Freddy Goes Camping

by Walter R. Brooks

  It was nearly eleven o’clock when a rabbit came bounding into the cowbarn to announce that a car had stopped just below the First Animal Bank, which was a shed a couple of hundred yards down the Centerboro road. A tall man had got out, had climbed the fence, and, followed by a big gang of rats, was coming towards the barnyard across the fields.

  “OK,” said Freddy. “Now keep quiet, everybody. We mustn’t let ’em think there’s anybody here but Mrs. Bean. Uncle Solomon, suppose you could fly out and keep track of where the rats go?”

  “Very well,” said the owl in his precise little voice. “I am supposing it.”

  “Oh, come on, come on!” said Freddy. “There isn’t time to argue about the way I use words. Go on, do it, will you?”

  “Observe, Freddy,” Uncle Solomon said; “if I tell you to suppose a thing, I am not asking you to do it; I am merely ordering you to imagine that you can do it. If you want me actually to do it, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  Jinx growled at him. “Look, owl,” he said; “suppose I give you a good smack in the beak?”

  Uncle Solomon gave his little crazy laugh. “It is not a supposition that appeals to me,” he said, and spreading his wings, flew out of the door.

  “I don’t know,” said Jinx; “sometimes I wonder how I keep my claws out of that fellow’s tailfeathers, the way he picks at everything you say.”

  “He doesn’t mean anything by it,” said Freddy. “It’s kind of fun, sometimes at that. Only not right now. Quiet, everybody. Not a sound till you get the signal.”

  The animals stood in the door, silently watching. Nothing happened for a minute or two, then Uncle Solomon came floating in through the doorway and lit on Mrs. Wiggins’ shoulder. “He’s up behind the fence, getting into his ghost costume,” he whispered. “The rats will be along in a minute; he told ’em to go into the stable and get to work.”

  Almost immediately there was a rustling and pattering of small feet as the rats, invisible in the darkness, swept by the cowbarn. Then a white figure appeared on the other side of the barnyard, and walked slowly towards the house.

  Georgie began to giggle. “He looks so darn silly!” he whispered. “Can’t I trip him up again, Freddy?”

  “Oh, be still,” Freddy murmured. “You’ve had your fun with him; let Mr. and Mrs. Bean have theirs.”

  Mr. Eha went up to the lighted window. Tap, tap, tap, tap! he rapped on the pane.

  But Mrs. Bean didn’t look up. Her head was bent, her eyes were closed, and her spectacles had slipped down to the end of her nose. “Oh, dear!” Freddy thought. “She wanted so much to see the ghost, and she’s gone to sleep!”

  Mr. Eha took something from under the sheet and reached up to the window. Rap, rap, crash! He broke the pane.

  Mrs. Bean’s head jerked up and she opened her eyes with a start. She looked vaguely around the room but didn’t seem to notice the window. “M’m,” she said. “Must have dropped off.” She gathered up her darning. “Lands sakes, it’s after eleven!”

  Mr. Eha drew a deep breath and let out a long hideous screech. Then he dropped down against the house, out of sight of the window.

  Mrs. Bean didn’t appear startled. She got up and raised the window sash without appearing to see the broken pane, although the glass scrunched under her feet. “Those pesky owls!” she said as she leaned out. “Make such a racket a body can’t get a minute’s quiet!”

  Then Mr. Eha stood up suddenly, so that the cat mask with its ferocious grin was within an inch of her face. “Yaaaaaah!” he yelled.

  Mrs. Bean never batted an eyelash. “Dear me suz!” she said. “Where in tunket did you come from?”

  Mr. Eha seemed taken aback. He hesitated a moment, then he said in a slow hollow voice: “I come from beyond the tomb.”

  “Oh,” she said, “guess you’re one of the Gurney boys from over beyond the cemetery. Well, where’s your manners, young man? If you want something, why don’t you come to the front door like a sensible human being?”

  “I am no human,” he said. “I am a spirit—a messenger from the underworld.”

  “Oh, you’re a ghost,” said Mrs. Bean. “Always seemed like a lonely sort of occupation to me—flitting about wailing in empty houses. Not that the houses are always empty. This one, for instance—it’s been haunted for years. The ghost of Mr. Bean’s grandfather—Bezaliel Bean. Won’t you come in and meet him? Come around to the front door—unless of course you prefer to seep through the keyhole.”

