Freddy and the Men from Mars

by Walter R. Brooks

  “Well, I know that, Leo,” Mr. Boomschmidt said irritably. “Of course I know that. Don’t just keep repeating everything I say and trying to look wise as if you’d got a brand new idea. Think!”

  But it isn’t easy to think with somebody standing right over you to see that you do it. The lion scowled fiercely and stared down at the ground so hard that he was almost cross-eyed. He glanced up once or twice to find that Mr. Boomschmidt was still standing there watching him. Then he concentrated harder than ever. The next time he looked up, Mr. Boomschmidt was gone.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Two days later Mr. Hercules Boomschmidt began to laugh about the mucilage being poured over Mr. Garble’s head. Every time he saw Mr. Garble he would stop and begin to heave with laughter. “Mucilage!” he would say. “Uh, uh, uh!” Of course the other animals saw him, and they picked it up. They would imitate Mr. Hercules’s heavy pronunciation of the word. “Moosiludge! Uh, uh!” Mr. Garble got pretty sick of it.

  At last he complained to Mr. Boomschmidt. “There isn’t anything I can do about it,” Mr. Boom said. “Herc will get over it, and then the others will quit bothering you. He always gets over a joke in a week or two.”

  “A week or two!” Mr. Garble shouted.

  “Hardly ever takes longer than that,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “Of course, if you can think up another good joke, something funny to tell him that might take the place of the—the mucilage, and get him to laughing about that… You see, Herc can never handle more than one joke at a time.”

  So Mr. Garble went downtown and bought a joke book, and then when he saw Mr. Hercules, and before the other could begin to laugh, he’d say quickly: “Hi, Herc: say, have you heard this one?” And he’d tell him a joke. Mr. Hercules would listen attentively, and when Mr. Garble finished and made a great show of guffawing and slapping his knee, he’d say “Yuh.” And then he’d begin to heave. “Moosiludge!” he’d say. “Uh, uh!” Mr. Garble didn’t get anywhere.

  The Bean farm was only a few miles from Centerboro, and after the first day, Freddy and Jinx drove back home with Uncle Ben. The Martians were a problem that the pig was worried about, but he had work to do—his newspaper, the Bean Home News, to get out, and the affairs of the First Animal Bank to attend to. And there was an unfinished poem, which went like this:

  “I think that I shall never see

  Another pig as smart as me;

  A pig so full of zip and zest,

  A pig so fashionably dressed,

  A pig so gay, a pig so free,

  A pig so quick at repartee.

  Who bears with fortitude the pain

  Of knowing that he’s rather plain.

  Although not handsome, you’ll admit

  He rather has the best of it:

  Some genius might invent a yak,

  An alligator or macaque,

  Or other animals, small or big—

  But no one could invent a pig!”

  The poem wasn’t really unfinished, of course. But Freddy thought that a few changes should be made. As it stood, he was afraid that it might sound a little conceited.

  And with all this work on hand, he wasn’t doing any good hanging around the circus grounds. Besides, every day the Boomschmidts, or one or two of the circus animals, would come out to visit their friends at the farm. Often he, or others of the farm animals, would go into town and spend the night with circus friends.

  Mr. and Mrs. Bean hitched up Hank, the old white horse, to the buggy and drove down to see the show and have a look at the Martians. Uncle Ben could have driven them down, of course, in a matter of minutes, but they said no, they preferred the buggy. Uncle Ben said they ought to get used to modern travel, but Mrs. Bean said that since modern travel evidently meant getting the living daylights jounced out of you, she guessed they’d stick to the old-fashioned way.

  One night after the circus had been in Centerboro a week, Freddy had been entertaining Willy, the boa constrictor. They had spent a happy evening in the cow barn with Mrs. Wiggins, the cow, and her two sisters, Mrs. Wurzburger and Mrs. Wogus, and some of the other animals, telling stories and singing and playing games, and it was nearly midnight when Freddy and Willy finally went back to the pig pen to sleep. Freddy politely offered Willy his bed, but the snake said no, he’d be much more comfortable just coiled up in the armchair. Freddy continued to insist and Willy to decline, and there was a great exchange of politenesses, and it was nearly one before they finally settled down, Willy in the chair and Freddy in the bed. And at two there was an agitated clucking outside the window, and then a series of hard, woodpecker–like taps on the door.

