Freddy and the Perilous Adventure Read Online Free PDF

up, “what Uncle Wesley said” was their law, and they would no more have thought of doing anything of which he disapproved—and he disapproved of practically everything—than they would have thought of becoming burglars.
    Freddy remembered something more about Uncle Wesley, too. For a band of the farm animals, who were fond of Alice and Emma and sick of seeing them tyrannized over, had kidnaped him one night and turned him over to an eagle, who for a small consideration had agreed to drop him somewhere in the next county. Freddy had not had a hand in that plot. But with his great detective ability he had of course found out about it, and while he didn’t approve of such highhanded action, he didn’t make any effort to get Uncle Wesley back. For after all, Alice and Emma would be much happier without him.
    But they admired him so intensely that even after his mysterious disappearance had freed them from his tyranny they continued to quack his praises and to do as they thought he would approve. His fearlessness, his polished manners, his high moral standards, his deep wisdom—they praised these things daily. Freddy didn’t believe that anybody, even a pig, could reach such a height of perfection.

Chapter 4
    As the sun got higher the breeze died down and the balloon hardly seemed to move. It rose higher as the sun got hotter, but it wasn’t as high as it had been yesterday, and they could see quite clearly everything that went on below them. Once, when the shadow of the big gas bag drifted across an untidy barnyard, a flock of chickens ran cackling for cover, and a woman came to the house door and stared, shading her eyes with her hand. A little stream ran out of the woods and across the foot of the garden and into the woods again. And in it were what looked like several large powder puffs.
    â€œDucks!” exclaimed Alice. She leaned over the edge of the basket. “Mercy me, sister, if that doesn’t look for all the world like Uncle Wesley!”
    â€œWhy, it does indeed,” said Emma. “He has just that same aristocratic way of holding his head. You don’t really suppose …?” The ducks stared at each other.
    Freddy, who had been hanging on to their tail feathers so they wouldn’t fall, tried to look too, but the balloon had drifted on. “It’s not likely to be him,” he said. “From this height all ducks look alike.”
    â€œNot Uncle Wesley,” said Emma proudly.
    â€œWe have always thought, Freddy,” said Alice, “that if we had come to you when Uncle Wesley first disappeared, you could have restored him to us. But of course then you hadn’t taken up detecting.”
    â€œI could probably have found him,” said the pig modestly. “But today, even if he hasn’t been—that is, I mean, if he is still, er—”
    â€œThere is no need to try to spare our feelings,” said Alice. “We are not afraid to face the dreadful possibilities of what might have happened. If he has not, you mean, been eaten by a fox, or—”
    â€œOh, sister!” quacked Emma faintly.
    â€œâ€”or a cat,” continued Alice firmly. “But if some such thing had not happened, he would have returned to us, or at least sent some word.”
    â€œPerhaps he got married,” said Freddy.
    â€œOh, I’m sure he would at least have sent us an announcement,” said Emma.
    â€œWe feel,” said Alice, “that he must have set out on some dangerous adventure. Perhaps he did not tell us, because he did not want us to worry. And he was so utterly without fear; he would not have hesitated to fight anything that walks or flies, if he felt he was in the right. Do you remember, Emma, the time he ordered that bull out of the cornfield?”
    The ducks went on with their reminiscences of their intrepid uncle, and Freddy stopped listening and leaned over the edge of the basket and watched the