“I don’t see any mice,” Dumpling said to herself. “It is a mystery, like Mother writes. If Angus McAngus was here, he would tell if it is mice or squirrels or what that eats the birdseed.” She thought about it awhile, and then she said, “But Angus McAngus is not here.” She looked up into the yellow tree and added sadly, “Neither is Dickie.”
Dumpling looked over at Professor Jones’s house, and she could see a light in the study window and also one in the kitchen. She went to the hedge and looked across into the kitchen window, and she could see Alvin and Rudy washing Mrs. Jones’s dishes. They had large gingham aprons tied around their necks, and they were very busy. Dumpling felt sorry for them. “I was not good to Dickie,” Dumpling said to herself, “but I will be very, very good to the Terrible Torrences.”
She went to the back door and knocked. Sometimes no child entered the house of the Joneses for months at a time, and suddenly there had been so many of them today that Mrs. Jones was quite taken aback.
“Dear me!” she said. “You, too, Dumpling?”
“I have come to help the Torrence boys do the dishes,” Dumpling said.
So Mrs. Jones got another dish towel, and Dumpling helped Rudy wipe while Alvin washed. Rudy and Alvin were busy telling Mrs. Jones a story.
“So there was this bad old man with a long blue beard and he hung his wives up in a little room by their hair,” said Alvin. And Rudy said, “And the forty thieves lived in a cave in the mountain, and when they wanted the door to open they said, ‘Open, Sessy-sessy-something—’”
Mrs. Jones seemed somewhat bewildered, and she looked anxious, too, Dumpling thought, about her nice china. But the Terrible Torrences did not break a thing.
“Thieves are nice in stories,” Alvin said, “but they’re not good to have around the house.” And Rudy said, “It is better to wash people’s dishes than to pick people’s flowers if people don’t want their flowers picked.”
“But we didn’t know that people didn’t want their flowers picked,” Alvin said. And Rudy said, “We are big boys and we do not need a sitter anymore.”
When the dishes were done, Alvin and Rudy said, “Good night, Mrs. Jones. We’ll be back tomorrow.” They went out the back door very quietly, and then they let loose and went up the street whooping.
Dumpling lingered behind. She went shyly to the door of Professor Jones’s study and stood with the round part of her middle extending a little way into the room. The lamplight shone roundly and clearly on her glasses.
“Good evening,” Dumpling said.
Professor Jones looked up in surprise. But he had had a good dinner, he was nearly halfway through with the examination papers, and he felt considerably better than when the children had seen him earlier in the afternoon.
“Dumpling,” he said, “you wouldn’t pick a man’s late chrysanthemums, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Dumpling said.
“I s’pose you’ve come about that fellow—what’s his name?”
“Tokarynski,” Dumpling said.
“Can you spell it?”
“No,” Dumpling said. “Can you?”
“No,” said the professor, “but I read his paper.”
“Did he pass?” asked Dumpling.
“He passed,” Professor Jones said. “It’s a miracle, one of the seven wonders of the world! He couldn’t have cheated because I had the seats all spaced out so they couldn’t see each other’s papers. Yet the fellow passed! Don’t say the age of miracles is over, Dumpling.”
“I won’t,” Dumpling said.
“And about the dog, Dumpling,” the professor continued. “I don’t object too greatly to a dog next door, if he does not dig holes under the hedge or howl at night.”
“I will tell him,” Dumpling said.
“You may go now, Dumpling,” said Professor Jones.
“Okay,” said Dumpling.
She ran so fast that she was all out of breath when she came into the kitchen.
“He passed,” Dumpling said.
They looked at her in surprise, and Susan said, “Who, honey?”
“Why, Tommy of course,” said Dumpling.
They all crowded around her.
“How do you know?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Where did you find out?”
“I asked Mr. Jones,” Dumpling said, “and he told me.”
They all began to pick her up and kiss her and waltz her around, and Terence barked, and Father came out of his study to find out what had happened, and Mother cried, “Good! Good!” and Dorothy just beamed and couldn’t say a word.