  Boa constrictors are heavy sleepers, especially when they have just eaten, and Willy, while not really full, had had a couple of pans of johnnycake and a dozen large jelly sandwiches—part of the refreshments which Mrs. Bean had kindly provided for the evening. Freddy, too, was never one to leave the table until the last crumb had vanished, and perhaps he had been a little overanxious to prove that a pig could hold as much as any snake—anyway he had eaten more than he usually did. Neither of the sleepers stirred.

  The tapping was redoubled; then, as there was no answer, it stopped for a minute or two. The duet of the two fellow snorers had not missed a single note. But then came the one sound which will wake any farm animal, no matter how deeply he may be dreaming—the crow of a rooster, just outside the door.

  Freddy came to in an instant and jumped up. “What—what is it?” he gasped, then went to the chair and shook Willy. “Hey, time to get up!” he shouted. But then he became aware that it was still dark outside. He went to the door and threw it open. Charles, the rooster, and his wife, Henrietta, were on the threshold.

  “Hey, what’s the matter with you, Charles?” Freddy demanded angrily. “Making all this rumpus, and it hasn’t even begun to get light yet! You clear out, before I—” Here he stopped abruptly, and turned back into the pig pen, for Henrietta had darted past him and flown at the boa. She was flapping and fluttering and pecking at his head with her strong beak, and all the time screeching: “Murderer! Chicken thief! What have you done with my daughter Chiquita? And her brother, Little Broiler? Answer me, you great squirming low-down good-for-nothing beast! Answer me before I tear you to pieces!”

  Willy, still half asleep, blinked and ducked as he uncoiled his fifteen-foot length from the armchair. He could have knocked Henrietta flat with one slap of his tail, but he was good tempered, even for a boa. “Hey, hey!” he hissed protestingly. “Lay off, sister. What’s the matter ails you?” And then, as a particularly sharp peck landed on the end of his nose: “Oh, quit!” he said crossly, and suddenly whipped a coil of his body around the hen and held her fast.

  “Lay off, sister.”

  Charles was still on the doorstep, and Freddy, now thoroughly awake, turned to him. “‘What’s got into you two?” he demanded crossly. “Coming around here and crowing in the middle of the night, and attacking my guest—”

  But Charles, in his turn, brushed past Freddy and went up to the boa. “Sir,” he said haughtily, “that hen is my wife. Release her immediately or it will be the worse for you.”

  “I’ll release her if she’ll quit trying to poke my eyes out,” said Willy, and Freddy said: “Let her go.” He took a broom from behind the door. “Henrietta, if you don’t shut up this minute, I’m going to let you have this right across the cackler.”

  To his surprise, Henrietta did not reply. The reason was that, before releasing her, Willy, who, like all boas, always hugged a little harder than he meant to, had given her an extra squeeze, and there wasn’t any breath left in her.

  “Well, Charles,” Freddy said, “perhaps you’d like to give some explanation of why you’ve come roaring around here in the middle of the night and disturbing me and my guest when we’re peacefully sleeping.”

  “You may have been sleeping,” said Charles, “but it sure wasn’t peaceful—not with the racket you were making. And let me tell you, sir,” he
went on, “if you will select as guest such a low, scoundrelly sneak, such a base miscreant, as this ravaging roost-robber—why then, sir, you deserve a far more dire punishment than merely to be roused from your sodden slumbers by the clear buglelike tones of my powerful voice. You ask me why I crowed. It was the only way to wake you. For we have come here to ask—nay, to demand—either the restitution of our son and daughter to their rightful perch in the home from which they were so savagely and cruelly snatched scarcely an hour ago, or the immediate execution of this villain, this low circus actor, whose very appearance brands him as guilty. As for you—”

  “Just a minute,” Freddy interrupted. “Guilty of what? As far as I can make out, you object that we were snoring. Well, go on away home and you won’t hear us. Anyway, we don’t either of us snore, do we, Willy?”

