Freddy the Pied Piper Page 2

  “I am,” said Freddy. “Of course I am. The trouble is I’ve got so many that it’s hard to select just the right one for the job. I’ll have to think this over for a while. You stay covered up, Jerry. I’ll be back soon.”

  Freddy knew it was no use trying to get back to the pig pen over that icy crust, so he went into the next stall where Hank, the old white horse, lived. Hank had overheard the conversation and he said: “Land sakes, Freddy, that’s too bad about old Boomschmidt. If he was in trouble, why didn’t he send word to us?”

  “I suppose he hated to ask for help. Felt ashamed, I expect, because he couldn’t support his animals any more.”

  “Don’t see how it was his fault,” said Hank.

  “It wasn’t. But what I don’t see is, why Leo hasn’t managed to get up here. Of course he couldn’t have come along the main roads, because he’d have been seen, and maybe shot or captured. But Mr. Boomschmidt lives in Virginia, and that isn’t so far but what he could have worked up through the back country in all this time.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose it’s as easy as it looks,” said Hank. “Nothin’ ever is. Exceptin’ maybe slidin’ down hill on skis,” he added with a snicker.

  “I don’t suppose I’ll ever hear the last of that,” said Freddy resignedly. “There’s one thing about the animals on this farm—they hang on to a joke the way old Zenas Witherspoon hangs on to an old hat, until it’s so smashed and stained and full of holes that if it wasn’t on his head you wouldn’t know what it was. Why, there are some jokes around this farm that were here before I was born, and I don’t believe anybody but maybe Mr. Bean knows what they mean any more.”

  “They must be pretty good jokes, then,” said Hank, “to last all that time. And I don’t know, Freddy—there ain’t anything like a good old time-tested joke, that you don’t have to stop to think whether it’s funny or not; you can just go ahead and laugh your head off.

  “Well, I think—” Freddy began, and then he said: “Hey, listen!” There was a deep humming sound that grew gradually louder, and they ran to the door and saw the snow plow coming slowly up the road. The animals all went out and shouted and waved to the men on the plow, and then somebody said: “Here comes the mailman!” and sure enough, way down the hill in the direction of Centerboro they saw a black speck coming up the white groove that the plow had cut through the snow.

  There was quite a stack of letters. Freddy got six, and there were several for Mrs. Wiggins, and all the animals—even the mice—had one or two. There was a big white envelope for Mrs. Bean, and the animals called her to the back door and stood around while she opened it. It was a beautiful lacy valentine all decorated with hearts and arrows and clasped hands, and on it was this verse:

  I love my pipe

  And my to baccy;

  I love you,

  I do, by cracky!

  I can’t write pretty

  For I ain’t a poet,

  But I love you,

  And don’t I know it!

  If you ditched me

  I sure would pine,

  So I hope you’ll be

  My valentine!

  “My land!” said Mrs. Bean, and she giggled and blushed, and then she turned to Mr. Bean, who had come to the door behind her. “So that’s the way you spend your time when you ought to be splitting me some firewood!”

  “Pshaw!” said Mr. Bean, looking embarrassed. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Mrs. B.” And he puffed so hard on his pipe that both of them disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

  The animals began opening their valentines. The two ducks, Alice and Emma, had one addressed to both of them. It read:

  Oh, Emma, Alice, Alice, Emma,

  I’m in a terrible dilemma.

  You’re both so fair, I can’t decide

  Which one I’d like to make my bride.

  I cannot think which one I’d druther,

  For each is lovelier than the other.

  So Alice, Emma, Emma, Alice,

  I pray you do not bear me malice,

  But share this poor devoted heart,

  Cut right in two by Cupid’s dart.

  They quacked excitedly over it. “Oh, sister, what a lovely valentine!” Emma exclaimed. “I wonder who could have sent it!”

  “Whoever it is,” said Bill, the goat, “he isn’t taking any chances. The guy ought to make up his mind.”

  “I expect it’s that brown duck over at Witherspoons’,” said Georgie, the little brown dog. “I’ve seen him wandering around on the edge of the woods above the duck pond a number of times. I expect he’s too bashful to come down and call.”