  Mr. Eha hesitated again. Evidently his failure to frighten Mrs. Bean had puzzled him, but he knew she was alone in the house, and he must have thought that if he went in, he would be able to think up something more terrifying. “I will enter,” he said. “Turn the lamp out.”

  From the door of the cowbarn the animals had heard every word. Then as Mr. Eha started around to the front door, Freddy said: “Come on, we can’t miss this. The rats will be busy for some time; we can attend to them later.” So they all crept out and crouched together under the broken window.

  They heard the parlor door creak, and Mrs. Bean say: “Don’t like much light, you say? Bezaliel doesn’t either. I’ve turned the lamp down a ways. Sit down over there. It’s pretty late, but I’m not a mite sleepy, and we can have a good talk. Now just who did you say you were?”

  “Woman,” said the ghost, raising his voice so it boomed through the house, “let us have no more of this silly chatter. I come to warn you. This house is doomed! Doomed, as are those who dwell in it. Tremble—and depart from it while there is yet time.”

  “Dear me,” said Mrs. Bean, “you seem very depressed.” She smiled at him. “You do remind me a lot of Bezaliel—he always talks like that. Let’s see if he can’t cheer you up.” She raised her voice. “Bezaliel, are you there?”

  There were three heavy knocks on the ceiling.

  Freddy had got his eyes up over the level of the windowsill. He saw Mr. Eha give a start, and half rise.

  “Grandfather is a little shy with strangers,” said Mrs. Bean. She got up and opened the door into the front hall. “Come down, Bezaliel,” she called. “You’ve got company.”

  There was silence for a minute, then a deep groaning voice somewhere in the darkness of the upper hall said: “I come!”

  And then Freddy himself got a real scare. The parlor door was a black oblong, through which he could just dimly make out the shapes of the front stairs banisters. And in front of the banisters something vaguely white fluttered and danced a spectral dance—and groaned again: “I come!”

  That finished Mr. Eha. He gave a very unghostly yell and leaped up and dove straight through the window—and landed scrunch on top of Cecil, the porcupine, knocking the wind out of him. It was in a way unfortunate that he fell on Cecil. If he had landed on one of the other animals there would have been a second or two before he could get to his feet, and they might have taken him prisoner. But he rebounded from Cecil as a man rebounds from a chair seat on which a tack has been placed. For Cecil was worse than a whole box of tacks; dozens of his sharp, barbed quills were driven into Mr. Eha’s stomach, and the pain lifted him from the ground and fairly shot him off across the barnyard before the animals could grab him.

  He landed scrunch on top of Cecil, the porcupine.

  Things happened very quickly after that. “Don’t chase him!” Freddy shouted. “He’s got a gun. Peter, Bill, and the cows—cut across lots down to the bank; you can beat him to his car. The rest of us to the barn!”

  Boom! went Mr. Bean’s shotgun from an upper window, and then boom! from the second barrel, and at the second boom Mr. Eha, just climbing the fence, gave another yell and leaped in the air. But he kept on going.

  Freddy and the others had already surrounded the barn, which squeaked and rustled excitedly. There was a scrabbling on the roof, and a rat dropped from the eaves and scurried off in the long grass before anybody could seize him.

  “You’re surrounded, Simon,” Freddy called. “Come out, one b
y one.”

  Nobody answered. There was a fluttering and a thin shriek from the roof, and Uncle Solomon’s neat little laugh floated down to them. “Would anyone else like his whiskers trimmed?”

  “Last call, Simon,” said Freddy.

  This time Simon answered. “Come in and get us, you big lopsided fat snoop!”

  “Tut, tut, such language!” said Freddy. “OK, Robert, try the sprayer.”

  So Robert dragged the sprayer up to the door and stuck the nozzle inside and squeezed the trigger. The ammonia did the trick. There was a great outburst of sneezing and coughing and wheezing in the stable, and then the rats charged out. Luckily for them, Sniffy Wilson and his family had been set to guard one or two weak places in the side walls, where Freddy had felt that they might be able to break out. So there were in front of them only Jinx and Freddy and John and the two dogs, with a dozen or more woodchucks and squirrels.

