Freddy didn’t care how much they took. All he asked was that when they had chewed all the flavor out of the gum, they would give it back. Then they could have some more. So when the four dollars’ worth was all chewed up, he and Jinx took it up in the loft over the stable and went to work. They shaped it into the form of a duck, and then rolled it around in a lot of feathers out of an old pillow and painted the bill and feet yellow. It looked quite a lot like a real duck. “Uncle Wesley to the life!” said Jinx. “Only it’s got more brains.”
“Doesn’t it seem awful quiet around here?” Freddy said, when they brought their chewing gum duck downstairs. “Don’t you notice it?”
“Sure,” said Jinx. “It’s all those jaws that have been chumping and chawing away for the past two hours. Now they’ve stopped. Hey, here comes Arthur!” He quickly covered the duck with an old sack as the big tortoise-shell strolled up.
“I’m obliged to you, Jinx,” Arthur said. “And to Bill. I just couldn’t take it if that awful name got out for all these animals to giggle over.”
“It won’t get out from us,” said Jinx. “Not as long as you let the mice and birds alone.”
“My dear Jinx!” Arthur protested. “It pains me deeply that you still distrust me. Ah, well, I shall hope to convince you in time.” And he went on.
“Too blamed sanctimonious,” Jinx said. “Well, I’ll guard this duck and you go cut us out a couple of hosses.”
Freddy had sent out several wasps as advance scouts to locate their enemy. Now as they rode up towards the duck pond Jacob came buzzing along and lit on the pig’s nose. “Got him, Freddy,” he said. “Cousin Izzy is keeping an eye on him. He’s asleep on the top of the wall—right where that beech overhangs it—see?”
“Swell,” Freddy said. “Couldn’t be better for us. Cy, you and Bill go up along this side of the wall, and when you’re opposite the beech, get into a quarrel and yell at each other. That will cover any sounds we make creeping up along the other side of the wall.”
So Freddy and Jinx dismounted and circled around and crossed the wall into the woods some distance up. Then they crept cautiously down towards where Jacob had said the snake was sleeping.
Freddy could move pretty silently when he had to; Jinx of course made no noise at all. As they came closer they could hear their two friends on the other side of the wall.
“Yeah?” said Cy. “Well, all I can say is that anybody that could chew up and swallow an old pair of galoshes, buckles and all, hasn’t got any very refined taste in food.”
“Oh, is that so!” Bill retorted. “Well, let me tell you that there’s more flavor in a good, well-aged galosh or boot than in a ton of that flat, prickly hay you smack your lips over.”
The two friends had brought a bamboo fishpole with them. To the end of it they had fastened their chewing-gum duck. When they were six or eight feet from the part of the wall where the rattler was asleep, they crouched behind some bushes and slowly pushed the duck towards the wall. As they did so, Jinx, with as much of a quack in his voice as he could manage, said, “Oh, come on, Emma. There isn’t any snake around here.”
Freddy who was behind Jinx, said: “Oh, do be careful, sister! He’ll hypnotize you. Oh, oh! How can I ever face Uncle Wesley if I let my dear sister get swallowed.” His voice didn’t sound much like Emma’s.
Jinx’s whiskers twitched with amusement. He said: “Pooh, just let him try—that’s all; just let him try!”
Then they saw the rattler. He raised his head from his coils and looked at the duck.
Jinx pushed it nearer. “Ha, ha!” he said. “I betcha he beats it the minute he sees me. Ah, there you are, old slither and snoop! Come on, do your stuff!”
Freddy crawled up carefully beside Jinx and whispered in his ear. “Alice doesn’t talk like that, you dope. Quit using slang or he’ll get on to you. She wouldn’t say ‘Betcha,’ and ‘do your stuff’!”
Jinx grinned. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Guess I wasn’t very ladylike. How’s this?” And then he gave a silly giggle, and said: “Oh, sister, I do believe the horrid creature winked at me! Why, Mr. Snake! Tee-hee! I bet you’re a terrible tease!”
“Oh, my goodness!” said Freddy under his breath.
