Freddy stepped out into the road, and the car stopped. “Well, young man?” said the woman in a deep booming voice.
“Excuse me,” said Freddy. “May I speak to you a moment?”
“That’s what you’re doing, ain’t it?” she said. “Not that I want to hear anything you’ve got to say. Stand aside, young whippersnapper, if you don’t want to be run over. Drive on, Percival.”
The driver jerked his head around and stared at her; then he muttered something and shifted gears.
But Freddy stood his ground. “Wait a minute. That man in there, Mr. Condiment—he’s a crook. He’s a—”
“And what are you, may I ask?” she boomed. “Well, I’ll answer that myself. I know you! You’re the fat, lazy good-for-nothing pig that lives on poor old Mr. Bean, eating him out of house and home. You’re that pig that runs a bank for animals, and gets their money away from them and they never get it back. You’re the editor of the Bean Home News that prints terrible lies about your friends and—”
Freddy began to laugh. “Hold it, hold it!” he said. “That’s the truth—every word you’ve spoken is the truth. Now do you want me to tell you who you are?”
“Oh, dear land!” she said. “I knew you’d recognize me, Freddy.” And she put back her veil and disclosed the broad face of Mrs. Wiggins. “How do you like this get-up? Think I’ve got too much lipstick on?”
“I like your hat,” Freddy said. “But who’s your chauffeur? I don’t seem to know him.”
The driver unhooked his beard from his ears and rubbed his chin. “Hot,” he said. “Wonder how General Grant stood it.”
“Uncle Ben!” Freddy exclaimed. “Well, I really didn’t know you!”
“Look, Freddy,” Mrs. Wiggins said. “We got rid of Jackson down the road a piece. He may go to Nineveh and phone, or he may not. Last we saw of him he was cavortin’ off over the hills, yellin’, so I’d guess not.”
“How’d you get rid of him?” Freddy asked.
Mrs. Wiggins grinned. “Put back my veil and kissed him,” she said. “Oh, I mustn’t think of it, I’ll get to laughing. What do you want me to do?”
“Tell me first what happened. Why you’re here,” he said.
So she told him that when Mr. Condiment’s plane had landed at the farm they had of course thought it was Freddy. The men had come down through the barnyard and gone up into the loft and taken the Benjamin Bean Improved Self-filling Piggy Bank and marched off with it without any opposition at all. A few of the animals had come out, but the men had revolvers—there was nothing to be done. Nobody wanted to call Mr. Bean because they were afraid he’d be shot. But Jinx had come back to the farm with Mr. Condiment—he had hidden in the plane—and he told them about Freddy’s capture. “So Uncle Ben and I thought we’d better come up,” Mrs. Wiggins said. “So what do you think we’d better do now?”
“That’s what I’m going to ask you,” Freddy said. “I’ve messed things up enough. I should stick to detective work and let dilemmas alone.”
“Oh, folderol and fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. Wiggins. “You’ve done plenty. Now let’s have your ideas.”
Freddy said he hadn’t any.
“Good grief!” she said. “If you’ve run out of ideas … Well, we’ll have to do the best we can with Uncle Ben’s. Tell him, Uncle Ben.”
Uncle Ben pointed a finger at Mrs. Wiggins. “Demon Woman,” he said.
“That’s me,” said the cow. “You pretty near fixed Condiment with the Great Serpent and the Leopard Woman. Now if the Demon Woman of Grisly Gulch comes alive—well, what are we waiting for? Get in and crouch down, Freddy, so Condiment won’t see you.” She pulled down her veil. “Drive on, Percival.” And Uncle Ben hooked on his beard and started the car.
CHAPTER
17
Uncle Ben drove the station wagon up near the plane and Mr. Condiment climbed out and went over to speak to Mrs. Wiggins. Freddy, crouched down in the rear seat with a blanket over him, heard Mr. Condiment ask where Jackson was, and Mrs. Wiggins’ reply: “My dear sir, I haven’t the faintest idea! Most extraordinary behaviour! When we arrived at the bus station, he said: ‘Let me out here.’ And then he said: ‘Kiss old Condiment goodbye for me,’ and the last we saw of him he was getting into the Utica bus.”
“Great heavens!” said Mr. Condiment. “You mean that he didn’t telephone?”
