Ginger Pye (14 page)

They began to knock at the doors of friendly looking houses. "Have you seen our dog?" they asked. "He's a little brown-and-white puppy."

No one had. They took a quick look in every
hall to see if the old felt hat was hanging there, the only clue they had. But they did not see it on any of the pegs they glimpsed.

One door that they knocked at happened to be the door of Wally Bullwinkle, the big boy in Jerry's class at school. He acted surprisingly unfriendly. Since the whole class was still talking about Jerry's smart dog, Ginger, and how he had climbed the fire escape, naturally Jerry and Rachel would have expected him to be very concerned about their dog's disappearance, or at least interested. They thought he might ask them in and talk the whole thing over with them, suggesting clues.

But they had hardly knocked at his door when it opened a tiny crack, as though Wally Bullwinkle had been right there waiting for them, and Wally whispered to them to get away from here. He said, still in a whisper, no, he had not seen their old dog; and furthermore, he said he had an enormous dog himself, and this dog was so ferocious Wally had to keep him locked up with heavy chains. So they better not come knocking at his door anymore, see?

Jerry and Rachel hurried away from there. "Maybe he did not have any Thanksgiving dinner," said Rachel, who was always ready to make excuses for anybody, even the unpleasantest people.

They recalled a story they had heard of a man over here, somewhere on Second Avenue, who had had his nose bitten off by a dog. Fortunately a bystander picked the nose up and stuck it back on this man's face where it belonged and, so the story went, held it there until the doctor arrived. The
doctor sewed the nose back on, and it was only a little crooked. From then on the man was known as Bit-nose Ned.

Now Jerry and Rachel wondered. Supposing it was Wally Bullwinkle's dog that had done this. If so, it was kind of him, after all, to warn them. They'd better take his advice and stay away from this place. Their noses were so little, if they were bitten off, it would not be an easy matter to sew them back on.

Then Jerry said, "Pooh! I don't believe Wally has a dog at all. I never heard him say anything about having a dog. He's always boasting about something, that's all."

Rachel was silent. She was thinking that, if she was not careful, she might turn into a Wally Bullwinkle. Twice yesterday, twice on one day, she had said something that was not true. She wondered if the disappearance of Ginger Pye was punishment for saying these two things that were not true.

The first wrong thing she had said yesterday morning to Mrs. Carruthers when she was running home from school across the lot. Mrs. Carruthers had said to her, "Rachel," she had said. "I suppose you are having turkey for dinner tomorrow."

Rachel had said, "No. We aren't having turkey. But we are having
three
chickens."

Actually, she had been told they were going to
have two chickens, which seemed tremendous enough, but in comparison to a turkey, they were probably nothing in Mrs. Carruthers' estimation, so she had tacked one on. As it happened they had had three chickens after all, so the statement was not really untrue. Gramma said the two chickens she had chosen were not large enough and so she had brought another, as a surprise. However, at the time Rachel told Mrs. Carruthers about having
three,
she thought they were having
two.
Therefore it was a wrong thing to say, especially as she had been ashamed they were having chicken and not turkey. Yet, that was nothing to be ashamed of.

The other wrong thing she had said, she had said yesterday afternoon to Mrs. Stokes, the lady who had given the big ice cream party. It happened that Rachel and a girl named Muriel Jenks, who had curls and a coat trimmed with white bunny fur, were dancing on Rachel's front lawn and turning handsprings. Muriel Jenks went to Miss Chichester's dancing school and Muriel said, "Why don't you take dancing lessons?" And Rachel said, "I do. I go far far away and I take lessons from this teacher that is far far away." And all the while, of course, she didn't take dancing lessons at all.

This was not so bad, for Muriel would think this
was all a game of pretending and Muriel would like to imagine that Rachel had an interesting life somewhere of which she knew nothing. But unfortunately at this moment Mrs. Stokes came along—she always seemed to glide up the street, she was so graceful—and she said, "My, what fine little dancers. And where do you take lessons?" she had asked.

Muriel said, "Miss Chichester in Moose Hall."

Mrs. Stokes would have gone on then without asking any more questions, but Rachel just piped up and said, "And I take from a teacher that is different and she teaches far far away."

"That's why she dances that way, not my way," said Muriel.

Mrs. Stokes smiled and said that was fine, they both danced beautifully and they must come and dance for her daughter Nancy sometime. And then she went on up the street.

Rachel looked after Mrs. Stokes in dismay. Where had the words come from? The wrong words? She raced after Mrs. Stokes and she whispered to her, "Hey," she said. "I really don't take dancing lessons. I said I do. But I don't." And Mrs. Stokes had smiled and said what a very good joke that was. Rachel looked up at her gratefully and then had run back to Muriel who wanted to know what had been
said. But Rachel didn't answer. Some other time she would tell Muriel about the dancing-school joke, not then.

Now. It was possible that these two wrong things she had said were changing her into a Wally Bullwinkle, and that in punishment Ginger was stolen from them. But that could not be, she reasoned hopefully, because, after all, Ginger was mostly Jerry's dog, and Jerry had not said the wrong things. Still, from now on, she would never say
three
when it was
two.
And she would not say she also went to dancing school when she didn't.

