“Now,” he said to himself, “for Egbert. Though how in the world I’m to find him I don’t know. But I’ve got to or I’ll never dare to show my face in the farm-yard again. I wish I’d never tried to be a detective, that’s what I wish!”
On a chance he decided to go a little farther down the creek, at least as far as the hermit’s house, a deserted cabin which stood on the other side of the stream. Perhaps some of the waterside animals might have seen the missing rabbit.
But he had not gone far before something drove all thought of Egbert from his mind. There were sounds coming from the hermit’s house. Shouts and rough laughter and occasional pistol-shots. What a chance for a detective! Freddy crept forward; then, finding that the bushes on the opposite bank were too high to permit him to see what was going on, he plunged into the water, swam quietly across, and worked his way up toward the house. And this is what he saw:
Hanging from the limb of a tall tree in front of the house was a swing made of two ropes and a board for a seat. A big man with a cap pulled down over his eyes, and his coat collar turned up, was swinging in long, dizzy swoops. He had a revolver in his hand, and at the top of his swing, when he was level with the top of the house, he would shoot the revolver and try to hit the chimney. A smaller man was sitting in a rocking-chair on the porch. He wore a black mask over his face, and no cap, and was knitting busily away at a woolen muffler.
Pretty soon the big man stopped swinging. “Come now, Looey,” he shouted. “It’s your turn now.”
The small man shook his head. “No, Red, I must get this muffler done. We’ll both want to wrap up warm tomorrow night; we’ll be out late.”
“Oh, come on,” said Red. “Take a couple of shots anyway. Bet you can’t beat me. I got two out of seven.”
The other got up rather unwillingly. “Well, all right. But you have got to promise to be more careful. I worry about you all the time. You remember that last bank we robbed; it was a rainy night and you didn’t wear your rubbers, and you caught a bad cold.”
“Yes, yes, Looey,” Red replied. “I’ll be careful. Come on, now. Into the swing.”
“You’ll have to push me, Red,” said Looey, taking a large revolver from the pocket of his coat. He seated himself in the swing, and the big man started him swinging. Higher and higher he went, until at each push Red was running right under him. Then when he was high enough, he aimed the revolver, and bang! a brick flew from the chimney.
“Hooray for Looey!” shouted Red. “A bull’s-eye! Shoot again!”
Freddy, peering out from his hiding-place, was so excited he could hardly breathe. Here was real work for a detective, and no mistake. For these men were certainly robbers. And if he could capture them, his name as a detective was made.
But just then, as Looey was whizzing for the tenth time up into the tree-tops, one of the ropes broke; he let go his hold and went up in a great curve like a rocket, then came hurtling down through the foliage and into the very bush behind which Freddy was hiding.
He wasn’t hurt, for the bush had broken his fall, and he picked himself up immediately, and his eye fell on the amazed pig. Freddy did not wait to see what would happen. With a squeal of fright he bolted.
“A pig! Quick, Red, a nice fat pig!” shouted Looey, and started after him, the other robber close behind. There was much shouting and a great banging of revolvers, and two or three bullets whizzed past Freddy’s head, but he was a good runner and in a very few minutes had left them far behind.
He ran on for a while, then sat down to rest under a beech-tree—and realized suddenly that he didn’t know where he was. The woods on this side of the creek extended for many miles. If he could find the creek, he would be all right—but he did not know where the creek was. And the day was cloudy; he could not tell his direction from the position of the sun. “Well, I suppose the best thing to do is to keep on going,” he said to himself. “May meet a squirrel or a jay who can tell me where I am.” And he started on.
But though he walked and walked, he met no one, and there was no sign of the creek. He had just about decided that he would have to stay out all night when he noticed some footprints. “H’m, someone been along here not many minutes ago,” he said. “Looks like a pig, too. Wonder what another pig is doing in these woods. I guess I’ll follow them and see if I can catch up.”
