Freddy the Pilot

When Sniffy and his merry men, and the Horrible Ten—who were really the Horrible Fifteen—floated down on to the secret air strip, they hurriedly folded up their umbrellas and made for the woods on the south side of the field, for the searchlight at the farmhouse was poking sharp fingers through the foliage, feeling for intruders. Once under cover they held a whispered council of war, and then, having hidden the umbrellas in a hollow tree, lay down and went to sleep.

In the morning Sniffy and No. 18 posted their men around the barn and the farmhouse, and along the old road. Every two hours they made the rounds. Aroma and Sniffy, Jr., dug a hole under the foundation on the west side of the house behind some bushes. They found that there was no cellar, and they managed to get in under the floor of the room which the occupants used as a living room.

There were two men in the house: the plane’s pilot, Jackson, and a mechanic named Felix. Much of their talk was technical stuff about the plane, and the skunks didn’t understand it. They quarreled a good deal. Felix did the cooking, and Jackson didn’t think much of it. They quarreled much more bitterly over the games of slap jack that they spent most of their time playing. Jackson had a terrible temper, and slap jack isn’t a game for people who can’t control themselves. When a jack was played, and they both tried to slap it at once, they would of course slap each other. Some of the games just ended up in seeing who could slap the hardest.

Rabbit No. 23, who was an ex-Head Horrible, managed to hop up on the windowsill one evening. He reported that the room was comfortably furnished, although not as elegantly as Mrs. Bean’s parlor, since there was no photograph album on the center table and no picture of Washington Crossing the Delaware on the wall. But there was a rack containing several guns beside the door. No. 23 felt that they should get into the house somehow and either steal the guns or do something to render them useless. But before their plans were made, Jackson came back from West Nineveh, where he went twice a week to telephone, with word that “the boss” was coming next day. The boss, the animals were sure, could be no one but Mr. Condiment.

Nothing had been heard from Freddy, and they had no way of getting word to him. They kept watch by the big elm, but Mr. Pomeroy didn’t appear. What had happened, they learned later, was that J. J. had set out from the farm the day after Freddy dropped them over the field. But in a thunderstorm his spectacles, which he now had to wear all the time, blew off. He flew on, since any attempt to find them would be useless, but as the weather did not clear he couldn’t see his landmarks, and he flew west instead of north. He got nearly to Buffalo before he found out where he was.

“We’ve got to do something,” Sniffy said. “You don’t think Robin Hood would have just sat around like this, do you?”

“My Horribles are restless too,” said 18. “But we can’t attack. I tell you what. There’s a loose board in the kitchen floor.” And he outlined a plan.

That evening Felix and Jackson sat down to their nightly game of slap jack. Halfway through dealing the cards Jackson stopped and raised his head. “What’s that?” They pushed back their chairs and went to the door.

A rabbit can give a shrill high-pitched scream that sounds pretty scary at night. When six rabbits all start screaming together, the effect is just plain terrifying. And six of the Horribles were down by the barn, screaming their heads off. The men ran back and pulled guns out of the rack, and sneaked cautiously down towards the terrible sounds.

Sniffy and Aroma and Sniffy, Jr., and the other nine rabbits were under the kitchen floor. The rest of the Wilsons were posted in the bushes near the house door with bows strung and arrows nocked to the strings, ready to create a diversion if the men came back too soon.

But the six Horribles moved slowly off down the old road, screaming at intervals, and drawing the men after them; so that the raiders were able to accomplish what they had set out to do. They lifted the loose board and scrambled up into the house. Ten minutes later when word that the men were returning was relayed to them from outside, they had succeeded in getting two shotguns down from the rack, and in dragging them out through the hole under the floor. Sniffy had also brought out three boxes of shotgun shells. And the men were so interested in wondering what the screaming could have been that they never noticed that the guns were gone.

A shotgun isn’t much use to a rabbit or a skunk. “Even if we could get the muzzle up to aim,” No. 4 said, “the thing would kick us right into the middle of next Sunday at supper time. I vote we bury ’em.”

“We’ll put ’em in the tree with the umbrellas,” said No. 18. “They may come in handy. Bring those cartridges along. We’ve got work to do at the barn.”

There were plenty of holes in the barn; they had gone in it the first day and inspected the plane, and tried vainly to figure out some way of putting it out of commission. Now they went in, and when they had gnawed off the ends of the cartridges and got the powder out, Sniffy laid a train of it from under the plane out through a hole and along the ground for five or six yards. Then he went in and turned the spigot on a big iron barrel of gasoline. He watched until the gasoline had formed a pool under the plane and had touched the powder train, then he went out, leaving the spigot open.

