The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain (16 page)

“And furthermore your own wife Maude just brought these cookies, so that makes you an accessory before the fact and don’t think I won’t tell the judge so if you try dragging us into court.

You just trot yourself back to Sam Wallaby and tell him to take his keg of beer and pour it over his head because that paunch of yours is big enough already, or I’ll sick Maude on you.”

Ormerod Burlson was not an abject coward or an absolute fool. He beat as dignified a retreat as the circumstances would allow, not forgetting to impound one of his wife’s cookies as evidence.

As things turned out he’d done the Grub-and-Stakers a favor since the incident only served to attract even more attention to the sale. People were having to stand in line to get into the bandstand and the crowd below was six deep. Caroline Pitz was down among them handing out campaign leaflets like mad, Samantha herself being at the town dump where any serious campaigner must be on the Saturday morning before a local election.

Dittany was wondering whether she ought to rush over to Ye Village Stationer and ask Mr. Gumpert to whip off a few hundred more fliers when an unmarked van with Manitoba number plates chugged down Main Street, made a fast swing around the bandstand and slowed where the crowd was thickest. A hidden hand opened the tailgate. Out leaped a huge, evil-smelling, rotten-tempered billygoat.

Without so much as waiting to be introduced, the goat started butting right and left, knocking down children who cried, women who screamed, men who yelled terrible words. Attracted by the odor of goodies, he butted a path straight up into the bandstand and had his unattractive muzzle buried in a marshmallow frosted devil’s food cake before anybody quite realized what was happening.

“Get out! Shoo! Scat!” Dittany grabbed Therese’s umbrella and belabored the beast around the horns and neck. Either the goat was too tough to care or Dittany, as a paid-up member of Friends of Animals, was inhibited from hitting hard enough. In any event he paid no attention whatever but finished the chocolate cake, leaving a mess of crumbs on the table, for goats are not fastidious eaters, and went on to a plate of hot cross buns.

“Do something!” Opinion on that point was unanimous, but nobody knew what to do. The goat was so very large and so very mean. He butted Dittany, he butted Therese, he butted Dot Coskoff and almost upset the money box, he butted anybody and anything that got between him and the food. He knocked over a table and upset a banana cream pie in order to get at a tray of wheat germ and eggplant muffins that had been contributed by Zilla Trott and were not among the better sellers. The goat appeared to relish the muffins and was looking around for more when a youngish, slimmish, blondish man nobody in town had ever seen before vaulted over the bandstand railing, wrestled the goat to a clean fall, and trussed its feet together with the belt from his gray flannel slacks.

All of a sudden there were heroes galore. Several men rushed up, seized the helpless animal, and dragged it off bodily to the nearby town pound, once a confinement for stray cows and horses, now maintained mostly for auld lang syne. The youngish man took off his spectacles, attempted to wipe banana cream filling off them with the tail of his shirt, put them back on still badly smeared, took a firm grip on his beltless trousers, and melted away before anybody could regain presence of mind enough to say thank you.

“What are we going to do?” moaned Dot Coskoff. “Half of what’s left here will have to be thrown away. That dratted goat either slobbered all over it or trampled it underfoot. We’ll have nothing left to sell.”

“Oh yes, we will,” said Hazel Munson with fire in her normally placid eye. “I’m going straight over to Dittany’s and get those ten dozen frosted cupcakes we made for Samantha’s party.”

“But what about tomorrow?” gasped Therese.

“We’ll make another batch after we finish here.”

“If you say so, Hazel.” Therese sighed and went back to scraping banana cream off the bandstand floor.

With the excitement over and the bandstand in a shambles, the crowd showed signs of drifting away. Dittany leaped up on the railing, steadying herself by one of the curlicued uprights.

“Please, everyone,” she called out, “bear with us a moment.

We’ll be back in business as soon as we get the mess cleaned up.

Fresh merchandise is on the way. And we’ll thank you to notice that this was the second attempt in about fifteen minutes to stop our sale. Now we’re not going to name any names or cast any aspersions, but you all know what this sale’s in aid of and you’re all intelligent people, so you can draw your own conclusions, can’t you? Does anybody know whose goat that is over there in the pound?”

Nobody did.

“Then it looks as if we’ve got two people’s anonymous goats, wouldn’t you say?”