“No doubt he will do so when he reaches Utica,” said Mrs. Wiggins. “He seemed a most vulgar fellow; you should be happy to be rid of him.”
Mr. Condiment shook his head. “I can’t understand it. It’s most disturbing, perplexing—I mean to say, odd.”
Mrs. Wiggins’ genteel manner, combined with her deep voice and the emphatic nods with which she punctuated her remarks, had reduced Freddy to a quaking jelly of laughter. Even Uncle Ben shook a good deal and his false beard jigged up and down in a way that must have startled Mr. Condiment if he had noticed it. But he was staring with consternation at Mrs. Wiggins.
“I am at a complete loss to understand it,” he said. “But I am deeply indebted to you, ma’am. My name is Condiment—Watson P.”
Mrs. Wiggins bowed majestically. “Charmed. My own name is perhaps not unknown to you. I am the Countess Chinitzky of New York, Newport and Grisly Gulch, Wyoming.”
Mr. Condiment jumped. “Grisly Gulch!” he gasped. “And the Countess Chinitzky! But th-that was the name of the Demon Woman. And Grisly Gulch!”
“I know,” said Mrs. Wiggins. “Ridiculous, those old stories. I believe there have even been books written about me. So amusing—just fancy, sir; they accuse me of having horns and a tail!” She began to laugh. “And of devouring my enemies—even men like yourself, sir—eating them whole and swallowing them down, body, boots and breeches.” And she laughed harder than ever.
Mrs. Wiggins’ laugh was known to every man, woman, child, animal, bird and insect in the north central part of the state. She was now of course two hundred miles from home, but it is possible that some of the better jokes told to Mrs. Wiggins had provoked laughter loud enough to be heard even at that distance. Of course she didn’t just laugh at good jokes, she laughed at all of them—good, bad and indifferent. Some of her friends complained of this. “We don’t mind hearing you laugh at something really funny,” they said. “What we object to is hearing you roar your head off over some old riddle that Noah brought over in the Ark.” But Mrs. Wiggins only said that a joke was a joke, and old ones, that had stood the test of time, were the best. “I don’t like to have to figure out what the point is,” she said. “When you’ve heard a joke fifteen or twenty times, you know just when to laugh. Although,” she would add thoughtfully, “I like to laugh at ’em whether I get the point or not.”
Mr. Condiment felt terribly alone as that great roaring laughter beat down on him. First Newsome, then Felix, and now Jackson had deserted him. And on top of that—well, the Great Serpent had been bad, Lorna the Leopard Woman had been horrible. But now this, the Ghost of Grisly Gulch in person! It was just too much. He leaned weakly against the side of the station wagon and moaned.
And Mrs. Wiggins stopped laughing. “Well, sir,” she said, “I fear we must be getting on. So I will just carry out your man Jackson’s request and kiss you goodbye.” She took off her hat and then leaned out and put her front hoofs on Mr. Condiment’s shoulders. Jinx had made her up with burnt cork eyebrows and powdered her with lots of flour, and when Mr. Condiment saw that huge white face coming close to his own, with the horns and the big flat teeth in a mouth large enough to snap his head off at one bite, he gave a little yelp and dropped his pistol and sank to the ground. There was no fight left in him and they had no further trouble with him. They helped him into the house and gave him a drink of water, and then Freddy sat him down at the table with pen and paper and said: “Now write as I dictate.
… dropped his pistol and sank to the ground.
“I, Watson P. Condiment, being of sound mind, but pretty well scared by thinking about my crim
es, do hereby confess …” And Freddy had him write out a full account of his persecution of Mademoiselle Rose and his attempts to ruin Mr. Boomschmidt. He confessed to having his men steal the Benjamin Bean Improved Self-filling Piggy Bank, and indeed he got so interested in writing these things down that he confessed to several crimes that Freddy didn’t know anything about.
So then they started for home—Mrs. Wiggins and Uncle Ben and the Self-filling Piggy Bank in the station wagon, and Freddy and Mr. Condiment and the Horribles—complete with umbrellas—in the plane. Sniffy and his family decided not to go with them. “You just leave us here, Freddy,” Sniffy said. “Oh, we’ll get back to the Bean farm some day. But we’re going to stay up here in the woods for a while.—I mean, there be adventures to be sought in the greenwood—yea, belike dragons to be slain and foul oppressors to be overcome. We like not the tame life of farm and barnyard. Farewell, lad, we will see thee anon.” He grinned. “Be seeing you, Countess,” he said to Mrs. Wiggins. “Come lads.” And the skunks trooped after him into the shadow of the forest.
