Blossom Promise by Betsy Byars Page B

place?”
    “Tonight. Tomorrow may be, you know, too late.”
    “Tonight,” Ralphie said.
    He set the phone onto the receiver. He put one hand on his letter and crumpled it into a ball.
    “What did she want?” Ralphie’s brother asked.
    “She wants me to smuggle her dog into the hospital to visit her grandfather.”
    “Tell me the truth,” the brother said in disgust. “You always lie! Tell the truth!”

CHAPTER 25
Smuggling Mud
    Ralphie sighed.
    Beneath his mother’s clown suit, his heart was pumping hard.
    “Are you sure this dog’s alive?” he asked.
    Mud had been pulled out of his misery hole. He now lay in the moonlight in front of the steps, apparently dead.
    Maggie, Vern, and Junior were on one side of him. Ralphie was on the other. All four leaned over Mud, looking for signs of life.
    Maggie said, “Yes.”
    Ralphie said, “I just don’t want to go to the trouble of smuggling a dead dog into Alderson General Hospital, that’s all.”
    “He’s not dead,” Junior confirmed. “If you look real close you can see his heart beating between his ribs.”
    “I don’t see any heart beating.”
    “Right there.”
    Junior pointed with one dirty finger to a spot three inches below Mud’s bandanna.
    Maggie said, “Yes, it is beating, Ralphie.”
    Ralphie said, “He could be brain-dead.” A cool silence followed this remark. Ralphie tried to put his hands in his pockets and discovered the clown suit didn’t have pockets.
    He said, “Oh, all right. I give up. Let’s get him into the wagon.”
    “Wait a minute. We need a quilt,” Maggie said.
    “We need a lifting crane,” Ralphie muttered.
    Maggie pretended not to hear. She ran quietly up the porch steps, opened the screen door without a sound, and disappeared into the house.
    “I hope she doesn’t wake up Mom,” Vern said.
    “I hope she does,” Ralphie said. “I’m sure your mom would get a kick out of me standing here in my mom’s clown suit with two get-well-soon balloons tied to my wrist, getting ready to pull a dead dog to town.”
    “I like you in your clown suit,” Junior said. “You make a good clown.”
    Ralphie did not respond.
    “You could be in a circus.”
    “I am not wearing this clown suit to amuse people, Junior. I am wearing this clown suit because the nurses are used to seeing this clown suit bringing balloons to patients.”
    “I know that.”
    “This clown suit is a disguise.”
    “I know that.”
    “It is—”
    Maggie came down the steps silently. She spread a quilt on the ground and rolled Mud on top of it. He gave no resistance.
    “All right, let’s get him into the wagon.”
    Ralphie took the head. Vern took the feet. Together they picked up the motionless Mud.
    “How much does this dog weigh?” Ralphie asked as they swung Mud into the wagon.
    Mud landed with a thud. He did not move.
    “I don’t know. Fifty pounds,” Maggie said. “Sixty at the most. He’s lost a lot of weight because he hasn’t eaten in three days.”
    “You couldn’t prove it by me,” Ralphie said.
    Maggie tucked the quilt around Mud and patted it. “He’s ready.”
    Mud lay with curved grace in the wagon. The tip of his tail stuck out from one end of the crazy quilt, his long nose stuck out the other.
    Ralphie reached out his hand—the one with the get-well-soon balloons tied on the wrist, and felt the rope that held the wagon to his bicycle.
    “Vern’s good with knots. Let him do it,” Junior had said with brotherly pride. “Vern tied the knots on my wings that time and they wouldn’t come off no matter what. The police had to cut them off.”
    “I didn’t do the knots so good on my raft,” Vern admitted, stepping forward.
    He had brushed his hands together as if he would now make up for the failure of those raft knots. Then he proceeded to tie the biggest knot Ralphie had ever seen in his life. And then he spit on it.
    Feeling the hard damp knot, Ralphie knew there was no chance the wagon would come loose and