CHAPTER IX
BUTTON DISCOVERS SPIES IN THE HAYMOW
WHEN Button got back where he had left Billy and the dogs, he found them all gone.
“I guess Billy thought they better hide somewhere until I came back. I can soon find them, however, by running up a tall tree and looking over the place, for even in this twilight I can see Billy’s white coat. Yes, there is a white object about his size moving toward the woods. I will follow it and I bet it will turn out to be Billy. It is too big for a dog, and too small for a cow.” So Button ran after the white object and soon came up to Billy and the dogs.
“There, didn’t I tell you dogs he would find us?” said Billy. “Button, our friends here did not want to leave until you came back. They were afraid you could not find us, and that you would feel hurt at our going off when you had gone to get information for me. They do not know us, do they? That we always understand one another and know that every move we make is for the best and our safety. Well, what did you find out?”
“That the two are at this very minute plotting to capture you so they can get the reward offered by the General,” and Button began to laugh.
“What are you laughing at? Tell us,” said Pinky.
“It is at what those two said. They have you down fine, Billy, and think you are a foxy old rascal with brains. So the two are going to lay a deep plot and are not going at it hastily so as to be sure to catch you. The chauffeur has promised to eat his shirt if he can’t catch you in three days.”
“They better lay a deep, dark plot and keep it under their hats if they intend to catch me within three days, for I am leaving in about fifteen minutes,” answered Billy.
“Oh, Mr. Whiskers, you don’t mean that! You surely don’t mean to leave us so soon. Besides, if I am to go with you to Paris, I can’t possibly get ready in that time. Why, I have all the chickens, ducks, pigs and the other fowls and animals on the place to say good-by to, let alone all my friends in the hospital!”
“Then you can’t travel with me, Miss Rosie de la France, as we three never know ten minutes ahead where we will be next, or what our next move will be. My being alive now is all due to my being able to think and act quickly. And I must leave here before those two plotting my capture set eyes on me again. Now here are my plans. I made them while walking over here. I will go ahead to the outskirts of the next town. There I will wait for Stubby, Button, Duke and yourself, if you still feel like risking your life with us, and taking all the hardships that come along without a whimper or complaint. For it is our motto never to complain or cry over spilt milk. What is done is past and gone; why spoil the present and becloud the future by dwelling on it?”
“Thank you, Mr. Whiskers, but I think probably I better stay here until my mistress comes for me. My surprising her might turn out not to be pleasant after all.”
“I think you are wise in your decision, for these are troublous times to be running around loose without a particular friend, and I think you are not enough accustomed to hard knocks to travel with three such hardened travelers as we are.”
“I am glad that sniffly-nosed, red-eyed little poodle is not going with us,” mused Button to himself. “I never could abide poodles, anyway, and this one seems to be a sentimental fuss-and-feathers kind of one.”
“Time’s up, boys! Glad to have met you all, and hope if any of you ever come to America that I shall have the good luck to run into you and the chance of returning some of the hospitality you have extended to me as well as that I may show you some of our beautiful country. Remember, Button, as soon as Stubby is able to travel to meet me on the outskirts of the next town. Good-by, good-by, kind friends!” and Billy was off.
He had scarcely disappeared in the darkness when the dogs heard the chauffeur and the cook coming toward the woods. They were sneaking along, looking carefully under every bush and behind every pile of stones for Billy.
“I tell you,” said the cook, “I saw him running in this direction after we had the mix-up with the bees.”
“Skedaddle, all of you!” mewed Button. “Don’t let them find us all together.”
“How long ago did you see him coming in this direction?” asked the chauffeur.
“Oh, about three hours.”
“Three hours! Oh, the dickens! In that time he might be half way to Paris. I thought you had seen him just before I came.”
“Well, he is somewhere around here, I bet.”
“If he is, he is probably laughing inside himself at the spectacle we make creeping along in the dark looking for him.”
Button went right back to the hospital and climbed up the rope that was still hanging from the window of Stubby’s ward. He thought he better go tell Stubby the latest plans while the rope was still there. He had very good luck indeed, and succeeded in getting to Stubby without being seen and in telling him what he had heard the men say and of Billy’s plans for them to join him as soon as he, Stubby, was able to use his leg.
“Isn’t it too provoking that I have to be laid up with a broken leg? Why couldn’t it have been my tail or an ear that got hurt? Then I could have traveled.”
