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

there’s one that’s got some decent manners anyway,” Freddy grumbled.
    â€œProbably 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!”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œWhat’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.”
    â€œAw, what did I do?” the mouse protested.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œDon’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.”
    â€œWhat 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.”
    â€œOh, yeah?” said Jinx. “You and who else?”
    â€œWhy him and me, cat,” Cy said. “What do you say, Freddy, shall we go up