POPPY OTT
AND THE STUTTERING PARROT
[Illustration: “IT ISN’T EVERY PARROT THAT HAS TWO SERVANTS TO GIVE
IT A BAWTH.”
_Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot._ _Frontispiece_--(_Page 133_)]
POPPY OTT
AND THE
STUTTERING PARROT
BY
LEO EDWARDS
AUTHOR OF
THE POPPY OTT BOOKS
THE JERRY TODD BOOKS
ILLUSTRATED BY
BERT SALG
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY
GROSSET & DUNLAP
To
GLENN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I POPPY OTT 1
II IN THE PARROT STORE 19
III THE STUTTERING PARROT 29
IV OUR NEW CHUM 40
V OLD CALEB’S QUEER STORY 51
VI UP THE CREEK 59
VII FOUR WHEELBARROWS 68
VIII THE ESCAPED PARROT 73
IX VOODOOISM 82
X THE ROBBERY 96
XI RED’S PREDICAMENT 113
XII THE BURGLAR 127
XIII POOR POLLY! 132
XIV THE VANISHED TOWNSMAN 139
XV A WILD NIGHT 155
XVI THE EMPTY GRAVE 163
XVII IN THE OLD MANSE 174
XVIII THE HAUNTED CISTERN 190
XIX VOODOOED 199
XX WHAT WE CAPTURED 209
LEO EDWARDS’ BOOKS
Here is a complete list of Leo Edwards’
published books:
THE JERRY TODD SERIES
JERRY TODD AND THE WHISPERING MUMMY
JERRY TODD AND THE ROSE-COLORED CAT
JERRY TODD AND THE OAK ISLAND TREASURE
JERRY TODD AND THE WALTZING HEN
JERRY TODD AND THE TALKING FROG
JERRY TODD AND THE PURRING EGG
JERRY TODD IN THE WHISPERING CAVE
JERRY TODD, PIRATE
JERRY TODD AND THE BOB-TAILED ELEPHANT
JERRY TODD, EDITOR-IN-GRIEF
THE POPPY OTT SERIES
POPPY OTT AND THE STUTTERING PARROT
POPPY OTT’S SEVEN-LEAGUE STILTS
POPPY OTT AND THE GALLOPING SNAIL
POPPY OTT’S PEDIGREED PICKLES
POPPY OTT AND THE FRECKLED GOLDFISH
POPPY OTT AND THE TITTERING TOTEM
POPPY OTT AND THE PRANCING PANCAKE
THE ANDY BLAKE SERIES
ANDY BLAKE
ANDY BLAKE’S COMET COASTER
ANDY BLAKE’S SECRET SERVICE
ANDY BLAKE AND THE POT OF GOLD
THE TRIGGER BERG SERIES
TRIGGER BERG AND THE TREASURE TREE
TRIGGER BERG AND HIS 700 MOUSE TRAPS
POPPY OTT AND THE STUTTERING PARROT
CHAPTER I
POPPY OTT
I guess you know who I am. My name is Jerry Todd. I have written
a lot of books about myself. I’m writing this book, too. But it’s
mostly about another boy. A new kid. I’ll tell you about him.
You see, to start with, I live in Tutter. Our town is the best small
town in Illinois. Boy, we have fun! In the summer time, I mean. One
reason why we have so much fun, I guess, is because we have a smart
leader. Scoop Ellery is the gnat’s knuckles, let me tell you, when it
comes to thinking up interesting things to do. Peg Shaw is a member
of our gang, too. He’s a great big guy. To look at him you’d think
he was three years older than Scoop and me. But he isn’t. He just
grew up faster. His folks fed him a lot of tough beefsteak, I guess.
Anyway, that’s what we tell him in fun. We’re all in the same grade
at school. Even Red Meyers, who is a sort of runt with freckles
parked all over his face and a brick-colored topknot.
Well, to jump into my story, Red and I started out one summer morning
right after breakfast to have an early-morning swim in the creek in
Happy Hollow. This is a peachy place to swim. The willows growing
there make it cool and shady even in the hottest weather. You never
saw a place so crammed full of willows. It’s a regular jungle. Tramps
hang out there in the summer time. But they don’t bother us when we
go there. We leave them alone and they leave us alone. They know
they’ve got to behave themselves. If they didn’t the Tutter marshal
would lock them up in the town jail. Sometimes Bill Hadley does lock
them up to get rid of them. After a night in jail they’re glad enough
to get out of town.
