Freddy Goes to Florida (6 page)

Then Robert built the fire with newspapers and wood, and he held a match between his teeth and scratched it on the floor and dropped it on the papers. He singed his nose before he got through, but at last he got the papers to burning. Then all the animals had to squat down on the hearth and blow the fire to make it go, because he hadn't built it very well. But at last it burned up brightly, and then they all sat round and talked.

“I'd like to know who lived in this house,” said Charles.

“Nobody knows,” said the oldest swallow, who was hanging just over the door. And all the other swallows said: “That's so,” and rustled their wings.

“Nobody lived here in my grandfather's time,” said the oldest swallow.

“That's so,” said the other swallows again.

“And nobody lived here in my great-grandfather's time.”

“That's so.”

“And nobody lived here in my great-great-grandfather's time.”

“That's so.”

“And nobody——”

“Excuse me,” said Robert politely, “but I don't think you need go any farther back. Don't people ever come here at all?”

“Once in a while—” the swallow began slowly. Before he could go on, the youngest swallow piped up: “That's so.”

The oldest swallow glared at him crossly, and his mother spanked him soundly for speaking out of turn. For it is a custom among the swallows for the oldest and wisest one to do all the talking, and for the others to say: “That's so” when he has finished. They do this because there are so many of them, and if they all talked at once in their little twittery voices, nobody would be able to understand what they were talking about.

“Once in a while,” the oldest swallow went on, when the little swallow had been spanked and sent off to cry softly in a corner, “men come out to this house to look for the money that is supposed to be hidden here. It is said that a bag of twenty-dollar gold pieces is concealed in or somewhere near the house. But if that is so, nobody has ever found it.”

The animals were all very much excited at this piece of news. Of course they could not use money themselves, but they thought how nice it would be if they could find the gold and take it back to Mr. Bean, who needed money so badly. Then he could buy all the things he wanted, and could repair the barn and the hen house, and perhaps put stoves in them to keep the animals warm in cold weather. So they all started hunting for the place where the money was hidden.

Hank tapped with his hoof on the floor and the walls, to see if they sounded hollow, and Jinx, the cat, climbed up on all the shelves and peered into cupboards, and Eek and Quik and Eeny and Cousin Augustus went back down the old mouse hole in the corner and scurried round under the floor and explored every crack and crevice. Even Mr. and Mrs. Webb slipped into the many cracks in the walls and fire-place and looked round. But they didn't find any sign of the money.

“The only place we haven't looked is the chimney,” said Freddy, the pig, at last.

“It is not in the chimney,” said the oldest swallow. And all the other swallows said: “That's so.”

“Well, I guess we'll have to give it up,” said Freddy. “It isn't in the house, and if it's buried outside, we could never possibly find it.”

And so they gave it up and came back and sat round the fire and told stories and played guessing games till bedtime.

VIII

Early the next morning Mr. Webb slipped out to get a breath of fresh air before breakfast. It was a bright clear morning. He took a long drink of fresh cold water from a raindrop, and then strolled along over the pine needles, humming to himself.

Oh, the winding road is long, is long
,

But never too long for me
.…

Pretty soon he met an ant.

“Good-morning,” he said politely. “I am a stranger in these parts. I wonder if you can tell me if there is any good fly-catching in the vicinity?”

Now, almost always, if you speak to an ant, no matter how pleasantly, it will walk right by without answering. Ants do this because they are always busy, and they think conversation is a waste of time. But Mr. Webb was a fine-looking spider, and the ant was rather flattered at being spoken to by him. So she said:

“I'm sure I don't know, sir. But there aren't many spiders in our neighbourhood, so I should think not.”

“Ah, that's a pity,” said Mr. Webb. “But it seems a very pleasant neighbourhood.”

“We like it,” said the ant. “Although it's not as pleasant as it used to be before the robber ants came. They live in an old stump down in the woods, and they are all the time stealing our children and robbing our storehouses.”

“Dear me!” said Mr. Webb. “That is very trying.”

“Indeed you may say so!” she replied. “It's hard enough to bring up a family of fifty children these days without having robbers about. We had to leave our old house and build a new one, deeper under the ground, so it wouldn't be so easy for them to break into it. Perhaps you'd like to see it?”

“I should be charmed,” said the spider; and so she led him to where there was a little hole in the ground, out of which ants were carrying bits of dirt and sand, which they dropped outside before hurrying back for more. She led him down the hole and into a long tunnel. Part of the tunnel was so narrow that Mr. Webb had trouble squeezing through, but at last they came out in a large room which was really the ants' dining-room. Here there were dozen of ants running to and fro, popping in and out of doorways; some of them bringing food which they fed to the ant children, and others carrying out dirt from the tunnels and corridors they were building. They were all much too busy to pay any attention to their visitor, and they merely nodded and said: “How do,” and went on with their work.

“It is a very pleasant house,” said Mr. Webb, when he had been shown through all the many rooms and passages.

“Ah, you should see our other house!” said the ant with a sigh. “Gold floors in the reception hall and the dining-room, and a gold ceiling in the nursery! There wasn't a finer one in the woods.”

Mr. Webb pricked up his ears. “I should think not!” he said. “Gold floors, eh? Now, may I ask how that happened?”

“Nobody knows,” said the ant. “When my grandmother first moved into the house, some of them were there, and then later, when we enlarged the house and dug out more rooms, we found more of them.”

“I should like to see that,” said Mr. Webb.

“If I weren't so busy this morning, I would take you over and show them to you,” said the ant.

“I am afraid I am keeping you from your work,” said Mr. Webb; “so I'll just run along. But if you will show me where your old house is, I'll run in and look at it on my way back to join my friends.”

So the ant went up to the door with him and showed him just which way to go, and then he thanked her politely for her hospitality and said good-bye.

