Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars Page 4

  Mr. Hercules had got the Martians interested in baseball, but he wasn’t very good at explaining, and—perhaps because he had bragged a good deal—they had got the impression that the purpose of the game was for the pitcher to hit the batter and knock him cold. If he did so, he scored one. If the batter could dodge and hit the ball, and knock the cover off it, that scored one for his side. It didn’t sound like much of a game, even to Martians, whose national game is a simplified form of duck-on-a-rock. But when Freddy explained how baseball really worked, they became enthusiastic.

  So after they had talked awhile, Freddy went back to Mrs. Peppercorn’s to sleep. And the next morning they all got out for practice. It was clear and cold. Mr. Hercules and the Martians didn’t mind, but Leo had on a red sweater the color of which clashed horribly with his beautifully curled orange-colored mane. Oscar had the arms of an old sweater cut off and pulled over his ankles. He complained a good deal, but when Mr. Boomschmidt, who was batting out fungoes, sent a few fast grounders his way, he picked them up and snapped them back with a queer underhand swing of his big claw.

  The Martians, who had had some practice, were fairly good, too. They dashed around, squeaking and clicking happily. They usually caught with three hands, and when they ran for one, they dropped onto all fours—or all sixes—and looked more than ever like spiders on the thin carpet of white snow. Their hitting was bad, even for beginners, for they swung at every pitch. They seemed to think that that was the way to play. But Freddy didn’t stop them, and he warned the others not to try to correct them. “I want them to think that’s the way to play. Anyone that tells them different gets fired straight off the team.”

  Mr. Hercules was pretty good, but the first ball he threw back came so fast that it whistled like a bullet, and Mr. Boomschmidt made no effort to stop it, but threw himself flat on the ground. “Good gracious, Here,” he called as he got up and brushed himself off, “you tired of seeing me around? Toss ’em, will you.” After that Mr. Hercules was more careful.

  After they’d done this for a while, Freddy swept off the pitcher’s mound and the home plate, and they all tried out for pitcher, while Leo caught. The best of the Martians was Chirp-squeak. He was the smallest and he didn’t have much speed, but his control was better, and he could throw with all four arms. The first pitch would be upper left-handed, and the next one lower right-handed, and then He’d shift to one of the other two. Mr. Hercules had a terrifically fast ball, but his control wasn’t very good, and later, when they took turns at bat, none of the batters would stand within three feet of the plate for fear of being hit. Leo, who said his big paws were tough enough to catch anything, finally had to use a mitt.

  They practiced all morning, and came out again for a while in the afternoon. Then Freddy said: “I think we’ve had enough for today. Tomorrow I’ll see if we can’t get some of the boys from the school to give us a game. We can make up two partial teams, anyway. Because the way to learn to play ball is to play.”

  But the next day came a thaw. The snow melted, and though it was warm, the ground was soggy. Freddy said they ought to play anyway. He said that the harder the conditions were under which they learned to play, the better players they would be in the end. “If we can learn to play in the snow, and in the mud, just think how good we’ll be when we have a good dry field to play on.” But when he telephoned Mr. Finnerty at the high school, the coach just laughed at him. “Kind of rushing the season, aren’t you, Mr. Arquebus?” he said. “Wait till spring. Then my boys’ll give you a game. And by the way, you hadn’t ought to play out there anyway—you’ll cut the field all up and ruin it.”

  Freddy thought that made sense, so he telephoned Mr. Bean—still in the character of Mr. Arquebus, the circus coach—and asked him to let them have one of his fields to practice in. “We’ll cut it up pretty bad,” he said, “but I know you expect to plow that field anyway in the spring, and maybe when we get through with it you won’t need to.” So Mr. Bean thought that was a good idea and said yes.

  CHAPTER

  6

  The Beans not only lent the ballplayers a field to practice in, but they offered them the hospitality of the farm for as long as they cared to stay. But only Leo, and Hannibal, the elephant, availed themselves of the offer. Oscar remarked snippily that he did not care to associate with vulgar farm animals, and came out on foot every day. “Likes to have folks stare at him,” Leo said. “He makes a regular parade of it.” Mr. Boomschmidt had to stay with the circus, and he and Mr. Hercules drove out every day, as did the Martians in their flying saucer.

