Freddy the Pied Piper

by Walter R. Brooks

  “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?”

  “He’s a wild African porkopotamus,” said Leo. “Lives entirely on boiled mice and beet greens, with plenty of butter. Only one in captivity, and isn’t that a break for everybody! Suppose there were a lot of them around.”

  “I think I’ve seen pictures of him somewhere,” said Willy. “Only I don’t remember that he was so homely.”

  “No,” said Leo, “they’ve never been able to photograph him. They’ve tried, but when they point the camera and pull the trigger, the camera always blows up with a loud bang. Can’t say I blame it.”

  “Ha!” said Freddy. “Very funny!” He got up. “Stand aside!” he shouted. “The porkopotamus is coming out of his cage!” And he opened the door and rushed at them.

  There was a sort of four-cornered tussle on the barn floor, which ended with Freddy held motionless in Willy’s coils, while Jinx and Leo came up and sniffed doubtfully at him.

  “Not very fresh,” they agreed.

  Then they all went up to breakfast.

  On the way, Freddy said: “Willy, are you really thirty feet long? You don’t look it.”

  “Don’t know,” said the boa. “Don’t remember. But that’s what it says on the sign I used to have on my cage.”

  So Freddy asked about it when they got up to the house. Mr. Boomschmidt said that how long anything was all depended on what kind of feet you measured with. And when Freddy said he supposed there was only one kind of f
oot, the one that had twelve inches in it, Mr. Boomschmidt said: “Oh, dear me, no! Look at my foot—about eight inches, wouldn’t you say? And then look at Jinx’s—about an inch. Do you remember what we used in measuring Willy, Leo?”

  “We used my foot,” said the lion. “Which is about six inches long. If you measured with a yardstick, you’d find Willy is about fifteen feet long.”

  Freddy started to say something more, but Leo shook his head at him. Later, the lion explained. “You’ll embarrass the chief by asking questions like that,” he said. “I suppose it’s really cheating to advertise Willy as thirty feet long. But all circuses measure things that way. Willy’s really the longest boa in captivity, but nobody’d believe it if we said he was fifteen feet and somebody else said theirs was thirty.”

  “Why don’t you just advertise him as the longest boa in captivity, then?” said Freddy. “Then you wouldn’t have to say things that aren’t really true.”

  “Well, fry me in butter!” Leo exclaimed, looking admiringly at the pig. “That’s an idea! My, that’ll please the chief!”

  After breakfast they all sat around on the porch and had a final cup of coffee, and Madame Delphine told their fortunes in the coffee grounds. Of course if Mrs. Boomschmidt had made the coffee in a percolator there wouldn’t have been any grounds in the cups, but she was an old-fashioned cook who didn’t hold, she said, with such new-fangled contraptions as percolators, and she just put the coffee right in with the water and some eggshells and stewed it up good. It was pretty strong for the smaller animals, but lions and rhinoceroses can drink anything. And I suppose Bill Wonks and Madame Delphine and Mr. Boomschmidt had got used to it. Anyway, when they had drunk the last drops and turned the cup upside down, there were plenty of grounds left sticking to the inside. And Madame Delphine would examine them and tell a fortune from them. It was a lot of fun, even when she had told the same person quite a different fortune the day before.

  She told Jinx that she saw a crown and sceptre in his cup. “It is plain,” she said, “that you come of a long line of very distinguished ancestors, and that royal blood flows in your veins. The crown is wrong side up, and that tells me that a base usurper now rules in your ancestral halls, but the sceptre is right side up, which means that you will, on some glorious day, not long hence, assume your rightful place on the throne of your forebears.” Of course Jinx came of a long line of alley cats, and he knew it perfectly well, but he was pretty pleased all the same.

  Then she saw a wedding ring and a needle in Bill Wonks’ cup, and Bill blushed and fiddled with his moustache, for as everybody knew, Bill had for over a year been paying court to a lady in Yare’s Corners, and the lady was a dressmaker.

  Mr. Boomschmidt’s cup had a house in it. The house had a very large chimney, and over the chimney was a dollar sign. At least that is what Madame Delphine said she saw, although it didn’t look anything like that to Freddy, when he peered into the cup. But Madame Delphine seemed much pleased, and she said that at last they were getting closer to Col. Yancey’s treasure, and she felt sure that if Mr. Boomschmidt would pull down the chimney …

  “Why, dear me,” said Mr. Boomschmidt excitedly, “that’s the one spot we’ve never looked! The chimney! Of course! Best place in the house to hide anything. Just take a few bricks out and … Now why do you suppose we never thought of the chimney? Leo, how could we have forgotten to look there?”

  “I guess it’s because the house is built around the chimney, chief, and you’d have to pull the house down to get at it.”

  “You start monkeying with that chimney, boss,” said Bill, “and I won’t answer for the consequences.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Boomschmidt disappointedly, “do you think …? Well, maybe you’re right, Bill. But I should think we could poke at it a little.” He stopped then to listen to Madame Delphine, who was examining Freddy’s cup.

  Freddy, said Madame Delphine, could expect an important visit very soon. There the visitor was, right in the middle of the cup—that little sprinkling of grounds.

  Freddy peered at it. “I don’t recognize him,” he said. “Looks sort of as if he’d been blown to pieces. Maybe somebody’s going to send me a bomb.”

