Scale was silent, trying hard not to breathe, let alone talk, through this terrible ordeal.

“Who’s the mummy?” Ophelia asked again, pushing down even harder.

“Yooouuu! Yoou are!” screamed Scale. “I beg you, madam, gedoff me!”

Ophelia motioned to Tate to get the rifle they kept hidden in the cocktail cabinet.

“If I get off,” she panted, “you’ll leave this farm and never come back?”

“Yeesss!” Scale yelled. “Whatever you say!”

Ophelia got up slowly, her huge bottom receding like an eclipse of the moon. Scale took a while to get up from the tiles without his cane. Alec noticed with satisfaction that the feet jammed into Scale’s shoes were more like hideous paws: No wonder he needed a cane to walk.

Eyeing Alec Tate, who had by now retrieved his rifle and was pointing it at him, Scale staggered out of the sitting room. The Tates watched in silence as he scuttled down the drive, looking over his shoulder as if to make sure that Ophelia wasn’t following him.

“Told you someone would come here looking for Woody, didn’t I?” said Alec Tate, his squashed face more glum than ever. “He’ll be back, too.”

Ophelia stayed silent, but had to admit to herself that maybe Alec had done something right after all. It was just as well Woody was no longer on the farm; Scale’s flaring nostrils would have smelled him out, that was for sure.

“Then we leave for Wookey Hole tonight,” she said, tossing back her Medusa hair dramatically. “We’ll leave this forsaken place forever.”

CHAPTER 8
THE AMAZING, MANGY MUTT

Like many people who have the misfortune to find themselves being bullied, Nat didn’t feel the need to share the incident outside the library with his mum. He was pretty sure he could avoid Teddy “The Tiger” Davis for the remainder of the summer. Compared with the rest of his problems, it didn’t seem that important.

The information he’d found out at the library had been about as useful as a mesh umbrella, and he didn’t feel they had made progress with the quest for Woody’s origins. Despondently, he picked up the flyer about the annual Temple Gurney Country Show and Fair, and had been pleasantly surprised to find that it would be quite an occasion, with real rides like bumper cars and a Tilt-A-Whirl, and bands playing in the afternoon and evening. But it was the part about the classes in the dog show that caught Nat’s eye:

“I bet that’s four out of five we’ll win,” said Nat, sharing his thoughts with Woody in the shade of the weeping fig tree. Seeing the hurt look on Woody’s face, Nat laughed. “OK! OK! We can enter the Appealing Face contest, but don’t make your eyes go all weird.”

Satisfied, Woody made his favorite supersonic jet noise as he stretched out in the late evening sun.