  The situation was more difficult for Freddy. But by appearing as himself most of the time, and in disguise only when on the ball field, and by giving out that Mr. Arquebus had rented a room in the pig pen, he got away with his double personality. Nobody noticed that Mr. Arquebus and Freddy were never both visible at the same time, or that often when one went into the pig pen, presently the other came out. And if the Beans recognized that old Prince Albert coat, they didn’t say anything.

  Now that the skating was gone, the farm animals didn’t have much to do, and they came up and hung around and watched the baseball practice, and made cracks about the players. There were plenty of chances for that, for although the field was high, it dried off slowly, and the players churned it into mud two inches deep. The Martians ran over this lightly, and Hannibal was so big that he didn’t notice it, but it was the middle-sized players—Leo and Mr. Boomschmidt and Mr. Hercules—who slipped and slithered and occasionally fell down, until they were so plastered with mud that you couldn’t tell man from lion.

  They were so plastered with mud that you couldn’t tell a man from a lion.

  Jinx, who was probably Freddy’s closest friend, and Mrs. Wiggins, who was his partner in the detective business, were the only farm animals that knew who Mr. Arquebus was. When in disguise, Freddy kept away from the others. At first, when he wasn’t in disguise, they asked him a great many questions about the coach. Freddy had to make up some very fantastic explanations. He said Mr. Arquebus was a very old friend of Mr. Boomschmidt’s, and had been almost as famous in baseball as Connie Mack. He said Mr. Arquebus believed that winter and early spring training in the North was the best way to harden his players. Of course as he was too old to play himself, he wore the whiskers to keep his face warm.

  “Does he shave ’em off in summer?” Georgie asked.

  “No, in summer they protect him from sunburn.”

  Finally the farm animals just accepted him, as the Martians and the circus animals had.

  Freddy kept his room at Mrs. Peppercorn’s, and on rainy days he stayed in Centerboro to keep an eye on Mr. Anderson. It was handy having the flying saucer nearly always available, with Two-clicks ready to fly him down. Mr. Anderson called several times at Mrs. Peppercorn’s to see “my dear friend, Mr. Arquebus,” as he called him. They talked about investments, but although Mr. Anderson didn’t again try to persuade Mr. Arquebus to buy one of the houses he had for sale, Freddy felt that he was working up to a proposition of some kind.

  Along about the first of April Mr. J. J. Pomeroy and his family came back from the South. Mr. Pomeroy was a robin, and the head of the A.B.I.: the Animal Bureau of Investigation. Freddy put him to work at once on “what I call,” Freddy said, “the Case of the Vanishing Martian.” He always gave a name like the title of a mystery story to any case he wanted Mr. Pomeroy to work on, because then the robin felt that his work was more important. And Freddy always said that people do their best work if they think what they’re doing is important.

  “The main thing is to watch the Martians,” Freddy told him. “They claim they know where Squeak-squeak is, and that he’s all right. Then why don’t they tell me? And why are they so worried that they have to call me off the case? And why did Anderson go to see them? I want answers to those questions.”

  “You shall have them, sir; you shall have them,” said Mr. Pomeroy impressively, emphasizing his promise by taking off his spe
ctacles with one claw and tapping them on the branch on which he was perched. “I will turn my whole staff to work on the case at once.”

  From any other robin this would have sounded very silly indeed. But Mr. Pomeroy, in spite of his pompousness, was a hard worker; he had organized his bureau with great care; and his staff was one which J. Edgar Hoover himself might have envied. For clever as an F.B.I. man may be, he cannot hide under a pie-plant leaf like a rabbit; he cannot sit on a window sill and listen to a conversation without being noticed, like a bumblebee; nor can he, without being observed, shadow a suspect by sitting on the rim of his hat as a ladybug can. And these were only a few among the birds and animals and insects who had pledged loyalty to Mr. Pomeroy and the A.B.I.