The snow flurry had stopped but the weather had turned awfully bleak and cold. When they cut across fields their feet crunched on the crisp little frost castles forming. They wiped their noses and they pressed their lips together to keep from sobbing. "Ginger! Ginger!" they gulped. In the end they had to go home without Ginger.

Their only hope now was that perhaps he had shown up at home and was right there all this time that they had been searching the town for him. This hope put speed in their tired toes and they tried to convince themselves that all this afternoon had been a bad dream from which they would awaken, and they would find everything as it always was at home with Ginger, perhaps, charging at the enemy dog in the pier glass mirror.

This was not so. They could tell it was not so the minute they got home because, if Ginger had been there, he would be racing to the door to meet them, the way he always did. Instead, it was awfully quiet in the house. Mama and Papa were sitting in the living room looking rather worried for they had been gone a long long time and it was nearly nine o'clock. Uncle Bennie and Gramma and Grampa had not been able to wait for them any longer and had left. It was funny that Jerry and Rachel had not passed them, but they must have gone home by way of Hickory Street instead of Second Avenue where the children had last been, the street of the mysterious footstepper, and of Wally Bullwinkle and Bit-nose Ned.

Rachel and Jerry were too tired and too heavy-hearted to say anything or to eat anything, not even the warm milk Mama wanted them to have at least. They went upstairs to bed and they didn't say anything to each other and they climbed into their beds and neither one of them had the thought to play the Boombernickles story game, the game that they had played every other night for so long they could not remember when it had started. They just crawled into their beds in their own rooms and put their heads down under the covers and cried. In private one could cry. On an occasion like this, when they had lost their dog, they could certainly cry.

Jerry told himself how he had watched this certain puppy and wanted this puppy from when it was only a few days old; and how he had studied this puppy every day and been impressed with how sweet and smart he was; and how he had wondered where he would earn the dollar to buy him. He told himself
how Sam Doody came to the rescue; how he earned the dollar, with the help of Rachel and Uncle Bennie, dusting the pews; how he had then bought the puppy with this dollar they had earned.

And Jerry told himself about the tricks he had taught Ginger, the smart dog he was. Ginger knew many tricks now. But Jerry was careful not to boast about him in front of Dick Badger or anybody, but especially not in front of Dick Badger, because Dick's dog, Duke, knew only the one trick—how to scratch his stomach when you scratched his back, a certain special place on his back. Ginger, on the other hand, when he was only about ten weeks old, had trailed Jerry to school and gone up the fire escape, even bringing a pencil Jerry had lost with him. Dick Badger's father ran the
Cranbury Chronicle
and he had put this story of Ginger on the fire escape in the newspaper, even running a picture of Ginger with a pencil in his mouth under the caption "Intellectual dog." The fellow who had also wanted to buy Ginger in the beginning must have seen the story and it probably made him wilder than ever to get hold of Ginger. Was it this same old fellow who had stolen Ginger, or who?

He'll be cold,
thought Rachel, sobbing silently to herself.

He'll be wondering where I am,
thought Jerry in anguish.

And they cried themselves to sleep. Jerry had a dream that Ginger Pye was asleep on his feet, the way he always slept. But in the morning, when he waked up, this fine dream was shattered. Because Ginger was certainly gone.

With the disappearance of Ginger Pye on Thanksgiving Day, the biggest search there ever was in Cranbury began. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend Jerry and Rachel covered the entire town looking for their puppy, calling him, and asking everybody they met if they had seen a dog such as they described.

"He's brown and white and has almost no tail, and he has elegant [they meant eloquent] eyes," they explained eagerly. And they said, "He answers to the name of Ginger, Ginger Pye, Ginger pup, or just pup, or puppy."

"What a great many names," said one lady, confused.

"It depends on how you say it, if he'll come," said Rachel. She envisioned a big class of Cranbury people learning how to call Ginger the right way, with affection and authority, and then of all these people going everywhere, calling and calling.

No one they asked had seen Ginger. They went up the country roads on the outskirts of the town, and they went along the shore, looking in all the little red boathouses. With their heels crunching on the wafer-thin ice, they made their way out to the end of Gooseneck Point to ask the lighthouse keeper if he had seen a little lost dog. He had not. They saw no trace of Ginger anywhere. It was as though the earth had swallowed him.

How had he got out of the yard? That was the puzzle. They decided that probably someone must have climbed over the fence—the fence, no doubt, that bordered the side street and where Uncle Bennie had seen the hat that first Sunday they had had Ginger. The person may have tempted Ginger with a piece of candy. Then he may have thrown a coat over Ginger and clamped his jaws together so he could not make a sound. Ginger may have whimpered but the Pyes would not have heard because of all the eating of drumsticks, and the laughter, and the conversation. He must have been stolen while dinner was going on. The thief must have plotted this from the beginning—to steal Ginger Pye while Thanksgiving dinner was going on.