CHAPTER IV
THE GENERAL RECAPTURES BILLY
THANK you, Miss Rosie de la France, for finding out so much for me. You certainly did have a narrow escape when under that davenport and you sneezed for you might have had your legs cut off by that officer’s sword. So the cook is going to catch me and bring me to the General, alive or dead, is he? I can tell him right now that he will never be able to give so much as one hair of my beard to him!”
“Here comes the cook now!” exclaimed one of the dogs. “We better scoot!”
With that they all jumped up and ran in different directions, Billy choosing a long, circuitous course that would bring him out on the Paris road. Then and there he gave up the idea of returning to the war and entering the army again with the Red Cross dog.
He soon reached the road, and once on it he put his head down like a race horse to resist the wind, and ran as he had never run before, jumping stones, ditches and uneven places on the roadway until he was completely winded. As it took a great deal to wind Billy Whiskers, you may know he traveled many, many miles and left the dogs’ hospital far behind.
“I shall stop running when I come to the next stream, get a drink, take a bath, and eat whatever I can find by the roadside. Then after a good rest I shall start on again,” he planned.
All of this he did, and he was hidden behind a big bush beside the road down by a stream, watching the big ambulances and high powered touring cars go thundering by in endless procession when, all plans to the contrary, he dropped asleep. It seemed but a minute to him after his eyes had closed when he felt something tight around his neck. He tried two or three times to loosen it by stretching his neck without taking the bother to open his eyes, but when at last he did open them, he saw standing around him three officers with broad grins on their faces. And behind them was the old General in his touring car, waiting for his officers to bring Billy to him!
“I certainly was caught napping that time!” thought Billy to himself. “And they have me all right enough now with this strong rope around my neck. It is queer I did not hear them coming! It must have been I was so tired that it made me sleep like the dead.”
“Come, get up, Billy, you old rascal, and come along without any fuss! For you are a smart enough goat to see that there is no use resisting with a rope around your neck and five men against you—we three officers with the General and his chauffeur.”
Yes, Billy saw all this and as he walked along quietly behind them he wondered where they were going to put him. They could not mean to tie him behind the car as no goat, even if fitted out with twenty league boots, could keep up with the General’s car at the rate he drove. And with three staff officers, the General and the chauffeur he could not see where there would be room inside the car.
“Well, Master Billy, you thought you had escaped from me for good, didn’t you? But you see you haven’t. And, what is more, you won’t escape in a hurry again, for I propose taking you right along with us, though it will crowd us some. Here I was blustering about and scolding the chauffeur for his carelessness in not seeing that we had water enough in the car to carry us through when the very lack of it led us to finding you. He got out to carry a bucket of water from the stream and found you so fast asleep behind the bush that you had not heard our approach in the car or even the chauffeur’s steps when within three or four feet of you. He had time to come back to the car and tell us what he had found, get a rope and the three officers to help me capture you while you slept on. Now, my dear Billy, you are my prisoner. If you behave, you shall have every care and comfort, but try to escape, and I shall send a bullet through you, for I shall stand no nonsense. Hear that?” and the General pulled Billy’s beard in a joking manner. But Billy knew he would do as he said if he tried to escape or cut up any monkeyshines. So he quietly let them help him into the car, where he stood between the two seats in the tonneau while they tied him to the rod at the back of the front seat on which the extra robes hung.
Billy was experiencing one of his rare moments of dejection and discouragement, for he knew if they once succeeded in getting him back in camp it would be very difficult indeed to escape as they would use every precaution to keep him there and they might even put him inside the electrically charged barbed wire fence where they kept the German prisoners. That would be horrible indeed!
“I must think up some way to escape before we reach camp or I am lost,” thought Billy. “How I ever can unless we have a breakdown is more than I can tell!”
Presently they came to the dogs’ hospital and whizzed by it at full speed, but not too fast for Billy to see standing at the gate the cook, or for him to get the cook’s expression of surprise and wonder when he saw Billy in the General’s car. Billy also saw the Red Cross dog close at the cook’s heels.
“I am glad they saw me for now the dog will know what has become of me,” thought Billy.
Presently the big car slowed down and went bumping and sliding over a terrible piece of road that was being repaired.
“Now would be my chance to jump out while they are going slower if I only were not tied. And I can’t chew the rope loose right under these men’s noses, either. Perhaps when they stop for supper I may get a chance.”
Just then there was a terrible explosion as one of the tires blew out, and at the same time the car slipped on the soft, shifting gravel with which they were repairing the roadway and slid down into the ditch.
“Now we are ditched and in for a long delay!” exclaimed the General. “I simply must get to camp with these plans within the next three hours. Stop the first car that passes here and I will make whoever is in it take me to camp while you officers stay here and help the chauffeur repair the damages and get the car out of the ditch. That should not be a hard job but only a tedious one for the men working on the highway can help you out of the ditch and the chauffeur can mend the tire for I expect the explosion was due to a bursted tube.”
It was one thing to say get the men on the road to help but where were those men? Nowhere in sight, but several miles down the road working on another bad stretch.
“I hear a car coming!” exclaimed the General. “Make ready to stop it, Lieutenant Strong!”
In less time that it takes to tell it, the car had come, stopped and taken the General aboard. As the General waved good-by to them, he called back, “I wish you luck, gentlemen! I will keep your supper hot for you!” to which Billy replied with a loud baa. This made the staff officers laugh, for his voice sounded exactly like a cross old man saying “Bah!” in derision to the General’s joking remark.