  “If there’s one thing I can’t abide,” said Mrs. Wiggins, the cow, “it’s a bashful duck. Bashfulness is bad enough in other animals, but a duck looks so silly shuffling his feet and rolling his eyes and peeking out from behind things.”

  “I don’t agree with you, dear Mrs. Wiggins,” said Emma. “Most of the young people today are so bold and forward—it is very refreshing to find one who doesn’t feel so sure of himself.”

  “He isn’t young,” said Georgie. “He’s quite a middle-aged duck.”

  “Sillier than ever,” said Mrs. Wiggins, but Alice and Emma didn’t agree; they felt that his bashfulness was merely a sign that he had been well brought up; and when the other animals realized that they were really much interested in this mysterious suitor they didn’t say any more.

  Freddy had opened his valentines. They were mostly jokes and verses from other animals on the farm. He could guess pretty well who had sent them. Perhaps the nicest was a very pretty one which had a five dollar bill pinned to it. It was from Mrs. Winfield Church, a rich friend of Freddy’s, who lived in Centerboro. She was a very generous woman and always sent the animals presents on Christmas and on their birthdays, but Freddy was her special favorite because he had helped her out several times when she had been in difficulties, and almost every holiday she sent him something. Usually it was money, because she said: “It’s hard to know just what to give a pig. But money is always useful.” This had been going on for some time, and Freddy was by now a pretty well-to-do animal.

  Among the valentines was even one for Jerry. It read:

  Here’s to you, Jerry; we all join together

  In welcoming you to our home.

  You came all this way in the worst kind of weather,

  For it couldn’t be colder in Nome.

  You had no red flannels to keep yourself warm

  And you had no galoshes or hat,

  But you plugged right along in the teeth of the storm,

  And we surely admire you for that.

  So you’re here, and we’re glad, and we all wans, to say,

  Though of valentines we’ve quite a few,

  The best of the valentines we’ll get today

  Is from our friend Boomschmidt—it’s YOU!

  Jerry read it, and then he said: “Well!” And then he read it again and said: “Well … my goodness!” And then he sniffed damply and blew his nose several times, though whether it was tears coming to his eyes or just his cold, nobody could tell. Rhinoceroses aren’t usually very emotional.

  Freddy’s mind was pretty well occupied with Mr. Boomschmidt and his troubles, and he wanted to talk them over with his friend Jinx. But the cat wasn’t around.

  Mrs. Wiggins laughed. “Oh, that Jinx!” she said. “He’s so wrapped up in what he calls ‘his art’ that he’s hardly stuck his nose outdoors in two weeks. He’s probably up in his studio.”

  So Freddy went back into the stable and climbed the steep stairs into the loft where Mr. Bean’s Uncle Ben had once had his workshop. Jinx had set up an easel there and had cleared a space on the workbench for his paints and brushes, and around the walls were hung the pictures he had painted. Most of them were portraits of Jinx himself—sitting up, lying down, crouched ready to pounce—but all looking very handsome and intelligent and at least twice life size. On the easel was a half-finished picture of Jinx, and be
side it stood a mirror in front of which lay the cat, apparently asleep.

  “Hi, Jinx!” Freddy shouted. And as the cat gave a start and opened his eyes, he said: “Asleep, hey? So that’s what you do up here.”

  “Hi, Jinx!” Freddy shouted.

  “I was not!” Jinx said crossly. “I was looking in the glass—painting my picture.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Freddy. “Painting with your eyes shut.”

  “Of course I had my eyes shut,” said the cat. “That’s the way they are to be in the picture. It’s a picture of me asleep.”

  “You can’t ever see what you look like asleep,” Freddy said, “any more than you can see between your shoulder blades.”

  “I can see between my shoulder blades,” said the cat, and he twisted his head around to show the pig.

  “Oh, all right,” Freddy said. “Look, Jinx. You can’t see yourself in the glass unless your eyes are open. So if you want to paint your picture with your eyes shut—”

  “I shut ’em, and then I open ’em very quick,” Jinx said. “I open ’em just before my reflection opens ’em, so that just for a second my reflection has his eyes shut and I can see what it looks like. See?”