  The morning after Mr. Pomeroy came back, a large limousine drove into the barnyard and pulled up by the pig pen. The chauffeur got out and tapped on the door. “Good morning, Mr. Frederick,” he said, as Freddy opened the door. “Mrs. Winfield Church to see you.”

  Freddy went out to the car. “Good morning, Mrs. Church,” he said. “Will you excuse me if I don’t ask you in? I have a house guest—Mr. Arquebus, the baseball coach, and he isn’t up yet.”

  “Don’t blame him,” said Mrs. Church. “Wouldn’t be up myself if I didn’t have to be. I’m in trouble, Freddy. Can you come out to the house with me?”

  Freddy said of course, and indeed there was nothing he would not have done for Mrs. Church. For although she was rich and had a big red stone house in the upper part of town with turrets sticking up all over it, she was very fond of Mrs. Wiggins, and often drove out to the farm and took the cow for a ride, and to tea at some expensive restaurant. Indeed, she said that Mrs. Wiggins seemed more like a sister to her than her own sister, who lived in Scranton and never even sent her a Christmas card. She was fond of Freddy, too, and had been a help to him in several of his cases.

  It had turned cold and snowed in the night, and the ground was white. Around the Church house the surface was unbroken except for Mrs. Church’s footprints, coming down the front steps to where she had got in her car. “And I want you to notice that particularly, Freddy,” she said. “No one has been in or out of this house since it stopped snowing, at ten o’clock last night.

  “And yet,” she said when they were inside and were seated in the drawing room, “Some body besides me was in the house last night. For look at this.” She showed him a flat, leather-covered case about eight inches square, and snapped it open. It was empty.

  “I wore my diamond necklace to the Methodist Church supper last night. When I got home, I put it in this case and left it on the dresser in the front room. This morning it was gone.

  “Where did it go, Freddy? No one has been in or out of this house except me since ten last night. If a thief came in before ten, how did he get out?”

  “Maybe he’s still here,” said Freddy. “Maybe he saw the snow and realized he couldn’t escape until it melted, without leaving footprints.”

  Mrs. Church got up quickly. “Good gracious, I never thought of that,” she said. “We must search the house.”

  “Er—just a minute,” said Freddy, who wasn’t specially anxious to go poking around in closets for a robber who was probably armed to the teeth. “It doesn’t have to be a thief. Suppose a mouse dragged it off down a mouse hole. Suppose a—a crow flew in a window and carried it off. They like bright things.”

  “If your crow flew in my open window last night it couldn’t get into the guest room because my door was closed. And how did your mouse open the case? Well, if you haven’t any more animals to suggest, suppose we go look.”

  Freddy followed her reluctantly into the hall. She went into a closet and brought out a very rusty double-barreled shotgun.

  “Is it loaded?” Freddy asked.

  “Goodness, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Church. “How do you find out?”

  Freddy broke open the breech. There were two shells in the chambers. He snapped the gun shut, shouldered it, and they set out.

  “Well,” said Freddy an hour later, “unless he went up the chimney I don’t see how he got away. I’ve looked out of every window, and the snow isn’t disturbed anywhere except on the roof under that unlocked window in the turret overlooking the garden—did you notice?—something seems to have pressed the snow down; it even seems to have rubbed some of the red paint off the roof. But it’s four or five feet below the window.”

  “A branch might have fallen there during the night,” Mrs. Church suggested. “But I didn’t see any.”

  “I don’t see how it can have anything to do with the necklace,” Freddy said. “There’d have to be tracks leading up to it. And there aren’t any.”

  Back in the drawing room they just looked at each other for a while without saying anything. Then Mrs. Church said suddenly: “Freddy, do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Well,” said Freddy thoughtfully, “I do and I don’t, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know just what you mean,” she said. “You do if they’re there, and you don’t if they’re not there. Well, they’ve been here for the last few nights. You know I let all my servants go two years ago. I got tired of eating a big dinner at seven o’clock just because the cook thought I ought to, when maybe all I wanted was a hot dog and a coke at five. I got sick of asking people to do things for me that I could do myself in a quarter of the time. And what if the house is dusty? I like it that way.” She lowered her voice. “And Freddy, twice last week I never made my bed at all!

