Freddy and the Ignormus Page 5

  “He won’t see many more if he goes around trying to push trucks off the road,” said the driver with a laugh. “Well, get him out of the way, will you?”

  So Freddy and Jinx dragged the angry rooster off the road and the truck went on.

  “What on earth is the matter with you, Charles?” said Freddy. “Even if you’re as brave as you say you are, you can’t push trucks around.”

  “Yeah?” said Charles. “Well, he stopped, didn’t he?”

  “And I suppose if he hadn’t,” said Jinx, “you’d have torn his tires off. This Big Woods trip of yours has gone to your head.”

  “It has not,” said Charles. “But I don’t take ‘chicken’ from anybody. Me, a full grown rooster! He called me a chicken. Nobody can call me that and get away with it.”

  “Oh, can’t they!” said Jinx. He looked worriedly at his friend. “I guess we’ll have to settle this right now. If you go on trying to bully people ten times your size, the Bean farm will have to find a new alarm clock in about a week. So I guess it’s up to me to put you through the grinder. I say you’re a chicken, Charles. Do you want to make something of it?” And he squared off and tapped Charles on the beak with his paw.

  But Charles backed off. “I don’t fight with my friends,” he said huffily. “Anyway, I know you don’t mean it.”

  “But I do. Chicken,” said Jinx, and he tapped Charles again, harder.

  “Here now, you quit,” said the rooster. For a minute it looked as if he was going to back down. And then suddenly, to their surprise, he gave a squawk and spread his wings and flew at the cat.

  It was pretty dark, and Freddy and Minx couldn’t see very well what was going on. There was a lot of fluttering, and then Jinx said: “For Pete’s sake!” and then he said: “Ouch!” And then Charles was pinned down on the road, with Jinx on top of him.

  “Well, you’re more of a scrapper than I thought you were, Charles,” said the cat, “I’ll say that for you. No, don’t struggle. I’ll let you up. I take back the ‘chicken.’ Does that satisfy you?”

  Charles said it did, and Jinx helped him up and brushed him off. But Charles was still huffy, and on the way home he and Minx walked on ahead.

  “Who’d have thought,” said Jinx, “that a trip to the Big Woods and one little movie could turn our old wind-bag into a roaring lion? I don’t like this, Freddy. He’ll get into real trouble if he goes on this way.”

  “He’s a little over himself, I’ll admit,” said the pig. “But he was just sounding off. Trouble was, you got him in a corner. Any animal will fight when he’s cornered. We’ll have to keep an eye on the old blow-hard, though. I’m kind of fond of him. I wouldn’t want him to get in a mess.”

  As they went on down the road, they could hear Minx telling Charles about a fight she had seen in Patagonia between a parrot and a rattlesnake. “He grabbed the snake by the tail,” she was saying, “and he flew up, and around, and under, and he tied the snake in a bowknot so he couldn’t move. You could have done that, Charles; you’re so strong and agile.”

  “She’s putting ideas in his head,” said Jinx.

  “He hasn’t room for more than one at a time,” said Freddy. “By the way, do you mind stopping at the bank? I want to deposit this thirty dollars.”

  The First Animal Bank was in an old shed beside the road. As president of the bank, Freddy could go in any time of the day or night, and now he pushed open the door and woke up the squirrel who had the job of night watchman, and who slept on the board over the hole that led down to the vaults where all the things the animals had brought in for safekeeping were stored. The squirrel pushed aside the board, and disappeared down the hole with the envelope. But as the animals turned to go, there was a squeak of dismay, and the squirrel came scrabbling up into the shed again.

  “Oh, Mr. Freddy,” he panted, “the bank has been robbed!”

  “Robbed!” shouted Jinx. “See here, squirrel, if all my money has been taken, there’s going to be trouble. I’ll hold you responsible—”

  “Oh, shut up, Jinx,” said Freddy. “You know you only have eighteen cents in the bank.”

  “No money was taken, Mr. Jinx,” said the squirrel. “It’s just things to eat—nuts and corn and things. The big storage room is empty, and there’s a hole in the roof. They must have tunneled down from the outside.”

