Freddy had about used up all his apologies. He just stood and looked at Dr. Wintersip and Dr. Wintersip looked at him and they both groaned. Then Freddy said: “I’ll get it back for you,” and he turned to go down off the porch. But as he stepped to the edge, the board he stepped on was one that Mr. Bismuth had repaired the floor with and forgotten to nail down. So it tipped up behind Freddy and smacked him in the rear, and he fell off the porch into a rain barrel about half full of rain water.
Freddy went into the barrel headfirst, but he didn’t go all the way in because he was too plump. He just went in up to his shoulders. Dr. Wintersip caught him by the legs and pulled him out, and Freddy wiped the water, and a few dead leaves that had been in it, off his face and said very coldly and quietly: “Thank you.” And then he left. But Dr. Wintersip sat down on the porch and put his head in his hands and moaned.
CHAPTER
4
Hank hadn’t seen Freddy fall into the barrel, but when he heard about it he thought it was pretty funny. As they drove back up Main Street he laughed so hard that people turned and looked after him, and then they began laughing too. They didn’t know the joke, but they had probably heard the saying: “It’s enough to make a horse laugh,” and so they laughed anyway because if it made Hank laugh, they thought it must be a really good one.
Hank didn’t stop until Freddy threatened him with the whip, and then he sobered down. But he kept making remarks. He said that he’d always heard that rainwater was good for the complexion, and then he would keep turning around and looking back at Freddy and admiring him. “Lovely!” he said. “Lovely! The skin you love to touch. Like rose petals, really.” “Blooming!” he said. “Positively blooming!”
Freddy stood it for about so long and then he thought he’d get out and walk, and he was just doing so when he caught sight of Mr. Bismuth in front of Beller & Rohr’s, talking to Judge Willey. The bicycle was propped against a post.
Freddy went up to him but before he could say anything, Mr. Bismuth said: “Aha, the great detective! Sniffing along the trail, I presume, of some arch-criminal? Ha, ha! Not mine, I hope.”
Freddy said: “Yes, yours. I want you to take Dr. Wintersip’s bicycle back to him.”
“What? This bicycle?” Mr. Bismuth demanded. “My dear boy, the good doctor gave it to me! He gave me this—”
Freddy interrupted. “He didn’t do anything of the kind. If he doesn’t get it back he’s going to have you arrested.”
“Arrested?” Mr. Bismuth started back dramatically. “Arrest a Bismuth? Ha, ha, my boy, you are joking.”
“I’m not joking!” said Freddy. “I have just been to see Dr. Wintersip.”
“I see, I see,” said Mr. Bismuth striking his forehead. “The good doctor has changed his mind. He regrets having given me the bicycle. Now who would have thought that that kindly man would turn out to be an Indian giver! Well I shall return it.” He reached for the bicycle, but Judge Willey said:
“Just a moment. You were about to return to me the five dollars which I paid you for a ticket to Mars.”
“Don’t be alarmed.” Mr. Bismuth leaned the bicycle against himself and reached for his pocket. “You shall have it, sir. A Bismuth never forgets.” He turned to Freddy. “All a joke, you know, really—this selling tickets. As if you could buy a ticket to Mars for five dollars, when it costs two just to go to Syracuse on the bus! Ha, ha! It always amuses a Bismuth to fool people. All kindly meant, of course. I am returning all the money today, with a little gift, so that there will be no hard feelings. I—” His hand had been sliding into his pocket and now it stopped and a look of consternation came over his face. The hand came out empty, and he held it up and stared at it. “Nothing!” he shouted. “The money is gone! I have been robbed!” He dropped the bicycle and began feeling himself all over, patting his pockets and fumbling inside his coat. “Robbed!” he cried. “Ha! They can’t do this to me—the villains!” He looked wildly around. “Where’s the sheriff?” he demanded. “Where’s an officer of the law?”
Freddy didn’t believe for a minute that Mr. Bismuth had been robbed. He remembered the big bag of candy, and he was sure that what was left of the ticket money was still in one of those pockets. That inside breast pocket in the coat bulged suspiciously. He went over and spoke a word in a low voice to Hank, who was standing by the curb, and the horse moved up behind Mr. Bismuth, seized him by the collar in his strong teeth and lifted him clear of the ground. Then Freddy said politely: “Let me help you,” and before Mr. Bismuth, who was struggling uselessly, could stop him, he reached into the inside pocket and drew out a wad of bills.
