Freddy Goes to Florida (13 page)

They all took turns standing watch over the gold at night, and to-night it was Charles and Henrietta's turn. The other animals had found a warm and comfortable place to sleep under the little bridge, beside the stream, and when all good-nights had been said, the rooster and his wife made a final round of the camp to see that all was in order, and then flew up into the phaeton, perched on the back of the front seat, and tucked their heads under their wings.

They had not been asleep long when it began to rain. It rained gently at first, and Charles, half awakened, moved about a little on his perch, then dropped off again, lulled by the monotonous patter on the umbrella-like roof of the carriage. But the patter grew to a rattle, and then to a roar, and he awoke again to find his feathers getting wetter and wetter, and Henrietta tapping him crossly on the shoulder with her beak.

“Come, come, Charles; wake up!” she was saying. “We'll get wet and catch our deaths, very likely.”

“This will never do!” said Charles. “We can't stay here. I think, my dear, we had better join the others under the bridge.”

“I think we had better do nothing of the kind,” said Henrietta crossly. “We are here to watch the gold, and here we stay. We can get down under the shawl in the back seat and keep dry. Come along.”

“But the mice are sleeping here to-night,” Charles protested. “And you know how Eeny snores. I shouldn't sleep a wink.”

But Henrietta was not listening; she had jumped down into the back seat, and Charles followed her, repeating: “I shan't sleep a wink! Not a wink!” But once they had got under the shawl, where it was dry and warm, and had pushed the sleepy mice over to make room, he did fall asleep again with great promptness. It is true that Eeny snored, although it was not a very loud snore, for Eeny was a very small mouse. And then Cousin Augustus had the nightmare, and dreamed that four tortoise-shell cats with red eyes were chasing him, baying like the bloodhounds in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, which he had once seen when he had been on a visit to his aunt, who lived in the town hall at Joy Centre, near Mr. Bean's farm. Cousin Augustus squeaked dreadfully when he had the nightmare, which was as often as he ate too much supper (and
that
was as often as he could)—and he jerked his legs and moaned and lashed his tail, so that Eek and Quik and Eeny had to get up and shake him awake. But even through all this Charles would have slept peacefully on if Henrietta had not pecked him on the neck and said: “Charles! Wake up! You'll have to do something about these mice. Keeping it up at all hours! I never heard such a racket! They don't seem to have any regard for anyone.”

So Charles took his head out from under his wing. He couldn't see anything, because he was under the shawl, but he could hear Cousin Augustus waking up, and then saying: “Oh dear! Oh dear me! Such a dream!
Such
a dream!”

“Here, here!” said Charles sleepily, and trying to be stern. “What's all this? Do be still, can't you? Other people want to sleep if you don't!”

“Cousin Augustus had the nightmare,” said Eek. “It's all over now.”

Charles was satisfied with this and would have put his head back under his wing, but Henrietta pecked him again. So he said gruffly: “Well, we can't have that. Do you understand? We can't
have
it! We cannot have our rest broken in this way. I think you mice had better go and sleep somewhere else, as you don't seem able to do it quietly, like other animals.”

The mice were a little afraid of Charles because he was so grand and talked so beautifully and strutted about the barn-yard so nobly, and so they did not give him any back talk, but climbed down meekly out of the carriage ond went to join the other animals under the bridge.

“Well, for once you had the gumption to stand up to somebody, even if it was only a mouse,” said Henrietta. But Charles did not hear her, for he was again fast asleep.

There was now no sound under the shawl but the ticking of the alarm-clock and Charles's gentle breathing, and so Henrietta went to sleep too. When she awoke again, it was still dark. For a few minutes she could not tell what it was that had roused her; then she heard a faint creak, and the carriage gave a lurch to one side. It was moving! Something or somebody was drawing the carriage down the road!

She pecked Charles sharply, and he awoke with a groan. “Oh, my
goodness
, Henrietta! What is it
now?
Can't you let me alone?”