  “Certainly don’t,” said the boa. “Freddy, can’t you get rid of these people? I’d like to go back to sleep. Yes, and I’ll snore if I want to, too, and how do you like that, rooster?” He darted his head at Charles and his pointed tongue flickered in and out so rapidly that the rooster felt a little dizzy, watching it. He backed off.

  “Have a care, sir,” he said. “Let me tell you, I am not to be trifled with. Beware how you arouse my wrath, for within this feathered bosom, sir, beats the heart of a lion, the—”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Freddy, “or you’ll get a wallop on your feathered bosom with this broomstick. Now clear out, both of you.”

  Menaced with the broom, Charles withdrew into the night, still making courageous noises. But Henrietta, who had recovered her breath, said: “I’m not leaving here until you do something about this, Freddy. Now you listen to me. You know the revolving door that Mr. Bean had put in the hen house last year—well, a little while ago it squeaked and woke me up. Little Broiler had been sleeping on the perch beside me, and he wasn’t there. I looked all around, and then I discovered Chiquita was missing, too.

  “Freddy, it’s a long time since anything like this has happened. Not since Simon and his family of rats lived under the barn. But you went and invited this snake to visit you; I must say, I thought you had better sense. Of all the criminally stupid things to do—”

  “Oh, now, wait a minute!” Willy put in. “I didn’t eat your squawking brats—I beg your pardon, your sweet little feathered angels—since that’s what you seem to be accusing me of. Good heavens, after all I had at the party, do you think I’d want a mouthful of bones and feathers for dessert?”

  “Bones and feathers indeed!” Charles exclaimed. “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head. If you think you can come here and insult my family—”

  “Oh, shut up, Charles,” Freddy said. “He didn’t come here to insult ’em or to eat ’em. He came here as my guest to have a good time. Will you tell me how, even if he’d wanted to, he could have got into the hen house and eaten Chiquita and Broiler?”

  “How!” Henrietta exclaimed. “Why, you know that revolving door. There’s no way of locking it. You push it and it just goes round and then you’re inside. All he had to do was to—was to—” She stopped short.

  “Yeah,” said Freddy. “All he had to do was get in. And if you can tell me how a fifteen-foot snake can get in through a revolving door—”

  “Oh, my goodness!” said Henrietta, and put one claw up to cover her face. “Oh! Oh, I could die of shame!” Then she put her claw down and resolutely faced Willy. “Sir, how can you ever forgive me! To accuse you of such murderous conduct! But I was so worried—” She broke off, then gave a loud squawk. “But what am I saying! I am worried! Chiquita! Little Broiler! Then where are they? Charles, do something!”

  “Yes, my dear; yes.” Charles stepped forward, the picture of quiet efficiency. “Just leave it to me.” He bowed to Willy. “We ask your pardon, sir, for our suspicions. Groundless suspicions, as we should have realized. But we were naturally somewhat upset—”

  “Somewhat upset!” Henrietta cackled. “Somewhat! When some monster has kidnapped and probably devoured two of our children! You ninnyhammer! You numbskull! You fine-feathered windbag! Go out there and find them!”

  Charles had no desire to go stumbling about in the night in search of some chicken-eating monster. Anyway, how was he to find his children if they had already been devoured? He hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other. But Willy came to the rescue. “Well,” he said resignedly, “I’m broad awake now—don’t suppose I’ll get asleep again very easily. I’ll go with you, Charles. I don’t believe there’s any monster around. We’ll probably find that those two have just stepped out to get a little air.”

  At another time Henrietta would have taken this remark as reflecting on her housekeeping, by suggesting that the hen house was a little stuffy—as, of course, with Charles and Henrietta and thirty-five children in it, it certainly was. But now she only said: “That’s very kind of you.” Then she turned to Freddy. “Will you come over to the hen house? Maybe there’ll be some clues.”

  So Freddy got his flashlight and his magnifying glass, and he put on his Sherlock Holmes cap with the peak in front and the one in back; and then after a moment’s thought he hooked his false beard over his ears. “Because,” he said vaguely, “you never know what you may run into.” Really, of course, he was just playing The Great Detective to an imaginary audience.

  Not that there’s any harm in that. A lot of his best detective work had been done when he was pretending in this way.

