Freddy the Pied Piper (3 page)

The animals began opening their valentines. The two ducks, Alice and Emma, had one addressed to both of them. It read:

Oh, Emma, Alice, Alice, Emma
,

I'm in a terrible dilemma.

You're both so fair, I can't decide

Which one I'd like to make my bride.

I cannot think which one I'd druther
,

For each is lovelier than the other.

So Alice, Emma, Emma, Alice
,

I pray you do not bear me malice
,

But share this poor devoted heart
,

Cut right in two by Cupid's dart.

They quacked excitedly over it. “Oh, sister, what a lovely valentine!” Emma exclaimed. “I wonder who could have sent it!”

“Whoever it is,” said Bill, the goat, “he isn't taking any chances. The guy ought to make up his mind.”

“I expect it's that brown duck over at Witherspoons',” said Georgie, the little brown dog. “I've seen him wandering around on the edge of the woods above the duck pond a number of times. I expect he's too bashful to come down and call.”

“If there's one thing I can't abide,” said Mrs. Wiggins, the cow, “it's a bashful duck. Bashfulness is bad enough in other animals, but a duck looks so silly shuffling his feet and rolling his eyes and peeking out from behind things.”

“I don't agree with you, dear Mrs. Wiggins,” said Emma. “Most of the young people today are so bold and forward—it is very refreshing to find one who doesn't feel so sure of himself.”

“He isn't young,” said Georgie. “He's quite a middle-aged duck.”

“Sillier than ever,” said Mrs. Wiggins, but Alice and Emma didn't agree; they felt that his bashfulness was merely a sign that he had been well brought up; and when the other animals realized that they were really much interested in this mysterious suitor they didn't say any more.

Freddy had opened his valentines. They were mostly jokes and verses from other animals on the farm. He could guess pretty well who had sent them. Perhaps the nicest was a very pretty one which had a five dollar bill pinned to it. It was from Mrs. Winfield Church, a rich friend of Freddy's, who lived in Centerboro. She was a very generous woman and always sent the animals presents on Christmas and on their birthdays, but Freddy was her special favorite because he had helped her out several times when she had been in difficulties, and almost every holiday she sent him something. Usually it was money, because she said: “It's hard to know just what to give a pig. But money is always useful.” This had been going on for some time, and Freddy was by now a pretty well-to-do animal.

Among the valentines was even one for Jerry. It read:

Here's to you, Jerry; we all join together

In welcoming you to our home.

You came all this way in the worst kind of weather
,

For it couldn't be colder in Nome.

You had no red flannels to keep yourself warm

And you had no galoshes or hat
,

But you plugged right along in the teeth of the storm
,

And we surely admire you for that.

So you're here, and we're glad, and we all wans, to say
,

Though of valentines we've quite a few
,

The best of the valentines we'll get today

Is from our friend Boomschmidt—it's YOU!

Jerry read it, and then he said: “Well!” And then he read it again and said: “Well … my goodness!” And then he sniffed damply and blew his nose several times, though whether it was tears coming to his eyes or just his cold, nobody could tell. Rhinoceroses aren't usually very emotional.

Freddy's mind was pretty well occupied with Mr. Boomschmidt and his troubles, and he wanted to talk them over with his friend Jinx. But the cat wasn't around.

Mrs. Wiggins laughed. “Oh, that Jinx!” she said. “He's so wrapped up in what he calls ‘his art' that he's hardly stuck his nose outdoors in two weeks. He's probably up in his studio.”

So Freddy went back into the stable and climbed the steep stairs into the loft where Mr. Bean's Uncle Ben had once had his workshop. Jinx had set up an easel there and had cleared a space on the workbench for his paints and brushes, and around the walls were hung the pictures he had painted. Most of them were portraits of Jinx himself—sitting up, lying down, crouched ready to pounce—but all looking very handsome and intelligent and at least twice life size. On the easel was a half-finished picture of Jinx, and beside it stood a mirror in front of which lay the cat, apparently asleep.

“Hi, Jinx!” Freddy shouted. And as the cat gave a start and opened his eyes, he said: “Asleep, hey? So that's what you do up here.”

“
Hi, Jinx!” Freddy shouted.

“I was not!” Jinx said crossly. “I was looking in the glass—painting my picture.”

“Oh, sure,” said Freddy. “Painting with your eyes shut.”

“Of course I had my eyes shut,” said the cat. “That's the way they are to be in the picture. It's a picture of me asleep.”

“You can't ever see what you look like asleep,” Freddy said, “any more than you can see between your shoulder blades.”

“I can see between my shoulder blades,” said the cat, and he twisted his head around to show the pig.

“Oh, all right,” Freddy said. “Look, Jinx. You can't see yourself in the glass unless your eyes are open. So if you want to paint your picture with your eyes shut—”

“I shut 'em, and then I open 'em very quick,” Jinx said. “I open 'em just before my reflection opens 'em, so that just for a second my reflection has his eyes shut and I can see what it looks like. See?”

“No,” said Freddy, “but it doesn't make any difference.” He looked around. “You must be awful stuck on yourself to paint nothing but your own portrait all the time.”