  There were probably twenty rats in the gang, and rats are wicked fighters, especially in the dark. But at that moment Mr. Bean came out of the kitchen door and snapped on the big porch light, so that the barnyard was almost as bright as day. There was a sprawl of snapping and snarling in front of the stable door as the animals leaped and slashed and clawed and bit. Freddy spied Simon, and with a lucky snap of his jaws caught him by the back of the neck, but was immediately attacked from behind by two other rats, who climbed up on his shoulders and bit savagely. He squealed and reared up and fell over backward on them, but he had dropped Simon, who slipped away. The rats he had fallen on, however, were out cold.

  Freddy looked around for another enemy, but the rats, half strangled by the ammonia fumes, were more anxious to escape than to fight, and except for half a dozen who had been knocked out or captured, were in full retreat. Freddy saw them scattering for cover, but he was too winded to give chase. He saw Simon galloping along in the lead, and as he looked, the old rat climbed up on a fence post. “We’ll be back, pig!” he squeaked defiantly.

  And then …

  Boom! went Mr. Bean’s shotgun. And Simon toppled and slid slowly to the ground.

  There was a minute’s silence.

  “You know,” said Freddy, “I’m kind of sorry to see that. Old Simon!”

  “He was a liar and a sneak, and he got what was coming to him,” said Jinx shortly.

  “Maybe. But he wasn’t a coward. That’s more than you can say for most crooks.—Hey, what’s that?” A faint cry for help had come to them.

  They went over to the fence. Simon lay on his side in the grass. He opened one eye. “Tell old Bean,” he murmured, “to load with buckshot next time. You can’t kill a rat with that little stuff.” Then he closed his eyes again.

  It was Jinx who picked him up and carried him carefully into the cowbarn, where he was laid out beside the other casualties of the fight. Mrs. Bean came out with iodine and bandages and a large bottle of cod liver oil, which was her favorite remedy for everything from nosebleed to measles, and she dabbed and bound and dosed the animals until as Georgie said, gritting his teeth as she put some iodine on a torn ear, it would have been more fun if they’d all been killed.

  “Stop talking and open your mouth!” said Mrs. Bean, and popped in a tablespoonful of oil.

  Counting the two that Freddy had fallen on, eight rats had been taken prisoner. There had been several teeth knocked out in the fight. One squirrel had lost the end of his tail, and there were any number of bites to be dressed. Cecil of course was badly shaken, and had lost thirty-four quills. And Sniffy Wilson’s daughter, Aroma, who had not been in the fight at all, had fainted away from excitement.

  But of course Simon was the most seriously wounded. “Hold the candle here, Freddy,” said Mrs. Bean. “Good land, he’s as full of birdshot as a muffin is of blueberries. We’ll have to dig ’em out.”

  “Leave ’em in, ma’am,” said the rat. “They’ll bring me up nearer the right fighting weight the next time I tackle that pig.”

  “We’ll dig ’em out,” said Mrs. Bean, and went to work at it.

  “Ouch!” said Simon. “I guess you enjoy this kind of work.”

  “I don’t enjoy hurting anybody, even a rat,” she said. “I’d help anybody that was sick. Except maybe a mosquito,” she added thoughtfully.

  Bill, Peter and the cows came back presently and said that they’d found Mr. Eha’s car down by the bank and had turned it over in the ditch, but had seen nothing of Eha himself. “Smart guy,” said Bill. “He knew we’d go down there and probably went home cross country.” “I wish we’d captured him,” said Mrs. Wiggins. “I don’t suppose we can have him arrested; we haven’t a mite of proof that he’s really Mr. Anderson.”

  “We can prove that’s his car,” said Peter.

  “He’ll just say somebody stole it and ditched it,” Freddy said.

  “Come, come,” said a gruff voice and there was Mr. Bean in the doorway. “Time you animals were in bed. Mrs. B., if you’ve got ’em fixed up, you’d better be seekin’ your downy couch yourself.”

  The animals grinned happily at him, for they knew that when he used such flowery language he was in pretty high spirits.

  “Well, Mr. B.,” Mrs. Bean replied, “seems to me you could say a word of thanks to your animals. After the brave fight they put up to keep a roof over our heads.”

