Freddy and the Perilous Adventure (4 page)

“I'm hungry,” said Emma.

“My goodness, I hope there's something to eat here,” said Freddy. He rummaged about. “Cans!” he said disgustedly. “Soup, beans, corned beef. Can opener, too. But what good is that?” For though he was very clever with his trotters, and could run a typewriter and even write with a pencil, he couldn't hold a can opener with them. “Well, we've got that bag of candy, anyway.”

So they ate the candy for supper. They didn't talk much while they were eating it, but when they could open their jaws again Freddy said: “It's going to be cold up here, and there's nothing more to see tonight, but we've got a blanket, and I vote we get under it and go to sleep.”

So they did. And Freddy was just dozing off when he felt a tickle in his ear and Mr. Webb's voice said: “Getting kind of chilly for mother out there, so we thought we'd crawl in with you if it's all right.”

“Sure, sure,” said the pig. “Only thing is, aren't you afraid you'll get squshed? If I was to roll over in the night—”

“Well, we'd rather not be squshed, and that's a fact,” said Mr. Webb drily. “But you've got good roomy ears, Freddy. Suppose we sleep in one of them? We'll be very quiet.”

“Yeah?” said Freddy. “And suppose you get to thrashing around in your sleep? Suppose you fell down into my ear and couldn't get out? It makes me shudder to think of it. No, I'm sorry but that's just out. Hold on, though. Ducks don't lie down when they sleep; they just stick their heads under their wings. Suppose you get in with them—under the other wing? Nice and snug, and no danger. Real feather bed.”

So the Webbs fixed it up with Alice to get in under her left wing, and then they all went to sleep.

When they awoke next morning the balloon was drifting along over rough and heavily wooded country. There were no villages in sight, and only here and there in a clearing a ramshackle house. They were much nearer the ground now, because in the cool night air the gas in the balloon had condensed so that it wasn't as light as it would be later when the sun heated it up again. At least that was how it was explained to Freddy later, though at the time he just thought they had begun to come down. The basket wasn't more than a hundred feet from the ground, though it might as well have been a thousand, Freddy thought, as far as getting out was concerned.

“It's funny,” said Alice; “I wonder if we went over Buffalo in the night? And if we did, I suppose we're in Ohio.”

“It's too rough for Ohio,” said Freddy. “And look—there's a mountain. There aren't any mountains in Ohio. The geography says so.”

“Maybe the geography is wrong,” said Emma. “Dear me, there is the mountain to prove it.”

“It's very odd,” said Alice; “we were going towards the sun when it set last night, and now it's rising and we're still going towards it.”

They puzzled over this for some time, until Emma said excitedly: “Why we're going east! And that's because the wind has changed in the night. It's carrying us in the other direction.”

“Oh,” said Freddy. “Oh, of course. Should have thought of that myself. I expect I would have in a minute, when I got waked up.”

“What you'd better think about when you get waked up,” said Alice, “is where we're going to get breakfast.”

“My goodness!” said Freddy, and fell back against the side of the basket. For if there was anything he
didn't
like it was going without his breakfast. Or for that matter any other meal that it happened to be time for. Or even indeed anything to eat whether it was time for it or not. The world of the sky in which they were adventuring was a wonderful world, but if it was a world without food it was no place for him. “We've got to get down,” he said.

“If we have to get down to get breakfast,” said Alice, “I prefer to go without breakfast. I'm not hungry enough to jump.”

“There's one piece of candy left,” said Emma.

So they decided to divide up the piece of candy, and when they had eaten that they could think about what to do next. But it isn't easy to divide up a piece of molasses candy if you haven't got a knife, or scissors or anything. The ducks took the paper off, and then they each took hold of an end and pulled. They pulled and pulled, but all that happened was that the piece of candy got longer. They pulled it until it stretched from one side of the basket to the other, and then of course they couldn't go any farther. They couldn't stop, either, because they had taken such a firm hold that they couldn't get their bills open again. So Freddy took hold in the middle, and then the ducks ate towards him, and pretty soon they were all sitting there with their noses together, trying to chew. And in that way they ate up the piece of candy.

When they could talk again, Alice said: “Dear me, I wonder why it is that as soon as your jaws get stuck tight together you think of so many important things to say?”

“I did too,” said Freddy. “And now I can't remember any of them.”

“Uncle Wesley always used to say,” quacked Emma, “that most of the things people thought of to say were better left unsaid. He said if you took all the talk that went on on this farm during a year and squeezed it out, you wouldn't get more than two drops of sense.”

“As I remember your uncle,” said Freddy, “he was quite a talker himself.”

“A very fine talker,” said Emma. “He said many wise things.”

“Wise, eh?” said the pig. “You ought to collect them in a book. You could call it ‘Wise-Quacks.' ‘Uncle Wesley's Wise-Quacks.' Hey, that's not bad!”

But the ducks didn't laugh, and Emma said primly: “I don't think Uncle Wesley would like that.”

Freddy tried to explain. “A duck quacks,” he said, “so a duck's wise-crack is a wise-quack. I mean, it's a—”

“Uncle Wesley did not approve of slang,” interrupted Alice. “He said it was the empty rattling of a brain too small for its skull. Were not those his words, sister?”

“His very words,” said Emma.

“And quite right, too,” said Freddy quickly. “Well, let's just—er, drop the whole thing.” He was getting a little tired of Uncle Wesley, whom he remembered as a stout and pompous little duck who had ruled his nieces with a rod of iron. Long after they had grown up, “what Uncle Wesley said” was their law, and they would no more have thought of doing anything of which he disapproved—and he disapproved of practically everything—than they would have thought of becoming burglars.