Red and I ran into a couple of tramps this morning on our way to the
swimming hole. One was a man, a quite oldish man, and the other was
a boy our age. Say, I wish you could have seen the outfit they had!
It was a sort of ramshackle bungalow built on a rickety four-wheeled
wagon. The house had side windows, all of different shapes and sizes.
There was a back door and a little back porch with a rickety railing.
Up in front a stovepipe poked its rusted snout through the roof. Like
everything else in the outfit the stovepipe was wabbly and ready to
fall to pieces. It was some tacky outfit, all right. The wonder to me
was that it didn’t fall to pieces in traveling the country roads.
An old gray horse was staked out close to the wagon. Talk about a
_sway-back_! Say, that old four-legged washboard had a gully in its
back as deep as the Illinois River. On the bottom side its stomach
bagged worse than the knees of Cap’n Tinkertop’s everyday pants. It
was awfully proud of its ribs, or so it would seem, for every rib
was shoved out in plain sight. The tail was bobbed. To help the old
skate switch away the mosquitoes and flies its owner had fastened
a frazzled-out rope to the stub. The old nag sure did look funny
swishing its rope tail. Red and I had a good laugh to ourselves.
“Some outfit,” says my chum, taking in the rickety traveling bungalow
and the ten-cent horse.
“That must be the guy who owns it,” says I, pointing to a
stoop-shouldered old man who had pottered into sight from the deeper
willows.
The newcomer hadn’t seen us. And shuffling up to the bungalow, he
rapped on a window.
“Poppy,” says he. “Poppy Ott. You git up now. Or I’ll come in thar
with a stick.”
Some one inside yawned like a young steam engine.
“_Poppy!_” says the old man, sharper-like.
“Uh-huh,” says a sleepy voice.
“You git up now,” says the old man. “You hear me? You hain’t took
care of Julius Cæsar yet. An’ I’ve got to go to town on business.”
Here a tousle-headed kid came into sight on the bungalow’s fancy back
porch. And at sight of him Red pinched my hand and giggled.
“Lookit, Jerry,” says he, pointing. “Huckleberry Finn has come to
town.”
The kid was a dead-ringer for Huckleberry Finn, all right. His shirt
was ripped at the neck and his pants were three sizes too big for
him. They hung on him like Charley Chaplin’s pants. And did a kid
ever have dirtier feet! _Good_ night! I wondered what his bed sheets
looked like.
“Did you eat, Pa?” says the kid, stretching and yawning.
“Two hours ago,” says the old man.
“Leave anything?”
“They’s some stuff under the wagon.”
While the kid was messing around in a box where food was kept, the
old man got out a whisk broom and dusted his clothes. He looked
pretty respectable when he got through.
Red got my ear.
“Lookit, Jerry! What’s he doing now?”
“Polishing something,” says I.
“It’s a badge,” says Red, sort of breathless-like. “A policeman’s
badge. Gee! He must be a detective.”
“Yah,” says I, in a sudden cold feeling toward the old man. “Like old
Mr. Arnoldsmith.”
If you have read my book, JERRY TODD AND THE WHISPERING MUMMY, you’ll
remember Mr. Anson Arnoldsmith. The old shyster! He gyped me out of
a dollar and a quarter. And ever since then I’ve been leary about
meeting “detectives.”
Red was excited.
“I bet he _is_ a detective, Jerry.”
“I’d sooner think he was a dog catcher,” says I.
“I don’t see any dogs.”
“Maybe he’s got ’em in the wagon,” I laughed.
“We’ll help him, Jerry.”
“We’ll keep away from him,” says I quickly, thinking of old Mr.
Arnoldsmith.
“We can detect, too,” says Red. “We know how.”
“If he’s a detective,” says I, “he better detect a bar of soap and a
scrubbing brush and get busy on his little Poppy.”
Red snickered.
“Poppy,” says he, speaking the boy’s name. “_Some_ name.”
“They ought to call him squash blossom,” says I. “For he looks more
like a muddy squash than he does a poppy.”