Without much trouble he found the house that the ants had moved out of, and he crawled down the tunnel into the empty rooms that had once been a happy home, but were now empty and deserted. Soon he stood in the dining-room. It wasn't very large. Even Mr. Webb, who was a very small spider, could walk across it in five or six steps. But sure enough the floor was of bright, shining, yellow gold. And there were raised letters on it, and the figure of an eagle.

Now before he was married to Mrs. Webb, Mr. Webb had travelled round a good deal. And once he had lived in a bank. So he knew what a twenty-dollar gold piece looks like. And now he knew that the floor of this ants' dining-room was a twenty-dollar gold piece.

He did not wait to look at the other rooms, but hurried back to the log house as fast as he could go. For he remembered what the swallow had told them about the bag of gold, and he knew that he had found it.

This was what had happened. The ants who had first built that house had happened to begin digging just where the bag of gold was buried. It had been buried a long, long time, and the cloth had rotted away. The ants had tunnelled in and around the gold coins, and wherever one lay flat, they had made it the floor or ceiling of a room.

Mr. Webb got back just as the animals were ready to start. They gathered round him with their ears as close to him as they could get, so they could hear his tiny voice, and he told his story, and then they all rushed out to the ant house, and the two dogs and Freddy, the pig, started digging. Freddy dug with his long sharp nose, but the dogs dug with their forefeet. And in no time at all they had uncovered a great shining heap of gold coins.

Then they were all very glad, and Charles, the rooster, was so excited that he crowed and crowed.

But Henrietta said: “My goodness! Stop that noise! I don't see what you are all so happy about anyway. Now you've dug it up, what are you going to do with it?”

“Take it back to Mr. Bean, of course,” said Robert.

“What are you going to do about going to Florida, then?” asked Henrietta. “Are you going to lug it all the way to Florida, and then back again? And what are you going to carry it in?”

“We hadn't thought about that,” said the animals.

“Well, you'd better think about it now,” said Henrietta. “The only thing you can do with the gold now is to bury it again, and get it when we come back from Florida. But I'm sure I don't know how we're ever going to take it to Mr. Bean.”

“Oh, we can carry it in baskets or something,” said Freddy. “Don't you worry about that, hen.”

So they scraped the earth back into the hole and covered up the treasure, and then they started along.

IX

As they went on southwest, the days grew hotter. Away back up north, at the other end of the road down which they were travelling, snow-flakes were flying, and Mr. Bean's breath was like smoke in the frosty air when Henrietta's sisters woke him in the morning and he put his head out of the window to see what the day was going to be like.

But down south the air was soft and warm, and the trees and the fields were green, and the animals tramped along merrily all day, and camped by the road-side at night. The only thing that worried them was how they were to get the gold coins back to Mr. Bean. There were about half a bushel of them, and even if they were in a sack or a basket, they would be much too heavy for one animal to carry, because gold is heavier than almost anything else in the world.

But Mrs. Wiggins, who always looked on the bright side of things, said: “We have got all winter in Florida to think about how to carry them. If we can't think of some scheme by spring, we aren't very bright animals. I for one don't intend to worry about it any more.”

By this time the travellers had got used to being stared at by the people they met, and so almost always when they came to a village, they walked straight through it instead of going round. When they did this, Jack, the black dog, would go to the butcher shop and sit up on his hind legs and beg in the doorway, and usually the butcher would give him a piece of meat or a bone, which he shared with Robert.

A good many of the people had heard of them, too, and knew that they had come hundreds of miles down from the cold north to spend the winter in Florida, and these people would come out to meet them when they came to the edge of the town, and bring them things to eat, and make a great fuss over them. In one town a band came out to meet them, just as in Washington, and there were carriages for them, too, and all the animals but Hank and Mrs. Wiggins rode through the town in the carriages.

But, of course, there were bad people, too, who had heard about them, and thought it a good chance to get some fine animals without paying for them. One day, as they were going along by the bank of a muddy, sluggish river, two men with guns jumped out from behind some bushes. As soon as they saw the guns, the animals started to run, but they were not quick enough, and before they knew what had happened to them, Hank and Mrs. Wiggins had ropes around their necks and were being led off down the road.

The other animals knew that the men would shoot at them with the guns if they tried to help their friends; so they hid in the bushes, and then followed along, keeping out of sight.

Pretty soon the men came to a gate, and they led the cow and the horse through the gate and past a small, white house, and locked them up in a big, red barn. Then they walked back to the house, whistling, with their guns over their shoulders, to get their supper, for it was six o'clock.

“I guess there's
two
animals that won't do any more migratin',” said one.

And the other laughed a loud, coarse laugh and said: “They'll do a little work now, instead of loafing round the country.”

And they opened the door and went into the house without wiping their muddy boots on the door-mat.

As soon as they had gone in, Jinx, the cat, sneaked up to the barn through the long grass. He crept along so very carefully that the tops of the grass hardly moved. He climbed up and looked in through the little, dusty window, and saw Hank and Mrs. Wiggins standing on the barn floor. Their heads drooped, and they looked very miserable and unhappy. Then he tapped cautiously on the window with his claw, and called in a low voice: “Hey! Hank!”

The horse jumped and raised his head. “Is that you, Jinx?” he said.

“Yes,” said the cat. “I came to see if you were all right. The others are hiding in the bushes down by the river. We're going to try to rescue you.”

“Well, I don't see how you're going to do it,” said Hank. “We are both tied up, and the barn-door is locked. It's very discouraging, to come all this distance and get almost to Florida, and then be stolen. I'm sure I don't know what Mr. Bean will say.”

“Now don't talk like that,” said Jinx. “You'll escape somehow. We won't desert you. Do you suppose you could kick a couple of boards out of the side of the barn if you could get loose?”