  “No,” said Freddy, “but it doesn’t make any difference.” He looked around. “You must be awful stuck on yourself to paint nothing but your own portrait all the time.”

  “’Tisn’t that, Freddy,” Jinx said. “There isn’t anything else to paint. None of you other animals will pose for me. Hank gets cramps in his legs, and Mrs. Wiggins goes to sleep, and—”

  “You could paint landscapes,” Freddy said.

  “What landscapes? Look out that window and show me a landscape I could paint.”

  Freddy looked. It was true there was very little to see. Just the broad expanse of white, broken only by the line of a fence and a tree trunk or two. Then he looked around at the one or two little landscapes Jinx had done last fall before the snow came, when he first started painting. Each of them had a little label under it—“Woodland Peace,” or “Giants of the Forest,” or “Moon Shadows.” This last showed the pigpen in the foreground, and Freddy grinned. “Very fanciful titles,” he said. “When the moon comes over the pigpen—we could make a song of it. But I don’t agree with you that there’s nothing to paint. Do a snow scene.” He propped up a blank canvas board on the easel, then with a brush made two horizontal lines for the fence and above them, two thicker vertical lines for the tree trunks. “There you are,” he said. “There’s your landscape. Slap in a little blue sky above it and you’ve got ‘Winter Fields’ or something, and my goodness, you can paint twenty of them in an hour and not use up more than a couple squeezes of paint.”

  “Golly, I believe you’ve got something there,” said Jinx. He backed off and squinted at the picture with his head on one side. “Yes, sir, that’s art with a capital A.”

  “Pooh,” said Freddy. “That’s nothing. But look here, Jinx. I need your help.” And he told him about Mr. Boomschmidt.

  Jinx was interested at once. He tossed aside his palette and brushes and sat down and listened intently, and then he scratched his head. He didn’t scratch it as you or I would scratch our heads—he scratched it with his left hind foot, but it meant the same thing—that he was thinking deeply. And at last he said: “I’m afraid you’ve tackled a job that’s too big even for you, Freddy. To get even a little one-horse circus like Mr. Boomschmidt’s on the road again would take a lot more money than we could ever raise. Money to hire the clowns and the bareback riders and the men to put up the tents and look after the animals, and more money to buy the food for them all. And if you did all that, you still wouldn’t have the animals. According to Jerry, they’re scattered all over the country by this time.”

  “Maybe so,” Freddy said. “But I’ve got to try. Mr. Boomschmidt is my friend, and so are Leo and the others. But of course if you don’t want to help—”

  “Who said I didn’t?” Jinx demanded. “We’ve always tackled things together, haven’t we? I’m with you from whiskers to tail, Freddy.” He knocked his unfinished portrait into a corner. “Kind of sick of looking at my own face in a mirror for weeks on end, to tell you the truth.”

  “I didn’t suppose you ever got sick of that,” said Freddy with a grin. For Jinx was proud of his good looks.

  But the cat shook his head. “To be quite frank with you, Freddy, I didn’t suppose so either. Shucks, everybody likes to—well, let’s be honest—everybody likes to admire himself. You do it, I do it, everybody does it. It’s animal nature. But I don’t know.” He looked at his friend with a puzzled frown. “It’s all right for a while. You keep finding new things that you like—the way your eyes sparkle, or how noble you look when you hold your head back a little. But pretty soon you begin to notice other things. Maybe it’s a little squint in one eye, or a kind of foolish expression when you smile. And you sort of begin to wonder …” He stopped and shook his head again. “It don’t do to study anything too long, even your own face,” he said. Then he shook himself and said: “Well, what do we do first?”

  “The first thing,” said Freddy, “is to go down to Centerboro. I’ve got a sort of plan, and we’ll see if it works.”

  Chapter 3

  Half an hour later Freddy and Jinx set out on the long walk to Centerboro. Freddy hadn’t been able to get back to the pigpen, and he bundled up in an old shawl that he borrowed from Mrs. Bean. As he trudged down the long groove made by the snow plow with Jinx at his side, he looked like a little old woman out for a walk with her pet cat. Jinx of course had a warm coat of his own fur and didn’t need anything else.