  Madame Delphine didn’t like to have people try to be funny about her fortunes. I don’t suppose she really believed in them herself, but she liked other people to—at least she liked them to pretend to. She handed the cup back to Freddy. “No use going on,” she said, “if you take that attitude.”

  Freddy started to apologize, when Jinx said suddenly: “Hey, pig; there’s your visitor right now.” He pointed to the gatepost, out by the road, upon which Phil, the buzzard, was sitting, waving his ragged wings to attract Freddy’s attention.

  Freddy went down to the gate. “Hey, look,” he said; “there isn’t any use your following me around. There’s only a few of those cookies left, and we want them ourselves.”

  “There’s only a few of those cookies left, and we want them ourselves.”

  “Y’all are kind of hasty, ain’t you?” said Phil. “If you think I’m after those cookies—well, I shore am. But I’ve got something to trade.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as how to get into Bleech’s house. I’ve been kind of projectin’ around there, and I got a way figured out. But I want the rest of the cookies if I tell you.” He smacked his beak in anticipation. “They shore are tasty! You suppose you could get me the recipe for ’em?”

  “I probably could,” said Freddy. “But what could you do with it?”

  “I could look at it, after the cookies are gone. Be kind of like havin’ a picture of your sweetheart to look at when she ain’t there any more.”

  “Well, what’s your scheme?” Freddy asked.

  “Maybe you noticed the pipe from Bleech’s kitchen stove,” said Phil. “It don’t go into the main chimney; it just goes up by itself through the roof. Now if you was to kind of ooze quietly up onto that roof tonight when the fire’s been out for a while, and lift off the top section of pipe without being heard—”

  “Oh, you’re just wasting my time,” Freddy interrupted. “Even Jinx is too big to go through a stovepipe, and he wouldn’t do it anyway—get all ashes and soot, and he’d have to drop into the stove—”

  “I wasn’t figurin’ on the cat,” said Phil. “I was figurin’ on that snake-friend of yours. Why it’s easy! How come you didn’t think of it yourself, I wonder?”

  Freddy thought a minute. Maybe Willy could get down the pipe, after all. But if Bleech heard him, it would be—goodbye, Willy.… Still, if they were prepared to create some diversion outside—

  Then he had an idea. “Wait here,” he said, and went in and brought out the rest of the cookies. “That’s all there are,” he said, “but if this thing works out, I’ll not only get you the recipe, I’ll see that you get a whole fresh batch of them. Only I’d like you to stick around tonight; we may want your help. But don’t say anything about this to the others, and specially to Mr. Boomschmidt. I’m working out a scheme, and everything depends on his not knowing about it till afterwards.”

  So Phil promised and Freddy went back to the porch.

  “What did old rusty-tail want?” Leo asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Freddy. “Just chiseling the rest of the cookies.” And he changed the subject.

  But later he spoke quietly to Jinx and Leo and Willy, and that night, after everybody had gone to bed, the four of them slipped out of the house and started off down the road to Yare’s Corners.

  Chapter 15

  It was a clear moonless night, and they trudged along in silence—at least the three animals trudged; Willy, having no feet to trudge with, slithered. Willy was rather grumpy. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, in order to keep slim enough so he wouldn’t get stuck in the stovepipe. Down the road they picked up Phil, who after a short conference flew on ahead to reconnoiter. Every house in Yare’s Corners was dark except the doctor’s, where a light burned in th
e office window; and Willy said: “I’m glad he’s home. I hope he knowth how to treat gunthot woundth.” Like all snakes, Willy had a tendency to lisp when excited.

  “There aren’t going to be any gunshot wounds,” said Freddy firmly, and Jinx said: “Don’t you worry, snake. We’ll keep him occupied if he wakes up before you get in.”

  At Mr. Bleech’s gate Phil was waiting, and reported everything quiet, and Mr. Bleech asleep and snoring in the upper front bedroom with all the doors locked and the windows nailed shut. The kitchen was a sort of lean-to affair attached to the back of the house, and the roof was low. Leo wasn’t much of a climber, but by standing on his hind legs he got his forepaws over the edge, and then he dug his long claws in, and with Freddy and Willy boosting, got up on the roof without making too much noise. Then Willy followed, and Freddy and Jinx went around and crept up on the porch, to be ready to divert Mr. Bleech’s attention from any suspicious sounds in the kitchen.

  On the roof, Leo sat down and taking the stovepipe between his forepaws, lifted it quietly out. Now there was just a hole, which smelt of ashes and soot, but luckily no heat was coming up. Evidently Mr. Bleech had not yet repaired the damage that Jerry had done to his stove.

  On the roof, Leo lifted the stovepipe out.

  The two amateur burglars whispered together for a minute. Then Leo hooked his claws firmly into the shingles and braced himself, and Willy took two turns with his tail around the lion’s body. “If I get stuck I’ll give you two squeezes,” he said, “and you pull me up.” Leo nodded, and the snake started down the pipe.

  Everything would have gone all right if Willy hadn’t sneezed. But I guess you would have sneezed too if you had gone head first down a stovepipe into a firebox full of cold ashes. The first breath Willy took, the ashes went up his nose. It is really to his credit that he only sneezed once. But it was a good strong sneeze, even for a snake, and it blew one of the stove lids right off and sent it clattering to the floor.