POPPY OTT AND THE GALLOPING SNAIL

HE REACHED DOWN AND PINCHED MY BARE TOES. Poppy Ott and the Galloping Snail. Frontispiece (Page 153)

POPPY OTT AND THE GALLOPING SNAIL

BY LEO EDWARDS Author of THE POPPY OTT BOOKS THE JERRY TODD BOOKS

ILLUSTRATED BY BERT SALG

GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK Made in the United States of America

Copyright 1927, by GROSSET & DUNLAP

TO MY WIFE

CHAPTER I THE GALLOPING SNAIL

All fagged out, I dragged myself wearily from the sun-baked concrete highway to the skinny shade of a thin-limbed, thirsty-looking bush.

“Under the spreading blacksmith tree the village chestnut sits,” I crazily recited, kicking off my shoes to cool my blistered feet. Then I looked at my chum with begging eyes. “Get me some ice cream, Poppy. Quick, before I faint.”

Boy, was I ever hot! I felt like a fried egg. But scorched as I was, inside and out, I could still sing a song.

To better introduce myself, I’ll explain that my name is Jerry Todd. I live in Tutter, Illinois, which is the peachiest small town in the state. And the kids I run around with are the peachiest boy pals in the state, too, particularly Poppy Ott, the hero of this crazy story.

[2]Poppy is a real guy, let me whisper to you. I never expect to have a chum whom I like any better than I like him. He’s full of fun, just like his funny name, which he got from peddling pop corn. And brains? Say, when they were dishing out gray matter old Poppy got served at both ends of the line. I’ll tell the world. If you want to know how smart he is, just read POPPY OTT’S SEVEN-LEAGUE STILTS. Starting with nothing except an idea, we ended up, under his clever leadership, with a factory full of stilt-manufacturing machinery and money in the bank. That’s Poppy for you. Every time. A lot of his ideas are pretty big for a boy, but he makes them work. Of course, as he warmly admits, I was a big help to him in putting the new stilt business on its feet and teaching it to stand alone. But his loyal praise doesn’t puff me up. For I know who did the most of the headwork.

With Poppy’s pa doing the general-manager stuff in the new factory, my chum and I had merrily set forth on a hitch-hike as a sort of vacation. This, too, was Poppy’s idea. A hitch-hike, as every kid knows, is a sort of free automobile tour. You start walking down the concrete in the direction you want to go, and when a motor car to your liking comes alone you wigwag the driver to stop and give you a lift. Sometimes you get it and sometimes you don’t.[3] But if you limp a little bit, and act tired, that helps.

Poppy, of course, was all hip-hip-hurray over his hitch-hike idea. That’s his way. Our most violent exercise, he spread around, seeing nothing but joy and sugar buns ahead, would be lifting our travel-weary frames into soft-cushioned Cadillacs and Packards. Once comfortably seated, we would glide along swiftly and inexpensively. No gasoline bills to pay. No new tires to buy. Everything free, including the scenery. Some automobiles would carry us ten miles, others would carry us a hundred miles. “We might even average around three hundred miles a day,” was some more of his line, “and still have time each night to stop at a farmhouse and do chores for our supper and breakfast.” If we slept in the farmer’s barn, that would be free, too. Our trip would cost us scarcely anything, though it would be wise, the leader tacked on at the tail end, to carry twenty dollars in small bills for emergencies.

I fell for the scheme, of course. For Poppy never has any trouble getting me to do what he wants me to do. Not that I haven’t a mind of my own. But I’ve found out that in going along with him I usually learn something worth while, and have a whale of a lot of fun doing it, too.

Having won our parents’ consent to the trip, we had set forth that morning in high feather. But in[4] poor luck we now were held up on a closed road, though why the road had been suddenly shut off was a mystery to us.

With a final look up and down the long stretch of concrete, Poppy came over to where I was and dropped down beside me in the hot sand.

“Still not a sign of a car,” says he.

“Not even a flivver, huh?” I suffered with him.

“I can’t understand it,” says he, puzzled. “We saw a few cars after we left Pardyville. But the road’s completely empty now, and has been for hours.”

I saw a chance to have some fun with him.

“‘And our most violent exercise,’” I quoted glibly, “‘will be lifting our travel-weary frames into soft-cushioned cattle racks and pant hards.’ Say, Poppy,” I grinned, “was that last cattle rack we rode in a four-legged wheelbarrow or another gnash?”

