“Whew!” exclaimed Tommy, taking a breath. “Jiminey! Where are we?”
They all looked about. There they were standing in the middle of
the big, dusty road right where it branched and went on up Lookoff
Mountain. At their left was the schoolhouse with its shutters closed
for the summer. At their right was the grange hall where pie socials
and spelling bees were sometimes held. Beyond, the church raised its
lofty steeple and behind them was the Millionaire’s House, big and
imposing as ever. Nothing was different. The Bramble Bush Man’s queer
little house was nowhere to be seen.
“You were right, Muffs. It wasn’t real,” said Tommy in an awed whisper.
“No,” agreed Mary. “It wasn’t. A real house couldn’t disappear any more
than a real rabbit could. But we’re real again and I think it’s time we
went home. Let’s take the short cut.”
But, in the meantime, Muffs had looked inside the Guide’s tall hat. She
looked to see what made it so heavy and two bright pink eyes looked
back at her. Two long ears went back and a soft nose twitched as much
as to say, “You didn’t know I was here, did you?”
“No, I didn’t,” said little Miss Muffet, just as if the rabbit had
really spoken.
“Didn’t what?” asked Tommy.
“Didn’t know there was a rabbit in the Indian Guide’s tall hat.”
Mary looked and her dark eyes grew round as saucers.
[Illustration]
“Goodness Sakes Alive!” she exclaimed. “It’s the same rabbit that
disappeared in the Bramble Bush Man’s house!”
Tommy gave a whistle of surprise. “So it is! Gee willikins, Muffs! How
did it get there?”
“The same way we got here, I guess. Magic.”
“There isn’t any such thing,” said Mary trying to be practical but
she might as well have said, “There isn’t any such thing as air,” for
it was all around them. First the glasses, then the house and now the
rabbit. Muffs stroked his silky ears and they flattened down on his
round little body so that he looked like a soft white ball.
“I never had a pet,” she said. “You have your white cat, Mary. And
Tommy has Thomas Junior and now I have Bunny Bright Eyes.”
“The name fits him,” said Tommy.
“Just the same you can’t keep him,” Mary declared. “The Bramble Bush
Man will know.”
“Oh,” she cried. “I hope we never meet him. He’ll be madder than ever
if he thinks I stole his rabbit and we can’t take it back when the
house is gone.”
“I think we’re dreaming,” Tommy announced loud enough to wake himself
up if he had been.
“Maybe it’s the glasses,” suggested Mary. “Feel in your pocket, Tommy,
and see if you still have them.”
Yes, the glasses were there, their thick lenses looking more like eyes
than ever. It wasn’t nice, having the eyes of a wondrous wise man
watching everything the children did. They made things look bigger.
Even the naughty things they had done that day looked much, much bigger
through the glasses.
“I’d like to get rid of them,” Tommy confided.
“You should have left them in the Bramble Bush Man’s house.”
“But, Mary, we couldn’t leave anything in the ghost of a house,” said
Tommy with a shiver. “I s’pose the Guide’s a ghost by now and we’d
have been ghosts too if we hadn’t run away.” Then he turned to his new
little playmate. “Muffs, you’re from the city and know a lot. Why don’t
you think of something?”
So Muffs sat down on a curb stone, still holding the rabbit carefully
in the Guide’s tall hat. But all she could think of was how angry the
Bramble Bush Man would be when he found the broken vase and missed his
rabbit. Then she thought of Mr. and Mrs. Lippett and how they would
scold her and wished she were home in her own little bed instead of
sitting on a cold stone trying to think. Her bed was so warm and cozy
and safe behind the green and gold screen. Then the screen made her
think of her mother’s paintings and the paintings, strangely enough,
reminded her of signs. The rest was easy.
“We might put up a Public Notice,” she announced.
“But where?”
“I know where!” Tommy cried excitedly. “On the walls of the Post
Office. Everybody comes in there after mail.”
Muffs thought she ought to hide the rabbit and stroked its ears so that
they would lay flat and not show over the brim of the tall hat. People
didn’t carry rabbits in hats when they went to the Post Office.
The big doors were hard to swing open and Tommy was just tall enough to
reach the desk. He found a pen and first he tried to write the Public
Notice on one side of a blotter. The ink all soaked in and it looked
like shadow writing. Then he tried the other side and wrote this:
[Illustration:
WE FOUND A PARE
OF EYEZ IN A
BRAMBLE BUSH
IF YOUR WONDROUS
WIZE PLEAZE CUM
AND GET THEM
]
He stopped writing and held his pen in the air. Neither he nor Miss
Muffet noticed that it spattered a round spot of ink on the back of her
good dress.
When they reached the corner house, Tommy and Mary ran on home and left
Muffs to face the dragons alone. She felt that Mr. and Mrs. Lippett had
actually changed themselves into two huge dragons with fire in their
eyes. Both of them were waiting on the porch. Both of them had deep
scowl lines in the center of their foreheads. When they saw Muffs’
dirty face and torn dress with the big ink spot on the back the scowls
grew bigger but they didn’t say a word until Bunny Bright Eyes poked
his head out of the tall hat.
“Good land!” exclaimed Mrs. Lippett. “She’s got a rabbit.”
“Now where did that come from?” asked Mr. Lippett, looking like a
thundercloud.
Muffs’ face was burning red but for a moment she couldn’t say a word.
When she did speak it was only to stammer. “I--I met some children--the
Tyler children--and we went on a--a _exposition_. They let me take
their hat and this rabbit got into it. None of us know how.”
“Nonsense!” the thundercloud exploded. “A little girl doesn’t come home
with a pet rabbit in her hat and not know where she got it.”
“I think it belongs to someone,” Mrs. Lippett declared. “You had better
take it right back where you found it.”
“I found it in the hat,” Muffs insisted. “I thought maybe it was magic.”
“A magic trick, that’s what,” roared Mr. Lippett. “But you’ll see,
young lady, that tricks don’t work in this house. You’ll either get
rid of that rabbit or find another place to board. Now scoot!”
Muffs turned and ran as if the dragons were after her. There was only
one place she could go and that was back to Tylers. She could see the
light shining through their windows and that helped guide her along the
dark little road, over the bridge and past the swamp that seemed to be
filled with voices calling:
“You cheat! You cheat! You cheat!”
“I am not a cheat!” Muffs called back to the frogs. “I didn’t take the
rabbit on purpose. So there!”