The Mouse in the Mountain | Page 4

pedigree?"
Doan nodded. "Ten miles long."
"Do you ever show him? I mean, enter him in dog shows?"
"Sure. It's just a bore, though. He always wins."
"He must be worth a lot of money."
"I was offered seven thousand dollars for him once," Doan said, sighing. "In cash, too. I turned it down. I wish I knew why."
"I think that's wonderful!" Janet said. "I mean that you didn't sell him."
"I wish he thought so. I hoped it would make him appreciate me, but he just sneered. Do you want to see him sneer? He does it beautifully. Watch." Doan leaned close to Carstairs and said in a stickily coy voice: "Who is Doansie-woansie's cutesy-wutesey 'itty puppy doggy?"
Carstairs looked up slowly and ominously. He raised one side of his upper lip. His eyes glowed golden-yellow and savage.
"I was only fooling," Doan said quickly.
Carstairs watched him warningly for a moment and then slowly lowered his head to Janet's lap again.
"He can sneer!" she said. "Horribly!"
"That was one of his milder ones," Doan told her.
"Do you ever punish him?"
"I tried it once," Doan said.
"What happened?"
"He knocked me down and sat on me for three hours. He weighs about a ton. I didn't enjoy myself at all, so I gave up the idea. Anyway, he has better manners than I have."
The Henshaws had seated themselves at the front of the bus, and Henshaw turned around wearily now and called:
"Say, when did that bird with the double-talk tell us we were going to start? Or is this trip just a rumor?"
"Here he comes," said Janet.
Bartolome trotted down the terrace steps and leaned in the door. "Starting instantly in a few moments. Have the kindness of patience in waiting for the more important passengers."
"Who are they?" Henshaw demanded, interested.
"The lady of incredible richness with the name of Patricia Van Osdel and her parasites."
"No fooling!" Henshaw exclaimed. "You hear that, Doan? Patricia Van Osdel. She's the flypaper queen. Her old man invented stickum that flies like the taste of, and he made fifty billion dollars out of it"
"Is she married?" Mrs. Henshaw asked suspiciously.
"That is a vulgarness to which she would not stoop," said Bartolome. "She has a gigolo. They come! Prepare yourselves!"
A short, elderly lady as thin as a pencil, dressed all in black that wrinkled and rustled and glistened in the sun, came out on the terrace and down the steps. She had a long, sallow face with a black wart on one cheek and teeth that popped out of ambush when she opened her mouth.
Henshaw had his hands cupped against the window, peering eagerly. "She sure has aged a lot, or else her pictures flatter her."
The elderly lady poked Bartolome in the chest with a stiff, bony forefinger. "One side!" She swished through the door into the bus, sniffed twice calculatingly, and then took a perfume atomizer from somewhere in her capacious skirt and squirted it in all directions vigorously. She selected a seat and dusted it with quick, irritated flicks of a silk dustcloth.
"Hey," said Henshaw. "Are you Patricia Van Osdel?"
"I am not," said the elderly lady. "I am Maria, her personal maid. Kindly turn around and mind your own business."
"Okay," said Henshaw amiably. He cupped his hands and peered through the window. "Hey! Here she comes! Get a load of this, Doan. Whee!"
The manager appeared, bowing and nodding and waving his hands gracefully in front of a girl who was as fair and fragile looking as a Dresden china doll. She was wearing a long white cloak, and her hair floated like spun gold above it. Her mouth was pink and petulant, but instead of being blue her eyes were a deep, calculating green. Her bearing and her manner and her features were all rigidly aristocratic.
A young man lounged along sullenly a step behind her. He was as magnificently dark as she was fair. He had black curly hair and an incredibly regular profile. He wore white slacks and a white pullover sweater with a blue silk scarf at his throat. He had a pencil-line mustache and long, slanted sideburns.
He stopped on the steps and pointed a forefinger at the bus. "Are we going in that thing?"
"Yes, Greg," said Patricia Van Osdel gently.
"I won't like it," Greg warned. "You know that, don't you?"
"Now, Greg," Patricia Van Osdel chided. "This is the democratic way, you see. This is the way we do things in America. We don't have any rigid class distinctions."
"It stinks," said Greg. "I mean the bus and Mexico and the United States and your democracy. I tell you that quite frankly because it's true."
"Get in the bus, Greg," said Patricia Van Osdel. "Don't be difficult."
"I don't approve of this," Greg said, getting in. "I'm warning you."
The manager and Bartolome handed Patricia Van Osdel gently through the door.
"You will enjoy yourself most exquisitely," the manager