The old man put his polished badge out of sight under his coat.
“Now, Poppy,” says he, businesslike, sort of working his shoulders up
and down to make his coat fit better, “you jest curry Julius Cæsar,
like I tell you, an’ brush him down nice an’ neat. An’ when you git
that job done you better git up on the roof with some tar an’ see
’bout fixin’ that hole whar it rained in on me last night. I’ve told
you before ’bout fixin’ it. So git busy now an’ do it. Fur it may
rain ag’in to-night. An’ I hain’t awantin’ to wake up like I did last
night an’ find my mouth plum full of rain water. You hear me?”
“Yes, Pa,” says the kid, over the top of a hunk of bread.
As this was the first boy tramp we had ever seen our curiosity was
aroused. It would be fun, we thought, to talk to him and thus get his
story. For undoubtedly in traveling here and there he had met with a
lot of exciting adventures. So we decided to stick around.
Finishing his breakfast, the kid got out a currycomb and brush and
began massaging the ribs of the four-legged washboard. He kept at
this job until his father had pottered out of sight in the direction
of town. Then he sat down on a stump and sort of buried his face in
his hands.
Red was puzzled in watching the other.
“What’s he doing now, Jerry? Crying?”
“Let’s go over and find out,” says I.
“Aw!... He wouldn’t want us to catch him crying. He’d be ashamed.”
“Maybe he’s sick,” says I, “and needs attention.”
“_You_ aren’t a doctor.”
“I can give him a stomach rub,” says I, grinning.
“Yah, and probably _he_ can give you a punch in the snout if you get
smart with him. He looks tough. You better stay here.”
Here the kid lifted his face. We saw then that he hadn’t been crying.
He had been thinking about something, like a fellow does sometimes
when he’s troubled. And whatever his thoughts had been they had led
him along until he was the maddest kid imaginable.
Getting up from his seat, he jumped up and down in his mad streak,
sort of shaking his clenched fists. Say, he acted like he was crazy.
We could hear him talking to himself, too. But we couldn’t make out
what he was saying, for we were too far away.
“What the dickens?...” says Red, blinking puzzled-like at the
strange-acting one. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Maybe he sat down on a hornet,” says I.
“Aw!...”
“Go over and put a nickel in him,” says I, in further nonsense, “and
see if he’ll play a tune.”
“Sh-h-h-h!” says Red. “He’ll hear you.”
Sort of quieting down, the kid went back to his currying job. We
watched him for several minutes, wondering what was next on the
program. Pretty soon he put away his currycomb and brush and went
over to the bungalow. I figured that he was going to climb on the
roof and sling some tar, as his father had ordered him to do.
Instead he thoughtfully walked around and around the wagon, sort
of squinting at it and shaking his head. Taking hold of a wheel, he
gave it a shake. Golly Ned! The old bungalow rattled in its wabbly
joints like the skeleton that Doc Leland donated to the Tutter public
school. I _know_ how that old skeleton rattles, for one day I fixed
some strings to it and the teacher was so scared when it waved its
bony hands at her that she almost jumped out of her skin.
[Illustration: “LOOKIT, JERRY! THERE GOES THE WHEELS!”
_Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot._ _Page 9_]
Well, we were right-down curious about the strange kid now. He was up
to something. We could see that plain enough. So we decided to stick
around a while longer.
Going back to where the old nag was staked out in a grassy spot, the
kid did something to the horse that made it kick. Bingo! Up went its
rope tail and out shot its hind feet like a double-barreled battering
ram.
Red grabbed my arm when the young horse tender led his nag over to
the wagon and backed it up against a front wheel.
“_Good_ night! He’s making his old horse kick the wagon to pieces.
Lookit, Jerry! There goes the two hind wheels.”
The four wagon wheels kicked to pieces, the kid led the horse back
to its pasture and then squatted, contented-like, in the shade of a
tree with a book.
“I wonder what got into him,” says Red, completely puzzled.
“He’s cuckoo,” says I.
“Aw! ... It’s only old men who get cuckoo.”
“How about yourself?” says I, grinning.
“You aren’t funny,” says he.
