Freddy the Cowboy (6 page)

The talk he gave was a very instructive one. It was about the proper use of mouseholes. “Let's say that you've got a cat watching a mousehole, and inside you've got a mouse trying to watch the cat. Pretty soon the mouse thinks: ‘Guess he's gone' and he sticks his nose out. Bam! Down comes a big paw. The mouse jerks back and almost has heart failure. But after another hour of waiting he thinks: ‘Surely he's gone now!' and out goes his nose again.

“Well, only one of these guys is going to lose in this kind of a game, and that's the mouse. And yet I never knew but one mouse who was smart enough to install some kind of a warning system. He lived in a house where there were four cats; but he never got caught because while he had only one doorway—a mousehole in the baseboard in the corner of the dining room—he had gnawed two or three peepholes on each side of the room, just big enough to look out of. The cats didn't even know they were there. He'd put one of his kids at each peephole, and when he'd heard 'em all say: ‘O.K., Pop,' he'd go out and clean up the crumbs on the dining room rug.”

Well every day Jinx would lecture for an hour in the morning on some such subject as “Cats, and How to Escape Them,” or “Safety Measures to Be Taken in Open Country,” and then the afternoon would be devoted to field work, or supervised peephole-gnawing or personal camouflage in the barn.

Howard was Jinx's best pupil. The cat got very fond of him, and when at last on the fifth day Jinx said he would really have to be getting back home he asked the mouse if he wouldn't like to come and spend the rest of the summer on the Bean farm, and Howard was delighted.

So they tied lengths of cord to Taffy's cage and two mice took hold of each cord, and they dragged the cage out of the barn and down the lane and started along the road with it.

Of course Jinx realized that if a car came along, his little procession would cause a good deal of excitement. So he didn't take one of the cords. He followed along behind, dragging a leafy branch that had blown off in a windstorm a few days earlier, and when they heard a car coming he would pull the branch right over the cage and the mice, and then sit beside it until the car had passed.

They had almost reached the Bean farm when they heard a strange sound, one not often heard on eastern roads nowadays—the drumming rattle of the hoofs of a dozen horses coming along the hard macadam. Jinx pulled the branch over the cage just as the riders swept around the bend ahead at a fast trot.

The leader was a tall sour-faced man in cowboy clothes, and behind him, two by two, rode some of the gaudiest dressed people, Jinx thought, that he had ever seen outside a circus. The leader, of course, was Cal Flint, and the riders were the dudes who were boarding at his ranch, though Jinx didn't know that then. And the dudes wore western clothing of every color in the rainbow. Some of them rode easily, but most of them bounced and jiggled in their saddles until the cat thought they must have shaken all their teeth loose.

Mr. Flint held up one hand and the riders pulled up.

“What's wrong?” someone asked.

“Cats—I don't like 'em,” said Mr. Flint as he swung out of the saddle and walked, with his big Mexican spurs clinking at every step, towards Jinx.

Jinx was not afraid of people. In general he had found them pretty well behaved. But there was something in Mr. Flint's expression that made him suspicious. The man didn't look as if he was coming over to scratch his head and say “Pretty Pussy!” And then as Mr. Flint swung his foot back for a kick he dodged. The big boot grazed his ear, and two seconds later he was halfway up a tree.

There was a murmur of disapproval from the dudes, and one woman—she was a Mrs. Balloway from Syracuse, and a very nice person too, though she sat in the saddle like a sack of damp sand—she said: “Oh, now, see here, Mr. Flint; that cat's doing no harm; what do you want to kick it for?”

But Mr. Flint's kick had dislodged the branch, and although the mice had run off and hidden in the grass, the trap with its prisoner was in plain sight.

Mr. Flint pointed to it. “That's why!” he said. “That's a cat for you!—trappin' innocent little squirrels and dragging them off in cages to be cooked and eaten! Why, just look at the poor little fellow!” And he picked up the cage and held it out to them.

Taffy just looked at them mournfully with his big squirrel eyes and squeezed out fat tears which rolled slowly down over his fur. He certainly did look pathetic.

The ladies in the party said, “Poor little fellow!” and “Isn't he sweet!” and the men glared and shook their fists at Jinx. And Mr. Flint pulled a big gun from the holster at his hip and pointed it up at the cat.

But Mrs. Balloway reined her horse up close to him and put a hand on his arm. “Innocent little squirrel, eh?” she said. “Guess you don't know much about squirrels. They rob birds' nests and eat young birds, and do more damage than any cat can even think up. Let him go if you want to, but don't shoot that cat if you want
me
as a boarder at your ranch.”

Mr. Flint shrugged his shoulders. “O.K.,” he said, “but I'll let the squirrel go later, where he'll be safe!” And he tied the trap to his saddle horn. “Also,” he said, “I'll just throw a little warning at that cat.” He whipped up the gun and fired.

The bullet clipped a leaf within an inch of Jinx's nose. “Golly,” he thought, “he really meant to hit me!” He tried to get round behind the tree trunk, but it wasn't big enough. But then just as Mr. Flint started to raise the gun again there came a distant yell: “Yip, yip, yipeee-e-e!” and down the slope of the pasture to the north of the road came galloping a small plump cowboy on a buckskin pony.

“Yip, yip, yipeee-e-e!” and down the slope came a small plump cowboy.

He had on a bright red shirt with a design of yellow and blue lightning flashes on it, and he waved his hat as he came yelling down towards them; but when he got to the wall that separated the field from the road, he crammed his hat down over his ears and pulled his horse to a stop.