But the snake didn’t seem to suspect anything. He perhaps had not had much experience with ducks, and may, like many other people, have thought them much sillier than they are. He raised his head higher and his forked tongue flickered out angrily. Then he just swayed there, staring at the duck.
Jinx managed to give a couple of little frightened quacks as he pushed the pole forward. “You better not touch me!” he quavered. “If you bother me, my Uncle Wesley will tear your scales off!”
The snake gave a mean little snicker. “We don’t want to bother your uncle, so we won’t tell him, will we? Not now. Maybe I’ll tell him later when I get hungry again.” And as Jinx pushed the pole closer, the snake opened his jaws and lunged at the duck.
A snake’s jaws can stretch pretty wide. Half of the duck disappeared into the rattler’s mouth. But as he closed his jaws and tried to swallow the rest of it, his long fangs stuck fast in the gum.
For a second or two he didn’t move, then he lifted his head and shook the duck hard. A few feathers flew off, and the gum just stuck tighter than ever. And then he flew into a rage, and he whipped and twisted and wriggled and thrashed about until he was exhausted. “O.K.,” said Freddy, and he and Jinx came out and tied the rattler to their fishpole. They wound wire around him in a spiral and fastened it tight at the ends, and then they crossed the wall and got into their saddles and started home.
“O.K. rattler,” said Freddy.
When they got there, they untied the snake and dumped him into a wooden box, covered with a piece of heavy window glass that Freddy had found in the loft. Before they put the cover on, Jinx held him down, and Freddy worked most of the gum out with a stick. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll take him down to Centerboro and see if we can sell him.”
“Who’d buy a rattlesnake?” Jinx said.
“Fred Whimper had two coons at his garage,” Freddy said. “He said a lot of folks bought gas there just so they could look at the coons. I was thinking of Dixon’s Diner. Folks that came in to look at him would have to at least buy a cup of coffee.”
So next morning they hitched up Hank to the phaeton and loaded the box in and went down to Centerboro. But Mr. Dixon wasn’t enthusiastic, even after Freddy offered to charge him only for the box, and throw the snake in free. “Folks don’t want to look at snakes when they’re eating,” he said. “Makes their stomachs feel funny.” Freddy tried a couple more places, and then drove home again.
He had to keep the snake in his study—which was the room in the pig pen where he had his typewriter and his easy chair and his books and papers. For Hank wouldn’t have him in the stable, and Mrs. Wiggins said she and her sisters wouldn’t get a wink of sleep if she knew he was in the cow barn. Freddy didn’t mind, for the snake had had an interesting life, and he seemed eager to please—probably in the hope of being let go. He told Freddy in his harsh whispering voice tales of his exploits—some of them pretty hair-raising, for he was really a tough customer. Freddy enjoyed having him as a guest.
So Theodore didn’t have to go live in Hank’s watering trough after all. Before he started back to his pool in the woods, he came up to the pig pen. He hopped up onto the snake’s box, and put his nose down on the glass cover and stared so long and so hard with his bulging eyes that the snake got mad. “Go on away, will you?” he said. “It makes me nervous to be stared at.”
“Oh, yeah?” said the frog. “And how abub—bout me? I suppose you weren’t trying to make me nervous up in the woods?” And he kept right on.
The snake got more and more nervous; he tried striking at the glass, and he tried calling Theodore names, and he tried appealing to the frog’s better nature—none of them had the slightest effect; there were those bulging eyes staring down at him without any expression a
t all in them. I guess you’d have been nervous yourself.
Finally the rattler got so jumpy and jittery that Freddy made Theodore stop. So the frog went home. But on the way he told everybody he met that he had hypnotized a rattlesnake. He made such a good story of it that for a week or so there was a crowd of small animals at the pool every day, wanting to hear about it, and hanging open-mouthed on his words.
Freddy wrote, offering the snake to his friend, Mr. Boomschmidt, who ran a circus. The circus was now in winter quarters in North Carolina. Mr. Boomschmidt replied that he’d be very happy to have a rattlesnake who would be company for Willy, the boa constrictor—at present the only snake in the show.
