Jacob laughed. “Just want to be sure everything’s in working order,” he said. “Wildcats are tough. You don’t mind if I just try it out a little-?”
“No! Put that away!” said Freddy.
“Just one teentsy-weentsy little jab?”
“No!”
“O.K.,” said Jacob resignedly. “Well, you lead the way. “We’ll follow along.” And he flew up into the tree.
“Don’t go for him until I give the signal,” said Freddy. “I want to talk to him first.”
He went over to the boundary wall, and up along it past the thinking hole, out of which came little regular puffs of smoke, so that he knew that Mr. Bean was sitting down there on the old mattress, thinking. He smiled to himself. If you were doing some heavy thinking a pipe was a pretty good thing: it kept you from going to sleep. And Mr. Bean seemed to be doing a lot of thinking, now that haying was over. He was down there a good deal.
A little farther on he ran into Jimmy. The boy had on his old overalls, but he also had on shoes, and the new shirt his father had given him, and with a proper haircut, he looked pretty nice. Freddy knew better than to say anything about it though. He just said “Hello,” and Jimmy said “Hello,” and then Freddy said: “I’m going up with the wasps to chase that wildcat away. Want to come along?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in hurting people?” Jimmy said.
“I don’t, if they’re friendly. But this wildcat isn’t.” And he told Jimmy about Joseph’s school.
“Well, maybe you’re right about him,” Jimmy said, “though he seemed nice enough to me.”
“I know,” Freddy said. “Everybody says the same thing. He’s been laying himself out to be nice; he gave that talk the other day, and he’s been around paying formal calls, and doing things for people—carrying bundles and so on. Sure, maybe I’m wrong. But I’m thinking of Joseph and his school. You can’t keep up attendance in a school if your pupils act like little cannibals and eat one another up.”
They went on up into the woods and had nearly reached Peter’s den when they caught sight of someone moving quickly along through the trees ahead.
“Good gracious, it’s Miss Peebles!” said Freddy.
She had seen them too, and turned down towards them. Freddy introduced Jimmy, and then said: “I didn’t suppose you’d be able to take enough time off from your store to get out into the woods, Miss Peebles. You’re so busy nowadays.”
“Much too busy,” she said. “In fact, I’m thinking of giving up the store. It doesn’t give me time any more to do the things I want to do. Oh yes, I know, I’ve been making more money than I ever did in my life, but I’m having a lot less fun, too. I can’t see that the money is doing me any special good. I’d rather make barely enough to live on, as I used to, and have a little pleasure.”
This was not the kind of talk Jimmy was used to at home, and he stared open-mouthed. If Miss Peebles felt that way, Freddy thought, the more Jimmy saw of her the better. So he told Jimmy that she knew all about the woods, and that if there was anything he wanted to know, he’d better ask her.
Jimmy looked at Miss Peebles skeptically. Then he looked around at the woods, which were pretty wet from a heavy rain the night before. “Yeah?” he said. “You know everything about getting around in the woods, ma’am? Well, could you build a fire with that?” And he held out a match.
Miss Peebles smiled at him. “Come over to this flat rock; we don’t want to burn Mr. Bean’s woods down.” She took a big jackknife out of her pocket and stripped some of the wet outer bark off a birch tree, then rolled up a sheet of the dry inner bark and handed it to Jimmy to hold. Then she gathered twigs. She didn’t pick them up off the ground, where they would be wet, but broke the dead twigs off the under side of limbs and from sheltered places. She laid the roll of bark on the rock and built a little crib of twigs over it, and then some larger twigs above that. And when it was all ready she touched a match to it. In two minutes she had her fire.
Jimmy was much impressed, but Jacob was getting impatient at the delay. He dropped down to Freddy’s nose. “Hey, look,” he said, “we ought to get going. Shall I chase this party away?” He waved a feeler towards Miss Peebles.
“No, no!” said Freddy. “She’s a friend of mine. Miss Peebles,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Jacob. I don’t suppose you’ve ever met a wasp before.”
“Well, not formally,” Miss Peebles said. She smiled at Jacob, and the wasp stood up on his hind legs and bowed from the waist.
