Ginger Pye (24 page)

Jerry was very proud to be walking along the streets of Cranbury with the policeman but Rachel was wondering if people were thinking she and Jerry had been arrested. Then she decided, no, people would not think this since neither she nor Jerry had handcuffs on and she danced along sometimes a little ahead of the policeman sometimes a little behind to accent the fact of their freedom.

"The Bullwinkles, eh?" said Chief Larrimer, breaking the silence. "A shiftless lot, the father is. And like father, like son," he said.

When they reached Wally Bullwinkle's house it looked smaller and more shrunken than it ever used to because it was all boarded up. A "For Sale" sign was tacked in a lopsided fashion on the front. Despite the house's closed-up look Chief Larrimer tramped up on the porch and knocked at the door. Presently, the street in front of the house was filled with curious onlookers, chiefly children, though women and men gathered too.

Without turning around Chief Larrimer called
for a hammer and a small ax. In no time at all a half dozen or more of these were offered him. And Chief Larrimer pried off the boarding from one of the front windows and in he stepped, telling Jerry and Rachel they might come too and identify their dog, if he was here, which he didn't think was so, but who could be sure of anything? Not a policeman, they cannot jump to conclusions, he said, though it was all right to follow up a good hunch.

Everybody else, outside, wanted to come in, too, but permission was not granted. So they stayed without, waiting for a little something to be said to satisfy their curiosity.

Chief Larrimer, followed by Rachel and Jerry, went from room to room. Meager furniture stood in each room. There was certainly no dog in this house, no live one that is, for there were plenty of pictures of dogs and posters of dogs and most of these were of the circus and vaudeville variety, doing this trick and that, jumping through hoops and everything. Still, from the look of the place, the Bullwinkles had gone for good, or at least for a long, long time.

"The backyard, now," said Chief Larrimer. And he pushed open the flimsy back door. He was so strong, he needed no hammer or ax for this and the three inspectors found themselves in a high-fenced

small yard with a shed in one corner. There was barbed wire on top of the fence and there were a number of huge signs, on the shed, on the fences, on the house itself, saying, "Big Dog. Keep out!" and "Beware of the Big Dog!"

"Those are to throw you off the track," said Chief Larrimer. "Your dog being little."

In the little shed, which was open, they found any number of old gnawed bones, a little pile of rags with some ginger-colored hairs on them, and also, again, any number of vaudeville and circus posters, all with dogs on them, dogs on the order of Ginger, if Ginger were a big dog and not a little puppy. There was a broken strand of frayed rope tied to a hook. Here Ginger must have been kept. Here he must have slept and eaten and, perhaps, cried for Jerry and Rachel to come and find him.

Jerry picked up some of the old rags Ginger must have slept on. While feeling proud that, like detectives, he could identify the hairs of his dog, remembering the color so well, a terrible lump was gathering in his throat. For Ginger was gone, yet had been here all the while. It probably was Ginger he had heard whining that night he and Rachel came to the skeleton house. They had been right all along that Ginger was nearer to them over here where first they heard the mysterious footsteps.

"You threw me off, lad, with that picture you drewed of the man," said Chief Larrimer.

"We threwed ourselves and all of us off the track," admitted Jerry ruefully. "We didn't know an unsavory character could be just a boy in my class. We thought it had to be a man."

"Wally did have a yellow hat on that night we saw him at the skeleton house," said Rachel. "It wasn't spots before our eyes or hats in our belfry, it was Wally."

Chief Larrimer twirled his nightstick and looked important. "Skeleton houses," he said, pondering.

"Even if we had been sure it was a hat like the hat of the unsavory character, we would not have thought Wally was the unsavory character himself. We thought there might be a band of yellow-hat wearers and he, Wally, might be under the spell of a Fagin."

"Fagin?" said Chief Larrimer.

"Sir. Chief," said Jerry. "Rachel once thought some perfectly good tomatoes were poisoned tomatoes and we had to bury them."

"I see," said Chief Larrimer, but he looked confused. "I like to stick to facts," he said. "As I see it, the Bullwinkles with your dog have gone. They've gone to join a circus, I would deduce."

"Gone," murmured Jerry. "My dog..."

"We will have the train watched from New York to Boston," promised the able, new policeman. "And from Boston to New York," he added, for anyone could see that Jerry and Rachel felt very badly. "Let the Bullwinkles try to come back to Cranbury," he said. He said he would lock the father up for stealing a dog and perhaps maltreating him. He was a villain, an unsavory character, a black blot on Cranbury and he was not welcome here. They had not had to use the jail in ten years. But let the Bullwinkles come back and they would use the jail now, all right, and he, for one—and he was sure Judge Ball would concur—hoped they would use it for a good long time, ten years maybe.

Sadly, Rachel and Jerry followed the policeman back through the house and out the front door again to the waiting throng. They didn't care about jail and the ten years there. All they wanted was Ginger back again. That was all. And that was everything to them.

"Go home," bade the policeman to the curious bystanders. "Disband. A dog is gone."

The crowd disbanded. "A dog is gone," they said, satisfied with this tidbit but disappointed it was not a murder.

Jerry and Rachel said good-bye to the policeman
in front of Judge Ball's house where their ways parted. They were so choked up they could not even thank Chief Larrimer for skipping his coffee and buns to come reconnoitering.