The horse seized him by the collar and lifted him clear of the ground.
Mr. Bismuth stopped struggling. “Let me down, please,” he said with dignity, and when he had pulled his coat down from around his ears, he held out his hand for the money. “How in the world did it get into that pocket?” he said. “I felt there, too. You both saw me. Well, I’m certainly glad it was not stolen. Just hand it over, Freddy, and I’ll—”
“You’ll run off with it again, I suppose,” Freddy said. “Thanks, I guess I’d better take care of it. Judge Willey, here’s your five. And now we’ll go in and give Mr. Rohr his.”
Mr. Bismuth protested. “I’m the one that should give it back,” he said. “You’re just spoiling the joke and making it look as if I was trying to cheat these people.”
“That’s right,” said Freddy. “Come on—or do you want Hank to help you?”
Mr. Bismuth didn’t. So he followed along as Freddy went up Main Street, stopping in the stores and paying back the people who had given up five dollars for a ticket. Mr. Bismuth made a little explanation each time, how it had all been done in a spirit of good clean fun, and of course he intended to give the money back all the time, and he hoped there were no hard feelings.
Word had got around that he was paying back the money, and before they’d gone far the ticket buyers came pouring out of the stores and surrounded them. Freddy paid them off as quickly as possible, but pretty soon the money was gone and there were still seven who hadn’t been paid. That meant that Mr. Bismuth had already spent thirty-five dollars of the money he had taken in, but of course he wouldn’t admit it, and he said that those seven people had never bought tickets from him. They got pretty mad. Freddy promised them that he would see to it that they got their money back, but a Mr. Gridley, the school principal, hit Mr. Bismuth on the nose, bending it still farther to the left, and there would have been a free for all fight if Hank hadn’t got Mr. Bismuth by the collar and dragged him away. Freddy left the bicycle with Mr. Rohr, who promised to phone Dr. Wintersip about it, and then he got Mr. Bismuth into the phaeton and they went back to the farm.
Mr. Bismuth tied his nose up in a handkerchief, and when they got home and his wife and children saw him there was such a howling and sobbing that there was no chance for Mr. Bean to get any explanation out of him. Mrs. Bean got a hot water bag and Mrs. Bismuth tried to tie it on his nose, and the little Bismuths climbed around on him and wept on him and yelled: “O poor pa!” So Freddy got Mr. Bean aside and told him what had happened. “Can’t you get rid of them?” Freddy said. “Can’t you tell them to go?”
Mr. Bean shook his head. “’Tain’t possible, her bein’ my wife’s cousin. And we promised. We’ve just got to keep ’em and make the best of it.” He hesitated a minute, puffing on his pipe so that the smoke completely hid his face. Then out of the smoke cloud came his voice: “Though, o’ course if you was to think of something—”
When Mr. Bean hid in a cloud that way it meant that he was through talking to you. So Freddy turned away.
But Mr. Bean called after him. “Don’t try anything till you get back from Mars, though. Uncle Ben’s all set to leave Friday—mustn’t disappoint him. He says it means waiting another eight months if he don’t start Friday—Mars won’t be in the right place the rest of the year. We can hold out all right.”
It was the first time
Mr. Bean had really appealed to Freddy for his help, and Freddy knew that he would have to do something. But it would be several months at least before he got back from Mars, and he didn’t know whether the Beans could really hold out that long or not. For the Bismuths ate so much, and did so much damage that he didn’t think there would be any Bean farm left if they stayed a few more months. Only the day before, the two Bismuth children, Carl and Bella, had smashed all of Mrs. Bean’s wedding china. They had climbed up on the pantry shelves to get at a glass of crabapple jelly, but Carl had slipped, and the children and the shelves and the jelly and a hundred and twenty-one pieces of Ironstone china had all landed together on the pantry floor with a most terrific crash. And as always, when the Bismuths had an accident, they had a good one. There was only one unbroken saucer left in the whole set, and that one Bella dropped and smashed when she picked it up and carried it out into the kitchen to show Mrs. Bean.