“Hiya, folks!” he said. “What's all the shootin'?”

Some of the dudes began to giggle and make remarks behind their hands, for while as a pig Freddy was nothing to laugh at, as a cowboy he really was sort of funny looking. But Mrs. Balloway spoke up and explained what had happened. “And I hope you can stop him from doing any more shooting at that cat,” she said. “The cat was only acting according to his nature.”

“And a very wicked nature, too,” said Freddy, looking up and seeing Jinx for the first time. But he gave no sign of recognizing his friend. “As a matter of fact,” he went on, “the sheriff's got a posse out scouring the hills for this cat. He's a pet cat belonging to Mrs. Bean. Been missing for most a week. So as a member of the posse I'll just take charge of him. Come down, kitty-kitty-kitty. Sweet little kitty! Come along. We'll put a pretty red ribbon around your neck and give you a nice fish head for supper.”

Jinx didn't much like fish, and he certainly didn't want any old fish head, and if Mrs. Bean had tied a ribbon around his neck he would have been so ashamed that he would have stayed under the porch for a week. But he had of course recognized Freddy, and although he couldn't figure out what the pig was doing in cowboy clothes and riding a pony, he felt that the only safe thing was to go with him. For Mr. Flint still had his gun in his hand. So he slid down and dropped on Cy's back. “Any more of that ‘pretty kitty' stuff,” he muttered, “and I'll sink a couple of claws in that fat back of yours, pig.”

Mr. Flint slowly pushed the gun back in its holster. “O.K.,” he said shortly. “Let's get going, folks.”

The troop started on. As they passed Freddy they stared hard at him and several of them giggled and made remarks behind their hands. Only Mrs. Balloway smiled and nodded to him and saluted him with a gloved finger touching her hat brim.

“Well, there's one that's got some decent manners anyway,” Freddy grumbled.

“Probably she's half-blind,” said Jinx. “That get-up of yours would make a cat laugh. In fact, it does make this cat laugh.” And he opened his mouth and gave a good yell to show that it did. Then suddenly he stopped. “Gee whiz!” he said. “I forgot about Howard!”

“I'm here, mister,” said the mouse, sticking his nose out of a crevice in the wall. “The rest of 'em have gone back home, but you said I could come with you.”

So Jinx told Freddy about Howard and Taffy and his adventure in the old barn.

“It's all right with me if he comes along,” Freddy said. “But it's really up to our home mice. He'll have to live with them, I suppose. What do you say, Quik?” Quik, who had been riding in the pocket of Freddy's thunder-and-lightning shirt, leaned out with his elbows on the edge of the pocket and frowned down at Howard. “I suppose it'll be all right,” he said. “If he doesn't eat us out of house and home. I never knew a field mouse yet who didn't eat like a pi—I mean, like a pinguin,” he said hurriedly.

“What's a pinguin?” Jinx asked, and Howard said: “I think he means a penguin. They're very greedy creatures, though seldom seen in this neighborhood.”

Quik grinned at him gratefully, but Freddy said: “Penguin nothing! He started to say ‘pig' and then couldn't change it into anything that made sense. I ought to make him walk home. As for you, young Howard, you'd better go back to your barn.”

“Aw, what did I do?” the mouse protested.

“It's all right for these fellows to kid me,” said Freddy, “they're old friends. But I'm a stranger to you. It's bad manners to make fun of a stranger.”

The mouse looked at him steadily for a minute, and then his ears drooped and he turned and walked slowly back along the road. Freddy frowned. Howard was putting on an act all right; no one could look so pathetic unless he was acting. But Freddy did a good deal of acting himself, and he could appreciate it when somebody did a good job. “Oh, come on,” he said with a grin, “you can go with us.”

Chapter 6

Freddy had a couple of those folding garden chairs with a long strip of canvas for back and seat, that you can lie back and go to sleep in. He had bought them at an auction, and they were so rickety that if anyone weighing over five pounds sat in them they just collapsed; but when he had them out, one on each side of his front door, he felt that they made the pig pen look quite like a gentleman's country estate. He was sitting that evening in the straight chair in which he had presided over the committee meeting five days ago. Jinx was in one of the folding chairs and Quik and Howard in the other. Cy was wandering about making scrunching noises as he pulled up bites of grass with his teeth.

“I can't help thinking about that Taffy,” Jinx said. “If Mr. Flint lets him go, he'll just go back and start that racket of his all over again.”

“Don't you worry about that, cat,” said Cy. “If old Flint was going to let him go, he'd have opened the trap right there.”

“What do you mean, Cy?” Freddy asked, and the pony said, “Squirrel pot pie, that's what I mean. I know Flint. Even if he didn't like squirrel he'd eat him just to be ornery.”

They all looked at him for a minute. Then Freddy said: “Why, that's pretty awful, specially after he promised to let him go. If I'd known that, I wouldn't have let him take the cage with him.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Jinx. “You and who else?”

“Why him and me, cat,” Cy said. “What do you say, Freddy, shall we go up to the ranch now and bring the squirrel back?”

But Freddy shook his head. “Jinx is right, Cy,” he said. “I guess I couldn't have done anything—especially as Flint had a gun.”

“Well, you've got a gun there in your holster,” said Jinx.

“It's just for show.” Freddy drew it out. “A water pistol. But hey, wait a minute!” he said, jumping up. “I have too got a gun. You remember, Jinx, the one that we took away from that magician, Signor Zingo, remember?” He ran in and came out in a minute with a big pistol which he pushed into the holster, then tried pulling out two or three times.