Freddy flew straight to the farm. The Horribles had never been up in a plane in daylight, and they thought that the country they passed over ought to look like the maps they had seen, with each county a different color. “How can you tell where you are,” they wanted to know, “without any names on the towns?” It took Freddy nearly a week after they got back to explain it to them, and some of the less bright ones, like No. 13, are still puzzling over it.
Freddy flew straight to the fair grounds and marched Mr. Condiment in through the gate and into the big tent where Mr. Boomschmidt was rehearsing a new act—a turtle who could turn cartwheels and back flips. As soon as he saw them Mr. Boomschmidt rushed up to Mr. Condiment with his hand outstretched. “My goodness, if it isn’t my old friend—” Then he stopped. “No, no, of course you’re not my friend,” he said: “You’re an enemy. Well, you’re welcome just the same, and we’ll try to make you feel at home.” The circus animals, having watched Freddy’s arrival, had come trooping into the tent. “Now here’s an old friend of yours,” Mr. Boomschmidt went on. “Willy, come shake hands with Mr. Condiment.”
The boa constrictor came gliding up. “Haven’t got any hands to shake with,” he said, “but I’ll be glad to give him a little hug.” He threw a loop around Mr. Condiment. “My, my, he’s the one that’s doing the shaking.”
“That’s enough, Willy,” said Mr. Boomschmidt, who saw that Mr. Condiment was not only trembling but had turned a rather muddy green color. “That’s enough!” he repeated firmly, as Willy began to squeeze. “Go sit down. Do you hear me?—sit down!”
That is a pretty hard order for a snake to obey. Willy unwound from Mr. Condiment and looked around helplessly.
“If you don’t mind me—!” said Mr. Boomschmidt threateningly.
“Oh, gosh!” said the snake. “Look, chief, you know I can’t sit down. Any more than you can glide.”
“I can too glide,” Mr. Boomschmidt retorted. He took off his silk hat and put it on the ground. “Look here.”
“Just a second, Mr. Boom,” Freddy said. He would have liked to see Mr. Boom imitate a snake; he was sure it would be pretty instructive; but he wanted to dispose of his prisoner. “Just look at this.” And he held out the paper on which Mr. Condiment had written his confession.
Mademoiselle Rose had come into the tent, and she looked over Mr. Boomschmidt’s shoulder as he read. “Oh dear!” she said. “Oh, dear!” And after a minute she began to cry quietly.
Mr. Boomschmidt went on reading, but he kept glancing at her, and when he came to the bottom of the page he folded the paper up and handed it back to Freddy. “I guess that settles our what-do-you-call-it, dilemma,” he said. “We’ll take him down to the jail and turn him over to the sheriff.” Then he turned to Mademoiselle Rose. “Guess you’re coming down with a cold,” he said, whipping out a huge red and blue checked handkerchief and holding it to her nose. “Here. Blow!”
She slapped his hand away. “I am not!” she said angrily, and then she seized the handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “I’m crying,” she said.
“Crying!” he exclaimed. “Why, goodness gracious mercy me, Rosie, what for? Leo! Where are you, Leo? Do you know what she’s crying for?”
“Don’t know, chief,” said the lion. “Unless maybe she’s sorry for old Condiment here. Going off to jail now, and after all, it’s just because she didn’t want to marry him. My old Uncle Ajax used to say that—”
“Oh, you and your Uncle Ajax go fall off a cliff!” said Rose furiously, and the other animals all sort of backed away and stared at her, for they had never seen her lose her temper before. They had never seen her look so pretty, either. “And as for you,” she said, turning to Mr. Boomschmidt, “can’t you ever figure anything out for yourself? Do you always have to ask that old moth-eaten lion to explain it for you?”
“O boy O boy,” said Leo under his breath. “You got a good high cliff handy, Freddy? If so, I feel sort of tempted to take a dive off it right now. Because she’ll really get going in a minute. Just between you and me—” he lowered his voice still further—“Uncle Ajax always said it was the quiet ones like our Rose who blew up with the loudest bang when they did blow up.”