Freddy had a talk that evening with his partner in the detective business, Mrs. Wiggins. Cows are not generally thought to make good detectives; they are too big and noisy to be much good at shadowing suspected persons, and they’re not usually much interested in doing anything but just standing around and being cows. But Mrs. Wiggins’s strong point was her common sense. She had solved a good many cases by just being sensible. Many detectives, and other people who have problems to solve, could do well to follow her example. She was of course well known and very highly thought of by others in the profession and she could have walked into any detective agency in the country and got a job.
She agreed with Freddy that there was nothing much he could do about the Bismuths until after the Mars trip. “But I’ll keep an eye on them,” she said. “Trouble is, Mrs. Bismuth being Mrs. Bean’s cousin. Mrs. Bean has got such strong family feeling that she’d be mad at us if we did something really mean to them.”
“So would Mr. Bean,” Freddy said. “He was awful mad at Hank the other day for pushing Carl into the watering trough. He said Carl hadn’t done anything to deserve such treatment.”
“Hadn’t done anything! Land sakes, ain’t just being a Bismuth enough?” Mrs. Wiggins demanded.
“Well, I guess ducking the boy wasn’t so much what Mr. Bean was mad at as shoving him back in three times when he was trying to get out. I guess Hank got kind of excited, because he didn’t really want to drown Carl. Hank’s pretty soft-hearted, really.”
They talked late, trying to work out some plan for keeping the Bismuths from making too much trouble while Freddy was away. Then they discussed poetry for a while, and Freddy recited several little things that he had recently dashed off. And he was just saying good night when Quik and Eeny, two of the mice, came galloping into the barn. They were yelling and whooping with laughter, and if you think a mouse can’t make a lot of noise you should have heard these two. “Oh boy!” they shouted. “Oh golly, Freddy, wait till you hear this one!”
“Well, OK,” said Freddy. “Tell it, and quit the racket.” And Mrs. Wiggins said: “Good grief, you boys ought to be home under the stove in bed, not tearing around all over the neighborhood keeping decent people awake!”
Eeny was rolling on the barn floor with laughter, but Quik got hold of himself and stood up and frowned at the cow. “All right,” he said crossly. “All right—you want to hear it or don’t you?” Quik was even more touchy than most mice.
So Freddy and Mrs. Wiggins said sure, they wanted to hear it; and Mrs. Wiggins even woke up her two sisters, Mrs. Wurzburger and Mrs. Wogus, who had got pretty sleepy during the latter half of the evening (cows haven’t much feeling for poetry), and they gathered around Quik.
“Well,” said Quik, “you know about Mr. Gridley’s hitting old Bismuth on the nose today, and bending it around farther to the side than ever. A couple more pokes like that and Bismuth’ll be breathing into his own left ear. Well, anyway, when they were getting ready for bed tonight Mrs. Bismuth says: ‘Ed,’ she says, ‘you got to do something about your nose. It’s twisted around so far now that when you blow it you have to stand almost behind yourself. And when you’re walking around your nose ought to point the way you’re going, not off at right angles. It confuses people.’
“So she gets out some rubber bands and hooks ’em over his right ear and then over the end of his nose, so they’ll pull it around straight. ‘There,’ she said, ‘now if you’ll sleep with that on for a few weeks I guess it’ll go back where it belongs.’
“So old Bismuth, he grumbles a while, but then he goes to sleep—at least he starts to, but when he wiggles his head down into the pillow one of the bands slips off his nose, and smack!—it hits Mrs. Bismuth right in the eye!”
Eeny, who had sobered down a little while Quik was talking, began to giggle again. But Freddy said: “How do you know all this? You talk as if you’d seen it.”
“Sure we have,” Quik said. “We’ve got a nice new hole gnawed up into the spare room. It’s in the corner under the dresser, but please don’t tell Mrs. Bean, Freddy. We’ve promised not to gnaw around the house, except a few places down cellar where it doesn’t matter. But the Bismuths—my gosh, Freddy, they even eat in bed—take cookies and cake and pie upstairs with them. And there’s crumbs everywhere. Gosh, you could feed a regiment of mice with what drops on the floor.
“Well anyway, that’s how we saw what went on; we were up there having sort of a late snack before going to bed. So when the rubber band hit her in the eye, Mrs. Bismuth thought Mr. Bismuth had hit her, and she began to holler and cry; and then he jumped up and another band pops off and hits her in the other eye—boy, oh boy, we like to died laughing!”