“'Tisn't that, Freddy,” Jinx said. “There isn't anything else to paint. None of you other animals will pose for me. Hank gets cramps in his legs, and Mrs. Wiggins goes to sleep, and—”

“You could paint landscapes,” Freddy said.

“What landscapes? Look out that window and show me a landscape I could paint.”

Freddy looked. It was true there was very little to see. Just the broad expanse of white, broken only by the line of a fence and a tree trunk or two. Then he looked around at the one or two little landscapes Jinx had done last fall before the snow came, when he first started painting. Each of them had a little label under it—“Woodland Peace,” or “Giants of the Forest,” or “Moon Shadows.” This last showed the pigpen in the foreground, and Freddy grinned. “Very fanciful titles,” he said. “When the moon comes over the pigpen—we could make a song of it. But I don't agree with you that there's nothing to paint. Do a snow scene.” He propped up a blank canvas board on the easel, then with a brush made two horizontal lines for the fence and above them, two thicker vertical lines for the tree trunks. “There you are,” he said. “There's your landscape. Slap in a little blue sky above it and you've got ‘Winter Fields' or something, and my goodness, you can paint twenty of them in an hour and not use up more than a couple squeezes of paint.”

“Golly, I believe you've got something there,” said Jinx. He backed off and squinted at the picture with his head on one side. “Yes, sir, that's art with a capital A.”

“Pooh,” said Freddy. “That's nothing. But look here, Jinx. I need your help.” And he told him about Mr. Boomschmidt.

Jinx was interested at once. He tossed aside his palette and brushes and sat down and listened intently, and then he scratched his head. He didn't scratch it as you or I would scratch our heads—he scratched it with his left hind foot, but it meant the same thing—that he was thinking deeply. And at last he said: “I'm afraid you've tackled a job that's too big even for you, Freddy. To get even a little one-horse circus like Mr. Boomschmidt's on the road again would take a lot more money than we could ever raise. Money to hire the clowns and the bareback riders and the men to put up the tents and look after the animals, and more money to buy the food for them all. And if you did all that, you still wouldn't have the animals. According to Jerry, they're scattered all over the country by this time.”

“Maybe so,” Freddy said. “But I've got to try. Mr. Boomschmidt is my friend, and so are Leo and the others. But of course if you don't want to help—”

“Who said I didn't?” Jinx demanded. “We've always tackled things together, haven't we? I'm with you from whiskers to tail, Freddy.” He knocked his unfinished portrait into a corner. “Kind of sick of looking at my own face in a mirror for weeks on end, to tell you the truth.”

“I didn't suppose you ever got sick of that,” said Freddy with a grin. For Jinx was proud of his good looks.

But the cat shook his head. “To be quite frank with you, Freddy, I didn't suppose so either. Shucks, everybody likes to—well, let's be honest—everybody likes to admire himself. You do it, I do it, everybody does it. It's animal nature. But I don't know.” He looked at his friend with a puzzled frown. “It's all right for a while. You keep finding new things that you like—the way your eyes sparkle, or how noble you look when you hold your head back a little. But pretty soon you begin to notice other things. Maybe it's a little squint in one eye, or a kind of foolish expression when you smile. And you sort of begin to wonder …” He stopped and shook his head again. “It don't do to study anything too long, even your own face,” he said. Then he shook himself and said: “Well, what do we do first?”

“The first thing,” said Freddy, “is to go down to Centerboro. I've got a sort of plan, and we'll see if it works.”

Chapter 3

Half an hour later Freddy and Jinx set out on the long walk to Centerboro. Freddy hadn't been able to get back to the pigpen, and he bundled up in an old shawl that he borrowed from Mrs. Bean. As he trudged down the long groove made by the snow plow with Jinx at his side, he looked like a little old woman out for a walk with her pet cat. Jinx of course had a warm coat of his own fur and didn't need anything else.

When they reached Centerboro they went right to the bank, and Freddy asked for the president, Mr. Weezer. As the founder and president of the first animal bank in the country, Freddy was well known in banking circles, and they were shown at once into Mr. Weezer's office.

The banker greeted them cordially, shook hands with Jinx, and then leaning back in his chair tapped the side of his sharp nose with his glasses and said: “And now, gentlemen, what can I do for you?”

So Freddy told him about Mr. Boomschmidt. “And we'd like your advice, sir, as to what we can do to help him get his circus started again.”

“H'm,” said Mr. Weezer. “Ha. I know Boomschmidt. A fine man. But it takes a lot of money to get a circus going. Even if he had all his animals.”

“A thousand dollars?” Freddy asked.

“More than that. Well, perhaps if he was willing to start small, a thousand would do it.”

“Would your bank lend him a thousand dollars?” Freddy asked.

Mr. Weezer shook his head. “Couldn't do it. If it was my money, I might take a chance. Boomschmidt's a good fellow, and I'd like to help him. But the money we have in this bank isn't mine; it belongs to the people who have left it here for safe keeping. So when I lend any it has to be on good security.”

“What's security?” Jinx asked.

“Oh, you know, Jinx,” Freddy said. “When you borrowed twenty-five cents from the First Animal Bank to buy that catnip mouse, you had to leave your best collar with the bank. Then if you couldn't pay the twenty-five cents back, the bank could sell the collar and get its money. You put up the collar as security.”