Three Bags Full Read Online Free PDF

Sir Ritchfield drily.
    “The murderer always returns to the scene of the crime,” said Mopple the Whale. “And the long-nosed man did return to the scene of the crime.” Mopple looked round proudly. That was the one useful fact they had learned from George’s detective story. Mopple, of course, had remembered it. “What do you think?” he asked Miss Maple.
    “It does seem suspicious.” She nodded. “He didn’t like George, and George didn’t like him. He seems too interested in what’s going to happen to us and the meadow. And when they were standing in front of the dolmen he looked at the exact spot, just where George was lying.”
    Impressed, the sheep said nothing. Maple went on. “But it could be just coincidence. He was looking at the ground the whole time. There are too many questions. What was the business with Ham that was over and done with long ago? Who is she —the person that Kate hoped George hasn’t left anything to?”
    “It isn’t easy to understand humans,” said Maude.
    The sheep lowered their heads. They grazed a little, and they thought.
    Mopple was thinking that he hadn’t always understood even George, although George was quite easy to understand—for a human. He was interested in his vegetable garden, and he read Pamela stories to his sheep. He wasn’t interested in apple pie. But recently George had been doing some odd things. Every now and then he got out the target.
    When George marched across the meadow in his gum boots with the round, brightly painted target, Mopple felt an urge to find a safe place. The only safe place where you couldn’t see the target was behind the shepherd’s caravan, close to the vegetable garden. When George came out of the caravan for the second time with his gleaming pistol he would find Mopple there. Then he aimed it at Mopple and shouted, “Caught you in the act! Hands up!” Mopple always ran for it, scuttling zigzag across the meadow, and George laughed.
    The noise had always been unbearable, but once George had bought a silencer all you heard was a soft smacking sound, like a sheep biting into an apple. This sound, together with Mopple’s fear, was the only perceptible outcome of George’s enthusiasm for firing his pistol. There was no point in it. Mopple would have been delighted to produce the same sound, with real apples, but George wasn’t giving up his target practice.
    Miss Maple was thinking of the way Lilly’s hands had wandered over George’s jacket like insects trying to find something.
    Zora was thinking how bad humans were about heights. As soon as they had tottered too close to the cliffs they turned pale, and their movements became even clumsier. On the cliff tops, a sheep was infinitely superior to any human. Even George could do nothing about it when Zora jumped down onto her favorite rocky ledge. He stayed a safe distance away. He knew that it was a waste of time trying to lure her back with blandishments, so he would call and begin throwing things at her, first dirty tufts of grass, then dried sheep droppings.
    From the depths below, the wind sometimes carried back to him the sound of a thin, long-drawn-out curse. George’s temper instantly improved. He would get down on all fours, crawl to the edge of the cliffs, and look to see tourists or villagers who had been hit on the head by his missiles. Zora saw them too, of course. Then they would look at each other—the shepherd, lying on his front grinning, and Zora, enthroned on her ledge like a mountain goat. At that moment they understood each other perfectly.
    Zora thought that human beings would be a lot better off if they could only make up their minds to go around on four legs.
    Rameses was thinking of the story of the escaped tiger that Othello sometimes told to a marveling flock of lambs.
    Heather was thinking of the road they took to the other pasture. Of the humming of insects, the noise of cars and their stinking fumes as they drove past the sheep, of the