Freddy remembered something more about Uncle Wesley, too. For a band of the farm animals, who were fond of Alice and Emma and sick of seeing them tyrannized over, had kidnaped him one night and turned him over to an eagle, who for a small consideration had agreed to drop him somewhere in the next county. Freddy had not had a hand in that plot. But with his great detective ability he had of course found out about it, and while he didn't approve of such highhanded action, he didn't make any effort to get Uncle Wesley back. For after all, Alice and Emma would be much happier without him.

But they admired him so intensely that even after his mysterious disappearance had freed them from his tyranny they continued to quack his praises and to do as they thought he would approve. His fearlessness, his polished manners, his high moral standards, his deep wisdom—they praised these things daily. Freddy didn't believe that anybody, even a pig, could reach such a height of perfection.

Chapter 4

As the sun got higher the breeze died down and the balloon hardly seemed to move. It rose higher as the sun got hotter, but it wasn't as high as it had been yesterday, and they could see quite clearly everything that went on below them. Once, when the shadow of the big gas bag drifted across an untidy barnyard, a flock of chickens ran cackling for cover, and a woman came to the house door and stared, shading her eyes with her hand. A little stream ran out of the woods and across the foot of the garden and into the woods again. And in it were what looked like several large powder puffs.

“Ducks!” exclaimed Alice. She leaned over the edge of the basket. “Mercy me, sister, if that doesn't look for all the world like Uncle Wesley!”

“Why, it does indeed,” said Emma. “He has just that same aristocratic way of holding his head. You don't really suppose …?” The ducks stared at each other.

Freddy, who had been hanging on to their tail feathers so they wouldn't fall, tried to look too, but the balloon had drifted on. “It's not likely to be him,” he said. “From this height all ducks look alike.”

“Not Uncle Wesley,” said Emma proudly.

“We have always thought, Freddy,” said Alice, “that if we had come to you when Uncle Wesley first disappeared, you could have restored him to us. But of course then you hadn't taken up detecting.”

“I could probably have found him,” said the pig modestly. “But today, even if he hasn't been—that is, I mean, if he is still, er—”

“There is no need to try to spare our feelings,” said Alice. “We are not afraid to face the dreadful possibilities of what might have happened. If he has not, you mean, been eaten by a fox, or—”

“Oh, sister!” quacked Emma faintly.

“—or a cat,” continued Alice firmly. “But if some such thing had not happened, he would have returned to us, or at least sent some word.”

“Perhaps he got married,” said Freddy.

“Oh, I'm sure he would at least have sent us an announcement,” said Emma.

“We feel,” said Alice, “that he must have set out on some dangerous adventure. Perhaps he did not tell us, because he did not want us to worry. And he was so utterly without fear; he would not have hesitated to fight anything that walks or flies, if he felt he was in the right. Do you remember, Emma, the time he ordered that bull out of the cornfield?”

The ducks went on with their reminiscences of their intrepid uncle, and Freddy stopped listening and leaned over the edge of the basket and watched the scenery and thought about scrambled eggs and hot buttered toast and muffins with jam and other things that the people in the houses below them were probably having for breakfast at that very moment. I don't know that you can blame him. One third of a piece of molasses candy is not a very filling breakfast.

Suddenly a large bird came soaring over the top of a distant hill, then swerved and with powerful wing beats came flying towards them. He was dark, with a white head and tail. “Good gracious,” said Freddy to himself, “an eagle! I do hope it isn't Pinckney. That would be just too much of a coincidence when we've been talking about Uncle Wesley.” For Pinckney was the eagle who had carried the ducks' uncle off.

Like all birds, the eagle was curious, and he wanted to investigate the balloon. Pretty soon the ducks caught sight of him, and with frightened quacks they cowered in the bottom of the basket. The eagle was so close now that they could hear the swish of air made by each down stroke of the great wings. And then he caught sight of Freddy, and with a harsh scream of surprise turned a complete double somersault in his amazement at seeing that the balloonist was a pig.

He recovered himself fifty feet down, and beat up to their level again. “Welcome, oh pig, to the starry upper spaces of the blue empyrean,” he said as he soared alongside. “What strange chance brings you thus to adventure in your frail chariot among the trackless haunts of the feathered folk?”

Freddy had talked to eagles before, so he was not surprised at this high-flown language. Eagles, since they are the national bird, have a great sense of their own dignity, and feel that just ordinary talk is beneath them.

Freddy, however, was pretty good at noble-sounding language himself. “Hail, oh monarch of the skies,” he said, and then explained about the ascension and their present difficulties. “And so,” he concluded, “we know not where we are, nor whither we are bound, nor are we provided with the wherewithal to sustain life on this problematical and involuntary journey. Therefore we beseech your aid. If your present course should lead you within wingbeat of the domicile of that respected farmer, Mr. Bean—”

“Mr. Bean!” interrupted the eagle, and he swung in towards them, and perching on the edge of the basket, stared at Freddy with his fierce yellow eyes. “Great is the renown and widespread the repute of that excellent man, Bean, and his talented livestock among all furred and feathered dwellers within the confines of the Empire State. And you—ha! those well-weighed words I should have recognized. Are not you that pig whose noble song in praise of the eagle is taught to every young eaglet throughout the length and breadth of these mountains before he is allowed to leave the nest?”

Freddy blushed. “I did indeed, five years ago, pen some few poor lines in unworthy tribute to our national bird. But I had thought them long forgotten.”