Freddy the Cowboy by Walter R. Brooks Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” someone asked.
    â€œCats—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