“Hush!” she whispered. “Don't you feel the carriage moving? Someone is running away with it. Someone's stealing the gold!”

Charles was very wide awake in an instant. He poked his head out from underneath the shawl and looked about him. Two shadowy forms—men, they looked like, though they might be animals—were pulling the carriage down the hill, and they must have pulled it some distance from where Hank had left it, for the bridge was nowhere in sight.

“This comes of not keeping watch,” whispered Henrietta, who had poked her head out beside him. “If you hadn't crawled under this shawl, you'd have been able to hear what was going on.”

“You crawled under too,” said Charles. “You're as much to blame as I am. But what shall we do? Even if I crow my loudest, they'll never hear me with the rain coming down the way it is.”

“One of us must jump out and run back and give the alarm,” said Henrietta. “And the other must stay here and find out where the carriage is being taken. You'd better go, Charles, and I'll stay.”

Charles was too scared to complain at being ordered to go out in the heavy rain. The only thing he wanted was to get away from that carriage as quickly as possible. And being scared, he did what a scared rooster always does: he gave a loud squawk. And then he made a wild jump for the road. But his feet caught in the fringe of the shawl, and before he could get them free, and before Henrietta could get out herself, one of the dark figures dropped the handle of the carriage at which it was pulling, ran back, and caught them both. It was the dirty-faced boy.

“Hey! Pa!” he called. “Here's a couple nice chickens for Sunday dinner in here with the money.”

They squawked and struggled, but he held on tight, and then the man with the black moustache came and tied their feet with string and shoved them roughly into the space under the front seat of the phaeton.

“I hope you're satisfied!” said Henrietta. “Of all the useless, good-for-nothing roosters, you're the worst! Why couldn't you keep your silly beak shut? My goodness, you certainly have got us in a nice mess now!” And she went on telling just what she thought of him. But Charles was not listening. “Sunday dinner,” he was thinking, “Sunday dinner! Me, that's travelled hundreds and thousands of miles in my time—me, that's seen what I've seen and done what I've done, to end as a Sunday dinner! Fricasseed, probably, and eaten by perfect strangers!” And he burst into tears.

XIX

The animals slept very soundly that night under the bridge, without a suspicion of the loss of their gold, or of the terrible fate that had overtaken Charles and Henrietta. Robert was the first to awake in the morning. It had stopped raining, but a heavy mist hid everything from sight.

“My goodness!” said Robert. “It must be dreadfully late! I wonder why I didn't hear the alarm when it went off at five o'clock. Hey, Freddy!” he called. “Hank! Wake up! We ought to have been on our way two hours ago.”

In two minutes all the animals were wide awake, and Freddy had gone out to see what was the matter with the alarm-clock. Pretty soon he came running back. “The clock is gone,” he panted, “and Charles and Henrietta are gone, and the phaeton is gone. Everything's gone. I bet Charles has run away with the treasure.”

“
The clock is gone,” he panted.

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Wiggins. “He couldn't if he wanted to. And besides, he isn't that kind of a rooster. I'm going out to see for myself.”

The other animals followed her, and when they came to the place where the phaeton had been left, there was no phaeton there. But they found prints of muddy shoes all about the place, and the marks of the wheels in the muddy road were as plain as plain could be, so that they very soon knew what had happened.

“Charles and Henrietta were sleeping under the shawl,” said Eek. “They made us get out. Probably they were captured in their sleep and didn't have a chance to call out to us.”

“Here's one of Charles's tail feathers,” cried Alice. “He wasn't captured without a struggle, you may be sure of that.” She was a great admirer of Charles.

“We'd better start right away to follow these wheel marks,” said Robert. “If we can find where the carriage has been taken to, maybe we can rescue them.”

So they followed the marks on down the hill, and they led straight back the way the animals had come from Florida, until they came to the road that went down to the house where the man with the black moustache lived. And they turned down that road.