Freddy explained to her where they were going, and Miss Peebles said she’d like to come along. “I’ve never seen a wildcat in his native haunts,” she said.
“These aren’t going to be his native haunts much longer,” Freddy said.
They started along, and pretty soon they came to a little clearing in the woods. At the far side the ground rose steeply to a sort of rock shelf, under which was the cave where Peter lived. And in the mouth of the cave lay the wildcat, stretched out with his head on his fore-paws and his eyes closed.
When he heard them he opened his eyes. Then he sat up and yawned, covering his mouth politely with his paw. “Excuse me,” he said. “Well, this is very nice. Won’t you come sit down? That log there will be comfortable for the lady, I think. I’ve been working all morning, and I just knocked off to take a little cat nap—a wildcat nap, I suppose you might call it.”
“We won’t sit down,” Freddy said. “This isn’t a social call. You see, we’ve just heard from Peter, and we’ve found out who you are. Oh, we don’t want to argue about it. We know why you’re here, and we’ve come to ask you to go back where you came from.”
“I see,” said the wildcat. He looked at Freddy thoughtfully. “Well, I knew of course that you’d find out when Peter got back, but I had hoped that by that time I would have convinced you that I didn’t want to cause any trouble. I’ve done everything I could to show you that I’d be a good neighbor, haven’t I?”
“You’ve got a bad record, and we don’t trust you,” said Freddy. “We think that when Joseph starts his school you’ll do the same thing right over again. We want you to go.”
The wildcat started to protest, but Jacob, who with thirty or forty members of his immediate family had lit on a limb that overhung the cave door, began to get bored with the slowness of the proceedings. Wasps are no diplomats. They don’t try to be tactful and persuasive when they want something done; they like to get out their stings and get to work. And so Jacob gave the signal and all the wasps took off from the branch with an angry buzz and came whirling down upon the wildcat.
If there is one sound in the world that means “Run for your life!” to an animal, that sound is the vicious snarling drone of a swarm of wasps or hornets. The wildcat put his ears back and crouched, then made a leap that carried him half across the clearing, and with the wasps pouring after him, went tearing down through the woods. And Freddy and Jimmy and Miss Peebles ran after them.
They could follow easily enough by the series of crashes, and the occasional screech the wildcat gave as one or another of the wasps got home a thrust. Oddly enough it was Miss Peebles who took the lead. Neither Jimmy nor Freddy could keep up with her. She looked more like a crane than ever as she hopped over logs, and from rock to rock, seeming to know instinctively which way to turn to avoid getting entangled in the bushes and briars that held the others back. And then they came out of the woods into the upper pasture.
They could see the wildcat streaking down alongside the wall, with the wasps streaming out above and behind him. As they watched, they saw him reach the path through the gap in the wall where the thinking hole had been dug. He checked, and evidently thinking to throw off his pursuers for a minute, leaped sideways into the path—and vanished. There was a loud screech, and a big puff of smoke went up into the windless air.
“Well, I never did!” Miss Peebles exclaimed, and Jimmy said: “Golly!” They didn’t know about the thinking hole, and evidently thought that he had jus
t exploded. But Freddy, who had stopped to catch his breath, started on down the hill at a run. “Come on!” he shouted. “He’s fallen into our elephant trap—and Mr. Bean is in there, thinking. Oh, dear! He’ll claw Mr. Bean to ribbons!”
It was Freddy who led this time, but Jimmy grabbed up a broken fence pole, and Miss Peebles had got out her jackknife. They tried to listen as they ran, but they heard no sounds of a struggle. They could see the wasps, circling above the hole, out of which came a good deal of smoke.
As they approached the edge of the pit they saw a few wasps climb out over the edge and stagger off into the grass. And then they reached it and looked down. Mr. Bean was sitting cross-legged on the mattress, puffing on his pipe, and beside him the wildcat lay on his back with all four paws in the air. The cat’s eyes were closed, and his face wore the silly smile of one who dreams happy and foolish dreams.
“Gosh!” said Freddy.