“You won’t feel so funny,” came the laugh, “if you have to go to bed to-night without your supper.”

“Bed?” says I, looking around at the sun-baked scenery. It was a beautiful country, all right—for sand burs and grasshoppers! “Where’s the bed?” I yawned. “Lead me to it.”

“This sand knoll may be the only bed you’ll get. For there isn’t a farmhouse in sight.”

I got my eyes on something.

[5]“The Hotel Emporia for me, kid,” I laughed, pointing to a billboard beside the highway. “‘One hundred comfortable rooms,’” I read, “‘each with bath and running ice water. Delectable chicken dinners. Sun-room cafeteria. Inexpensive garage in connection.’ Who could ask for more?” I wound up.

“Jerry, don’t you ever run down?”

“Hey!” I yipped, straightening. “What do you think I am?—a clock?”

“Yah,” came the quick grin, “a cuckoo clock.”

“It took real brains to think up that one, kid. You win.”

“It’s a cinch,” the leader then went on, “that they aren’t letting any cars into this road. For we haven’t seen an automobile since three o’clock. And it’s after six now.”

“Supper time, huh?”

“Yes, supper time, but no supper. Shall we walk back to Pardyville, Jerry?”

“How would that help us?”

“The automobiles must detour from there.”

“First let us sleuth the road map,” I suggested, “and find out where we are.”

“Here’s Pardyville,” Poppy presently pointed out.

“We must be near New Zion,” says I, squinting at the map. “See? Here’s a river running east[6] and west, with a concrete road on each side—C. H. O. and C. H. P.”

“County Highway ‘O’ and County Highway ‘P,’” Poppy explained.

“We must be on C. H. O.”

“That’s what the map says.”

“Come Here Often,” I made up of the three capital letters, looking around at the Sahara sandscape. “Yes, I will—not!”

“I should imagine,” came thoughtfully, as the leader studied the map, “that a better scheme than going back will be to cross the river at New Zion and pick up the other road. For both roads lead into Sandy Ridge. And that’s our next regular town.”

“How far have we come?” I inquired.

The leader got out his “log” book.

“About sixty-two miles.”

“What!” I squeaked. “Has it taken us all day to cover sixty-two miles?”

“Here’s the dope: The first automobile carried us twelve miles. The next one kissed a telephone pole before it had gone a mile. The third one got on the wrong road and we lost seven miles. The fourth one—”

I let out a yip.

“The end of a perfectless day!” I sang noisily. “And you were the bird,” I threw at him, “who said[7] that some automobiles would carry us a hundred miles at a jump. Poppy! Poppy! I believed in you, and now my sugar is salt.”

“I guess I put it pretty strong,” says he, with a sheepish look.

“I guess you did. Sixty-two miles! Hold my head, I’m dizzy.”

“Anyway,” he added, “you can’t blame me because they suddenly closed this road.”

“I suppose not,” I let up on him. “But just the same I feel like a victim of circumstances, as the tomcat said when it sat down on the fly paper.”

We got up then. And taking to the concrete again, we kept our ears sharpened for the sound of an automobile, for it didn’t seem possible to us that the fine highway could much longer remain closed. But all we heard in the desolate strip of country was the rasping applause of happy-go-lucky crickets and the occasional bagpipe notes of a long-winded, hard-working locust. The waste land was an irregular checkerboard of sand ridges and clumps of unhappy-looking scrub trees. Men who jerked plows around for a living certainly had saved themselves a lot of grief and hardship by not stopping here. There wasn’t a sign of a fence, which showed in itself that the land wasn’t any good. Still, I concluded, it must belong to some one.

[8]Weary from watching us all day, and messing up our faces with sweat, the sun, on its way to bed, was fast sliding out of the sky in the west. From a sizzling white moth ball it had changed itself into a big orange. The air was cooler now, but the concrete under our dragging feet seemed hotter than ever. It was like walking on hot stove lids.

It was Poppy’s idea that the small town of New Zion, where we were going to cross the river, was just ahead of us, to the left, on a side road running north and south, between C. H. O. (where we were) and C. H. P. (where we wanted to be). But as we trudged along the hard roadway no sign of church steeples or shapely water towers came into sight. I was about to let go in weak-kneed despair, when suddenly the sound of an automobile cut the road silence behind us.

“Hot dog!” I cried, with new pep. “The road’s open! We won’t have to walk now.”