“You know that Mr. Bean won’t allow us to have matches,” No. 7 said. “He’s afraid we’ll burn the barn down.”

“Well, here’s one barn he’ll be glad to have us burn,” said Sniffy. “Oh, darn it, how can we get a match?”

His father looked at him for a minute. Then he said: “Wait right here.” He ran back to the house. He crawled under the kitchen, lifted the board, and crept cautiously over to the stove. The matches were in a holder hung on a nail a good foot out of Sniffy’s reach. He saw a yard stick in a corner of the room, so he got it and, holding it between his paws, pushed one end up under the match holder and jiggled it. Nothing happened. He jiggled it harder, and the matches jumped around, but none came out. He jiggled it harder, and the whole holder came off the nail and dropped.

It rattled on the floor, but luckily for Sniffy, at that moment in the next room Felix dealt a jack, and the bang as both men slapped at it covered the sound. Sniffy grabbed half a dozen matches in his mouth and ducked down under the floor.

“Then scatter,” he said. “You know what to do. Get as far away as possible.” And when they had gone he touched a match to the powder train and ran.

He touched a match to the powder train.

He stopped on the far side of the clearing and watched. A bright light and a plume of white smoke traveled along the powder train. It looked like a little steam engine as it went up to the barn, through the hole, and then … whoosh!—there was a gush of flame, and boom!—the sides of the barn blew apart and the roof opened up like a book. In two minutes the barn wasn’t a barn any longer, and the plane itself was burning fiercely.

Mr. Condiment had chosen the site of his secret airfield well. Lying in a fold of the hills, it was so well hidden from observation that nobody saw the flames. Nobody notified the West Nineveh fire department—who in any case couldn’t have done anything. And Felix and Jackson could only stand and watch until the barn had burned to the ground and the plane was a scorched skeleton.

The Horribles and the Wilsons watched from the other side of the field. They laughed and danced and whacked one another on the back as the flames roared up, and when at last they died down, 18 said: “Well, Brother Horribles, there’s a good night’s work done. And all thanks to Sniffy. Let’s give him the Horrible salute.”

So the rabbits began circling around Sniffy in a war dance, and sang:

O Sniffy, we salute you,

And hereby constitute you

A Horrible (first class) and we

Do therefore solemnly agree

To back you up in any fight.

Provided you’re not in the right.

But in the wrong, we’ll stand by you.

(Good deeds of course, we never do.)

If you have enemies, we’ll help

To make them holler, squirm and yelp;

We’ll pinch them black, we’ll punch them blue!

Oh, we’ll do anything for you!”

Sniffy was pleased, and he thanked them; but later he said to Aroma: “Robin Hood was a fighter; he didn’t go in for sabotage. Oh, sure; we had to do it for Mr. Boom. But I didn’t like doing it much.”

“Oh, Sniff, don’t be silly,” said his wife. “Robin Hood didn’t have gunpowder; if he had, he’d have blown that Sheriff of Nottingham right through the roof of his old castle.”

Sniffy dreamt of noble deeds and rescues all night, and when he woke in the morning the contrast between the heroic exploits he had dreamed of and just setting fire to an old barn made him feel unhappy. But he cheered up when he saw the new respect with which the Horribles greeted him. Even his own children were respectful. This is very unusual among young skunks.

Late in the morning a car came bumping up the old road. It stopped by the barn and the animals, watching from their posts, saw Mr. Condiment and Mr. Newsome get out. The men just stared silently at the ruins of the barn. After a minute Felix and Jackson came out from the house, and then Mr. Condiment let loose. He yelled and roared and stamped his feet; he called them every name he could think of, and accused and threatened until his voice gave out, and then he kept right on in a whisper. He didn’t give them a chance to explain, which was just as well for them, since they didn’t have any explanation. And finally even the whisper gave out, and Mr. Newsome said: “Let’s go back to the car and talk it over.”

The animals couldn’t get near enough to hear anything, but the argument seemed less angry now that Mr. Condiment was silent. The others talked, and he chewed throat lozenges and wrote notes in a little book which he then passed around. Finally they all got out and went over to the house to have some lunch. And it was while they were there that Freddy came sliding down from the sky in his plane and made an elegant three-point landing on the field.