Well, we stuck around. There’d be some excitement, we figured, when
the old man came home and found his bungalow squatting on the ground
instead of on wheels. As for the kid, he sure had us guessing with
his queer actions. We couldn’t make him out at all. And curious, too,
about the book that he was reading, we crawled closer.
“It’s a schoolbook,” says Red. “What do you know about that?--_him_
studying an arithmetic!”
The kid had paper and a pencil. He was working problems. One problem
seemed to stump him. He figured and figured. But he couldn’t get the
right answer.
Suddenly he looked up and caught our eyes.
“Say,” says he, as unconcerned over our presence as you please, “can
you kids do fractions?”
We felt foolish in being caught. We hadn’t figured on this. We had
thought to ourselves that we were too smart to be caught. I had to
admit to myself now that the kid wasn’t as much of a squash as I had
let myself believe.
“I can’t get this problem,” says he, and he dug at his tousled
hair with his pencil, looking more puzzled than ever. “It’s about
a steamboat. Going up stream the steamboat travels sixteen and
two-thirds miles per hour. Going down stream it travels twenty-seven
and one-half miles per hour. It is three hours and seventeen minutes
longer going up stream than down. How far did it go?”
Red and I had had that problem in school. So we got busy and worked
it. And now that I was close to the kid I saw what bright, snappy
eyes he had. I liked his looks. He interested me. And I kind of
forgot about his old clothes and dirty bare feet.
“I suppose you wonder,” says he, putting away his arithmetic, “why I
made old Julius Cæsar kick the wagon wheels to pieces.”
“Did you know we were watching you?” says I, in surprise.
He nodded.
“I saw you kids in the weeds,” says he, “when I first got out of bed.”
Red and I traded sheepish glances.
“We thought we were hid,” says I.
That made the ragged one grin. And in that moment I liked him better
than ever. For he had a good grin. I could see that he would make a
swell pal, all right. He was smart, too.
And I had called him a squash! I wanted to kick myself at the thought
of it. It was _me_ who was the squash.
Then, taking a liking to us, he told us his story. Maybe we thought
it was fun, he said, thoughtful-like, to travel around the country
like a tramp and skip school and go dirty. But for his part he was
sick and tired of the lazy, shiftless life.
“That is what I was thinking about when you saw me on the stump,”
says he. “I felt pretty blue. Things were getting worse for us. In
thinking about it I got mad. And I suddenly made up my mind that I’d
stay right here. I wouldn’t go a step farther, I said. Pa, of course,
would kick on that. _He_ would want to keep on going until the old
wagon dropped to pieces in the middle of the road. Thinking about the
old wagon dropping to pieces sort of put an idea in my head. Why not
fix the wagon, says I, so he _couldn’t_ move it? Then he’d have to
stay here and settle down and be somebody, like other men. So I got
busy. You saw what I did.... Say, can you tell me where I can get a
job?”
“How old are you?” says I.
“Fifteen,” says he.
I shook my head.
“You’ve got to be sixteen,” says I, “to get a job in this state. I
know, for my dad runs a brickyard.”
“I’m going to get a job of some kind,” says he, determined-like. “For
one of us has got to work if we’re going to eat.”
“Why doesn’t your father get a job?” says Red.
The kid laughed at that.
“Pa work!” says he. “That’s funny. He’s too busy detecting to work.”
Red was excited again.
“Is your pa a detective?”
“He thinks he is,” says the kid.
“We saw his badge,” says Red.
“Yes,” says the kid, nodding, “he takes a lot of pride in that tin
badge of his. It cost him six dollars. I had a row with him the day
he sent for it. I told him that the detective company he was writing
to was a fake and all they wanted out of him was his money. But he
wouldn’t listen to me. And ever since then he’s been making a monkey
of himself. Some detective, _he_ is. Huh! He’s my own father, and I
suppose I ought to stick up for him, but if he was anybody else’s
father I’d say he was an old dumb-bell. When Ma was alive she sort of
kept him busy. Still, he didn’t do very much work at that. He’d sit
around the kitchen reading his old detective books and let her take
in family washings. When she died he just quit working altogether.
That was two years ago. Look at me! Here I am fifteen years old and I
haven’t been in the eighth grade yet.”
“It wouldn’t worry me,” says Red, who hates school, “if I never got
in the eighth grade or any other grade.”