“And of course,” Mr. Boomschmidt wrote, “any friend of yours, Freddy, is always welcome. But I think we’d better wait till the show comes north, for you can’t ship him—the express company doesn’t take rattlesnakes.”
A good many animals dropped in at the pig pen to have a look at the rattler. Jinx wanted to charge them a nickel apiece just to look, and ten cents to bang on the box until he got mad and struck up at the glass. But Freddy said no, there was to be no teasing him. “It’s never fair to pick on somebody that’s helpless and can’t fight back,” he said. “Anyway, it’s interesting to meet the animals that call. Those two sheep yesterday—do you realize they’d come all the way from Seneca Falls?”
John came in nearly every day to report progress in stirring up the farmers against the hunters. He had tried the same trick at the Macy’s—getting the hounds to chase him through a window; at Schermerhorns he had run through the milk house and managed to tip over two cans of milk; and at several other farms he had led the hunt across lawns and flowerbeds. “But it doesn’t work, Freddy,” he said. “Old Margarine pulls out his pocketbook and hands ’em enough to pay for the damage ten times over. And what happens? They tell him he’s free to hunt over their land any time he wants to. We’ll never put a stop to the hunting that way. I hate to bother Mr. Bean, but—what do you think, Freddy?—should I get ’em to chase me through here some morning? You could manage to have a window open, couldn’t you? Get those four hounds in the parlor, and they’d stir it up, but good! I bet Margarine wouldn’t get anywhere trying to pay Mr. Bean money.”
“Mr. Bean wouldn’t take his money,” Freddy said. “He’d throw him off the place. But we mustn’t bring Mr. Bean into it. Anyway, John, you get such a kick out of getting these people to chase you, why do you want to get rid of ’em?”
“I get a kick out of it—sure,” said the fox. “Mainly, I guess, I want to get rid of ’em because instead of settling down nice and quiet, they want to run everything. It’s like somebody joins a club, and he’s a new member and ought to do things the way the rest of the club wants to. But instead, he starts right in telling them how he wants everything done and trying to boss them around.”
“That’s about it,” Freddy said. “And he gives ’em each fifty dollars, and they say: ‘Yes, sir; yes, sir,’ and do just as he says. You can’t blame ’em. Macy and Schermerhorn and the rest of them—they don’t want these hunters galloping all over their fields, but it doesn’t do much harm this time of year. And they need the money. Well, we’ll have to try something different.”
Chapter 7
One evening about a week later, Freddy was sitting in a chair tipped back against the front wall of the pig pen. He had on his cowboy outfit, which he wore nearly all the time now, and he was strumming his guitar and singing in his pleasant tenor a little song of his own composition about life on the wide prair-ee. Of course Freddy had never seen a prairie, but he didn’t see why he shouldn’t sing about it. “Most cowboy songs,” he said, “are written by folks that have never been west of Niagara Falls.”
Georgie, the little brown dog, was curled up in a deck chair beside him. Georgie was fond of music, and often came up and asked Freddy to sing for him. Sometimes he tried to join in, but he didn’t have a very good ear—Freddy found it hard to keep on the key himself when Georgie opened up.
“Sing the one that has the yodeling in it, the serenade,” said Georgie. So Freddy sang.
When the sun is gone,
(Ooly ooly hey!)
When the shadows fall,
When across the lawn
(Ooly ooly hey!)
Bugs begin to crawl,
By your window, sweet,
(La di doodle day!)
Then I strike my lute.
I look pretty neat
(La di doodle day!)
Wearing my best suit.
So I tell my love
(Ho di wowly wow!)
Underneath the moon,
Cooing like a dove,
(Ho di wowly wow!)
Slightly out of tune.
O, be mine! Be mine!
(Bungle o li bang!)
Tell me I’m desired;
Give me but a sign;
(Bungle o li bang!)
I am very tired.
It is very late.
(Hi de heedle ho!)
Show me that you care
Do not make me wait:
(Hi de heedle ho!)
Throw me out a chair.
Ah, she sleeps, alas!
(Ooly ooly hey!)
Does not hear my song.
Dew is on the grass;
(Ooly ooly hey!)
Better get along.
Silent is the lute;
(Ho di wowly wow!)