“Then Tommy can play in the Homecoming game!” cried George. And Susan shouted, “Three cheers and a rah!”
Ever since she had let Dickie out of his cage, Dumpling had felt that while everybody still loved her and treated her politely she had somehow lost the special niche that she usually occupied as family saint. But now she had brought them good news, and she saw that they were proud of her once more.
Whose Dog?
On October thirty-first the Ridgeway children hauled all of the wooden boxes they had collected during the year up the street to the practice field. Already the students had made a pile as high as a tower that would be set afire after dark. Susan, George, and Dumpling saw with pleasure how their very own boxes were flung up here and there on the great pile to add to the brilliance of the evening. Then they hurried home to clear the yard as Father had told them to do. When everything was neatly stowed, so that Halloween or football pranksters could not find anything to carry away, they looked around with satisfaction.
“Oh boy! What a lot of room we would have to park cars, if we could park cars,” George said.
“Four and one-half cars,” Dumpling said.
“There’s only one way we could ever get Daddy to let us park cars,” Susan said, “and that is if Dean Ambrose would ask Father to let us do it.”
“Ha! Ha!” George said scornfully. “That will happen when there are icicles on the sun.”
“But how could icicles ever be on the sun?” asked Dumpling.
“George means it never will happen,” Susan explained sadly.
They went over and looked at the Gimmicks’ yard, and it was in the usual hopeless confusion.
“Oh boy! Oh boy! What a lot of things Halloweeners could carry off here,” George said.
“Aren’t you going to put away your things?” Susan asked.
“We can’t,” Tad said. “We have too many. Pop says Tim and me have got to take turns standing guard, so nothing gets took off.”
“And can’t you even go to the bonfire?” asked the Ridgeways.
“Yah,” said Tim, “but we can’t both go at once. We’ve got to take turns.”
“You want to play in Leaping Lizard?” Tad asked. “We could play a picnic.”
“With chorc’late cake!” said Tim.
“We can’t today, thank you,” Susan said, “because now we are going home to decorate our Tower for Homecoming.”
“How are the Lizard’s brakes?” asked George.
“Well, Pop hasn’t got around to fixing them yet,” Tim said. “We still don’t dast to touch them.”
“How you going to decorate your Tower?” asked Tad.
“Come over and see,” Susan said. “We think we have a good idea.”
“And Tommy Tucker’s going to play!” George said. “You know that? Tommy Tucker’s going to be in the Homecoming game!”
When they had finished decorating the Tower it looked very fine. Out of each window hung a ghost, and there were red and yellow paper streamers and the red and yellow pennant. A large sign with red and yellow crayon lettering said,
MIDWEST MAKES GHOSTS OF HER ENEMIES
Whenever a little breeze came rustling by, the five ghosts stirred and moved “as natural as life,” George said.
“But ghosts are not alive,” Dumpling said. Usually they would all have stopped and looked at her. But since s
he had let out the canary, what Dumpling said did not impress the others as much as it had. The light sparkled and shone on her glasses just as it used to do, but nobody seemed to be impressed.
“Anyway the ghosts look swell,” the Gimmick boys said. “I wish we had a Tower.”
All up and down the street houses were being decorated and trimmed for Homecoming. The children walked up and down admiring them. Some of the fraternity houses where the men students lived had very wonderful decorations. One group of students had painted a great canvas stadium which covered almost the entire front of the house, and in the center, like football players, were dummies borrowed from a store and dressed in football suits.
Another group of students had carried corn shocks in from the country and set them up all over their lawn. In the midst of this they had put a very large scarecrow with black cardboard crows sitting on its shoulders. A sign said:
YOU CANNOT SCARE MIDWEST
When the children had looked at all the houses, George said, “Nobody but us has ghosts.”
“Maybe ghosts are not a good idea,” said the Gimmick boys.
“It’s because nobody else thought of mixing up Halloween with Homecoming,” Susan said. “But I still think that it’s a good idea.”