None of the animals said very much as they plodded along through the mist to the rescue of their friends. For they knew now that the man with the black moustache had stolen the carriage, and he was a dangerous and desperate character whom it would be hard to get the best of. Even Mr. Webb was worried. “He's a bad man,” he said to his wife. “He'd squash a spider as soon as look at him.” And Mrs. Webb shuddered.

Pretty soon they came near the house, and Jack said: “You'd better let me go ahead now, because I used to live here and I know my way round.” So he led them by a back way round to where they could peek in the barn window, and sure enough, there was the phaeton, standing on the barn floor beside the rickety automobile. But the gold was not in it, and there was no sign of Charles and Henrietta.

Although the mist was so thick that they could not be seen from the house, they did not dare stay near the barn for fear that the man with the black moustache might come out and find them there. So the four mice said they would sneak up to the house and try to get in and find Charles and Henrietta, and the other animals went back and waited for them a little way down the road.

After quite a long time the mice came back, and the animals all crowded round them eagerly. “Did you see them?” they asked. “Are they all right? Did you find where the money is?”

“We didn't find out anything,” said Eek. “We didn't even get into the house. I never saw such a house! Not a crack to get in by anywhere, and all the old mouse holes with pieces of tin nailed over them. We couldn't even get down the chimney, because there was a fire in the stove. He certainly is a mean man!”

“They're there, though,” said Quik, “because we heard them talking. And Charles is there too, because we heard him crying.”

“Poor thing” said Mrs. Wiggins. “But we'll get him out, if we have to tear the whole house down with our horns and claws and beaks and hoofs! Won't we, animals?”

“We will! We certainly will!” cried the determined travellers.

“But the first thing,” she continued, “is to find out where Charles and Henrietta are, and the second thing is to find where the money is; then we can make a plan. Has anybody anything to suggest?”

“I want to suggest something,” shouted Mr. Webb. But nobody heard him. So he crawled down into Mrs. Wiggins's ear and stamped around until he tickled her, and then told her, and she told the others. He had an idea that he could get into the house through a keyhole, if Robert would carry him up to the door.

This seemed a good idea to everyone except Mrs. Webb, who thought it too dangerous. Indeed, she burst into tears at the very thought. “No, no, Hubert,” she sobbed. “I can't let you go. You said yourself he was a wicked man. Suppose he should see you and hit you with a newspaper or something. I should never forgive myself if I let you go.”

Mr. Webb, however, was firm in his decision, as spiders are apt to be, and, having kissed his weeping wife tenderly on the forehead, he jumped down on to Robert's back and they started.

At the front door he got down, and while Robert hid behind a bush to wait for him, he crawled up and squeezed in through the keyhole. It was gloomy inside, because the windows were rather dirty, but that didn't bother Mr. Webb, and he walked up the wall as easily as you would walk up your own front steps, and then he walked across the ceiling to the front parlour, where he heard voices.

The reason he walked on the ceiling was because that was the safest place for him to be. He knew that on the walls or the floor he was much more likely to be seen, but people hardly ever look up at the ceiling except when they are in bed. And then, too, if you see a spider on the floor, it is easy to run over and step on him, but that is a pretty difficult thing to do if he is on the ceiling.

So Mr. Webb walked boldly into the front parlour on the ceiling. The man with the black moustache and the dirty-faced boy were sitting at a table counting the gold coins they had stolen from the animals. They would count twenty, and then they would wrap them up in a piece of newspaper and pack them away in a big canvas bag. But they didn't get on very fast because they both counted out loud, and they kept mixing each other up and having to start all over again. Mr. Webb watched them for a while; then, hearing a noise in the far corner of the room, he walked over and saw Charles and Henrietta lying, with their feet tied, in a box beside the stove. Charles was lying on his back and staring gloomily at the ceiling, but Henrietta was picking busily with her beak at the knots in the string, and Mr. Webb saw that she had very nearly got herself loose.