Mr. Bean heard him and looked up. “Consarn it!” he said crossly. “Wildcats and wasps—and now you! I might have known you’d be along! Can’t a body ever have a minute’s peace and quiet without you stirrin’ it up?”
“L-look out, he’s trying to get up!” said Freddy, for the wildcat had opened one eye and was raising his head. Mr. Bean turned slowly and looked down at him, then he took the pipe from his mouth and blew a big puff of smoke into his face. And the wildcat’s head dropped back, and his eyes closed again, and he smiled more sillily than ever.
… and the wildcat’s head dropped back.
Mr. Bean got up. “You’d think,” he said, “that if there was one place in the world where you could sit kind of calm and collected and listen to your own thoughts, this would be it. But evidently it ain’t. If you’ll give me a hand up, boy—you too, ma’am, please—I’ll go do a little work. I guess I ain’t fated to be a thinker.”
When they had pulled him up, he turned to Miss Peebles. “Well, Harriet, what are you doing way up here? Used to see you walking around this part of the country quite often, but I expected you’d be too busy to find the time nowadays. I’ve been hearing great stories about those hats of yours.”
“I guess I’ve been trying to get a little thinking done too,” said Miss Peebles.
“Better come over to the house and have a cup of tea with Mrs. B., and sample that new batch of cookies she’s just taken out of the oven.” He sniffed the air. “No matter what part of the farm I’m working,” he said, “I can always smell a fresh batch. I thought I noticed ’em a minute or two before that critter landed on me.”
How Mr. Bean could have smelt fresh cookies over at the farmhouse through the thick fog of tobacco smoke was a mystery to Freddy, but of course he didn’t say so.
“Why, I’d like to,” said Miss Peebles. “Perhaps I can make Mrs. Bean a hat.”
Mr. Bean made the creaking noise behind his whiskers which meant that he was amused. “How about a nice rooster?” he said. “She can pay you out of her egg money.”
“Rooster, indeed!” said a voice behind them, and they turned to see Mrs. Bean, who had walked across to see what all the excitement was about. With her were Mr. Popinjay and his wife who from their nest in the elm by the gate had also seen something going on, and had flown over.
“I’m not having any rooster hat,” said Mrs. Bean. “With everybody else coming out in such fine feathers, I certainly shan’t be satisfied with anything less than an eagle.”
“Great land of Canaan!” Mr. Bean exclaimed suddenly. He had just caught sight of the Popinjays, and although he had heard about the new hats, he had never yet seen any examples of Miss Peebles’ workmanship. “Where did those critters come from?”
Miss Peebles explained. “And I’m afraid,” she said, “that they are making me rather unpopular with some people. You know Miss Crispie, don’t you, Mrs. Bean? She teaches the fifth grade in Centerboro, and sometimes takes groups of children out for bird study. Well, you can imagine what happens to one of these bird classes when they’ve correctly identified several birds, and then a green robin with a long white tail feather flies out in front of them. The children want to know what it is, and of course Miss Crispie can’t name it, and there isn’t any picture of it in her book, and then the children think she doesn’t know anything about birds, and she gets mad at them.… Well!” Miss Peebles laughed. “You can’t blame her for complaining.”
Mr. Bean creaked some more; then he said: “Well, better come along. Those cookies are best when they’re just hot out of the oven.”
Miss Peebles turned to Freddy. “Can you manage this wildcat all right now?”
Freddy said yes, he could. “He can’t get out of the hole unless we help him. And the wasps will stand by.”
So Miss Peebles went on with the Beans.
Freddy still didn’t understand what had happened when the wildcat fell in on top of Mr. Bean. But as soon as the others had gone, Jacob flew down and lit on the pig’s nose and explained. “The old boy gassed him,” he said. “I saw the whole thing. When your friend Mac came tumbling in on top of him, Mr. Bean just took a big puff on his pipe and then blew the smoke right into Mac’s mouth, as he opened it to get breath for a second screech. And Mac just folded up like a wet towel. Trouble is, two of my aunts and one of my third cousins got gassed too. They were on Mac’s back just getting ready to give him the old zip-zowie when he fell in. They crawled back up over the edge, but they passed out and are lying over there in the grass. Boy, what tobacco! And what a man, to smoke such stuff! I wonder where he buys it.”