In the afternoon judges went around to look at all the houses to see which ones were best.
“What if they forget to look at ours?” George asked.
“They will look at all of the houses,” Susan said, “but I think that they will give the prize to the house with the painted stadium or the one with the scarecrow. We must not expect anything. If we expect too much we will be disappointed.”
“That is something that they say in Sunday School,” Dumpling said. Everybody stopped and looked at her for a second, but then they went on doing what they were doing without asking her to repeat the text.
As darkness fell people began to crowd College Avenue to look at the decorated houses. The fraternity houses had loudspeakers that carried the sound of jazz or boogie-woogie records out into the October air. Sometimes a voice from inside the house would comment over the loudspeaker on the people who were passing by in the street. “Hi, Pete! Where’s Sally tonight? Wow! Wow! What a pretty girl in that green coat! Hi, folks! There’s Tommy Tucker! First time I ever saw Tommy with a girl! Who’s your friend, Tommy? Or friends? Why, Tommy’s got the whole darn family with him!”
Of course it was only Dorothy and the Ridgeway children and the Terrible Torrences that Tommy Tucker was taking to the bonfire and the football rally.
“Tommy! They’re talking about us, Tommy!” the Ridgeway children cried.
“Sure they are! You bet!” said Tommy, laughing and throwing out his chest. “We’re something to talk about.” Tommy was happy because he had made a first down in chemistry and could play in the Homecoming game.
As the Ridgeways passed the Gimmicks’ yard they could see Tad sitting wistfully on the front porch of his house, watching the crowd go by to the football rally.
“Where’s Tim?” asked George.
“He’s gone to the rally,” Tad said. “I’ve got to watch until he comes back. When he comes back, I can go.”
“I hope he remembers to come back,” George said.
“I sure do hope he does,” Tad said gloomily.
The Ridgeway children had not intended that Terence should go to the football rally. In fact George had given him a nice ham bone as an extra treat and had shut him up in the carriage house. But even more than a juicy ham bone Terence loved people and crowds and a lot of excitement. He could hear the sound of passing feet and blaring loudspeakers. By standing on his hind legs he could see through the carriage-house window that the children he adored were going away with the crowd. First Terence howled and barked, and then he clawed and scratched at the door. The carriage-house door closed with an old-fashioned latch. As Terence was leaping about and scratching and clawing his nose, he happened to bump and lift the latch. The door opened very easily, and Terence rushed out and down the street after George and Susan and Dumpling. He did not catch up with them until they had reached the practice field and the pile of boxes that would soon be lighted for the bonfire. Tommy Tucker had gone up onto the speakers’ platform where the cheerleaders and the football coach and the other football players and important people were gathered. Dorothy was holding tight to Dumpling’s hand so that Dumpling would not be lost in the crowd, and with the other hand she was holding Alvin, and he was holding Rudy. Susan and George stood next in a good place where they could hear all the speeches and also get a clear view of the bonfire. They were so busy looking at everything that they did not notice Terence until he put his front paws on George’s shoulders and kissed George on the nose.
In his joy at finding them Terence would probably have knocked George right off his feet except that the crowd was so thick in this place that George was held up by it and did not have room to fall down.
“Oh dear!” Susan cried. “Terrence shouldn’t have come at all! That’s how he got lost before—in the midst of a football crowd!”
“You will have to take him home,” Dorothy said.
“Now?” George cried in dismay.
“Yes, I think you had better,” Dorothy said. “There will just be time before they light the bonfire. I’ll stay here and keep the little kids, and you two take Terence home and shut him in the basement, and then come back. We will be right here.”
“Terence, you are torrible!” scolded George, but Terence jumped up and down so happily that they could not really be angry with him. So Susan and George, with Terence between them, began pushing through the crowd on their way back home.
