Mystery of the Pantomime Cat Read Online Free PDF Page A

with!"
grinned Fatty. "We'll have old Pippin hunting round for Zebediahs before he's
very much older!"
    "Well, I'll put a Z on then," said Daisy. "I'll get
my needle and thread now. What other clues will you put down?"
    "A page out of a book," said Pip. "Out of a
timetable or something."
    "Yes. That's good," said Fatty, approvingly. "Any
other ideas?"
    "What else do people drop by accident?" wondered Daisy.
"Oh, I know what we could do. If there's a nail or anything there, we
could take along a bit of cloth and jab it on the nail! Then it would look as
if whoever had been there for a meeting had caught his coat on the nail. That
would be a very valuable clue, if it was a real one!"
    "Yes, it would," agreed Fatty. "And we'll take a
pencil and sharpen it there—leave bits of pencil-shavings all over the place.
Gosh, what a wonderful lot of clues!"
    "We must also leave something to make Pippin go on with the
chase somewhere else," said Larry.
    "Yes. What about underlining a train in the timetable page
that we're going to throw down?" said Pip. "We're going to chuck one
down, aren't we? Well, if we underline a certain train—say a Sunday train—old
Pippin will turn up for that too!"
    Every one giggled. "And Fatty could dress up in some
disguise, and slip a message into Pippin's hand to suggest the next place to go
to," said Daisy. "We could send him half over the country at this
rate!"
    "Wait till Goon gets a report of all this," said Fatty
with a grin. "He'll see through it at once—and won't he be wild!"
    Soon all the clues were ready, even to the pencil-shavings, which
were in an envelope.
    "When shall we place the clues?" said Bets. "Can I
come too?"
    "Yes. We'll all go," said Fatty. "I don't see why
not. There's nothing suspicious about us all going out together. We can go on
our bicycles and put them in
    the car-park at the back of the Little Theatre. Then we'll pretend
to be looking at the posters there, and one of us can slip up to the verandah
and park the clues. It won't take a minute."
    "When shall we go?" asked Bets again. She always wanted
to do things at once.
    "Not today," said Fatty. "There's a bit of a
breeze. We don't want the clues blown right off the verandah. The wind may have
died down by tomorrow. We'll cycle along after tea tomorrow, about six."
    So the next day, about ten to six, the five set off, with Buster
as usual in Fatty's bicycle basket. They cycled round to the back of the Little
Theatre and came to the car-park there. A good many children were there
already, getting bicycles from the stand.
    "Hallo!" said Fatty, surprised. "Has there been a
show here this afternoon?"
    "Yes," said a boy near by. "Just a show for us
children from Farleigh Homes. They let us in for nothing. It was jolly good. I
liked the cat the best."
    "The cat? Oh, Dick Whittington's cat, you mean," said
Fatty, remembering that the show that week was supposed to be a skit on the
Dick Whittington pantomime. "It's not a real cat, is it?"
    " 'Course not!” said the boy. Daisy, who had already seen the
show, explained to Fatty.
    "It's a man in a cat's skin, idiot. Must be rather a small
man—or maybe it's a boy I He was very funny, I thought."
    "Look— there
go the actors," said a little girl, and she pointed to a side door.
"See, that's Dick Whittington, that pretty girl. Why do they always have a
girl for the boy in pantomime? And that's Margot, who is Dick's sweetheart in
the play. And there's Dick's master—and his mother, look—she's a man, really,
as you can see. And there's the captain of Dick's ship—isn't he fine? And
there's the chief of the islands that Dick visits—only in the play he's a black
man, of course."
    The five children gazed at the actors as they left the side door
of the Little Theatre. They all looked remarkably ordinary.
    "Where's the cat?" asked Bets.
    "He doesn't seem to have gone with them," said the
little girl. "Anyway I wouldn't know what he was like, because he wore his
cat-skin all the time.