So he went on, following the footprints, until he came to a place where the other pig had sat down to rest before going on. There was the plain print of a curly tail in the leaf mould under a beech-tree. Freddy sat down too, and then suddenly something about the place seemed familiar to him. This beech-tree, those bushes over there—“Why, this is where I sat down to rest myself a long time ago! Those are my own footprints I’ve been following!”
This realization made him feel very foolish, as well it might, for it is rather silly for a detective to try to shadow himself. Still, he realized that all he had to do was to follow those footprints backward instead of forward, and he would come out by the hermit’s house. Which he did, and presently he heard the sound of voices.
But this time he did not stop to see what the robbers were doing. He gave the house a wide berth, jumped into the creek, swam across, and in a few minutes more was back on familiar ground.
“I’ll just stop in and see if anything has been heard of Egbert,” he said to himself. So he turned down toward the Widow Winnick’s home. Half a dozen small rabbits were playing about on the edge of the woods as he came up, and one of them called down the rabbit-hole: “Mother! Mr. Freddy’s here!”
Almost at once Mrs. Winnick’s head popped up through the opening. But it was a changed Mrs. Winnick that beamed happily at him.
“Oh, Mr. Freddy!” she cried. “How can I ever thank you? My Egbert! You found him for me!”
“But,” stammered the bewildered Freddy, “I didn’t—” And then he stopped. For one of the little rabbits who were standing around him in a respectful and admiring circle hiccuped, and said politely: “Excuse me.” And Freddy saw it all. Of course! That rabbit had been Egbert all the time!
He recovered himself just in time. “Oh, don’t thank me, Mrs. Winnick. Don’t thank me,” he said rather grandly. “It was nothing, I assure you—nothing at all. Indeed, I am very grateful to you for having sent me down in that direction, for I have made some very important discoveries. However, I am glad Egbert got back safely. All the other children are well, I hope. Good, good; I am very glad to hear it. Good evening.” And he went on homeward.
“Well,” he said to himself, “I guess as a detective I’m not so bad after all. Restored a lost child to his mother and discovered a band of robbers, all in one day! Huh, Sherlock Holmes never did more than that, I bet. And now for those rats!”
CHAPTER V
THE CASE OF PRINNY’S DINNER
Freddy was a pretty busy pig for the next few weeks. Mrs. Winnick told all her friends about how quickly he had found Egbert, and her friends told other animals, and they all praised him very highly. At first Freddy tried to explain. He said that he really hadn’t done anything at all, and that he didn’t even know that the rabbit he had sent home was Egbert. But everyone said: “Oh, you just talk that way because you are so modest,” and they praised him more highly than ever.
And they brought him detective work to do. Most of them were simple cases, like Egbert’s, of young animals that had run away from home or got lost. But a number of them were quite important. There was, for instance, the strange case of Prinny’s dinner. Prinny was a little white woolly dog who lived with Miss Mary McMinnickle in a little house a mile or so down the road. Prinny was a nice dog, in spite of his name, of which he was very much ashamed. His whole name was Prince Charming, but Miss McMinnickle called him Prinny for short. Now Prinny’s dinner was always put out for him on the back porch in a big white bowl. Sometimes Prinny was there when it was put out, and then he ate it and everything was all right. But sometimes he would be away from home when Miss McMinnickle put it out, and he w
ould come back an hour or two later and the bowl would be empty.
“The funny part of it is,” he said to Freddy, “that there isn’t ever a sign of any animal having been near it. I wish you’d see what you can do about it.”
So Freddy took the case. First he got some flour and sprinkled it around on the porch, but though the food was gone from the bowl when he and Prinny came back later, there were no footprints to be seen. Then he watched for two afternoons, hidden behind the back fence with his eye at a knot-hole. But on these days the dinner was not touched.
“Have you any idea who it is?” asked Prinny anxiously. The poor little dog was getting quite thin.
“H’m,” said Freddy; “yes. It’s narrowing down, it’s narrowing down. Give me another day or two and I think we’ll have him.”
