Ginger Pye (17 page)

Wally stood in their path and Jerry and Rachel smiled at him, they were so glad to see him and not the real Unsavory. No, they would not care to encounter the real Unsavory all by themselves over here on Second Avenue even though they were fairly

near a streetlamp and not an awfully long way from the house of Judge Ball, the most important man in Cranbury. It would be hard to think of a more important man than Judge Ball in Cranbury and they had dusted his pew once whether he knew it or not.

Wally did not seem as glad to see them as they were to see him. He did not return their smile. And then on third sight, they saw that Wally didn't have a yellow hat on after all. He had no hat on. He was bareheaded. Were they just so eager to see the yellow hat they had begun imagining they saw yellow hats all over the place? That's what they wondered.

Wally snarled, "What are you doing over here? What are you snooping around for over here anyway? Didn't I tell you I'd sick my hound on you if I ever caught you over here?"

"We're not snooping. We're getting wood and we're looking for our dog," said Rachel indignantly.

Jerry clenched his fists. He was not the sort of boy to ever say ouch and now he was trying to remember the one, two, threes of self-protection that tall Sam Doody had taught him. It looked as though he might have to put his knowledge into effect for the first time on Wally Bullwinkle.

But Wally did not give Jerry a chance even to warm up. He gave their wood a good kick so they
would have to gather it and pile it up again, and then he raced off toward his house a few doors up the street. He was gone.

"He's mean," said Rachel as they stacked the new wood up again.

Jerry said nothing. He couldn't understand what had got into Wally. What'd he have to act like this for? That was what Jerry wondered.

"I thought he had a yellow hat on, when I first saw him," said Jerry.

"I did, too," said Rachel.

"But he didn't have a hat on at all," said Jerry.

"Unless he threw it in the bushes," said Rachel.

"I didn't see him flip it off or pick it up or anything," said Jerry, puzzled.

"You know what?" said Rachel. "I think there is a secret society of mean people that wear funny yellow hats. Unsavory is one and perhaps is the head man. And Wally Bullwinkle makes two. There may be others."

"Jiminy crickets," said Jerry, appalled at the prospect. "Still," he said, "we will always know our yellow hat from all others because of the mark Dick Badger put in it."

"Yes," said Rachel. "Unless, as in
The Tinder Box,
the mean people with the yellow hats have the
sense to put red marks in all of them. The way to tell have they done this or not is for you to look in Wally's hat, if he ever wears it to school and hangs it on the peg. If he has a yellow hat, that is. If his yellow hat has a red mark in it, you will know all the yellow-hat people have done the same thing, put red marks in their hats, to throw us off the track. But you can try to get it out of Wally who the head man, Unsavory, is."

"Oh," said Jerry tiredly. "That's fairy-tale stuff." He was remembering the poison tomatoes and Rachel's unreasonable reasonableness and he was reminding himself, the earnest way she was talking, he should be on guard.

As they turned down Second Avenue, starting for home, a little terrier, black-and-white and full-grown, came running out of a yard barking at them. No doubt this was the dog Jerry had heard before, they thought dolefully. Probably here they were, spending all their time looking for Ginger over in this part of town, when all the while he might be over in a completely different section. Hereafter they would think of new and far places to go and search.

"You know," said Rachel. "Ginger came to be a member of the family on Labor Day, or just before Labor Day anyway. He found you in school the day
before Columbus Day. He was stolen on Thanksgiving Day. Maybe he will come home on Christmas Day. Maybe he is a sort of a holiday dog."

"M-m-m," said Jerry. Christmas was not very far away. But it was too far to consider Ginger being gone all that time more. In silence they left the skeleton house far behind and went home with their wood, their breath blowing behind them in gusts in the crisp fresh wind that had arisen. The wind, at any rate, broke the silence and sent dry boughs creaking and bending and the sign in front of the drugstore swaying and rocking on its hinges.

There might be something in what Rachel said, a holiday dog,
thought Jerry. He could see no catch in that.
He might come home for Christmas. He might.

When they reached home they got out one of their drawings of Unsavory, the villain. They had colored his hat yellow as they did in all the pictures. Now they wished the person they had seen tonight had been the real villain instead of Wally, just a boy in Jerry's class. If it had been Unsavory, they might have their puppy back by now. To think there was more than one yellow hat of this sort in town! If Wally had had a yellow hat on, that is, and it wasn't a case of their just having yellow hats on the brain. Then they would have one less clue. In fact
the only clue they would have left then, aside from their drawing, was the red mark Dick Badger had put in the real hat. Even at that, Wally might have been playing around at the res' that day and Dick might have put the red mark in his hat and not in that of Unsavory at all.

Well, as Rachel had suggested, the way to tell whether it had been Wally and not the real Unsavory at the res', was for Jerry, the first chance he got, to examine Wally's yellow hat—if Wally did have a yellow hat, that is, and it was not a case of hats on the brain tonight.

That was what they decided to do, they told one another, as they got out their papers and pencils and crayons, pushed everything off the square dining room table, and began to draw a new funny paper of the unsavory character. In this one, they had him being the head man of a band of yellow-hat mean men, as Rachel had suggested he might be, and in the distance the Secret Service men were coming.

Wally never wore any hat to school except an old brown worsted one. "We must have had yellow hats on the brain that night at the skeleton house," said Jerry to Rachel.

"Yes," said Rachel. "Hats on the brain."