That broke them up. “Atta girl, Dittany,” roared a voice from the crowd. “Say, who’s collecting donations?”

“Well, Caroline Pitz is right behind you handing out campaign leaflets and you’ll notice they’re for the candidate who supports the park. If you have any spare cash to get rid of, you might want to hand some over to her. But the best donation you or anybody else can give is to get out on Tuesday and vote for Samantha Burberry. And bring your friends and neighbors and your Uncle Louie and Aunt Sophrony with you!”

They were raking in the cash hand over fist when Roger Munson rushed up with a plateful of sugar cookies, not appearing the least bit ruffled at having his regular Saturday schedule knocked into a cocked hat.

“I’ve organized the kids into a cookie-baking production line,”

he panted. “Further contributions will be along forthwith. Got to run. I’m head man in charge of ingredient procurement.”

He took off like a rocket. Dittany, seeing that Caroline was managing fine with the collections down below, stopped to deal with the cookies. She was packaging them in half dozens when a diffident voice murmured in her ear, “Er-I was wondering what you planned to do with the food that got spoiled?”

She looked up in surprise. The speaker was the unknown knight-errant who had captured the goat. His eyeglasses were now spotless and his trousers secured by a piece of clothesline carefully tied in a square knot.

“I hadn’t thought,” she replied in surprise. “Why?”

“Well, I-er-thought I might take it over to the goat. By way of apology, as it were.”

“Why should you apologize?” said Ben Frankland, who had just returned from the pound to see if help was still needed with the tables. “Last I saw of him, he was eating your belt.”

“Did you leave him any water to drink?” asked the strange man anxiously. “He might choke on the buckle or something.”

“Here’s the stuff for the goat,” said Dittany, thrusting a boxful of orts at the strange man. “And I do want to tell you how tremendously grateful to you we all are, Mr.-er … Ben, why don’t you drop him off at the pound, then see if you can find out who owns that goat and who was driving the truck he got out of?”

“Can’t right now. I promised Mrs. Oakes I’d go back and haul brush to the dump. I just stopped to find out if you want any Fig Newtons for later.”

“Don’t even mention cookies to me! After this episode, I’m taking the pledge.”

Ben looked so crestfallen that she added quickly, “But why don’t you and Minerva drop over about half past six and split a can of beans with me? She’ll be too bushed to cook.”

“Great! See you then.”

“What do you mean, then? Aren’t you coming back at two to pick up the tables?”

“Ever thought of teaching a course in slave-driving?”

He grinned and was gone, with the unknown man beside him carrying a box of mangled apologies to the recreant but now perhaps repentant goat. Dittany went back to peddling cupcakes.

By two o’clock there wasn’t a crumb left in the bandstand.

Gratefully the Grub-and-Stakers folded their tablecloths, sorted out which cake tin belonged to whom, and wended their various ways. As a parting gesture, Dittany scrawled across the bake sale poster with her lipstick, “Gone to work on the mountain. Come and help!” Then she picked up the heavy money box Dot Coskoff had given her to pass on to Mr. Binkle. So far this had been quite a day.

The first half of the day turned out to be the easy part. When Dittany got home she found Hazel already in the kitchen greasing cupcake pans and Ellie at the dining table doggedly pleating butterfly wings. Dittany greased a few pans, creased a few doilies, took the sale money over to Jane Binkle, who promised to hand it over to Henry as soon as he returned from the shop, and went home again because she’d promised on Guides’ honor to help frost the cupcakes.

There she was discovered by a moppet Minerva had sent down to see if Miss Henbit had any more axes and rakes kicking around because a swarm of people had come to help and most of them hadn’t thought to bring any tools. Dittany festooned herself and the child with whatever she could lay hands on and trudged up to the Enchanted Mountain, accompanied by Ethel, who had heretofore been guarding the house, the butterflies, and especially the cupcakes.

“Apace” was hardly the word for the way work was going on.

The mountain literally swarmed with volunteers, some of whom even seemed to know what they were there for. Chain saws whined ferociously through dead trunks and fallen logs. A shredder was ingesting the branches and spewing them forth as wood chips that were at once snatched up and carried away to cover the newly cleared paths.

