Read Online Freddy Rides Again by Walter R. Brooks - Free Book Online

trough after all. Before he started back to his pool in the woods, he came up to the pig pen. He hopped up onto the snake’s box, and put his nose down on the glass cover and stared so long and so hard with his bulging eyes that the snake got mad. “Go on away, will you?” he said. “It makes me nervous to be stared at.”
    â€œOh, yeah?” said the frog. “And how abub—bout me? I suppose you weren’t trying to make me nervous up in the woods?” And he kept right on.
    The snake got more and more nervous; he tried striking at the glass, and he tried calling Theodore names, and he tried appealing to the frog’s better nature—none of them had the slightest effect; there were those bulging eyes staring down at him without any expression at all in them. I guess you’d have been nervous yourself.
    Finally the rattler got so jumpy and jittery that Freddy made Theodore stop. So the frog went home. But on the way he told everybody he met that he had hypnotized a rattlesnake. He made such a good story of it that for a week or so there was a crowd of small animals at the pool every day, wanting to hear about it, and hanging open-mouthed on his words.
    Freddy wrote, offering the snake to his friend, Mr. Boomschmidt, who ran a circus. The circus was now in winter quarters in North Carolina. Mr. Boomschmidt replied that he’d be very happy to have a rattlesnake who would be company for Willy, the boa constrictor—at present the only snake in the show.
    â€œAnd of course,” Mr. Boomschmidt wrote, “any friend of yours, Freddy, is always welcome. But I think we’d better wait till the show comes north, for you can’t ship him—the express company doesn’t take rattlesnakes.”
    A good many animals dropped in at the pig pen to have a look at the rattler. Jinx wanted to charge them a nickel apiece just to look, and ten cents to bang on the box until he got mad and struck up at the glass. But Freddy said no, there was to be no teasing him. “It’s never fair to pick on somebody that’s helpless and can’t fight back,” he said. “Anyway, it’s interesting to meet the animals that call. Those two sheep yesterday—do you realize they’d come all the way from Seneca Falls?”
    John came in nearly every day to report progress in stirring up the farmers against the hunters. He had tried the same trick at the Macy’s—getting the hounds to chase him through a window; at Schermerhorns he had run through the milk house and managed to tip over two cans of milk; and at several other farms he had led the hunt across lawns and flowerbeds. “But it doesn’t work, Freddy,” he said. “Old Margarine pulls out his pocketbook and hands ’em enough to pay for the damage ten times over. And what happens? They tell him he’s free to hunt over their land any time he wants to. We’ll never put a stop to the hunting that way. I hate to bother Mr. Bean, but—what do you think, Freddy?—should I get ’em to chase me through here some morning? You could manage to have a window open, couldn’t you? Get those four hounds in the parlor, and they’d stir it up, but good! I bet Margarine wouldn’t get anywhere trying to pay Mr. Bean money.”
    â€œMr. Bean wouldn’t take his money,” Freddy said. “He’d throw him off the place. But we mustn’t bring Mr. Bean into it. Anyway, John, you get such a kick out of getting these people to chase you, why do you want to get rid of ’em?”
    â€œI get a kick out of it—sure,” said the fox. “Mainly, I guess, I want to get rid of ’em because instead of settling down nice and quiet, they want to run everything. It’s like somebody joins a club, and he’s a new member and ought to do things the way the rest of the club wants to. But instead, he starts right in telling them how he wants