Now, this time Freddy wasn’t just looking wise and pretending, for he really did have an idea. The next day, before the sun had come up, he went down to Miss McMinnickle’s. He took with him Eeny and Quik, two of the mice who lived in the barn, and they hid under the back porch. The mice were very proud that Freddy had asked them to help him, so they didn’t mind the long wait, and they all played “twenty questions” and other guessing games until finally, late in the afternoon, they heard Miss McMinnickle come out on the porch and set down the bowl containing Prinny’s dinner.
“Quiet now, boys,” said Freddy. “I told Prinny to stay up at the farm until after dark, so the thief will think that there’s no one here.”
For half an hour they waited. Then, without any warning, without any sound of cautious footsteps on the floor of the porch close over their heads, there was a rattling sound, as if someone were tapping the bowl with a stick. The mice looked at Freddy in alarm, but he winked reassuringly at them. “They’re there,” he said. “Wait here till I call you.” And he crawled quickly out from under the porch.
Three crows were perched on the edge of the big bowl, gobbling down Prinny’s dinner as fast as they could. At sight of Freddy they flew with a startled squawk up into the branches of a tree, from which they glared down at him angrily.
“Aha!” said the detective. “Caught you at it, didn’t I? Ferdy, I didn’t think it of you, stealing a poor little dog’s dinner! I knew it was some kind of bird when we didn’t find any footprints and when hiding behind the fence wasn’t any good. I suppose you saw me from the air, eh? But I thought it would be some of those thieving jays from the woods. I didn’t expect to find you here, Ferdy.”
Ferdinand, the oldest of the crows, who had been Freddy’s companion on the trip to the north pole the year before, merely grinned at his friend. “Aw, you can’t prove anything, pig,” he said. “Who’s going to believe you? It’s just your word against mine.”
“Is that so!” exclaimed Freddy. “Well, I’ve got witnesses, smarty. Come out, boys,” he called, and the two mice came out and sat on the edge of the porch.
Ferdinand looked a little worried at this. He was caught, and all the animals would soon know about it. Of course, they couldn’t do anything to him. But they would be angry at him, and it isn’t much fun living with people who don’t approve of your actions, even if they can’t punish you for them. In fact, it is often much pleasanter, when you have done something you shouldn’t, to be punished and get it over with. Ferdinand thought of this, and he also thought of his dignity. He had always been a very dignified crow, and it certainly wasn’t very dignified to be caught stealing a little dog’s dinner.
So he flew down beside the pig. “Oh, come, Freddy,” he said; “it was just a joke. Can’t we settle this out of court? We’ll promise not to do it again if you won’t say anything about it.”
“Well, that’s up to Prinny,” said the pig. “It doesn’t seem like a very good joke to him. But I’ll talk to him about it. You three crows had better not be here when he gets back, though.”
“All right,” said Ferdinand. “That’s fair enough. Do the best you can for us, Freddy. We’ll push off now.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” said one of the other crows. “How about these mice? How do we know they won’t talk?”
“Say, listen,” squeaked Eeny shrilly. “Just because we’re small, you think we haven’t got any sense, you big black useless noisy feather-headed bug-eaters, you!” His anger at the insult was so hot that he fairly danced about the porch on his hind legs. “Another one like that and I’ll climb that tree and gnaw your tail-feathers off!”
“Oh, he didn’t mean anything, Eeny,” said Ferdinand, edging a little away from the enraged mouse. “Sure, we know you won’t say anything.”
“Well, let him keep a civil tongue in his head, then,” grumbled Eeny. “Come on, Quik.” And he started off home without waiting for Freddy.
The pig overtook them, however, a minute later, and they climbed up on his back, for it was slow going for such small animals across the fields. “I must say, Freddy,” remarked Quik, “that I think you’re letting the crows off pretty easy.”
Freddy nodded. “Yes, that’s the trouble with this detective business. You see, there isn’t much of anything else to do. Of course with Ferdinand, I’m sure he’ll let Prinny alone now. He really did think it was more of a joke than anything else. But if he wanted to keep on stealing things, there isn’t anything I could do to stop him. We ought to have a jail, that’s what we ought to have.”