Nobody appeared nervous about the fact that a still unsolved shooting had taken place on the mountain only a few days ago, though some of the young fry kept shouting, “Duck if you see any Yank hunters.” Dittany found the jest ill timed, but most of the adults were too pleased with themselves to notice.

“Just look at this,” Minerva gloated, her face glowing like a hot stove despite the raw weather. “Doesn’t it do your heart good?”

“It can’t be doing your blood pressure much good,” Dittany retorted. “Hadn’t you better go home and lie down awhile, eh?”

“Time enough to lie down when they plant me six feet under.

What a pity to cut down that nice little birch, but it’s right in the path.”

Minerva swung her hatchet and the three-inch sapling lay on \ the ground, sliced off slick as a whistle. That was how she’d handled the frisky squirrels that invaded her attic and the cute, fat woodchucks that invaded her lettuce bed. One simply expressed polite regret and swept them neatly out of existence. Not far from here, old John Architrave had been pinned through the body by a single perfectly placed arrow. Dittany decided to go home and frost cupcakes.

By the time Hazel and Ellie gasped at the time and rushed off, leaving her to clean up their messes, the day was far spent and so was Dittany Henbit. Thankful that Hazel had removed the lettuces from her bathtub, she bathed and changed into a skirt and pullover that didn’t have yellow frosting all over them. Whatever had possessed her to invite company for supper tonight of all nights?

She was opening her can of beans when Henry Binkle phoned in wild excitement, for him, wanting to know how in the name of Little Jim they’d ever managed to raise four hundred thirty-two dollars and seventy-six cents in four hours.

“I think it was mostly the goat,” Dittany told him. Then of course she had to tell him the rest because Jane hadn’t mentioned any goat and what did goats know about fundraising that he didn’t, eh? Before she’d got him satisfied on the finer points, somebody was thumping at her door.

“Henry, I’ve got to hang up now. My company’s here and the beans aren’t even on the stove.” He’d know what she meant. Everybody in Lobelia Falls ate baked beans on toast for Saturday night supper and would have been considered eccentric if they didn’t.

She was surprised to find Ben Frankland alone on the doorstep.

“Where’s Minerva?” was her not very tactful greeting.

“Mrs. Oakes said to tell you she’s not so young as she thought she was. She’s going to soak her feet in Epsom salts and watch Lawrence Welk.”

“Oh. Well, come in and haul up a chair. Supper isn’t ready yet because I was on the phone with Henry Binkle. Can you imagine we made well over four hundred dollars at the bake sale?”

“Sure. I can imagine anything around this town. Is it always like this?”

“If it were, we’d all have been laid out in neat rows long ago.

Have some cheese while I make a salad.”

She poured them each a glass of burgundy from her stepfather’s sadly depleted largesse, set her beans on to heat, filled the kettle, and put what Gramp Henbit used to call the eating tools on the table. “We’ll have to eat in the kitchen. The dining room’s full of gold paper butterflies. And I’ve got twenty-seven fancy casseroles in the freezer and ten dozen frosted cupcakes in the pantry but I’d be taking my life in my hands if I tried to sneak any.”

“That’s what you get for having a pantry. Be nice to rip it out and turn this into a real old-fashioned country kitchen, wouldn’t it? You could install knotty pine overhead cabinets and plastic counters and one of those island units in the center with an electric stove and dishwasher set into a nice, rustic butcherblock top.”

Dittany was staring at Frankland in stark, horrified unbelief when the door burst open as though propelled by a blast of hot air straight from Ottawa. “Ah, just in time,” caroled Arethusa Monk, executing an expert riposte in tierce at the cheese. “Two more glasses vitement, s’il vous plait.”

Too stunned to wonder why Arethusa was demanding the extra glass, Dittany went back into the pantry, aghast that anybody should even think of desecrating this sacred shrine where Gram Henbit used to keep the never empty crock of hermits.

When she emerged she was relieved to see not a nice butcherblock island unit but a belt made of clothesline tied in a proper square knot. Its wearer, a tallish, thinnish, blondish young man, was hovering close to the door. All at once a great light dawned.

“I know,” cried Dittany. “You’re Osbert.”

“There, you see, Osbert,” said Arethusa. “I told you she was intelligent. Osbert can’t stand stupid women.”