As soon as the General was out of sight, the officers fell to and tried to lift and push the car up into the road. But they might as well have tried to move a huge rock for it did not so much as budge an inch. It was embedded too deep in the sand and loose gravel.
“This is most provoking!” said one of the officers. “It means that we must try to stop some passing car and get them to help us. When they see it is the General’s car that is in trouble they will feel in duty bound to aid us, no matter whether they really want to or not. But I just hate the job of stopping any one for that purpose as it always makes any one provoked to be so hailed on the road.”
“Here comes a farmer driving a pair of horses hitched to an old wagon. Let us stop him. I think his horses can pull us out if we all push,” suggested another of the officers.
“Now is my chance!” thought Billy, and he was just about to chew at the rope around his neck when the farmer came up and stopped opposite them to see if he could help them any.
“Yes,” replied one of the officers. “You are just the man we have been looking for to give us a lift out of this ditch.”
“Wal, that is a purty durn big car of your’n. But I guess my hosses kin pull her out. That is, if I only had a rope to tie to the back of my wagon, but I can’t get hide nor hair of any rope or chain or nothin’.”
“We have a rope,” answered one of the officers. “We always carry a good strong rope for just such purposes under one of the seats. Here, Jean, get it out and we will see how soon these horses can pull us out.”
Jean, the chauffeur, stopped working on the tire to get the rope, but alas! when he looked under the seat no rope was there. From the fury into which the officers flew, Billy thought they were going to kill the fellow on the spot for his carelessness, first running out of water and now finding no rope.
“You are discharged the minute you get us to camp!” roared the superior officer. “And what is more, I shall see that the General has you severely punished. What if the enemy were at our heels and we were trying to escape from them, or we had important dispatches that must get to Headquarters to change some movement of the army that would mean the saving of hundreds and thousands of lives?”
At last the chauffeur managed to say, “Could we not use the rope that is around the goat’s neck to pull the car out of the sand? It is a very long one. In fact, it is the rope that belongs under the seat. In my excitement I forgot I had used it to tie the goat.”
“Of course we can! And to keep him from escaping we can tie him with one of the farmer’s reins.”
“Here, you Billy, stand still while I take this rope off your neck.” The chauffeur stood on the step, leaning through the open door of the tonneau as he untied the rope that was around Billy’s neck, with the farmer standing behind him ready to hand him one of his reins to secure Billy again.
“Here is a good chance to escape,” thought Billy. “To be sure, I will have to run the chance of one of the officers shooting me, but I will take it. For I would rather be shot than carried back to camp and shut up with a lot of German prisoners.”
At the moment Billy was forming his plan of escape, all the officers were fussing on the car at one place or another trying to dig out the wheels by shoveling a path for them in the sand.
Seeing all this, Billy made up his mind he would butt the chauffeur so hard he would knock all the breath out of him so he could not cry out and give the alarm. So just as the farmer stepped close behind the chauffeur to hand him the rein, and the rope was off Billy’s neck, Billy gave a plunge forward and planted his head in the middle of the chauffeur’s stomach, sending him backward with all the breath knocked out of his body and with such force that he hit the farmer and sent him sprawling on his back, with his head hanging over the ditch. Now just as his head hit the ditch, the officer who was shoveling a path for the car raised up and the farmer in turn hit him and sent him flying into the ditch. There were three men disposed of in one butt. That left only two to shoot or pursue him, and both of these were on the far side of the auto and had not noticed anything as their heads were down and they were busy tugging big stones out of the way of the wheels. So Billy had a good start of a hundred yards or more before the officer who had been sent rolling into the ditch could right himself and give the alarm. By the time he found out what really had hit him, Billy had run to the side of the road, jumped a fence and disappeared in a thick woods. The officer’s anger knew no bounds, and he swore a blue streak and fired two shots after Billy.
“Thunder and lightning, I would not have had that goat escape for a million dollars,” he exclaimed.
“Bet your small change first,” counseled another.
“Yes; his escape puts us in a pretty light, doesn’t it? Five able-bodied men not able to keep one goat in an auto! To be sure, one man was not a man, only an idiot of a chauffeur,” he stormed.
“Say, Jean, you better stop working on that tire and go hang yourself with the rope in your hand!” scoffed the third, “for you are likely to be hung in earnest when you get to camp for all the mistakes you have made to-day, to say nothing of losing the goat besides.”
But poor Jean heard this not at all for he was still unconscious from Billy’s terrific butt.
“Some goat, that, misters!” said the farmer in a dry way.
“I guess you would think so if you knew just a little of his history!”
“You don’t mean to tell me that that there goat is the one they call the —th Regiment’s mascot, and the one the papers are always telling about?”
“Same goat!”
“Wal, I’ll be gosh darned!” in astonishment.
Jean did not come to and one of the officers had to run to the auto for restoratives while Jean was stretched out on the back seat with his head in a second officer’s lap. In falling he had hit his head on a stone and the wound was now bleeding profusely. The soldiers tied their handkerchiefs around his head and tried to stop the flow of blood as best they could and after the car was out of the ditch they drove so fast they were in danger of breaking their necks or having the car turn turtle at every turn.
When at last they did reach camp and got the chauffeur into the hospital and reported to the General for duty, they were in a pretty mess and looked as if they had been in a pitched battle with the enemy for they were covered with dirt and blood from their heads to their heels, which made the General exclaim when he saw them, “Well, bless my soul, you are a nice looking crowd! Whatever has happened to you?”