Ginger didn't come home for Christmas, and he didn't come home for New Year's, nor for Lincoln's Birthday, nor Washington's Birthday either. If he were a holiday dog, that is a dog for whom important events happened chiefly on holidays, he would have to come home for Easter, Decoration Day, or the Fourth of July. There were not many holidays left in the year.

Now it was the beginning of the Easter vacation. Spring was in the air. Crocuses were coming up and the trees looked ready to bud. Spring, in fact, would burst forth at any moment. What fine trips Jerry and Ginger Pye could be having, now the weather was fine. They could go, not only up to the res' and down to the beach. They could go up East Rock and West Rock and the Sleeping Giant, too.

But Ginger did not come home on Easter and on Monday after Easter, with the house full of fragrant hyacinths, lilies, and tulips, Jerry sat on a stool in the kitchen eating an apple and thinking. He was thinking—here Ginger Pye had found Jerry in the classroom when he was only a little puppy. Yet he, Jerry, couldn't find Ginger, though he was a boy ten years old. And it was not that he didn't think of unusual places to look either. He even looked in the movies.

Whenever Jerry went to the moving pictures, which was usually once a week on Saturday afternoons to see the adventures of Stingaree, he would get a terrific feeling of loneliness if he saw a dog on the screen. The thought had occurred to him that, since Ginger was such a smart dog, some talent scout might have snatched him up and made off with him; and perhaps that was what the man in the yellow hat was, a talent scout now far away in Hollywood with Ginger. Jerry studied all dogs in movies but, so far, none was Ginger.

Rachel sat by the stove. She was watching Jerry eat his apple for Jerry had a way of eating an apple that was altogether different from the way she, or Addie Egan, or anybody else she knew ate apples.

Jerry always carried a jackknife around with him. Usually the jackknife had one half of its bone handle missing, but it cut very well anyway. Her brother always carefully peeled his apple with his jackknife and ate it in neat chunks that he cut off with his knife. Rachel enjoyed the ceremonious, crisp, clean manner of Jerry's apple eating.

Jerry had also first called Rachel's attention to §pple sandwiches. "They are very good," he said.

"An apple sandwich?" asked Rachel in surprise. The image of a large apple in its natural state, bulging between two thin slices of bread, had flashed before her eyes.

"No, foolish," said her brother. And slicing his apple in his same ceremonious way, he had put these crisp slices between two well-buttered slices of bread. He had invited Rachel to have a bite, a
small
bite, and it
was
good. But then, that was when Rachel had been at an age when alphabet soup, animal crackers, two yolks in the egg, watching her mother spell
Rachel
in Karo syrup on a piece of bread and butter or on a pancake, were all wonders setting her pondering for a long long time. Well, she still liked all these things, and she particularly enjoyed watching Jerry eating his apple in his special and tidy fashion, as he was doing now.

Jerry said, "I'd like to climb East Rock today." He had it in mind to look for Ginger in far places now. He was tired of looking just in Cranbury.

Rachel said, "So would I."

Jerry said, "Mama. Can we climb East Rock today with Dick Badger and Duke?"

"No," said Mama. "You are all too little to go up there alone."

"We can't ever go anywhere," said Jerry.

"That is nonsense," said Mama, going on with her typing of Papa's latest treatise on birds.

It was nonsense, so Jerry saw no use saying any more. Just then tall Sam Doody came in. He had several pots of geraniums—pink and red ones—in his arms; and he said, here, they could have these because, even after the sick and the hospitals had been taken care of, there had been a few left over at the church. The minister had told him to divide them up between himself, the altar guild, the sexton, and the curate, and who else deserved a few if not Jerry and Rachel Pye, his assistants?

Then Sam Doody said, "I was thinking of going up East Rock today." You would think Sam Doody was a thought reader, a mind reader, a clairvoyant, because that was exactly what Jerry and Rachel had been thinking of. "I have a new camera," he said. "And I want to get some shots. There's a little zoo up there. Did you know that?"

No, Jerry and Rachel had not known that. They just knew that there was this enormous rock called East Rock, and that they had never been up it. Trees grew on the top of East Rock and on three sides of it. But the face itself was nearly four hundred feet high, bare, bald, hard, and copper-colored.

They had seen East Rock from the trolley and
from the train going to Boston, but they had never been up it all the time they lived in Cranbury, which was all their lives. They had never been up West Rock either, a rock very similar on the other side of the city. West Rock had a cave on it, Judges Cave, and they had never been in it either. If Sam Doody took them up East Rock today, he might some other time take them up West Rock, too, to see the cave.

Jerry and Rachel looked at Mama. Surely she would let them go with tall Sam Doody so he could take some shots from up there? And surely Mama did. She even made some sandwiches for them all in a hurry, because after such a climb as going up the Giant Steps, they would certainly be very hungry.

"Giant Steps!" thought Rachel. That sounded the best of all. She asked no questions, for the minute she heard the expression, "Giant Steps," she had already figured out in her mind what they would be like. They would be enormous steps built by and for giants, the biggest steps anyone anywhere could imagine. Could she get up them? She bet she could.

Sam Doody, besides being the tallest boy in Cranbury, had the whitest teeth and the blackest hair, and he was always smiling. Even when he was
just walking along, thinking, he looked as though he was smiling. In addition to being the captain of the high school basketball team, and the boy who kept the church in order, and scout, first class, he had, also, a father who looked like Woodrow Wilson. Besides all this, he took pictures that sometimes won prizes in camera contests. Jerry and Rachel were honored to be asked to go off with him on a picture-taking expedition. They climbed into his old jalopy and off they went, saying nothing in order not to interrupt Sam Doody in his thoughts.