When the day came for Smush to unveil his grand machine, the only ones present (or so he thought) were Mogey, a half dozen nesting hens, and their next door neighbor, a rock creature named Stone Baloney.
Mogey privately believed the reason for such a modest ceremony was Smush's apprehension that the machine would fail. On the other hand, his pal wore a cape - and an ostentatious cape at that - to the occasion and spoke boldly to the onlookers:
"Behold!" Smush thundered. "For I have accomplished what all the so-called 'ancient masters' could not. I give you... the Perpetual Train!"
Smush whipped a cloth away to reveal a vehicle nearly as jumbled as Cap'n Flunk's Hodgepodge Van (a well-known local curiosity). It was a trolley car with a crane mounted on the roof. Smush leapt into the vehicle to demonstrate how the crane's grabber arm could reach behind the trolley, seize a section of train track, then rotate around to place the track just ahead of its front wheels. The trolley then rolled forward onto the new track, and did the whole procedure over again. Thus the Perpetual Train could move continuously, using only a few short sections of train track.
The crowd went wild. And by "wild," I mean that Mogey and Stone Baloney applauded while the nesting hens ruffled their feathers and bugaw-ed.
Suddenly, however, the festivities were silenced by a clanging noise beneath the trolley. This was followed by a muffled "help! Help!"
"The Perpetual Train's first stowaway!" Smush cried. He threw wide a trapdoor in the trolley's floor. Crammed into the compartment beneath was a beefy man wearing a purple top hat. "Cap'n Flunk?" Smush exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
"Indeed it is I," said Flunk with a flourish of his top hat (if it is possible to flourish in a compartment beneath the floor of a train). "And I'm quite embarrassed to admit that I got stuck snooping. I felt my Hodgepodge Van might be threatened by the promise of your great machine, you see."
"You were trying to sabotage the Perpetual Train?" Mogey demanded.
"No, no, no, of course not," insisted Cap'n Flunk. "This was merely a reconnaissance mission!"
"Well who let you into the train?" Smush inquired.
"Him," Cap'n Flunk said, pointing to Stone Baloney.
Mogey and Smush both stared at their neighbor in frustrated disbelief, hands on their hips. Stone Baloney, for his part, did his best to look innocent by averting his eyes and chomping into drumstick-shaped hunk of quartz.
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