"Fire!" bawled a loud hoarse voice from the cellar.
"It's Pedro. He's said his first English word." Jerry was beaming with pride. "He'll be as good as a watchdog. Don't miners sometimes take parrots into mines with them to warn them against poisonous fumes?"
"A canary I've heard of—not a parrot," said Mr. Martin. "And we're really in very little danger from poisonous fumes. But I guess we can't risk offending a neighbor by refusing a gift."
"Taking care of a parrot can be a lot of work," said Mrs. Martin.
"I'll help," offered Cathy. And Jerry was grateful to her.
"Fire!" the parrot kept bawling. "Fire!"
"Go down and put something over his cage or we'll not get any sleep," Jerry's mother told him. "Yes, you can keep him. I might have known when I saw that parrot come into the house that he would stay."
As Jerry galloped down the stairs to the recreation room with a scarf to put over Pedro's cage, he wondered if he would have hurried quite as fast over to the Bullfinch house if it had not been for the money in the grandfather clock. He had slipped in and put it back there before coming home. Fire was not likely to strike twice in the same house, he had thought.
Pedro was making gentle, clucking noises.
"Good night, old bird," said Jerry, after he had put the scarf over the cage. "I wonder if parrots eat candy," he thought on his way upstairs to bed. "When I get that candy from Mr. Bartlett tomorrow I'm going to try Pedro on a piece of a lime mint. They're almost the same color as the feathers near his throat."