POPPY OTTAND THEGALLOPING SNAILCHAPTER ITHE GALLOPING SNAIL
POPPY OTTAND THEGALLOPING SNAIL
Allfagged 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.
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. Andbrains? 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.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 inpoor 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.
“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, “acuckooclock.”
“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 eastand 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 saidthat 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.
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,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.
“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.