  “Roof’s over their heads too, ain’t it?” he said. Then he stood up straight and thought and thought, and cleared his throat about fifteen times, and at last he said: “Animals!” After that he didn’t say anything more for quite a long time, but finally he did make a sort of speech.

  “Animals,” he said, “you don’t want thanks and you don’t want praise. You did just what I expected of you, and that’s the best praise I can give you. Because I guess I expect more of you than Schemerhorn or Witherspoon or Macy or any of these other farmers expect of their animals. Maybe you expect more of me, too. But don’t go expectin’ a lot of high-class oratory. If that’s what you want, go live with Senator Blore, out on the hill t’other side of Centerboro. He’s given away free, gratis and for nothing more fancy highfalutin language than any man in the county. But he never gave away anything that cost him more than maybe a sore throat. You folks that look to me, you’ll get taken care of without any fuss and feathers, and …” He stopped. “There I go, talking politics!” he said. “Well, I’m proud of you … that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  The animals didn’t applaud much because they felt that Mr. Bean wouldn’t like it. But they all felt very warm inside. And Jinx called out: “How about a word of thanks for Grandfather Bezaliel?”

  Mr. Bean stared at the cat a moment, then from behind his whiskers came the fizzing sound that the animals had come to learn was laughter. “So you liked the old rapscallion, did you?” he said. “Well, I guess old Bezaliel has gone back to his home, wherever his home is. But he’ll always come back if we need him. Eh, grandfather?” And the groaning voice came from behind the whiskers: “Whenever you say, grandson.”

  The animals yelled delightedly, but after a minute he held up his hand. “Time to go to bed,” he said, and stumped off towards the house.

  Mrs. Bean followed after a minute, and Freddy walked across the barnyard with her. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, “but I just wanted to know how Mr. Bean made that ghost dance out in the hall. It was ten times as scary as Mr. Eha, with all his false faces and yelling.”

  “Of course it was,” said Mrs. Bean. “False faces and yelling make you jump, but a little flutter of white in the darkness, when you know there’s nothing there, makes you curl right up inside. It was just a shirt of Mr. Bean’s; he tied a string to it and let it down from the upper hall. And we knew Mr. Eha was deathly afraid of ghosts.”

  “How did you know that?” Freddy asked.

  “Why, because he is so sure that everybody else is afraid of them. If you like something, or want something, or are afraid of something yourself, you’re pretty apt to think that everybody else in the world likes or wants
or is afraid of the same thing. You like poetry, and so you think everybody else does too. Though I expect you’ve found out by this time that there are some folks that think it’s all a lot of foolishness.”

  “Come along, Mrs. B.” said Mr. Bean from the doorway. Then he fumbled in his pocket and held out something in his hand to Freddy. “Some of that fudge,” he said. “I brought a little with me, to eat before I went to bed. But I’d like you to have it.” Then he whacked Freddy on the back. “Go on, now. Go to bed.”

  Chapter 15

  Freddy was up early next morning. It was a dull drizzly day, and he shivered as he hurried down to the stable to take a look at the prisoners. They were locked up in the box stall next to Hank’s, and guarded by Jacob, the wasp, and two of his cousins. Simon was asleep on an old grain bag and breathing heavily, but the others were awake, and they stared at the pig anxiously with their beady black eyes, but didn’t say anything.

  Jacob flew down and lit on Freddy’s nose. “Everything’s under control,” he said. “Caught one of ’em starting to gnaw through the wall a while back, but I guess he won’t do any more gnawing for a while. Had to give him a little touch of the old needle. My, my; such language as he used!

  “Tough, he was, too,” Jacob went on. “Afraid I blunted my sting on his thick skull.” He slid it out and placed the point on the tip of Freddy’s snout. “Mind if I just try it a mite here? I won’t hurt you.”

  Freddy thought Jacob was joking, but it was hard to tell, for wasps only have one expression on their faces, and even that one doesn’t express anything. “No!” he said. “Lay off, Jacob!” He stared apprehensively at the wasp, and some of the rats began to giggle.

  Jacob leaped into the air and droned in a circle above their heads. “None of that!” he buzzed. “You show a proper respect for your betters if you know what’s good for you.”

  “Oh, please, Mr. Jacob,” said one of them; “we didn’t—we weren’t laughing at you. It was Mr. Freddy—he looked cross-eyed at you.”