Freddy and the Flying Saucer Plans Read Online Free Page A

sometimes.” He pointed up toward the gate.
    â€œSo? Good, good!” said the man. “I come long way to visit him. We are old friends. Those people up by house”—he shook his head—“no good. All wanting to steal from him something. You jump on horse—go see him, tell him meet me here, right here, ten o’clock tomorrow night, no?”
    A thin man with glasses and red hair said quickly: “I too am an old friend of Mr. Benjamin Bean’s. Really a friend,” he said with a dirty look at the other man.
    â€œThat’s what you say,” drawled a slim man with a neat pointed beard. “Look, bud,” he murmured confidentially, “tell him to ask for Mr. Penobsky at the Centerboro Hotel tonight. He’ll hear of something to his advan—” But he got no further, for a fourth man pushed in and hit him on the nose.
    At that the man with the glasses pulled a blackjack from his pocket and slugged the big man, and in ten seconds the rest of the men had joined the fight. Jinx ducked between the thin man’s legs, jumped over a man in a turban who had just been knocked flat, and skittered through the fence; and Freddy grabbed up his guitar, scrambled on to Cy’s back, and cantered up the road and through the gate.
    The barnyard was full of cars, and Mr. Bean was on the back porch looking down angrily at the crowd of men who pressed up close to the railing. “I tell ye, consarn ye, that Uncle Ben ain’t here,” he shouted. “I ain’t seen him for months.”
    â€œYou’re sure he isn’t here?” one man asked. And another: “Couldn’t he have come today, maybe, and you not see him?”
    â€œLook!” Mr. Bean roared, bringing his hand down with a smack on the railing. “What kind of a lot of numbskulls and ninnyhammers are you, anyway? Don’t ye understand plain English? I tell ye, he … ain’t … HERE!”
    Some of the men, by twos and threes, had drifted away and were poking around in the stable and the cow barn. One was even trying to crawl through the little revolving door in the henhouse. Looking at the stable, Mr. Bean saw a face appear at one of the windows of Uncle Ben’s workshop. “By cracky!” he exclaimed. “This is too much!” He dashed into the house and brought out his shotgun.
    The big man who had interrogated Freddy had just driven up and got out of his car. Mr. Bean went down off the porch and up to him. He just said one word: “Git!” And the man got. He went straight back to his car, got in, and whirled off down the road to Centerboro.
    The sight of the gun sent the other men scurrying back to their cars. As Freddy said afterwards, they probably all had pistols in their pockets, but they had nothing to gain by starting something. If one of them pulled a pistol the sheriff would probably be put on his trail, and that would badly hamper his work as a spy.
    Mr. Bean turned to Freddy, who had just ridden up. “Feller up in Uncle Ben’s shop,” he said. “Chase him out.”
    Freddy had two guns in his holsters; one was a cap pistol and the other a water pistol. Sometimes, in his detective work, he carried a real pistol; but in the ordinary run of cases, where there was not likely to be any shooting, he carried the water pistol, loaded with a generous charge of strong perfumery. For most crooks would rather face bullets than be drenched with cheap perfume—first, because if they go into hiding it’s easy to smell them out, and second, because they can’t stand the remarks that their friends, and even people who pass them on the street, make about how lovely they smell. For Freddy’s perfume was nothing that you could get rid of by taking a few baths. It clung for weeks.
    The pig jumped out of the saddle and went into the stable and up the stairs. The man who was looking over some papers on the work bench was the man with