Vain my tuneful pleas.
She doesn’t give a hoot.
(Ho di wowly wow!)
I am going to sneeze.
Freddy stopped suddenly. Up the slope from the barnyard came a procession of small animals. It was getting dark, and he couldn’t see them very clearly, but they seemed to have perfectly round heads, and as they came closer, walking on their hind legs, he could make out that they were brandishing little knives in their paws.
Georgie gave a yelp and bolted into the pig pen with his tail between his legs. But Freddy laughed. “Come back,” he called. “It’s only the Horrible Ten. You’ve seen them before.”
Georgie came to the door. “Yeah,” he said. “But they always scare me. I’ll stay right here.”
The Horrible Ten was an organization of rabbits which Freddy had started in order to play a joke on Jinx. But rabbits don’t often get a chance to scare people, and they had had so much fun that they had kept it up. They tied their ears down so that they wouldn’t be recognized, and their knives were pieces of tin that Freddy had cut for them. But if they caught you outdoors after dark and went into their war dance, stamping around you in a circle and waving their knives and shouting their bloodthirsty chant—well, it was a pretty scary business.
When they got up to the pig pen the rabbits all sat down in a semicircle around Freddy’s chair, and the Head Horrible—who was Freddy’s detective assistant, No. 23—stepped forward and addressed them.
“Brother Horribles,” he said, “gaze upon Mr. Frederick Bean.”
The rabbits gazed at Freddy.
“Brother Horribles,” said No. 23, “is it still your wish, as expressed by unanimous vote in the secret meeting of our order, to induct Mr. Frederick Bean into the order, with the title of Exalted Honorary Vice-Horrible, and all the privileges and emoluments thereto appertaining?”
“It is, Your Dreadfulness,” said the rabbits.
So No. 23 hopped to Freddy’s knee and reached up with his tin knife and tapped him on the shoulder. “Rise, Exalted Honorary Vice-Horrible!” he said solemnly.
“If I rise,” Freddy thought, “23 will fall on his face.” “But he didn’t say it. He got up slowly, so that 23 could jump down.
“Brother Horribles,” he said, “I am deeply appreciative of the great honor which you have bestowed upon me. I will endeavor to abide by the rules of the order, and to be, when necessary, as horrible as possible. In a purely honorary capacity, of course. For I understand that an honorary office is—well, just an honor. There is nothing that I have to d
o.”
“Oh, nothing, of course,” said No. 23 quickly. “Although,” he went on after a slight pause, “we did hope that you might give us a little help in one matter.”
“H’m,” said Freddy thoughtfully, “as a strictly honorary Vice Horrible, I doubt it if I would be allowed to—”
“Oh, quit it, will you, Freddy?” said 23. “We thought you’d be pleased at being asked to join.”
“So pleased that I’d agree to do a little work for you, hey?” Freddy said. “Oh, well, skip it. What is it you want?”
“Oh, I guess we went about this wrong, Freddy,” said 23. “We thought maybe making you an honorary officer, we’d kind of soften you up so you’d be willing to help us. But we really did want you to be one of us. Because we’re a lot bigger now, and we aren’t just out for fun—we’ve got a real job to do.” And he went on to say that all the rabbits in the countryside were disturbed about the foxhunters. The horses, galloping across fields, had smashed in a number of homes, and the hounds had dug up many more and they chased rabbits wherever they saw them. One of 23’s cousins had been chased away up beyond Tushville, and had been three days getting home again, and was still confined to his bed, speechless from shock. “I doubt if he’ll ever be the same rabbit again,” said 23 mournfully.
“But foxhounds chase foxes, not rabbits,” Freddy said.
“Oh, yeah?” said 23. “That’s what they tell you. But when those Margarines aren’t around they’ll chase rabbits or cats or woodchucks or—why, I’ve seen ’em even trying to dig a chipmunk out of a stone wall. Fine business for a full-grown hound!”
“Well, what do you want me to do?” Freddy asked.
“We’re the Horrible Twenty now instead of the Horrible Ten,” said the rabbit. “So we need a new chant to go with our war dance. The old one—
Freddy Rides Again Page 5