But instead of a string of cars coming toward us from the direction of Pardyville, we could make out just one moving shape. It was far down the sloping road. Nor was the solitary car speeding toward us, though from the noise it was making, and the smoke, you could have imagined that it was scorching along at double the law’s limit.

After an hour or two, more or less, the slow-moving,[9] smoking car got close enough for us to see that it was a roadster without a top. Maybe at one time it had been a fairly good-looking car. But that was years and years ago. In its old age it had gotten a broken back, which left the front and rear ends tipped up like the head and tail of a canoe. The sides were open—there were no doors—which in itself stamped the car as a relic. The windshield had long ago shimmied itself to pieces, though the brass frame that once had held the glass was still there. All four wheels toed out, like the wheels of Dad’s brickyard dump cart, and one front fender was gone.

There was an old man in the car—a queer-looking old man, sort of stooped and thin-faced. He was hanging to the steering wheel for dear life. I waved to him to stop, but he didn’t seem to see us at all, so deep was he in his driving job.

The crazy car having passed us, the noisiest piece of junk that I ever had seen on the road, I untangled myself from its smoky tail to find Poppy laughing his head off.

“The Galloping Snail!” he yipped, having read the name that was printed on the back of the car.

“It sure is a ‘Galloping Snail,’ all right. Why didn’t you jump in, Jerry?—you’ve been yelling for a ride.”

“I didn’t want to cheat the goose out of its seat,” I laughed.

[10]“Goose?” says the other, looking at me.

“Didn’t you see the goose on the seat?”

“Who do you mean?—the old man?”

“No, a real goose.”

“I guess it was a pair of geese,” laughed Poppy, thinking of the queer driver.

Sometimes a fellow gets a hunch about things that he’s heading into. But we had no hunch that we’d ever see that old car again, much less get mixed up in a crazy, shivery adventure with its queer driver and his equally queer gander—for it was a gander that I had seen, as we learned later on, and not a goose.

A spotted gander! Did you ever hear of one? No? Well, you’re going to hear about one pretty soon.

CHAPTER II A HOUSE OF MYSTERY

As though to completely take the joy out of life for us, no other cars came along, as we had expected they would. The sway-backed roadster with the crazy name and queer-looking driver seemed to have the whole highway to itself. And that was strange, we thought, puzzled.

Why had the road been closed to all the cars except this one? Or, to put it another way, if the road had been closed to the general traffic, for certain reasons, how had the one car gotten permission to come through?

It was dusk now. And as though cheered up by the cooler air of early nightfall, the crickets and locusts were tuning it up to beat the cars. Or maybe, was my crazy thought, they were hooting at us in derision as we passed. I could imagine, as we trudged along, hungry and fagged out, that we looked not unlike some rare piece of junk that the cat had dragged in. I know I felt that way.

Once or twice we caught sight of a scuttling rabbit. And now that the bushes beside the hard road were[12] lost in creeping shadows, I began to pick out moving eyes. Hunks of green glass set close together.

Poppy had joked with me about putting in the night here, though at the time neither of us had thought that we might in all fact have to do that very thing. But now the outlook was against us. We seemed to be a million miles from nowhere. Did snakes and sand lizards, I wondered, have green eyes? Br-r-r-r! If it came about, to our further grief, that we had no other choice than to stick it out all night in the open, it was my clever little decision to roost in a tree—that and nothing else but. I wasn’t so well supplied with spare legs and arms that I cared to run the chance of having one chawed off and hurriedly digested by some green-eyed monster while I snoozed on a bed of sand burs. I guess not.

Certainly, I checked up on the day’s adventures, so different from our dreams, a fellow’s fortunes were easily turned upsidedown. Only that morning we had set forth on our trip with lilting hearts, as the saying is. Everything was sunshine and chocolate drops. But were we lilting now? Not so you could notice it. I had the beaten feeling, as I dragged myself along, that I had lilted my last lilt.

“Poppy,” I suffered, feeling that it was time for some more nonsense, “if the worst comes to the worst, and I go down first, you can have my jigsaw[13] and football shoes—only the jigsaw needs a new leather belt.”

“Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along,” the other sang, to cheer me up.

“Say, Poppy,” I breathed, clinging to his arm, my eyes far away, “what is heaven like?”

“Be yourself, kid,” he shoved at me. “You aren’t Little Eva.”

“I wish now that I had taken lessons on a harp,” I tremoloed, “instead of a shoehorn. If only we could look ahead and know what the Fates have in store for us. Eh, kid?”