  “They?” said Freddy. “Who?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It’s not a very big tunnel—not as big as you. It could have been woodchucks or skunks or foxes, I guess.”

  “When I was in Buenos Aires—” Minx began.

  “Sure, sis, we know,” interrupted her brother. “Bigger and better burglaries. Pipe down, will you? Let’s have a look outside, Freddy.”

  Back of the bank was a pile of fresh dirt beside a hole which slanted down under the shed.

  “That’s how they did it,” said Jinx. “Tough on you, Freddy. I suppose you’re responsible for the safety of everything deposited in your bank, aren’t you?”

  “Goodness, I never thought of that,” said Freddy. “I suppose I am. All next winter’s supply of food for half the small animals on the farm was down there. My goodness, what’ll I do?”

  “I guess you’ll have to catch the robbers before they eat it all up,” said Jinx. “Oh, cheer up. You’ve done harder jobs than that in your detective work. Tell you what: it’s too dark to do anything tonight. Minx and I will stay on guard here, in case they come back. And you go home and get a good night’s sleep. Then in the morning we’ll all get busy.”

  “Maybe that’s best,” said Freddy. “Only we must keep quiet about this until we’ve had a chance to look the ground over. If we get a mob of curious animals tramping over the place, there won’t be a clue left. So not a word, you understand.” And he looked sharply at Charles.

  “You needn’t look at me,” said the rooster truculently. “Anybody’d think I couldn’t keep a secret!”

  “Anybody’d be right, too,” said Jinx with a laugh; but Freddy said: “All right, Charles. I just wanted you to be careful. Now let’s go home to bed.”

  Chapter 7

  Freddy didn’t sleep very well that night. The faces of all those trusting little animals who had brought their treasures into his bank for safekeeping crowded reproachfully into his dreams. For a poet to be president of the bank had always seemed to him something of a joke. For the first time he realized that it was a serious matter to be responsible for other people’s property. But if he didn’t catch the robbers, he’d make it good—down to the last kernel of corn.

  He was at the bank early next morning, but not early enough to avoid trouble. Charles evidently hadn’t been able to keep his beak shut, for word of the robbery had got out, and the building was surrounded by a mob of angry animals, who, when they saw Freddy, came streaming down the road towards him, shaking clenched paws and yelling: “We want our money!” “Give us back our belongings!”

  “Please! Please!” shouted Freddy. “You’ll get everything back. Let me through, will you?”

  He elbowed his way to the door of the bank, and then turned and faced them. “Quiet, please!” he said. “You’ll get everything back. Every depositor in this bank will be paid in full. But let me say first that all the money and jewelry and other things you have brought in here are safe. Only the food was taken. And I, personally, will see that you get back whatever you left here. I’ll make it good if it takes my entire fortune.”

  “Yeah,” said a voice, “and what’s that worth?”

  “I guess you may not have heard,” said Freddy, “that I collected a thirty dollar fee at the movies last night. I guess that will take care of anything you’ve lost.”

  “Good old Freddy!” shouted a squirrel, and somebody proposed three cheers. But some of the animals, who, although they had not lost anything, had money or jewelry in the safe deposit vaults, were still worried.

  “I thought your old bank was burglarproof,” said one of them. “If the robbers can get in once, t
hey can get in again and steal our money.”

  “If you feel that your money is safer in your own homes,” said Freddy with dignity, “you are at perfect liberty to take it out of the bank. We do all we can to protect the property you leave here, but there is always the possibility that a clever burglar can break in. However, I should like to point out that your own homes have no protection against burglars whatever. Here, there is always a watchman on the premises, and I may say that we plan to install a burglar alarm system this week which should give you added security.”

  This burglar alarm was something Freddy had thought about while he was lying awake that night. And I may say here that he did install it, and it worked very well. He hung an old dinner bell of the Beans’ in the tree over the bank, and strung a cord from it down into the vaults where a mouse he had hired for the purpose was always on duty. If the mouse heard any suspicious noises, all he had to do was pull the cord and ring the bell. As you know, a dinner bell can be heard a good deal farther than any other kind of bell, even a church bell.

