” said Leo. “Thanks just the same. It was awful nice of you boys to come, and I appreciate—” He broke off. “Psst! Here she comes!” And he slammed down the window.
Freddy and Jinx got back to the sidewalk before Mrs. Guffin came along, but of course their tracks were visible under the side window, and when Freddy said good morning she looked at him suspiciously. “What were you doing out back?” she asked.
“W-well,” Freddy said, “we—that is—I knocked, and then I thought you might be out in the garden so I went around back.’’
“Out in the garden in February?” she said. “What did you think I was doing—picking roses?”
Freddy pulled himself together and put on the haughty air that had gone over so well yesterday. “My good woman,” he said, “I’m not interested in your rose garden. I do not care for roses, and I did not come here to purchase any. I want—”
“I haven’t got a rose garden!” shouted the woman, and her big face got very red and angry. “You said—”
“Please!” Freddy interrupted. “No need of getting excited. I know what I said. I said I was looking for you; it was you who began talking about your roses. If you haven’t any, so much the better. I came to see if you were able to show me the animal you spoke of yesterday.”
The woman gulped and glared, but Freddy had got her so mixed up about the roses that she couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I told you,” Freddy reminded her, “that I was looking for something unusual in the animal line. Of course if you haven’t anything, and are just wasting my time—”
“I’ve got something all right.” she said. “If you’ve got the money to pay for it.”
“I shouldn’t worry about that if I were you,” Freddy retorted loftily. “The name of Vandertwiggen is a sufficient guarantee of any amount up to fifty million dollars.”
Mrs. Guffin’s features smoothed out. The mere mention of any sum in the millions is often enough to smooth out even tougher features than hers.
But though he had advised her not to worry, Freddy was worrying some. He had started from home with just a dollar and a quarter in his pocket. He had spent fifty cents of it for the fake canary. He worked it out quickly in his head—he was rather slow at arithmetic, though—and as close as he could figure it he had somewhere around seventy cents left.
“What would you say,” said Mrs. Guffin, dropping her voice, “if I told you I had a full-grown lion for sale? Ha, that’s something unusual, I guess! That’s something you don’t just walk into a department store and pick up off the notion counter! That’s—”
“Look,” said Freddy, “suppose you show me your lion, and don’t keep on telling me what he isn’t.”
“He’ll cost you a hundred dollars,” said Mrs. Guffin.
“All right, all right,”
Freddy said. “Show him to me.”
So Mrs. Guffin took him into the shop. As he went in he bent down as if to pat Jinx, and whispered to him to stay outside to give warning if anybody came. “Now keep back,” Mrs. Guffin said. “He’s pretty fierce.” And she opened the door into what seemed to be her diningroom. There was a big table, and a sideboard and chairs, and under the table on a blanket lay Leo. There was a brass collar around his neck, into which was padlocked a heavy chain.
Freddy sniffed. “Hmf! Pretty poor specimen. Where’d you get him?”
“Do you want him or don’t you?” she said.
Freddy was thinking hard. If he had a hundred dollars … but he only had seventy-some cents. Yet if he said he didn’t want to buy, he would have no excuse for coming back again. He hadn’t planned his rescue very well.
He said: “I suppose you have a cage for him? I can’t take him home like this.”
“You’ll have to provide your own cage,” said Mrs. Guffin. “If you haven’t got one, you can call up Johnson’s hardware store. They may have a lion cage in stock; they have most everything.” And she pointed to the telephone, which stood on a little table on the other side of the diningroom.
Freddy looked at Leo’s chain. He saw that it was just about long enough to reach the little table. He wondered if Mrs. Guffin realized that.
“I never use the telephone,” he said.
“You never what?” She stared at him. “You mean you—you don’t know how? I never heard of such a thing!”