“I thought it was fun at first,” says the kid, “to skip school. But I
feel different about it now. For I can see that a fellow has got to
go to school or be a dumb-bell like Pa. And it’s a cinch I don’t want
to grow up and be like _him_. I guess not. I want to go to school, I
do. And I’m going to go to school, too--right here in Tutter. I’ve
made up my mind to that.”
I was looking at the flattened wagon wheels.
“What’ll your pa say,” says I, “when he comes home and sees the
wreck?”
The kid shrugged.
“He’ll be mad, of course. But I should worry.”
“Will he lick you?”
“_Lick_ me? Pa? Shucks, he couldn’t catch me. Besides,” came the easy
laugh, “why should he lick _me_? _I_ didn’t do it. Old Julius Cæsar
did it.”
“When’s your pa coming back?” says Red.
“Oh, when he gets through sleuthing ... if he doesn’t get locked up
in the town jail. He’s been in jail three times this summer. That’s
the kind of a detective _he_ is. Probably right now he’s crawling
along some alley on his hands and knees searching for finger prints,
or something like that. He tries to be like the detectives in books.
It makes me sick. No wonder the cops lock him up on suspicion.”
Red grinned.
“He ought to show the cops his detective badge. Then they wouldn’t
lock him up.”
“That’s the trouble,” says the kid. “It’s his tin badge that gives
him away.”
“And he isn’t a real detective?” says Red, disappointed.
“_Him?_ Of course not. But he thinks he is, as I say. And snooping
into things that are none of his business is what gets him into
trouble.”
“We were down this way yesterday,” says I, “but you weren’t here
then.”
“We pulled in late last night,” says the kid. “Pa’s been crazy to
get here. He’s been talking about coming here ever since he started
working on that black-parrot case.”
Red pricked up his ears in new interest.
“Black-parrot case,” says he. “What do you mean by that?”
“It wasn’t a real parrot,” says the kid, “but it could talk like a
parrot. And it was coal black. I think it was a mino bird. Yes, that
is the name. It came from India. A woman in Cedarburg owned it. Mrs.
Casper Strange. And when it was stolen she offered a reward of a
thousand dollars for its return.”
“A thousand-dollar parrot!” says Red. “I can’t believe it.”
“Oh, she has oodles of money! A thousand dollars doesn’t mean
anything to her. We lived in Cedarburg, you know. Pa told her that he
was a detective and would get her parrot for her. So she hired him.
That is, she told him she would pay him a thousand dollars if he was
successful.”
I was puzzled.
“But why did your pa come _here_?” says I. “You say he was crazy to
get here. Does he think the stolen parrot is in Tutter?”
“Search me,” says the kid, shrugging. “All of a sudden he got a
notion to come here, as I say. And here we are.”
Red laughed.
“Maybe he came here to search old Cap’n Tinkertop’s bird store.”
The kid gave the speaker a quick look.
“Old Cap’n Tinkertop,” says he.
“He’s a friend of ours,” says Red. “He runs a parrot store.”
A queer look came into the kid’s eyes.
“I wonder,” says he at length, “if Pa is as dumb in his detective
work as I thought. Tinkertop! That was the name of a man who worked
for the rich Cedarburg woman.”
“It wasn’t the Cap’n,” says I quickly. “For he’s lived in Tutter for
years.”
“_Ham_ Tinkertop,” says the kid after a moment. “That was the man’s
name. He used to be a sailor.”
“I know,” says Red quickly. “Ham Tinkertop and the Cap’n were
brothers. Don’t you remember, Jerry?--the brother died and the Cap’n
went away to the funeral. And when he came home he had a lot of
money. That was when he started up his bird store.”
I _did_ remember about the Cap’n going away to his brother’s
funeral. And at the time of the old man’s return I had wondered at
his sudden wealth.
“When was it,” says the kid, “that this old friend of yours was in
Cedarburg to his brother’s funeral?”
“The week of my birthday,” says Red. “Around the tenth of June.”
“That was the week,” says the kid, “that the black parrot was stolen.”
I looked at my chum and he looked at me.
“Come on,” says I, taking his arm. “Let’s snap into it and find Scoop
Ellery. He ought to know about this.”