“Never mind, old fellow! You will be all right in a day or two. In the meantime Billy can amuse himself by getting in more mischief, and I can pass the time by trying not to get into any here. I think I better vamoose now or some one will be coming and find me as I see it is about time they change the night shifts. I’ll see you in the garden to-morrow. Good-night and pleasant slumbers free from pain!”
Just as Button was on the window sill about to jump for the rope, the second night nurse who was to relieve the one now on duty came in the room, and it happened to be the one who had seen Button first and had been trying to argue herself into believing that she had not seen a big, black cat sitting on the window sill in the moonlight. On seeing the same cat again in the same place, she screamed and threw up her hands to cover her eyes. Her cry startled Button so that he nearly lost his hold of the rope, for he was just sticking his claws into it preparatory to climbing down when the nurse opened the door.
When she took her hands from her eyes to look once more and be sure that the cat was still there, the cat had disappeared, just as it had done before.
“There is something horrible going to happen to the hospital, I know,” she said to the other nurse, “for that is twice I have seen the vision of a big black cat.”
“And I too. I also saw it this evening, just where you did, when I first came in to take your place. I do hope it is not the forerunner of a German raid or that the Germans are going to drop bombs on us.”
It amused Button greatly to see how superstitious the nurses were about a black cat.
“I wonder how I shall pass the time until Stubby is taken out into the yard to-morrow,” he thought. “I think I will go over to the haymow and catch a mouse and see if French mice taste like American ones.”
He had crawled through a hole in the side of the barn and was quietly making his way toward where he thought the haymow would most likely be when he heard whispering voices. He stopped to listen and made out that they were speaking in German, not in French. And he immediately thought, “Spies, or escaped prisoners!”
“I’ll just listen and hear what they have to say,” he decided, “but I’ll try to get a little closer.”
Being black as a coal, he could not be seen easily unless the light struck his eyes. So he crept cautiously toward where the sound of the voices came from, and found it was in the haymow above his head. It took but a minute for Button to climb the ladder that led up to the mow, but as he stepped from the ladder onto the hay, it gave way and he fell into a hole in the hay made by one of the men’s legs when he had stepped off the ladder.
“What was that noise I heard?” said one of the two voices in a frightened tone.
“S-s-sh-h-h-h! Keep still and listen!” commanded the other.
“I hope it is not that French colonel who has been on our track for days,” answered the other.
Button never moved, and in fact he held his breath until the men began talking again.
“It was probably a rat you heard in the hay,” said the man who had spoken last. “Don’t you think it is about dark enough for us to get to our work and blow up this Red Cross hospital, so we can get back to our line before daylight?”
“So-ho!” thought Button. “You two think because this hospital has a big red cross on a white ground painted on its roof that it is a regular hospital for wounded soldiers instead of just one for dogs. And you have been sent to blow it up! Well, I’ll fix you! I’ll scratch your eyes out so you can’t see to blow it up.”
Then and there Button began to act as if he had a fit. He flew out of the hole he had been hiding in and right for the men, whom he could see plainly with his cat eyes in the dark mow. Before they knew what was happening, he ran up one’s back, reached around his neck as he sat on his shoulder and scratched both his eyes out.
“How do you like the feeling? That is for scratching out the eyes of little Belgian children!”
The man cried out from pain, but what cared Button? He jumped from this fellow’s shoulders straight into the other’s face and out went his eyes.
“Now you two can sit here and repent of your sins and think how the little children suffered whose eyes you dug out! And the Germans are planning to blow up this hospital, are they? Such being the case, I must get Stubby away from here at the earliest possible moment. I know what I can do. I can carry him on my back, he is such a little fellow, and he is so thin now that I can easily do it. Then when we reach Billy, he can carry him and in this way, by taking turns, we can get him far away from here before the Germans raid the hospital.”
And this is just what Button did. The very next day when Stubby’s nurse carried him out of the hospital and placed him on a cushion under a tree, with the splints off his leg, Button came along and told him what he had done the night before and that he feared the Germans would blow up or set fire to the hospital that very night. By first coaxing, then scolding, he at last persuaded Stubby to consent to ride on his back and let him take him where Billy was waiting for them on the outskirts of the town seven miles away. They bade all the dogs good-by and the Red Cross dog insisted that as he was larger and stronger than Button he should carry Stubby on his back part of the journey. “Besides,” he said, “I have a cloth bandage around my body with the Red Cross sewed on the front. Now this bandage will be an excellent thing for Stubby to stick his claws in to help him hold on. It will be much easier trying to do that than trying to stick them into your short hair, more especially as he has only three legs he can use.”
