[Pg 3]

[Pg 3]

CHAPTER I

HOW A BOGEY-MAN CAME TO DALE END

Told by Bobby, the Horse

MINKIE says I ought to begin this story, because I am the biggest and strongest. I don’t see that at all, but she thinks I can’t see much, anyhow, owing to my silly habit of wearing blinkers, which is just her irritating way of settling an argument—as if I made the harness. And she knows better, too. I have an eye stuck on each side of my head to enable me to look nearly all round the circle; but that clever individual, man, tries to improve on Providence by making me don the rogue’s badge. Well, it would make any horse laugh. You watch how the clever individual came to grief when Minkie and her gang tackled him. Yes, that is what they call us—her “gang”—although Dandy, the [Pg 4]fox-terrier, won’t admit that Tibbie belongs to our crowd, and he gets furious if one even mentions the Parrot. Perhaps he is prejudiced against Tibbie—I have noticed that most dogs seldom have a good word for a cat—but I do agree with him about that green idiot, Polly. Of all the back-biting, screeching—Eh, what? Oh, don’t worry, as I tell Dan when he trots in to my place to look for a rat—you’ll be in the middle of a real up-to-date yarn in two buzzes of a gad-fly....

M

[Pg 4]

The fun started last Christmas Eve, when a small blue boy on a big red bicycle came to our front door and tried to pull the bell out by the roots after playing tricks with the knocker. Everybody thought it was a parcel for herself. Dorothy sailed out of the drawing-room; Cookie and Evangeline, our housemaid (Mam wanted to call her Mary, but she threatened to give notice), rushed from the kitchen; even dearest Mam dropped her sewing and wondered what the Guv’nor had sent her; but Minkie tobogganed downstairs on a tray, and came in an easy first. Dan was close up, as he simply hates every sort of [Pg 5]postman; so Minkie grabbed him with one hand and opened the door with the other.

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