“Yeah,” said Eeny, “only Cousin Augustus had to go and get the hiccups like he always does when he’s excited, and they heard him and got up and poked after us under the dresser with a coat hanger. We got away all right, but the hanger hit Eek—he’s got a peach of a black eye.”
“I hope they don’t find that hole,” said Quik. “Mrs. Bean will be awful mad.”
“I wish we could plug the hole up,” Eeny said. “But you can’t un-gnaw a hole, I guess.”
“If there’s any trouble about it,” Mrs. Wiggins said, “you can tell her about the rubber bands. Mrs. Bean likes a joke, and if you get her to laughing, she’ll forget to be mad.”
“Maybe she’ll be so mad she’ll forget to laugh,” said Eeny.
“Just show her Eek’s eye,” said Freddy. “I think a mouse with a black eye is funnier than all Mr. Bismuth’s rubber bands.”
“Yeah?” said Eeny crossly. “Somebody else’s black eye is always funny. I’d like to see you with one, pig.”
Freddy grinned. “Pick on somebody your size, mouse,” he said. Then he yawned. “Well, I’m for bed. Goodnight.” And he trotted off towards home.
CHAPTER
5
During the next few days, before the departure of the space ship, the Bismuths were pretty quiet. Partly it was because the little Bismuths were sick. Between them they had eaten nearly five pounds of the candy their father had brought them. And partly it was because Mr. Bismuth went down to Centerboro every day. Mr. Bean had lent him the $35 to pay back the seven people whose money he had spent, and he paid them and went around explaining to everyone how the whole thing had been a joke, and he hadn’t meant to steal the money. He was a good explainer. A lot of the people believed him. All except Dr. Wintersip. When he went to explain to the Doctor, the door was slammed in his face. If his nose had been straight, the door would have taken the end of it right off. As it was, it missed it by a good inch.
Freddy had to spend a lot of time in the men’s furnishing department of the Busy Bee, getting fitted to a space suit. The Busy Bee had a good line of space suits, but they were for people, and they had to be cut down and altered a lot to fit animals. The suit for Charles of course had had to be specially made, as even a cut-down boy’s suit will not do for a rooster.
Early on the morning of the day set for the take-off, all the animals for miles around came
pouring through the barnyard and up the slope to the pasture where the rocket stood. Georgie and Robert, and half a dozen dogs from neighboring farms whom Uncle Ben had hired for the job, acted as police, and kept the crowd back of the fence that surrounded the pasture. For there would be a big blast of flame and hot gases when the rocket was fired, and it would be dangerous to be anywhere near it.
A lot of people had come up from Centerboro, too. Mr. Bismuth had built a small grandstand at the north end of the field, and was charging ten cents for seats; but he hadn’t done a very good job on it, and when six or seven people climbed into it the whole thing collapsed and came down with a crash. He said that it fell down because he hadn’t had enough money to buy nails for it, and had had to use old rusty bent ones he found in the barn. But Mr. Bean said that there were plenty of nails in it; the trouble was that they were all put in in the wrong places.
Fortunately nobody was hurt, though one of the prisoners from the jail—the sheriff had given them the day off to go see the rocket fired—had his new derby hat smashed. He made such a fuss, threatening to call the state troopers and make Mr. Bismuth buy him a new hat, that Mr. Bean promised to buy him one. It cost Mr. Bean seven dollars.
The rocket was to take off at eight twenty-one. Uncle Ben with his passengers—Jinx and Charles and Freddy and Georgie—had been aboard since five o’clock. Only Mrs. Peppercorn had not yet put in an appearance when, at eight o’clock, Freddy stepped to the doorway of the ship and addressed the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we are, as you know, taking off in a very few minutes in this, the Benjamin Bean Space Ship, with the object of reaching and exploring the planet Mars. Mr. Benjamin Bean has asked me to say a few words in explanation of just how we plan to do this. In order to get through the earth’s atmosphere and out into space, it is necessary to start with a speed of at least 25,000 miles an hour. Needless to say, until the invention, by Mr. Benjamin Bean, of the Benjamin Bean Atomic Engine, no such speed was possible. But with this engine, now for the first time installed in a space ship, Mr. Benjamin Bean states that he will be able to develop a velocity, not of 50,000, but of 100,000 miles per hour! (Loud cheers.)
Freddy and the Space Ship Page 3