  The animals were reassured by Freddy’s promise, and after they had hung around for a while and stared at the hole made by the burglars, they drifted off home.

  “Not much use looking for clues now, after this mob has been tramping all over the place,” said Freddy to Jinx. “I thought we might find some footprints. Darn that rooster! We ought to have tied him up and kept him in the bank all night.”

  “Only way to keep him from talking,” said the cat, “is to cut his head off. And I’m not sure even that would work.”

  “My goodness, I’m glad they all took it the way they did,” said Freddy. “All their savings gone, poor things. By the way, Jinx, did you notice a stranger in the crowd—I saw him two or three times, and then when I looked for him again he was gone. A funny looking animal, with a bushy white tail and fuzzy white whiskers.”

  But Jinx hadn’t seen anybody. “Sounds like something Minx thought up,” he said.

  “They say the criminal always returns to the scene of his crime,” said Freddy, “and as I knew all the other animals here, I thought he might be the robber.”

  “Looks like a rat job to me,” said Jinx, “but we haven’t seen tail nor whisker of a rat anywhere around. I guess you’ll have to go back in the detective business, Freddy.”

  Freddy didn’t want to go back in the detective business much. Detectives have to do a lot of hard thinking. Of course, in writing poetry he had to do a lot of hard thinking, too, but if a poet doesn’t think hard enough to make his poem come out right he can always tear it up and nobody knows about it. But if a detective doesn’t think hard enough, he doesn’t catch the criminal, and everybody says he’s no good. Of course Freddy had always caught everybody he went after, but he never knew whether he was going to or not, and this case looked like a particularly hard one.

  The first thing he did was to hire a couple of woodchucks to fill up the hole the burglars had made. Then he fixed up the burglar alarm. Then he got hold of all the rabbits who had helped him in his other cases and had them go out and see if they could find any trace of the mysterious animal with white tail and whiskers. After that he couldn’t think of anything more to do, so he went home and worked on his second poem. The sentence he started with was: “Bees, bothered by bold bears, behave badly.”

  For nearly a week nothing happened. No trace was found of the robbers, and the mysterious white-tailed animal seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. Freddy began to get worried. The Big Woods expedition and the robbery had caused a lot of talk, and some of the animals began to link them together and say that maybe it was the Ignormus himself who had been the burglar.

  Freddy pooh-poohed the idea. “It’s a well known fact,” he said, “that the Ignormus (if there is an Ignormus) has never left the Big Woods in all the years he’s been there.”

  “That’s all right,” said Mrs. Wogus, “but there’s no reason why he couldn’t leave the woods, is there? There’s a lot of us that think maybe that’s just what he’s doing. Maybe he’s got tired of staying in the Big Woods. Maybe he’s hungry. I’ve heard some pretty queer noises around the cowbarn nights, I can tell you. Maybe he’s wandering around the farm nights. We don’t like to think about that, some of us. Freddy, you’ve got to do something.”

  Freddy went around and talked to some of the other animals. He found that the situation was really becoming serious. A number of the more timid animals were even talking about leaving the Bean farm and going somewhere safer to live. And Charles was going around saying that if Freddy didn’t do some thing pretty soon, he was going to take matters into his own claws. He would call for volunteers and lead an expedition into the Big Woods and clean out the Ignormus once for all. Of course Freddy knew that this was all talk on Charles’s part, but it was causing trouble all the same.

  Freddy was pretty well stumped. In all the detective stories he had read, the detective always found clues, and then he chased down the clues one by one and at the end of his chase he found the criminal. But in this case there weren’t any clues. It was like trying to play a game of baseball without any ball. “How can you be a detective if there isn’t anything to detect?” he said bitterly to himself. “And yet I’ve got to do something.” There was no use thinking any more, because he had thought all the thoughts he had, and they weren’t any good. So he decided that there was only one thing to do. The animals were already beginning to say that he couldn’t be much of a detective or he’d have found the bank robbers by this time. But they’d forget all their criticism if he went up and really explored the Big Woods and proved there wasn’t any Ignormus. They’d think he was wonderful.