"'Bye," they said. They didn't even remember anymore that it was Jerry's birthday and that they might have ice cream. But, once they had parted from Chief Larrimer, they tore for home anyway. Thoughts of Ginger speeding away on the Banker's Express put speed in their toes too. Papa just had to think of what to do next. It was all right for Chief Larrimer to say he'd have all trains watched from New York to Boston and from Boston to New York. It was circuses that had to be watched now, they thought.

Chief Larrimer's ideas were all right as far as they went. He was a wonderful Chief of Police to have kept the jail empty the way Chief Mulligan, before him, had done, too, for ten years. This showed how orderly they had both kept the town of Cranbury so far. But ideas of a more dramatic nature were necessary now, the kind of ideas Papa must have every second or the men in Washington would not be forever saying, "Call in Mr. Pye."

That was the sort of thinking Rachel and Jerry were doing as they rounded the corner, skidding the
way Ginger used to, they were going so fast, and sprinted, panting, down Beam's Place to home.

During these exciting adventures they had lost all of Uncle Bennie's berries but not the cups.

When Jerry and Rachel drew near their house on Beam's Place they stopped short in amazement for a very extraordinary sight greeted them. There were Mama and Papa and Gramma and Uncle Bennie all standing around on the Pyes' front lawn under the chestnut tree. And there was a strange dog tearing around and around in wider and wider circles, snorting painfully, acting half mad.

In wonder, feeling like outsiders to this family picture in which they had no part—for, obviously, a great moment in the Pye family was taking place, as great a moment, perhaps, as that of Papa running up the "down" escalator—Jerry and Rachel slowly drew nearer. Then the strange dog spied them and he raced to them. He leaped in the air in front of them, half crying, half barking with joy, licking their faces, whimpering, talking the best he knew how. He was a full-grown dog, a fox terrier, and he was brown-and-white.

For a moment Jerry and Rachel were speechless as the truth dawned on them. In their minds it had been so firmly fixed that Ginger Pye was on the Banker's Express, it did not seem possible that this might be he, here on Beam's Place. Still, all of a sudden, the truth, like skyrockets, burst upon them and first Jerry and then Rachel cried, "Ginger! Ginger!"

For it was Ginger! They could tell it was by the odd crooked marking on his back. They knew it was Ginger. Ginger was back and they hugged him and petted him and kissed him. It was big Ginger, not little Ginger pup anymore.

It was funny but all the long months that Ginger had been gone, everyone still thought of him as a little puppy such as he had been when he had disappeared. Of course he would have been growing and growing all this time but everyone had forgotten that he would be doing this. But so he had. And this was Ginger, and he was not on the Banker's Express going heavens knew where, to what circus and what strange lands. He was right here in the Pyes' own front yard and he was beside himself with joy and so were they.

"I found him! I found him!" yelled Uncle Bennie. "I tojer I'd find him. I found Ginger. I was looking for Friskies and the Japanese and I found Ginger. He ran up to me and kissed me. I found him."

Ginger had a long, frayed, shaggy, broken-off rope tied to his collar that was exactly like the piece of rope in Wally Bullwinkle's shed. "Where'd he come from? Where'd he come from?" asked Jerry and Rachel excitedly. They wanted to tell all about the Banker's Express and the policeman but first they wanted to know how Ginger got to be here when they thought he was on the way to New York. So Gramma, with corrections and interruptions from Uncle Bennie, explained what had happened as far as she knew Uncle Bennie's and her end of the story. They had already explained it to Mama and Papa but, of course, they were happy to explain it all over again to Rachel and Jerry.

Well. As Gramma and Uncle Bennie were on their way over here—they had left very early, just a little after seven because Uncle Bennie was impatient to get to Jerry and the birthday house and he hoped the ice cream was going to be steamboats again—and as they were walking along Second Avenue near the big new house, Uncle Bennie said,
"Down, down." That meant he wanted to get out of his express wagon and chase the Friskies and the Japanese, his words for butterflies.

So Gramma stopped and Uncle Bennie climbed out and he went chasing butterflies from hedge to hedge and bush to bush while she drew his empty squeaking wagon behind her.

Suddenly they heard a frantic barking and yelping, like a dog in terrible pain. They thought perhaps a dog had been run over and while they were looking around to see, why, the next thing they knew, this strange dog came bounding out from some yard behind them. Gramma could not tell which house, but she knew the general direction.

"Wally Bullwinkle's," murmured Rachel in awe at the way things, like the frayed rope on Ginger's neck, were being pieced together.

"Sh-sh," said Jerry. "There's more."

Gramma went on with the explaining.

"It's Ginger. It's Ginger!" Uncle Bennie had yelled and the dog kept jumping up on Uncle Bennie and kissing him. But Gramma thought this was just a dog, just any dog. She didn't realize it was Ginger because she still thought of Ginger the way they all did, as being a tiny little puppy. So she said, "Go back, doggy. Nice doggy, go back."

But the dog didn't want to go back. Whenever Gramma said, "Go back," to him, he cringed and slunk on the ground. The minute they went on a few paces he bounded along eagerly and happily with them. Gramma thought, "My, what a friendly dog!" He kept jumping up on her, trying to kiss her, and he kept licking her hands and he behaved the same way with Uncle Bennie. It was as though he was trying to tell them something, the way he whimpered and barked.