  When they reached Centerboro they went right to the bank, and Freddy asked for the president, Mr. Weezer. As the founder and president of the first animal bank in the country, Freddy was well known in banking circles, and they were shown at once into Mr. Weezer’s office.

  The banker greeted them cordially, shook hands with Jinx, and then leaning back in his chair tapped the side of his sharp nose with his glasses and said: “And now, gentlemen, what can I do for you?”

  So Freddy told him about Mr. Boomschmidt. “And we’d like your advice, sir, as to what we can do to help him get his circus started again.”

  “H’m,” said Mr. Weezer. “Ha. I know Boomschmidt. A fine man. But it takes a lot of money to get a circus going. Even if he had all his animals.”

  “A thousand dollars?” Freddy asked.

  “More than that. Well, perhaps if he was willing to start small, a thousand would do it.”

  “Would your bank lend him a thousand dollars?” Freddy asked.

  Mr. Weezer shook his head. “Couldn’t do it. If it was my money, I might take a chance. Boomschmidt’s a good fellow, and I’d like to help him. But the money we have in this bank isn’t mine; it belongs to the people who have left it here for safe keeping. So when I lend any it has to be on good security.”

  “What’s security?” Jinx asked.

  “Oh, you know, Jinx,” Freddy said. “When you borrowed twenty-five cents from the First Animal Bank to buy that catnip mouse, you had to leave your best collar with the bank. Then if you couldn’t pay the twenty-five cents back, the bank could sell the collar and get its money. You put up the collar as security.”

  “That’s it exactly,” said Mr. Weezer. “If Mr. Boomschmidt has any good security to put up—”

  “How about Jerry?” said Jinx, and Freddy said: “Oh, sure. Mr. Weezer, how much would you lend on a rhinoceros in good condition?”

  “A rhinoceros? Why, we lend money on animals sometimes—cows and horses and pigs—excuse me, Freddy. But if Mr. Boomschmidt couldn’t pay up, what would the bank do with a rhinoceros?”

  “You could sell him.”

  “Who to? Barclay,” he said to a small man in a green eyeshade who came in at that moment, “what are rhinoceroses quoted at today? Will you look it up, please?”

  The man looked surprised. “Rhinoceroses, sir? Never seen any quotations on them.
Pigs are firm today, sir. Chickens are off two cents, and lambs very weak. But rhinoceroses—not a very active market in them, I should say.” He paused a moment, then laid a sheaf of papers in front of Mr. Weezer. “I thought you ought to see these, sir,” he said. “Just brought them up from the vault.”

  Mr. Weezer put on his glasses and examined the papers, the edges of which seemed to be badly chewed and tattered. “Tut, tut!” he said. “Worse and worse!” He held them out to Freddy. “Mice,” he said. “Chewing up half the important papers in our vault. I wish I knew how they get in. Of course it’s an old vault, and there are cracks here and there. They ate up a whole package of five dollar bills two nights ago, and now here—here’s two war bonds half eaten and Jacob Wensley’s note—they’ve eaten the corner where the amount was written, and now we won’t be able to collect. Don’t know how much he borrowed now. I don’t suppose you remember, Barclay?”

  Mr. Barclay thought it was either a hundred and fifty or seven hundred, he couldn’t remember which.

  “There you are,” said Mr. Weezer. “Of course Jake has lost all his money and can’t pay anyway, but it’s the principle of the thing.” He looked at Jinx. “You wouldn’t want a good mouse-catching job around here for a few weeks, would you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Jinx said. “I don’t catch mice any more—haven’t in years. Why, some of my best friends are mice.”

  “We’ve been trying to borrow a cat,” said Mr. Weezer, “but it’s a big year for mice, and everybody that has a cat wants to keep it to protect his own property. Well, it’s too bad; if you could have helped me out, I might have done something for Boomschmidt.”

  “I might be able to help,” said the cat. “I know about mice. They don’t tear papers up just to be mean. It’s usually to make nests, unless they’re terrible hungry, and then I guess they’d eat them. Why don’t you strew a lot of old newspapers around in the vault?”