Strange children from far distant neighborhoods had walked or come by streetcar from all over the city to see the college bonfire. Some of these children were friendly and polite, but some of them were rude and noisy and in the worst kind of Halloween mood. Just as George and Susan and Terence were leaving the practice field, a band of the rude and noisy kind of boys met them.
“Hey!” cried one of the strange boys in a loud voice. “Look there, Butch. Those kids have got our dog!” The boy called Butch began to call, “Here, Moose, Moose, Moose!”
Terence pricked up his ears and looked around. When he saw the strange boys rushing at him, his eager tail went down like a flag at half-mast. He began to press close against George and to make a funny growling, whining sound deep in his throat.
“This is our dog!” cried George. “His name is Torrible Terence.”
“Torrible Terence!” roared the strange boys. “Gosh, what a name! He’s our dog and his name is Moose.”
“I am afraid,” said Susan politely but firmly, “that you have made a slight mistake.”
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” jeered the strangers. “She’s afraid we’ve made a slight mistake! A slight—ho! ho! mistake. Didja hear that, kids? A slight—ho! ho! mistake!”
“Give us our dog, kids,” said Butch. “You can’t get away with takin’ our dog.”
“But he came to us,” cried George, “and we advertised in the paper, and no one ever claimed him.”
“I don’t care! He’s ours,” the first boy said. “We lost him at the football game two or three or four weeks ago.”
“They can’t even remember how long ago it was they lost their dog,” said George scornfully.
“Well, see, he knows us! You can tell he does. Come here, you Moose, you! Get a wiggle on!” Butch raised his arm in a menacing gesture toward the dog, and Terence drooped his tail still farther and leaned hard against George.
“I’ll tell you what,” said George, “if you can call him and he goes with you, then we’ll believe he’s yours and you can have him.”
“Here, Moose! Moose! Moose!” the boys began to call. George started to run toward home. “Here, Terence! Terence! Terence!” George called. Terence ran after George, leaping and bounding with joy and relief. “You see!” cried George triumphantly.
But Susan was worried. “Where do y
ou live?” she asked the boys.
“Fifteen fifteen and a half North River Street,” shouted one boy, “and you better bring our dog back there tomorrow or we’ll tell the cops on you.”
Susan ran after George and Terence, repeating the address to herself as she ran.
“I think he really was theirs, George,” she said. “How terrible! How simply, really awful!”
“I don’t care!” George cried defiantly. “He likes us best, Susie. Did you see how scared he was of that kid? They weren’t good to him, Susie! They were mean to Terence.”
“I know,” Susan said, “but if he really belongs to them—oh dear!”
They shut Terence in the basement, where there was no latch that could easily be undone, and they poured out the tale of their adventure with the strange boys to Mother.
Mother wrote down the address that Susan remembered. “Tomorrow we will see about it,” she said, “but this evening I’ll keep Terence safe indoors, and I am sure that everything will work out for the best.”
“Oh, gee!” George wailed. “We lost the turtles and the canary! And now if Terence has to go, too, and to people who will be mean to him! It isn’t right, Mother. It isn’t right.”
“George,” Mother said, “you can be sure that we will not do a thing that is not right, if we can help it. Now go back and enjoy the bonfire, dear. This ought to be a happy evening.”
More about the Lizard
There was a red glow on the sky as Susan and George started back to the rally, and they knew that the bonfire had been lighted. Coming and going on the wind was the wonderful oom-pah-pah of the college band playing “Forever, Dear Midwest.” On the Ridgeways’ Tower the five ghosts danced and shivered in the fitful breeze.
As they passed the Gimmick house, they saw that Tad was still sitting there, looking very disconsolate.
“Didn’t Tim come back yet, Tad?” Susan asked.
“No, he didn’t,” Tad said. “He’s gone and forgot.” They could hear the sound of tears in Tad’s voice.
“Gee!” George said. “That’s too bad! But everybody’s around the bonfire now. Surely nobody’s going to come and carry off anything until the bonfire’s over.”
Family Grandstand (Nancy Pearl's Book Crush Rediscoveries) Page 12