“You mean like the one in Centerboro?” asked Eeny.
“Yes. Then when we find any animal doing anything he shouldn’t, we could lock him up for a while.”
“You mean if a cat chased us, he could be locked up in the jail?” asked the mice. And when Freddy said yes, that was exactly what he did mean, they both agreed that a jail was certainly needed.
So that evening Freddy called a meeting of all the animals in the cow-barn, where the three cows, Mrs. Wiggins and Mrs. Wurzburger and Mrs. Wogus, lived. It was one of the finest cow-barns in the county, for when the animals had come back from Florida with a buggyful of money that they had found, Mr. Bean had been so grateful that he had fixed up all the stables and houses they lived in in the most modern style, with electric lights and hot and cold water and curtains at the windows, and steam heat in the winter-time. Even the henhouse had all these conveniences and such little extra comforts as electric nest-warmers, and little teeters and swings and slides for the younger chickens.
All the animals on the neighboring farms as well as at Mr. Bean’s had by this time heard about Freddy’s success as a detective, so the meeting was a large one. A lot of the woods animals, including Peter, the bear, came. There were even a few sheep, and if you know anything about sheep, you will realize how much interest the proposal for a jail had created, for there is nothing harder than to interest sheep in matters of public policy. Freddy found it unnecessary to make much of a speech, for nearly all of his audience agreed at once that the jail would fill, as Charles, the rooster, aptly expressed it, a long-felt want. Practically the only dissenting voice was that of Jinx. When Freddy threw the meeting open to discussion, Jinx jumped to his feet.
“I don’t see what we want a jail for,” he said. “We’ve always got along well enough without one before.”
“We got along without nice places to live in, too,” replied Freddy. “But it’s nice to have them.”
“Yes, but we aren’t going to live in the jail.”
“Some of us are,” said Freddy significantly.
“You mean animals like the rats, I suppose,” returned the cat. “Well, if you’re such a swell detective, why don’t you catch them and get Everett’s train back? If you aren’t any smarter at catching other animals that steal things than you have been about them, you won’t have anybody in your old jail. And anyway I don’t see any need for it. Let me get hold of those rats and you won’t need any jail to put ’em in.”
“I’ll catch ’em all right,” said Freddy. “Even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t do everything in a minute. These things take time. I guess I’ve settled quite a number of cases since
I started being a detective, haven’t I?”
“Sure he has! Shut up, Jinx!” shouted the other animals, and Jinx had to sit down.
So the matter was voted upon, and it was decided by a vote of seventy-four to one that there should be a jail. But where? After a long discussion the meeting agreed that the two big box stalls in the barn would be a good place. Mr. Bean’s three horses lived in the barn, but they had stalls near the door, and the box stalls were never used.
“How do you feel about it, Hank?” asked Freddy.
Hank was the oldest of the horses, and he was never very sure of anything except that he liked oats better than anything in the world. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I guess it would be all right. Some animals would be all right, and then again, some wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want elephants or tigers. Or polar bears. Or giraffes. Or—”
“Or kangaroos or leopards or zebras,” said Freddy impatiently. “We know that. But there won’t be any animals of that kind.”
“Oh, then I guess it’ll be all right,” said Hank. “These prisoners, they’d be company for me, too. I’d like that.”
“That’s all settled, then,” said Freddy. “Hank can be jailer and look after the prisoners and see that they don’t escape. Then let’s see; we’ll need a judge, to say how long the prisoners shall stay in jail. Now, I suggest that a good animal for that position would be—”
“Excuse me!” crowed Charles, the rooster, excitedly. “I’d like to speak for a moment, Mr. Chairman.”
“All right,” said Freddy. “Mr. Charles has the floor. What is it, Charles?”
Charles flew up to the seat of the buggy, and all the animals crowded closer. The rooster was a fine speaker and he used words so beautifully that they all liked to hear him, although they didn’t always know what he was talking about. Neither did he, sometimes, but nobody cared, for, as with all good speakers, what he said wasn’t half so important as the noble way he said it.
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