Read Online The Wind on the Moon by Eric Linklater - Free Book Online Page B

said Dorinda.
    Every day they ate a good dinner which Mr. Plum brought them. It usually consisted of some hay and some turnips, a few pounds of carrots, a couple of cabbages, and a bucket of beans. And carrots and hay, to their surprise, now tasted rather like roast chicken and chocolate pudding, so they enjoyed their dinner and often went to sleep for a little while afterwards. But when they woke up they generally felt very sad and lonely, and it was all they could do to keep from crying. They used to go to bed quite early.
    One night when they had been sleeping for two or three hours, perhaps, Dinah woke and saw a light shining faintly through a chink in the left-hand wall of their little house. On the other side of the wall lived Bendigo the Grizzly Bear, and Dinah wondered why there should be a light in his house. Perhaps he was ill?
    She got up and peeped through the chink in the wall, and what she saw was most surprising.
    A candle, about three inches long, stood in its own wax on the edge of the feeding-trough in Bendigo’s house, and Bendigo himself, sitting comfortably in the corner beside it, was reading The Times !
    She recognised the newspaper at once, because her father always read it when he was at home, and she had, indeed, seen a copy of it only that morning—a copy of it sticking out of Sir Lankester’s pocket as he leaned against Bendigo’s cage on his daily round. She remembered the look of it quite clearly. And then she remembered something else: there was no newspaper in Sir Lankester’s pocket when he walked away again! Where had it gone?
    There could be only one answer: Bendigo had stolen it. Bendigo was a thief! And since he was a thief, perhaps it was he who had stolen the egg from Lady Lil?
    She was so excited by this possibility that she quite forgot how strange it was to see a Grizzly Bear reading a newspaper. She woke Dorinda and told her to keep very quiet and look through the chink in the wall.
    Dorinda had a good look, and then she whispered, ‘Did you know that bears could read?’
    â€˜No,’ whispered Dinah.
    â€˜It just shows,’ murmured Dorinda, ‘how much we don’t know.’
    â€˜He must have stolen it from Sir Lankester,’ said Dinah. ‘ The Times , I mean.’
    â€˜Perhaps he’s only pretending to read it,’ said Dorinda. ‘Look again, and see if he’s holding it the right way up.’
    At that moment, however, the light in Bendigo’s house went out.
    â€˜Do you think he heard us talking?’ asked Dinah, and held Dorinda’s hand.
    For two or three minutes all was quiet, and then Dorinda whispered, ‘I can hear somebody else talking!’
    They both listened, and from the cage on the other side, that belonged to Mr. Parker the Giraffe, they heard the low mutter of another voice.
    Moving as quietly as they could, they looked out from the door of their house and saw against the starry sky the tall shape and the long dark neck of their other neighbour. He was pacing slowly to and fro, as if deep in thought, and talking very quietly to himself.
    â€˜A very baffling mystery,’ he was saying. ‘Very baffling indeed. The Case of the Stolen Ostrich Eggs. As baffling a case as I can remember. There were, to begin with, no footprints: that makes it baffling. There is, so far as I can see, no motive for the theft: that makes it more baffling. And as we don’t know who the thief is, we can’t ask him if he’s got an alibi: and that makes it utterly baffling.’
    Mr. Parker walked up and down for a minute or two without saying anything at all. But his head, nodding so wisely among the stars, showed that he was thinking very hard indeed.
    â€˜A note-book!’ he suddenly exclaimed. ‘If I had a note-book, I could write down the various clues, the names of everybody I have cause to suspect, and so on and so forth. But without a note-book, what can I do? What could any