Show e. e Well maybe you can explain it All I know is Now look maybe you wont won't even believe this Theres There's this News office see and its kind of It leaks In the wintertime the girls here all wear bloomers and wool stockings under dresses Some Sometimes Sometimes Sometimes times they set fire to little piles of paper to act smart Just to show its it's cold With so many little holes and cracks cracks- cracks we we stuff old dollar bills in em to keep out some of the draft one draft one might assume that mice would come waltzing in and set up house house- keeping This they have failed to do until this fall that is Now if I were a mouse there is nothing I would like better than to spend the winter in a print shop Moving in from the tall grass would be quite a step up in society and other mouses would envy me and say I must bea be bea a rich mouse I could eat pretty high on the rollers which are made of old melted cow pretty much of and for my bedroom I would chomp up nothing but the finest rag bond just to hear the boss scream But apparently theres there's been something a little hay haywire wire about the news o 0 office f f i ice c e. e Maybe the mouses resented the midnight work we sometimes do o maybe maybethe the light hurt their eyes Maybe we didn't leave enough cookie crumbs under the typewriters Maybe there was ink on the rollers and the other mouses laughed when Cedric showed up with black teeth Anyhow they stayed out Until this fall Near as we can tell there was only one Hes He's gone now But until he f finally nally got tangled in a trap he gave us quite a go There for a while we thought we might have to move out First thing we noticed was wasa a big red apple rolled off Veloys Veloy's desk and out into the back shop and up into a window sill and I have to bring Veloy a big red polished apple every month or she wont won't get out the bills This apple had teeth marks in it bigger than thana a horse I mean a horses horse's teeth You silly Then one morning there were soap marks on the window Just big enough to read On the INSIDE of the window In Ir German German German Ger Ger- man Mac is a shike That's the way interpreted it and her mother was one of those sweet little Ach Mein Gott ladies But blushed a little and made me scrub it off and I Iguess Iguess Iguess guess there is some German which reads about the same but not quite And there were little a a mouse was here signs each morning right at the scene of the crime One morning at 3 0 o'clock clock Dr Martineau was going past and he swears he heard song coming from The News office kind of a thin reedy tenor No not squeaky he says Just reedy He admits he thought I had fallen off the wagon but if I ever do I wont won't be singing in a thin reedy tenor in the theoffice theoffice theoffice office at 3 am a.m. I will be drinking drinking drinking drink drink- ing Sanka In my blue pajamas We might have overlooked all this and other minor items such as tying typewriter ribbon into hard knots and depositing peach seeds in Rick Irwins Irwin's apron pocket and turning on the darkroom darkroom darkroom dark dark- room light at am a.m. and gnawing one leg off Colleen Mecham's desk and dumping three of Lynx Langfords Langford's wedding wedding wedding ing jobs into the hell-box hell but then something else got kind of funny All the dogs in town love to stop at our bush out in front and sniff around and see who was there last and leave word that they were here too I think some of them wait all day just until they get to The News office Well last week they quit They would come within about 10 yards of the office then stop suddenly and let out a howl howland howland howland and run like striped apes Now they did this whether I Iwas Iwas Iwas was here or not Dogs refuse to speak to me you know They will not e even eve v e n nod Just l Ii like i k e But even when the office was empty all the canines shunned the place like the dog pound We knew from this that something uncanny was afoot Last Thursday morning did it The ton five-ton press was moved An inch and a half haUl Northwest We can show you the nice clean cement underneath The only thing besides a power winch on ona ona ona a tractor that could move that press is a mouse Rick and Lynx and I set traps bear-traps from the Park City Antique Floral that night I also set a trap mouse-trap just in case All the traps bear-traps were sprung the next morning but the trap mouse-trap was loaded With a mouse It looked so kind of little and pitiful and dead lying there all squeezed to death Doesn't seem possible it could raise all that Hell Does it |