The Four-Story Mistake Read Online Free Page A

and maple trees, and autumn.
    Isaac found smells to his own taste, too: a fragrance of squirrels, and field mice, and moles, with a faint intoxicating hint of skunk. He trotted to and fro, zigzagging from side to side, doubling back, snuffing and pausing with his tail quivering, and twigs caught in his ear-fringes.
    Rush walked in the direction of the roaring sound, but from time to time he found it necessary to stop and examine some new object of interest. There was a summerhouse, for one thing, with cast-iron trellis walls, and a half-rotted floor full of leaves. And there was a sycamore tree with a cave in its trunk more than big enough for Rush and Isaac. A good place to come and think in. There were also two iron deer who looked as though they had been frozen in a mood of disapproval.
    The roaring grew louder and louder. And then between lifting mist veils Rush saw the brook! At one point it was a broad, brown stream gliding smoothly in its course, and at the next it had turned into a little torrent brawling and hustling down between the rocks in a cascade, and breaking below into snowy eddies and cuffs of foam.
    Rush stood at the edge of the little cataract, and watched it. A very valuable thing to have right in your own backyard; he felt extremely proud of it. Then he walked to the point above it where the water was held in a clear, brimming brown pool. At the bottom he could see the turning sand like brown sugar, lacy filaments of leaves, twigs with rotted bark, and stones with moss on them.
    He dipped his right big toe into the pool and the cold spread upward through his leg in a little electric shock. After a moment of consideration he pulled off his pajamas and plunged in.
    Cold! It was cold enough to make his teeth rattle in their sockets and his hair stand on end, and it wasn’t more than three feet deep at its deepest point, but at that moment Rush wouldn’t have traded it for the pearl-lined pool of a maharaja.
    â€œCome on, sissy,” he said to Isaac, and Isaac with a look of loathing, but obedient to the last, flung himself into the water.
    When Rush came out he was red as a boiled lobster and he felt like Superman. He thumped himself on the chest, and uttered several ear-splitting sounds which he fondly imagined to be good imitations of Tarzan’s jungle cry. There was nothing to dry himself with except the top of his pajamas, so he used that: first on himself, and then on Isaac. Then clad only in the pajama trousers, and holding the jacket over his head like a drenched banner he marched back toward the house.
    But he felt so fine with the wind tickling his bare ribs that when he came to the house he walked right past it toward the stable. He might as well see everything, he thought.
    â€œHi there, Robinson Crusoe, where’s your clo’es?” said a voice. And Rush saw Willy Sloper sitting on an overturned bucket under a tree. There was a little fire in front of him and he was cooking something over it. Something that smelled equally delicious to both Rush and Isaac with their differently attuned noses.
    â€œHi, Willy. What’s cooking?”
    â€œMy breakfast,” Willy said. “Coffee. Hot, black coffee, strong enough to lift a safe. And bacon; crisp, juicy bacon. And eggs still warm from the grocery store. I done the marketin’ early; I rode to the village with the milkman and I rode back with the garbage collector. Awful nice fellas both of ’em. Want some breakfast?”
    Rush refused politely although he could feel the hunger in his stomach uncoiling like a cobra.
    â€œWhy don’t you go up to the kitchen, Willy? Cuffy will give you breakfast.”
    â€œI know, I know. But it’s just that I like eating outdoors this way. It reminds me of Van Cortlandt Park.”
    â€œIt’s the gypsy in you,” Rush said.
    â€œThe hobo, more likely,” Willy told him. “I always had a kinda good-for-nothing streak in me, like a stray dog. I