“I came here to buy a lion,” said Freddy, “not to discuss my personal habits. If you’ll kindly call the hardware store—”
Mrs. Guffin shrugged and went over to the phone. As soon as her back was turned Freddy winked at Leo, pointed at her, and made grabbing motions. Leo nodded, and when she had seated herself before the instrument he got up. He came out from under the table so quietly that not a link of the chain rattled. And then as Mrs. Guffin put the receiver to her ear, one huge paw came down on her right shoulder, and another huge paw came down on her left shoulder, and right at the back of her neck there was a deep rumbling growl.
Mrs. Guffin had nerve, all right. For a minute she didn’t move, then she shuddered a little, and very slowly put the receiver back on the hook. She said quietly: “This won’t get you any where.”
She said quietly, “This won’t get you anywhere.”
Freddy said: “Where’s the key to your pad lock, Leo?”
“In the pocket of her apron. But she’s right, Freddy. There’s no use my leaving here.”
Freddy got the key and unfastened the collar. “Nonsense!” he said. “We’ll lock her up and beat it. How can she stop us?”
“In an hour, half the population of Tallmanville will be out after us with guns,” said Leo. “With this snow on the ground we can’t hide our tracks. I could have got away any time in the last two months, but what was the use? I never should have tried to come north in the wintertime in the first place. As soon as I got into snow the hunters began to find my tracks, and they’d have caught me, too, if I hadn’t happened to dodge in here just before Christmas.”
Mrs. Guffin, with Leo’s paws on her shoulders, had sat perfectly still—which seems like the sensible thing under the circumstances. But now she said: “If you really want this lion, Mrs. Vandertwiggen, you can have him for five dollars.”
Freddy laughed. “He isn’t yours to sell,” he said. “He belongs to my friend, Mr. Boomschmidt.”
“Never heard of him!” Mrs. Guffin snapped.
Freddy wasn’t going to get into an argument. He walked around the room and tried several locked doors, but at last came to one which opened on a sort of pantry. There were shelves of dishes and supplies, and one small window, very high up. Freddy doubted if Mrs. Guffin could reach it; she certainly couldn’t climb out of it. He took a chair in, and then told her to go in and sit on it.
She protested bitterly, but there wasn’t much she could do. “You’re just getting a dose of your own medicine,” Freddy said. “How do you suppose those chickadees you trapped, like being shut up in cages?” They pushed her in and shut the door and locked it.
“Well,” said Leo, “it’s good of you, Freddy, to take all this trouble for me, but what good is it? I had a pretty tough time before I got here. After the snow began, and people began to notice my tracks, word got around that there was a lion roaming around the countryside, and I’ll bet there were fifty hunters looking for me. I didn’t leave tracks on the roads, but I couldn’t travel on the roads because they could see me for miles against the snow. And at night the cars picked me up in their headlights. If I’d had any sense I’d have turned back south and waited for spring, but I don’t know, I guess I’m sort of pigheaded … oh, gosh, excuse me, Freddy.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Freddy generously. “I don’t know why it’s so awful to call anybody pig-headed. Pigs—well, they’re firm, they’re determined, they don’t just give up weakly when things go against them. If that’s being pig-headed, then I’m glad I’m a pig.”
Leo said: “Yeah. Well, you bear up under it well.” He went on with his story. “I got up here to Tallmanville just before Christmas. The hunters were beginning to close in on me; they had me cornered in a little patch of woods just north of town. I knew I’d have to run for it, so I gave a couple of good loud roars up on the north edge of the woods, and then streaked it right down into the town. It was early morning; there wasn’t anybody much around; and as I came down this street I saw this Mrs. Guffin shoveling a path around to her side door. She’d left her front door ajar and she had her back to me.
“Well, I didn’t have any plan, but here was a place maybe I could hide. I was inside in two jumps, and I hadn’t left any tracks on the clean sidewalk. I smelt food, and I came out here in the diningroom and ate up a loaf of bread and part of a pound of butter and some other things she had left over from breakfast. Then I heard her come in, and I got under the table. She came to the door and looked in, and then she gave a sort of grunt and said: ‘Come out from under there.’ So I came out.