“Why, Rose,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “This—well, it isn’t like you. Why, I didn’t know you could cry.”
“Oh, you didn’t!” she snapped. “Well, I guess that’s right; you didn’t know I was a girl at all; I was just another of your performing animals. Why, you’ve never even treated me as if I was human!”
For the first time in the years Freddy had known him, Mr. Boomschmidt seemed at a loss for words. “Huh?” he said. “What?” He reached up to push his silk hat back off his forehead as he always did when he was trying to think, but of course the hat wasn’t there—it was on the ground. Willy saw the gesture, and picked it up and handed it to his employer, but Mr. Boomschmidt didn’t seem to know what to do with it; he just put it down on the ground again.
Mr. Condiment seemed to have recovered somewhat for he wasn’t so green any more. He opened his mouth, and then he hesitated, and then he said: “I always thought you were a fool, Boomschmidt, but now I know it.”
“Did you?” said Mr. Boomschmidt mildly. “Well, my goodness, maybe you’re right. But let me tell you, it isn’t so easy to be a fool nowadays, what with all this education they give you. Not that I ever …” His voice trailed off, and evidently he wasn’t much interested in what he was saying. He looked helplessly at Leo, but the lion, after a glance at Mademoiselle Rose, shook his head, as much as to say: “Leave me out of this, chief.”
“I’d like to propose an agreement, an understanding—that is, a bargain with you, Boomschmidt,” said Mr. Condiment.
“A bargain? Gracious, there are always two sides to a bargain, aren’t there, and you haven’t got any side now.” Mr. Boomschmidt looked puzzled. “Maybe when you get out of jail, in eight or ten years, we might discuss it, but not now.”
Mr. Condiment shivered at mention of jail, but he didn’t give up. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Are you happy?”
“Happy?” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “Of course I’m happy. Leo, don’t you think—” He stopped abruptly. “Never mind, Leo,” he said. “Just go over back of Hannibal, will you, so I can’t see you?”
Leo winked at Freddy and went.
“Well then, you’re happy,” Mr. Condiment continued. “But you could be happier, couldn’t you?”
“Why, I suppose so,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “Goodness, you can always be more of anything. At least I think you can. Tired? Yes, you can be tireder. Sleepy, sunburned, hungry—yes, I can’t think of anything you can’t be more of. No, my goodness, wait a minute. How about asleep? You can’t be asleeper. And—”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Condiment. “Well then, suppose I tell you something that would make you immensely, tremendously—that is to say, a great deal happier. In exchange for that would you be willi
ng to let me go?”
The animals all began to laugh, but Mr. Boomschmidt held up his hand. “Quiet! Why, Mr. Condiment, nothing you have ever said or done up to now has ever made me any happier,” he said, “so I kind of doubt—”
Mr. Condiment interrupted him. “Please! I am not proposing that you give me back the confession that I wrote out. You can keep that, so that if I ever give you any trouble in the future you can have me arrested. All I ask is that you do not have me arrested now. In case you agree that I have made you happier by what I tell you.”
“Oh, I don’t have to listen to all this foolishness!” Mademoiselle Rose exclaimed. She gave Rajah, who was standing behind her, a shove that nearly knocked him over, and ran from the tent.
“Oh dear,” Mr. Boomschmidt said. “Another dilemma!”
“If you ask me, chief,” said Leo, who had come closer now that Rose has left, “it isn’t any dilemma, it’s just a plain darned mess. Hadn’t I better go get the sheriff?”
Mr. Boomschmidt appealed to Freddy. “What do you think about this business? Shall I make a deal with him?”
Freddy wished that Mrs. Wiggins was there. He knew that here was something that needed common sense, and not bright ideas. If he had any common sense, he wondered, what would he do? He thought a minute, and then he said: “Well, I don’t see how it can do any harm. If you decide that it does make you happier, you can let him go. You can always put him in jail if he gives you any more trouble. And in a way I’d be sorry to see him locked up in that jail for a long time. Because the sheriff runs an awful nice jail. The prisoners are all happy and contented—goodness, they have ice cream for dessert every night. And I don’t think they’d like Mr. Condiment much. He just wouldn’t fit in with all those nice burglars, and there’d be trouble right away.”
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