“Jerry,” came warmly, as the leader slipped an arm around me, “you’re a regular little sunbeam. For no matter how hard we get bumped, your stock of silly gab never dries up. I don’t know how I ever could get along without you. Certainly, it wouldn’t be the same old world.”

Well, that was pretty nice of him, I thought. I appreciated the hug, too!

“If you want to,” I puckered up, looking at him with my soul in my eyes, “you can kiss your little sunbeam ... once.”

“Go on!” he shoved.

I was about to unhinge some more of my crazy gab, when all of a sudden the leader gave a whoop and scooted down the road.

[14]“Here’s a signboard, Jerry. ‘New Zion ten miles,’” he read.

“Ten miles!” I groaned.

“We can make it.”

“But look at the road!” I wailed. “It’s nothing but sand. We’ll slip back faster than we can go ahead.”

“Then we’ll walk backwards,” came the quick grin.

“Ten miles!” I suffered anew. “It’s no use, Poppy,” I waggled weakly, as a sort of climax to my little act. “I’m done for. Remember, kid, the jigsaw’s yours. And you’ll find my book of patterns and seven new blades under the dog house. Good-by, Poppy. You meant well in bringing me here. But you didn’t know, old pal. So I forgive you. And if you can’t make the jigsaw saw ask Dad to help you, for he’s almost as clever at sawing hunks out of his finger tips as I am.”

“I’ll ‘jigsaw’ you in the seat of the pants if you don’t come on and shut up,” he told me.

Seesawing together, the moon had been lifted into sight by the sinking sun. And now we could trace the winding course of the sandy road leading to New Zion. As I have hinted in an earlier paragraph, it was some road. Sand to the right of us, sand to the left of us and sand in front of us, as Lord Tennyson[15] would have written it in poetry. But as I trudged along beside the leader I tried to grin and bear it.

“A light, Jerry!” he suddenly yipped. “There’s a farmhouse up ahead of us. We’re saved now, old kid.”

There was indeed a house up ahead of us, on the right-hand side of the road. We could see it in the moonlight. But as we hurried toward it, in livelier spirits, I couldn’t make myself believe that it was a farmhouse. Certainly, it was no ordinary farmhouse. For it was much too showy. I could count three stories and an attic. It was a stone house, too. And even if it had been built years and years ago, when labor and plaster were peddled around at bargain rates, I could not doubt that it had cost a fortune.

Who had been crazy enough, I wondered, curious over the unusual place, to build a house like this at the very end of the world? It didn’t fit into the waste landscape at all. Still, was my contented thought, the better the house the better the meal. It ought to work out that way. So we really were in luck to strike a place like this instead of a shack, which would have better matched the country.

Not only was the house itself built of stone, but it was inclosed by a stone wall at least three feet high. Where the private road turned in, smoothly graveled, the wall was lifted into a huge arched[16] gateway. Looking in, I thought curious-like of the magic palace that the genii had built for Aladdin.

“Is it real?” I asked Poppy’s opinion, wondering if it would be safe for us to go in. “Or is it a mirage, as you read about in stories of people crossing the desert?”

“Tell me what you see,” laughed the other, as puzzled over the unusual place as I was, “and I’ll tell you what I see.”

“A beautiful three-story stone house,” I checked off, “with fancy jiggers all over it, to make it showy, and a stone wall in front, with a big gateway, like a cemetery.”

“That’s exactly what I see, too. So I guess it’s real enough. But it beats me,” the puzzled leader concluded, matching my thoughts, “to find a place like this in a country where there aren’t even farmhouses.”

Leg weary and hollow under our belts, it had been our intention to buy a meal here, late as it was, and if possible rent a bed for the night. Certainly, done up as we were from our first unsatisfactory day on the road, it was all right for us to draw on our emergency fund. The next night, when we were on the other road where the automobiles were, and playing in luck again, we would try working for our supper and breakfast, as we had planned on doing. But not to-night.

[17]It struck me, though, as I stood there looking at the peculiar house, that this was no place to buy a meal. If we were admitted into the house at all it would be without pay. For only a very wealthy man could have built a place like this. And what would a dollar or two of our money mean to him?

Still, unless we wanted the people to think that we were tramps, it would be better for us to offer to pay for our supper, I told Poppy, than to ask for it. So of this determination we turned in through the big gate and mounted the front steps.