Freddy the Magician by Walter R. Brooks

Author:Walter R. Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Overlook Press

“Well, what can Ollie do? He has to let him stay. And every time he says anything about the bill, Zingo pulls some such stunt. Last night there was a traveling man named Giblet or some such name having his supper in the dining room, and Zingo stops at his table and says excuse me and picks a couple of them fuzzy caterpillars off the edge of his plate, and Giblet jumps up and grabs his bag and beats it.

“OK, you got any ideas?”

“Why, good gracious,” said Freddy, “no, not at the moment. But let’s see—today’s Thursday—there’s five days before Zingo’s show. Now if I could stay at the hotel as a guest those five days … How about it, Mr. Groper? It would give me a chance to make my own preparations for Zingo’s show, and I’m pretty certain we could find some way of getting rid of him for you.”

“The benefits of such a plan seem highly problematical,” said Mr. Groper. “Your features being recognizably porcine, and this necromancer bein’ a perspicacious individual and fully cognizant of same, I’d say we’d become involved in unpredictable eventualities terminating in a highly detrimental denouement, catastrophic in its scope.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” said Jinx with a grin.

But Freddy said: “I guess you mean he’d recognize me. But I’d be in disguise of course.”

Mr. Groper fired a string of polysyllables which Freddy took to mean that he didn’t think any disguise would work, but the sheriff reassured him. Freddy, he said, was a master of disguise. “You remember that time,” he said to Freddy, “when you wore that old-fashioned sailor suit that used to belong to Mr. Bean, and you stayed here for weeks and nobody knew you? Why, I believe that suit’s still here. You could be Ollie’s nephew, come for a visit.” He glanced from the pig to Mr. Groper and back again; there certainly was a sort of family resemblance between them, though he didn’t say so. “Wait; I’ll get it.”

Freddy was a little thinner that summer than he had been on the previous occasion when he had worn the suit. They didn’t have to tug so hard to get him into it. And Mr. Groper was much impressed. There was even, he said, a distinct resemblance to his brother Mervyn’s boy, Marshall.

“Fine,” said the sheriff. “You’ll give out that Marshall has come to visit you. You better go right over to the hotel now and get settled.”

But Freddy said he wouldn’t be able to until later in the day. There were a number of arrangements to be made at the farm, and of course he would have to get Mr. Bean’s permission. So they shook hands all around, and then Freddy and Jinx left.

They were too busy when they got home to make much of a search for Minx, who had apparently really disappeared during their absence. Nobody had seen her for some time. But there was nothing to worry about. She could take care of herself, and she would find out soon enough that she wasn’t really invisible.

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