POOR POLLY!
Red bragged afterwards that he whacked the burglar six times with his
croquet mallet before the housebreaker got up and scooted into the
night. But I can hardly swallow that heroic story. For I know Red!
That same week his mother discovered a crack in her fancy lawn urn.
And if the rattle-headed one hit anything at all I bet a cookie it
was the urn.
However, the man wouldn’t have gotten away from _me_, let me tell
you, if it hadn’t been for that blamed parrot. Yes, sir, if Solomon
Grundy, Jr., hadn’t handicapped me by attaching himself to the roof
of my nose, I would have landed neatly on the escaping one’s cranium
with my paving brick. One swing of my trusty right arm and Mr.
Burglar would have been a dish rag.
But the point is that the law breaker _did_ get away from us. That
was a big disappointment. Yet, with the sooted parrot miraculously
delivered into our hands in the eleventh hour, so to speak, we
couldn’t kick on the way Fate was managing things for us. There was
mystery in the burglar’s possession of the sooted parrot, but we
didn’t let that confuse us--not then! We had other things to think
about.
The burglar’s loot was scattered all over the lawn. In the mess of
stuff we picked up an Ingersoll watch and Mrs. Meyers’ silver-backed
dresser set and the solid silver shaving mug that Red got as a
premium for selling twenty colored pictures of “Washington Crossing
the Delaware” and probably forty or fifty pieces of table silver,
such as spoons, knives and forks.
Dumping the recovered loot into the hall, we scooted up the stairs
to the bathroom. Turning on the water in the tub, some hot and some
cold, we made a deep oozy suds and got busy on the bird, finding to
our great satisfaction that the soot came off easily.
“Breakfast,” says the blinking, bedraggled parrot, eyeing us
reproachful-like. “Polly wants breakfast.”
I grinned at Red.
“It isn’t every parrot,” says I, sloshing around in the suds, “that
has two servants to give it a bawth.”
He laughed at that.
“It’s a good thing,” says he, “that the parrot can’t tell on us. Or
I’d catch it from my aunt--bu-lieve me!”
“Here,” says I, shoving a towel at him, “take this and finish the
job.”
In the drying process the parrot suddenly stiffened out like a poker.
“Holy cow!” says Red, his eyes swelling in horror. “It’s dead!”
I told him that the parrot probably had swallowed too much water. And
knowing the trick of reviving a drowning man by pumping his arms up
and down, I got busy and pumped the parrot’s wings. But to no good
results. Nor did the feathered hunk stir when I gave it a whiff of
Mrs. Meyers’ smelling salts.
Red was tearing his hair again.
“It’s dead, I tell you,” says he, suffering at the top of his voice.
“Oh, oh, oh! Now I’m in for it worse than ever.”
Here an automobile cantered down the street and stopped in front of
the house. I thought sure it was Red’s people. And of no desire to be
caught in the house with the guilty one and his dead parrot I beat it
for the stairs.
In the excitement my chum had forgotten about his earlier intention
of staying all night with me. But he remembered it now. And grabbing
the parrot, eager to delay his punishment, he made quick work of
following me down the stairs to the lawn, where we saw the car that
we had thought was his father’s turning into a private drive on the
opposite side of the street.
On the hall table in my home I found a note from Mother explaining
that Mr. Meyers, stalled in his auto halfway between Ashton and
Tutter, had telephoned to Dad to come and pick him up.
“If you get home before we do,” the note concluded, “please don’t
forget to lock the doors when you go to bed. For we don’t want to
have another robbery in the family.”
Wanting to do the handsome thing by my company, I set out a bedtime
lunch of two bananas apiece and some cookies and half a lemon pie,
after which we headed for our roost. As I was undressing I suddenly
noticed that my invited bedfellow was acting queer. His mind seemed
to be somewhere else. I thought, of course, that he was worrying
about the dead parrot. But it wasn’t the parrot that he was thinking
about, he said, it was his pajamas--he had forgotten to bring them
along. I told him that he could use a pair of my pajamas. But, no, he
held off, he had to have his own night clothes. So home he went to
get them.
He was gone about five minutes. I was sitting on the edge of the
bed when he came upstairs. Not for one instant had he fooled me. It
wasn’t the need of pajamas that had taken him back home--I realized
that. He had a hidden reason.
While I was debating in my mind whether I should ignore him or pump
him, a car drove into the yard. A few moments later footsteps sounded
on the front porch and my parents came into the house.
I heard Dad lock the door. Then the telephone bell rang.
“Yes,” says Mother, in answer to a question that had been put to her
over the wire. There was a moment’s silence. “Why, how dreadful!”
came the cry. “Yes, indeed--we’ll come over right away.” Dad was
called. “It’s Mrs. Meyers,” says Mother in continued excitement.
“Their house has been robbed. Even the parrot’s gone. And she
says the filthy thief had the nerve to take a bath in her clean
tub--there’s a ring on the tub, she says, that looks just like soot.”
At first surprised and puzzled that Red’s folks should completely
overlook the stuff in the front hall, I suddenly tumbled to the truth
of the matter. To escape a licking in the parrot’s unfortunate death
my tricky chum had hidden the burglar’s loot. That is what had taken
him home. No wonder his folks thought they had been robbed!
“It’s queer,” says I, in a scheme to pry the tricky one out of his
hole, “that your folks overlooked the stuff in the front hall. For we
left everything in a pile.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m going to tell Dad,” says I, starting to pile out of bed.
He stopped me.
“Don’t do that, Jerry. Please. You’ll get me in an awful fix if you
do.”
“You’re already in a fix,” says I.
“Not like you think.”
Here was my chance.
“Red Meyers,” says I, giving him a scowl, “what have you been up to?”
“I--I didn’t want to get licked, Jerry. So I made a bundle of the
stuff that we picked up on the lawn and dumped it into your ma’s
cistern.”
I gave a squeak.
“For the love of mud!” says I weakly.
Here Mother came to the foot of the stairs.
“Are you awake, Jerry?”
“Sure thing,” says I.
“I thought I heard voices up there. Did you hear me tell your father
about the robbery?”
Red gripped my hand.
“Don’t squeal on me, Jerry,” says he, begging.
I didn’t. For when a fellow is your chum, even if he does something
sneaking, you’ve got to stand by him to sort of help him square
himself.
But I read the tricky one a sharp lecture, let me tell you, when we
had the house to ourselves, Mother having hurried to the scene of the
“robbery” to comfort the weeping parrot owner, and Dad to help his
excited neighbor go over the yard for clews.
Instead of having benefited himself, I lectured the culprit, he had
gotten himself, and all the rest of us, into a deeper hole than ever.