  Freddy rather liked to be thought wonderful, as who doesn’t? And first he thought he’d tell everybody what he was going to do, so that if there really was an Ignormus and he really got eaten up, he would at least have had the fun of being praised first. But then he thought he’d better not tell them, in case he got scared and decided to turn back before he got to the Big Woods at all. And he was getting up his nerve to start when he had a really bright idea. He would wear one of the disguises he had used in his detective work. He would disguise himself as a man—a hunter. For hunters often went into the Big Woods, and the Ignormus certainly never bothered them. Probably he didn’t like guns.

  Mrs. Bean, who was always willing to help the animals, had cut down a couple of Mr. Bean’s old suits for Freddy when he had been in the detective business. There was one of very bright yellow and green checks that had hardly been worn at all. Mr. Bean had bought it in Paris, but after he got home he didn’t like it so well. He said when he wore it into Centerboro people seemed to think he was a parade or something. So Mrs. Bean made it over for Freddy and the pig really looked very nice in it. He decided to wear it now, because it seemed to him the kind of suit a well-dressed hunter would wear.

  But of course if he was a hunter, he must have a gun. So before dressing he went up to the house. Jinx and Minx were lying on the kitchen porch, blinking sleepily at a grasshopper who was sitting on the rail making faces at them, and wondering if it was worthwhile to chase him. From inside came the clatter of Mrs. Bean washing up the breakfast dishes.

  “Hi, cats,” said Freddy. “Where’s Mr. Bean?”

  Jinx said he was down in the cowbarn.

  “Well, look,” said Freddy. “I want to get Mrs. Bean out of the house for a few minutes. Would you two put on a fight, so she’ll have to come out and stop it?”

  Jinx grinned. “Anything to oblige a friend,” he said. “Eh, sis?” And he gave Minx a box on the ear.

  “Hey, quit,” said Minx. “I don’t want to fight. I’m comfortable.”

  “Just make a lot of noise,” said Freddy. “It doesn’t have to be a real fight.”

  “You don’t know Jinx,” said Minx. “He’s rough.—Hey, quit!” she said as Jinx cuffed her again. “Oh, you would, would you?” And in two seconds they were rolling down the steps, slapping and biting and squalling
loud enough to rouse the neighborhood.

  There were quick footsteps in the kitchen, and Mrs. Bean came to the door, carrying a pan of dishwater.

  “Land sakes!” she said. “What’s the matter with you cats? Stop it!” She followed them as they rolled down across the lawn, trying to get near enough to throw the water on them. Freddy darted into the house. Mr. Bean’s shotgun was just inside the closet off the kitchen, and he grabbed it and ran out and around the corner of the house. There was a splash, and a loud squeal from both cats, as he made off towards the pigpen.

  It was a pretty serious thing to borrow Mr. Bean’s gun without his permission, and under ordinary circumstances Freddy wouldn’t have considered it for a minute. But these circumstances were far from ordinary. And anyway, he thought, it wasn’t as if he was going to shoot the gun off. Mr. Bean seldom used it and would never miss it, and he’d bring it back in a day or two and nobody’d be any the wiser. So Freddy thought.

  So Freddy put on the checked suit, with a cap to match, and shouldered the gun and trudged off up towards the woods. He was a good-sized pig, but he made a very small hunter. But none of the animals he met examined him very closely. They saw the gun and promptly got behind trees and ducked down holes, or if they were caught in the open, they sat still and pretended to be a stone or a bunch of grass.

  … and trudged off towards the woods

  At another time, Freddy would have thought this was pretty funny, but today he had serious business on his mind, and he hardly noticed the animals. He went doggedly along, his eyes on the ground, talking to himself. “The Big Woods are perfectly safe,” he muttered. “I know they’re safe. Nothing to be scared of. Nothing.” And then he took a little card out of his pocket, on which, before he left home, he had typed the words: “There isn’t any Ignormus.” “There,” he said to himself, “you see? There it is in black and white. There isn’t any such animal.” For Freddy, like lots of other people, believed things more easily when he saw them in print than he did when he just heard them. Even when he had printed them himself.