  CHAPTER

  7

  It was plain that since the revolving door of the hen house was only large enough to let chickens go in and out, the kidnapper must have been a small animal.

  “Might be a weasel,” Freddy said. “We cleaned all the rats out of this neighborhood several years ago.” He turned on his flashlight and began to examine the door, and at once all the thirty-three remaining chickens began a great fluttering and squawking. So Henrietta went inside to quiet them.

  Freddy went on with his examination. He turned the door slowly, and with flashlight and magnifying glass went over every inch of the four leaves. Then he looked around on the ground. He got as far inside the door as he could, which wasn’t very far, because only his head would go in. “H’m,” he said. “Ha!” And then he gave a screech that could have been heard for half a mile.

  Charles and Willy were standing back, watching the great detective do his stuff. Willy’s expression was awestruck—or would have been, if a snake can express such an emotion. It was really just snakelike. Not that he knew what Freddy was doing. But it astonished him that Freddy should do anything.

  Charles, too, watched attentively, but with a patronizing air, nodding now and then to himself as if saying: “Ah, yes, that’s very well done; that’s just as I would have done it.” Though the rooster of course knew no more than the snake what Freddy was up to. He couldn’t very well, because as a matter of fact Freddy didn’t know himself. He was just doing his Big Detective act.

  When Freddy screeched, Willy said excitedly: “Golly, he must have found something.”

  “Possibly a clue,” said the rooster. “Very capable fellow, Freddy—very. One of my—” Then he stopped. He had intended to say: “One of my most promising pupils,” but then he remembered that Willy had known Freddy long enough not to be taken in by such a boast.

  Freddy, however, had not found a clue. If you stick your head in a revolving door, and don’t go all the way in, and then if somebody tries to come out from the other side, and pushes, your head will be caught and you won’t be able to get it out until they stop pushing. This was what had happened. Henrietta had started out, and when Freddy got caught and yelled, she pushed harder than ever, so as to get out and see what was going on. The louder he yelled the harder she pushed, and if Willy hadn’t grabbed the flashlight and turned it on the pig, so she could see through the glass how she was squeezing his neck between the edge of the door and the jamb, she might have injured him seriously.

  When he got loose, Freddy had
to lie down to get his breath. Henrietta stood beside him and fanned him with a wing, and she said: “I’m very sorry, Freddy. But why didn’t you call to me?”

  “Call!” he exclaimed. “You can’t call when you’re being choked to death.”

  “Nonsense!” said the hen. “You couldn’t have been choked much, the way you were bellowing. Anybody’s being choked can’t even squeak.”

  “Bellowing!” said Freddy indignantly. “How could I bellow when … Why, look at my neck!”

  There were indeed marks on each side of Freddy’s neck, but when Henrietta brushed them with her wing, they disappeared. “Just dust from the edge of the door,” she said. “I guess you were more frightened than hurt, Freddy.”

  “All right! All right!” Freddy got up. “If that’s the thanks I get—”

  The general disturbance and Freddy’s yells had waked up some of the other farm animals, and now Jinx and Mrs. Wiggins and the two dogs, Robert and Georgie, came over to the hen house to see what was going on.

  Since there was no sign of the robber, nor of the vanished chickens, Freddy asked the dogs to sniff around and see if they could get the scent of any stranger. If they could, it might be possible to track down the kidnapper and restore the chickens to the bosom of their family. That is, if they hadn’t been eaten up.

  Since there were no feathers around, it was certain that they hadn’t been eaten on the spot, and it seemed likely then that the thief intended to take them to some quiet place where feathers wouldn’t be noticed. So Robert and Georgie sniffed around hopefully. Finally Georgie announced that he thought he’d picked up a strange scent, and he called the others to see if they could detect anything.

  Jinx said he thought there was a slight smell of marshmallows. Freddy said the predominant smell was old dusty carpets, though there was a faint undertone of boiled cabbage. Willy couldn’t smell anything.

  “Well, I don’t believe any kidnapper ever smelled of marshmallows and carpets and cabbage,” Mrs. Wiggins said. “Let me smell.” She gave a couple of strong sniffs, but she blew her breath out instead of drawing it in and raised so much dust that it set them all sneezing.