“Well, she’s got nerve all right. Most people, they come into the diningroom and find a lion there, and they give a yip and dive through the window. Sometimes they don’t even bother about the yip. But she just said: ‘H’m. I’ve heard about you. Hungry, I suppose.’ And she went out in the kitchen and got me some more to eat. Then she said: ‘You’d better take a nap while I think what’s to be done with you.’
“I hadn’t had much sleep for a week, and now with a good hot meal inside me I could hardly keep my eyes open. So I went back under the table. Next thing was, I woke up with this collar and chain on. I’ve been here ever since.”
“Why did she keep you, I wonder?” Freddy said.
“She thought I’d escaped from a zoo, and maybe there’d be a reward. But she didn’t have to chain me. I’d have had to stay—until spring anyway. This chain business made me mad.”
“She was pretty good to you though, at that.”
“Don’t you kid yourself. Sure, she was good to me, if you mean she kept me alive. She had to keep me alive if she wanted to make any money out of me. But she fed me on stale bread from the bakery and bones from the butcher’s. Bones are all right; I got nothing against bones. But she always boiled them first to make soup for herself, and a bone that has been made soup out of is about as pleasant to chew on as an old doorknob. Why, singe my whiskers, Freddy, I bet I’ve lost fifty pounds! I’m glad there isn’t a mirror in this room; I shudder to think what I must look like.”
“You look all right,” said Freddy. “You’re thin, and your mane is kind of faded out—probably from being indoors so much.”
Leo said: “ ’Twouldn’t take long to get it in shape. A henna rinse would fix it up. And I ought to have another permanent; there isn’t hardly a crinkle left in the darn thing, except at the ends.” Then his head drooped. “But what’s the use thinking about that? I can’t get away from this place.�
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“Listen,” Freddy said. “Mrs. Church brought Jinx and me down here in her car. She’s picking us up again day after tomorrow and taking us home. Well, she picks you up too. You won’t leave tracks riding in a car.”
Leo cheered up a little at this news, but he was still doubtful. What were they going to do until day after tomorrow? They couldn’t keep Mrs. Guffin locked up; her friends and neighbors would begin to wonder …
“You leave it to me,” said Freddy. “We’ll work it somehow. Right now I have to go back to the hotel. I’ll leave Jinx with you.” And he went to the door and called the cat.
“Hi, lion,” said Jinx. He looked at Leo critically. “Boy, you certainly look like a candidate for the Old Lions’ Home. You look like you’ve been entertaining a couple of moths. What’s the matter—didn’t a diet of chickadees agree with you?”
“You’ve heard about that, eh?” said Leo. “I didn’t eat the chickadees. But I had to catch ’em for her. She dyed them and sold them for canaries. Nights I hadn’t caught any I didn’t get any supper. But eat ’em!” He made a face. “Oh, I was hungry enough to, but they don’t pay for the trouble. You’re picking feathers out of your teeth for the next hour.”
Jinx said: “Yeah. I gave up birds years ago. Feathers tickle your nose and make you sneeze so you can’t tell what you’re eating. Mice now—they’re real tasty. But I gave them up too. I like ’em personally, you understand, and it don’t seem right to eat ’em. Kind of abusing their friendship, isn’t it?”
Freddy had adjusted his shawl and was moving towards the door. “You two stand guard over Mrs. G. while I’m gone,” he said. “I’ll hurry back. And better lock the front door after me, so if anybody comes they’ll think Mrs. G. is out shopping.”
Chapter 7
Back at the hotel Freddy went up the stairs and down the corridor towards his room. He was just fumbling in his pocket for his key when he heard a terrified scream, the door of his room was flung open, and a chambermaid came tearing out, her eyes wild, her skirts flying. She galloped past Freddy without even seeing him and made for the stairs, screaming all the while.
Freddy the Pied Piper Page 5