And thus they started on their journey, keeping close to the road, but going just inside the fields and orchards that bordered either side of the highway. They made very good progress, and the Red Cross dog did not feel the weight of Stubby at all. They rested a little after noon, and Button and the Red Cross dog left Stubby behind a straw stack in a barnyard while they sneaked up to the house to see if they could not find something to eat and to carry back to Stubby.
“Bow wow!” barked a big dog, jumping out at them from his kennel. “Who are you that comes prowling around here? Oh, I beg your pardon! I did not notice you wore the badge of a Red Cross dog or I should not have barked, for all Red Cross dogs are welcome in this place and the farmer and his family will do all they can for you. Just go up to the house and when they see you wear a Red Cross badge they will give you a hot supper and a soft bed to sleep on if you care to stay over night. I would go up to the house with you, but, as you see, I am chained. They will bring some dinner to me and I will share it with your friend here, the black cat.”
“I am sure that is very kind of you,” replied Duke, the Red Cross dog. “Since you say the family here is kind to Red Cross dogs, I will walk boldly up to the house.”
“You will find them all I say they are, for my master used to train dogs to be police dogs, and he sold them to the police in Paris. Then when the war began he trained them for Red Cross work. But all his dogs are sold now or gone to war. He was such a good trainer that he got very high prices for his dogs. I should not wonder but that you may have met some of the dogs trained by him if you have been at the front lately, as many of them are in active service there now.”
“Your master’s name could not possibly be Jean Baptiste Frère, could it?”
“That is just what it is!”
“Well, well, well! I declare! That is too queer! My chum was trained by him and lots of the dogs I know. My chum’s name is Sharp Ears, or rather that is what the Red Cross people call him, for he seems to be able to hear things long before any one else can detect the slightest noise. For that reason he is kept on police duty with the sentinels that have to tramp up and down, up and down in the deep woods on guard all night. He will hear or scent an enemy long before he comes in sight, and he always gives warning by pricking up his ears and looking straight into the sentry’s face, but he never barks to betray the sentry to the enemy. Then he turns his face in the direction from which the sound comes. If it is one of our soldiers, he will keep perfectly still. If it is a German, Austrian or any of the enemy soldiers, he will give a scarcely audible growl. He has saved many a sentry’s life by warning him in this way that some one was coming.”
“How can he tell whether it is an enemy or a friend coming when he can’t see them?”
“I asked him that very question, and he said he can always tell a German by the scent as they smell like pigs, and that he had never made a mistake yet.”
“I did not know before that the German soldiers have an odor peculiarly their own.”
“Nor I until he told me! Here they come with my dinner now, and as they don’t like cats very well, I think your friend better hide in my dog house. I will stand before the door so they can’t see inside.”
“Hello, Towser!” called out the farmer when he saw Duke. “I see you have company and most distinguished company at that. Come here and let me see by your badge to what regiment you belong.”
Duke went up to the farmer who had a very strong but kindly face and allowed him to read what was engraved on the tag that dangled from his collar.
“Why, bless my soul! You are from the same regiment that my son is in and also the one that owns my best trained dog. Oh, if you could only talk and tell me how they are faring out on that battlefront!” And he gave a deep sigh. So did Duke for he too wished he could talk and tell the farmer of some of the noble, brave deeds his son had performed and also some of the clever, smart things his dog had done.
“Come with me up to the house and I will give you a dinner that will make your sides stick out and ready to split,” which he certainly did. Duke ate and ate and still he could not see the bottom of his plate. There was fried chicken, with mashed potatoes and gravy fit for a king to eat. He ate all he possibly could for he knew it would be a long time before he ever was offered such a dinner again. But all the time he ate he kept thinking of how Stubby would enjoy the big chicken leg he was going to carry to him in his mouth when the farmer left him and he could slip away. He was just wondering how he was going to get away from the farmer when some one in the house called him to say that he was wanted on the telephone.
He had not disappeared inside the door when Duke picked up the chicken leg and ran with it to Stubby, and as he rounded the stack from one side Button did from the other with a second drumstick in his mouth. So you see Stubby fared pretty well.
“Those people seem to be very kind,” said Stubby, “and I guess it will be a good while before we meet any one their equal again.”