The wildcat was beginning to recover from the effects of Mr. Bean’s pipe. He stirred, opened his eyes, then sat up groggily, still smiling his foolish smile. And the first thing he saw was the Popinjays, sitting on the edge of the hole and looking down at him.
“Moses!” he exclaimed. “Where am I? Have I been transported to some tropical isle? Are these gay plumaged tropical birds I see? Is this—” he sniffed—“is this the perfume of the spice islands that greets my nostrils?” He shook himself, and sneezed twice. “Moses! I hope not!” he said more energetically. Then he saw Freddy. “I’ve seen you before,” he said.
“Pull yourself together,” said Freddy. “You’re not on any isle, tropical or otherwise. You’re just on your way back to your home in Herkimer County.”
“Ah, yes, I remember now,” said the wildcat. “Well, as I was saying when those wasps attacked me—” he evidently didn’t connect Freddy with the attack “—I don’t want to go back to Herkimer County.”
“You’re going back just the same.”
“Now, listen,” said Mac. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious of me. It’s all true, what Peter said. We ate those school children; we ate ’em and enjoyed ’em. But when the school broke up, and our children had to be home all the time—well, their mother and I realized what a mistake we’d made. We remembered how peaceful it had been around the house when the children were off at school all day long. But when they’re at home—well, how’d you like to have three young wildcats around the house all day long? We’d have given anything to have the school back.
“And another thing we realized: the children were missing a great opportunity. Neither their mother nor I had any education, and we realized that we’d been pretty foolish to break up a school that gave them advantages that we’d never had ourselves. When we heard that Joseph was coming here to reopen the school, I decided to come down and look the ground over. I liked it here. I tried to make friends with everybody, to make a good impression. You think I’m doing it just so we can get in here and do the same thing over again. But why should I take all that trouble? I could just hide up in the Big Woods, and then when school opened, just sneak down and pick off a fat student every now and then.”
“Yes, I see that,” Freddy said. “I really haven’t been able to figure out why you bothered to make yourself so pleasant. Unless you really do want to move into this neighborhood. But even if that is so, how do we know that you won’t change your mind after a wh
ile? And what do you think Joseph will feel about having your children as pupils again? No, we can’t take a chance on it. You’ll have to go.”
“Oh, now look,” said the wildcat. “You’re being pretty tough. If anybody says he’s turned over a new leaf, you ought to give him a chance. I know the bears will be tough. But if you believe me, I think you could use your influence with them. You’ve got more influence around here than anybody.”
“You won’t get anywhere by flattering me,” said Freddy.
Jimmy had been listening to the argument without saying anything. Now he cut in. “Look, Freddy,” he said; “I’ve quit throwing stones and picking on you animals, haven’t I?”
“Why yes, I guess you have.”
“Well, that’s turning over a new leaf, isn’t it? And if you can believe I have, why can’t you believe this fellow has?”
“You didn’t eat any of us up, for one thing,” Freddy said. “It’s a little different. Oh, all right, all right!” he said crossly. “So I believe him! And so what?”
“Say, listen,” said Mac. “I’ve got an idea. If I can prove to you that I mean what I say, will you help me get my kids into the school?”
“If you can prove it—sure,” said Freddy. “Only I don’t see—”
“You don’t have to. If this boy will help me,” the wildcat said, “I can prove it all right.”
Jimmy said: “Sure, I’ll help you. I don’t know why you shouldn’t get a break.”
As he reached down to help the wildcat out of the pit, Jacob flew down again. “Shall we let him have it when he comes out, boss?”
“No. Let him go. And thanks for your trouble, Jacob.”
“Shucks!” said Jacob disgustedly. “I love to hear that guy screech. And there’s a place just under his chin.… He’s playing you for a sucker, Freddy.”
“If he is, you’ll get your chance later,” said the pig. He watched the boy and the wildcat go up across the pasture together, then turned back towards home.
Freddy and the Popinjay Page 12