  “But about this ghost. You know, Freddy, if he’d stomp around and rattle chains and yell, I wouldn’t mind him so much. But he’s a quiet ghost. You just hear a kind of faint swish-swish out in the hall, and then he snuffles at the door. And then he’ll sort of blow under the door, the way a dog does. I tell you, being alone in the house, it’s pretty awful.”

  “How long has he been around?” Freddy asked.

  “Oh, I guess about a week. But he’s never touched any jewelry before. My goodness, I’d have given him the necklace if he’d asked for it, just to have him go away. Because it’s either him or me. One of us has got to leave this house. I can’t sit up night after night, shivering and shaking; why I’ve lost ten pounds already. Not that I don’t need to lose it, but how do I know that he’ll go away when I get down to the weight I ought to be?”

  Freddy said: “And is it the ghost or the necklace you want me to try to do something about?”

  Mrs. Church laughed. “You guessed it, Freddy. It’s the ghost. Just between you and me, that necklace came from the five and ten. I sold all my real jewelry years ago. Why wear real jewels when for twenty-five cents you can get just as much sparkle out of glass? No, what I’d really like you to do is catch this ghost for me.”

  Freddy said: “I don’t seem to want to very much, Mrs. Church.”

  “Really?” she said. “Have you ever spent a night in a haunted house? I should think it would be most interesting.”

  “If it is a ghost,” Freddy said, “I don’t see what I could do about it. On the other hand, if it’s something else, maybe I can. Now as I just said, I don’t believe in the ghost, because he’s not here now. And as long as I don’t believe in him, I can believe all the snuffling and swishing is something else, and maybe I can do something about it. But if I should hear him, then I’d believe in him, and I wouldn’t be any use.”

  “All right, all right,” said Mrs. Church impatiently. “I suppose that’s one way of getting out of it. Though after all, what can a ghost do to you? Moan and groan and make faces—that’s all. If it was a real burglar, I wouldn’t think of asking you to try to help catch him. But—”

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Church,” Freddy said. “Let me tell you about the last time I tried to catch a ghost. That ghost was Mr. Anderson, the real estate man. He had false faces and luminous paint, and a bunch of rats to help him, and he was haunting the Lakeside Hotel. A Mrs. Fillmore owned it, and he thought he could drive her out and buy it cheap. Well, we caught him, and
we made him sign a confession, too. But every time I hear of a house being haunted, I wonder if Mr. Anderson is trying to buy it cheap.

  “I don’t say it’s Anderson. He couldn’t have got in here without leaving tracks. And there aren’t any rats. But it just makes me suspicious. Let me ask you to do this: offer a reward for the return of the necklace, and let’s see what happens.”

  “But it only cost twenty-five cents,” said Mrs. Church.

  “All right. Put it in the paper like this: One-third of the value of the necklace stolen from me last Tuesday night will be paid for its return and no questions asked.”

  Mrs. Church laughed. “Freddy, you kill me!” she said. “Won’t they be surprised when I pay them eight and a third cents!” Then she stopped. “But Freddy, nobody could have stolen it. I mean, no human. They just couldn’t! You didn’t hear that thing snuffling around my door! Freddy, you can bring anybody you want to with you, but if you won’t stay here tonight, I’m moving out. I won’t spend another night like last night.”

  Freddy hesitated. Mrs. Church had never appealed to him for help before. Even now she didn’t remind him of the times when she had helped him. The thought of sitting in that dark upper room, waiting for some supernatural monster to come slithering down the hall, snuffling greedily at the door, made his tail come completely uncurled. But this was his friend. She needed his help.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  A month ago Freddy had ordered a special large-sized catcher’s mask for Leo. The regular mask the lion had been wearing was much too small for his face; it looked like a mouse trap perched on his nose, and when it slipped sideways, as it sometimes did, it just covered one eye. When Mrs. Church drove Freddy home he wanted to stop in the sporting-goods department of the Busy Bee and see if the mask had come. But when they drove down Main Street, there didn’t seem to be a parking space for blocks, and Freddy said never mind, he’d get it later.