CHAPTER XIII

POOR POLLY!

Red bragged afterwards that he whacked the burglar six times with his croquet mallet before the housebreaker got up and scooted into the night. But I can hardly swallow that heroic story. For I know Red! That same week his mother discovered a crack in her fancy lawn urn. And if the rattle-headed one hit anything at all I bet a cookie it was the urn.

However, the man wouldn’t have gotten away from _me_, let me tell you, if it hadn’t been for that blamed parrot. Yes, sir, if Solomon Grundy, Jr., hadn’t handicapped me by attaching himself to the roof of my nose, I would have landed neatly on the escaping one’s cranium with my paving brick. One swing of my trusty right arm and Mr. Burglar would have been a dish rag.

But the point is that the law breaker _did_ get away from us. That was a big disappointment. Yet, with the sooted parrot miraculously delivered into our hands in the eleventh hour, so to speak, we couldn’t kick on the way Fate was managing things for us. There was mystery in the burglar’s possession of the sooted parrot, but we didn’t let that confuse us--not then! We had other things to think about.

The burglar’s loot was scattered all over the lawn. In the mess of stuff we picked up an Ingersoll watch and Mrs. Meyers’ silver-backed dresser set and the solid silver shaving mug that Red got as a premium for selling twenty colored pictures of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and probably forty or fifty pieces of table silver, such as spoons, knives and forks.

Dumping the recovered loot into the hall, we scooted up the stairs to the bathroom. Turning on the water in the tub, some hot and some cold, we made a deep oozy suds and got busy on the bird, finding to our great satisfaction that the soot came off easily.

“Breakfast,” says the blinking, bedraggled parrot, eyeing us reproachful-like. “Polly wants breakfast.”

I grinned at Red.

“It isn’t every parrot,” says I, sloshing around in the suds, “that has two servants to give it a bawth.”

He laughed at that.

“It’s a good thing,” says he, “that the parrot can’t tell on us. Or I’d catch it from my aunt--bu-lieve me!”

“Here,” says I, shoving a towel at him, “take this and finish the job.”

In the drying process the parrot suddenly stiffened out like a poker.

“Holy cow!” says Red, his eyes swelling in horror. “It’s dead!”

I told him that the parrot probably had swallowed too much water. And knowing the trick of reviving a drowning man by pumping his arms up and down, I got busy and pumped the parrot’s wings. But to no good results. Nor did the feathered hunk stir when I gave it a whiff of Mrs. Meyers’ smelling salts.

Red was tearing his hair again.

“It’s dead, I tell you,” says he, suffering at the top of his voice. “Oh, oh, oh! Now I’m in for it worse than ever.”

Here an automobile cantered down the street and stopped in front of the house. I thought sure it was Red’s people. And of no desire to be caught in the house with the guilty one and his dead parrot I beat it for the stairs.

In the excitement my chum had forgotten about his earlier intention of staying all night with me. But he remembered it now. And grabbing the parrot, eager to delay his punishment, he made quick work of following me down the stairs to the lawn, where we saw the car that we had thought was his father’s turning into a private drive on the opposite side of the street.

On the hall table in my home I found a note from Mother explaining that Mr. Meyers, stalled in his auto halfway between Ashton and Tutter, had telephoned to Dad to come and pick him up.

“If you get home before we do,” the note concluded, “please don’t forget to lock the doors when you go to bed. For we don’t want to have another robbery in the family.”

Wanting to do the handsome thing by my company, I set out a bedtime lunch of two bananas apiece and some cookies and half a lemon pie, after which we headed for our roost. As I was undressing I suddenly noticed that my invited bedfellow was acting queer. His mind seemed to be somewhere else. I thought, of course, that he was worrying about the dead parrot. But it wasn’t the parrot that he was thinking about, he said, it was his pajamas--he had forgotten to bring them along. I told him that he could use a pair of my pajamas. But, no, he held off, he had to have his own night clothes. So home he went to get them.

He was gone about five minutes. I was sitting on the edge of the bed when he came upstairs. Not for one instant had he fooled me. It wasn’t the need of pajamas that had taken him back home--I realized that. He had a hidden reason.

While I was debating in my mind whether I should ignore him or pump him, a car drove into the yard. A few moments later footsteps sounded on the front porch and my parents came into the house.

I heard Dad lock the door. Then the telephone bell rang.

“Yes,” says Mother, in answer to a question that had been put to her over the wire. There was a moment’s silence. “Why, how dreadful!” came the cry. “Yes, indeed--we’ll come over right away.” Dad was called. “It’s Mrs. Meyers,” says Mother in continued excitement. “Their house has been robbed. Even the parrot’s gone. And she says the filthy thief had the nerve to take a bath in her clean tub--there’s a ring on the tub, she says, that looks just like soot.”

At first surprised and puzzled that Red’s folks should completely overlook the stuff in the front hall, I suddenly tumbled to the truth of the matter. To escape a licking in the parrot’s unfortunate death my tricky chum had hidden the burglar’s loot. That is what had taken him home. No wonder his folks thought they had been robbed!

“It’s queer,” says I, in a scheme to pry the tricky one out of his hole, “that your folks overlooked the stuff in the front hall. For we left everything in a pile.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I’m going to tell Dad,” says I, starting to pile out of bed.

He stopped me.

“Don’t do that, Jerry. Please. You’ll get me in an awful fix if you do.”

“You’re already in a fix,” says I.

“Not like you think.”

Here was my chance.

“Red Meyers,” says I, giving him a scowl, “what have you been up to?”

“I--I didn’t want to get licked, Jerry. So I made a bundle of the stuff that we picked up on the lawn and dumped it into your ma’s cistern.”

I gave a squeak.

“For the love of mud!” says I weakly.

Here Mother came to the foot of the stairs.

“Are you awake, Jerry?”

“Sure thing,” says I.

“I thought I heard voices up there. Did you hear me tell your father about the robbery?”

Red gripped my hand.

“Don’t squeal on me, Jerry,” says he, begging.

I didn’t. For when a fellow is your chum, even if he does something sneaking, you’ve got to stand by him to sort of help him square himself.

But I read the tricky one a sharp lecture, let me tell you, when we had the house to ourselves, Mother having hurried to the scene of the “robbery” to comfort the weeping parrot owner, and Dad to help his excited neighbor go over the yard for clews.

Instead of having benefited himself, I lectured the culprit, he had gotten himself, and all the rest of us, into a deeper hole than ever.