The Well-Wishers (9 page)

"A little
bittle
girl," said Smoko.

"Prob'ly a rich little girl, too," said Stinker.

"Gently nurtured," agreed Smoko.

"Whaddaya say we kidnap her for ransom?" said Stinker.

It was my turn to say, "You wouldn't do that, would you?" And I found an unexpected ally.

"I don't want any part of it," Dicky LeBaron surprisingly said.

"You don't?" said the Stinker one, sounding dangerously smooth and smiling.

"No I don't," said Dicky. "Picking on little girls is for creeps. And I don't like Lydia Green and she may have played a dirty trick on me, but that's my business. Why don't you scram outa here and leave her alone?"

The two high school boys came up one on each side of Dicky. Their smiles were broader and their eyes meaner than ever.

"Listen, Dicky boy," said the one called Stinker. "We let you tag along after us. Strictly for laughs, see? But we're not taking orders from squirts like you, see?"

"I don't care. I'm not going to let you hurt some little girl," said Dicky. "See?" he added.

There was a silence.

"Smoko," said Stinker, "we're going to have to do something about Dicky boy."

"Stinker," said Smoko, "you're right. A squirt like him could gum up the works."

Suddenly all three heads disappeared and there was the sound of a scuffle. And then I heard the Stinker one say, "If you like teacher's pets so much, stay and get to know them better."

And he and his friend lifted Dicky LeBaron up and dropped him right down the shaft on top of me. I saw him coming in time to brace myself. And then I heard the other two start pushing the big chest over the opening in the floor, and all was blackness.

Dicky didn't say anything for several seconds. I guess he had the wind knocked out of him. I know I had.

"Your foot's in my eye," I told him, when I could talk.

He moved it quickly. "Pardon
me,
I'm sure! I wouldn't touch your old eye with a ten-foot pole if I'd known!"

I was sorry he felt like that. Goodness knows, I'd always felt the same way about
him,
up till today, but he had shown a different side, standing up to those goons.

So I said, "Thanks for sticking up for us."

He snorted. "Don't worry, it wasn't on your account. There're just some things I draw the line at, that's all."

"I'm sorry I played a trick on you," I said. But he was still sulky.

"It was a dirty trick. I thought we were friends."

"Well, who started it? Who kept pestering us? Who threw a stone at who?" Which wasn't grammar but was the truth all the same.

"Aw, I just wondered what you all were doing, that's all. I'm sorry now I ever came near your old house."

"If you wanted to be friends with us, why not say so in the first place?" It was a new idea to me that somebody like Dicky LeBaron might feel left out of things. I'd always thought people like Dicky
wanted
to be out of things so they could jeer at them. It was a new idea to me that maybe they didn't have any choice.

"Forget it," he said shortly. "We got no time for conversation. We got to look out for that little girl. Gimme a leg up."

I tried, but my ankle wouldn't bear my weight, let alone his.

"It's no use," he said, after a second. "Even if I could reach, I couldn't move that chest, not from here. I couldn't get any purchase. Let's see your foot."

By now we were getting used to the darkness. There was a little grating up near the ceiling that was too small for squeezing through, but it did let in a feeble glimmer, enough for Dicky to take a look at my ankle.

"Whew," he said, when he saw it. But he tore strips off his shirttail and bound it up. When he'd finished, it still hurt, but I could stand, and even hobble a little.

The grating let in sound from outside, too, and what I heard now was a familiar crashing and swishing and a high childish prattle, coming nearer. And I knew it was just as I'd feared, and Gordy and Deborah were arriving at the secret house first.

"Look out! Keep away!" I called, but it was too late.

There was a cry of triumph from the fiendish high school boys and a cry of surprise and alarm from Gordy and Deborah, followed by a thud of blows and a scrobbling sound.

And then there was silence.

Dicky and I looked at each other. Of course we knew the two high school boys weren't really deep-dyed kidnappers and it was all just a game to them, but Deborah was little and wouldn't understand and would be terrified.

"I've got to get out there," Dicky muttered.

He ran round exploring the dark passages and bumping into things, with me limping after. The house has a cellar door, the slanting kind little kids like to slide down, but when Dicky tried it, it wouldn't budge.

"Somebody's piled rocks on it," he said.

And I knew the humiliation of poetic justice, because I was the one who'd done that in my idle folly, plotting my trap for Dicky. But I will never tell him.

But then Dicky found where the chimney comes down into the cellar, and there was a hole in one side of it where the smoke pipe from the old furnace must have joined on, in olden days. We stood looking at it.

"Do you suppose?" I wondered.

"I kind of think maybe," he said.

"Chimney sweeps used to do it," I said. "Like Tom in
The Water Babies."
"

"Who?" he said. But he didn't stay for an answer. He took off one of his motorcycle boots and started knocking at the brickwork with it. He is proud of those motorcycle boots, too, but he was getting this one all scuffed and dusty. One or two bricks did come away, but it was slow work.

"Darn that magic," I said. "You'd think at least it could loosen the mortar!"

"What do you mean, magic?" said Dicky. And while he worked, I told him about the well. But he wouldn't believe a word of it.

"I bet," he said. "Some magic! About as magic as that old ghost you were telling me about!"

It is funny about some people. Dicky believed in his rabbit's foot and black cats and not walking under ladders, but real magic was a closed book to him. And I didn't have time to convince him just then because the hole in the chimney was getting big enough to try crawling into; so I boosted him up. It was a tight fit. His shoulders were the worst.

But he stretched his arms high and tried to find a hold inside the flue, and I pushed his feet from beneath. Inch by inch he began to worm his way upward.

"How is it?" I called.

"I'm getting there," he said. But he complained that he was rubbing off pounds of him on the way. Then later he called down that his front part had reached where the flue from the parlor fireplace joined the chimney and it was roomier now. "Only something's blocking the way, up above," he said. After that I couldn't hear him anymore.

But I heard something else, and it chilled my blood. Stealthy footsteps sounded in the hall overhead, and a furtive whisper.

"Psst," it said. "Anybody there?"

"No, nobody," came a second whisper. "Where'll we put the ransom note?"

Just then one of Dicky's feet must have slipped. Because a whole lot of soot came down the chimney onto me. And some must have fallen in the parlor fireplace, too, because I heard the boy called Smoko call out, "Cheesit! There
is
a ghost!"

But Stinker was made of sterner stuff.

"That's no ghost," he said. "That's somebody up the chimney. It's that squirt of a Dicky. He'll get away and ruin everything. Whaddaya say we climb up on the roof and mom him when he comes out?"

I heard the front door bang and then I heard feet on the roof shingles. I tried to call a warning up the flue to Dicky, but I knew he would never hear. There was too much of him between his ears and me.

It is awful to know horrible things are happening and have to wait and not do a thing about them. And it is even worse when the horrible things are all your fault in the first place. All I could do was hobble over near the grating in the wall and stand under it and listen. And while I listened, in my mind I begged the well to forget that other wish I'd made about getting even with Dicky and
do
something.

Or if the well had had its fill of me, and I'd be the last to blame it if it had, maybe there was some magic still left over in the secret house, and
it
would help.

And I guess the house heard me.

Because the next thing / heard was Stinker's voice. "I see his head," he said. "No, it's not. It's something blocking the way. I've got a grip on it, though."

The instant after that I heard a yell and the sound of someone falling off a roof. And then the sound of someone tumbling after, and more yells and running feet. It seems to me now I heard a buzzing sound, too, but Dicky says I couldn't have. And James says that is
argumentum post facto
, which is Latin, and a common phenomenon, which is just James showing off.

All I know is that I waited in wondering darkness for what seemed like hours, and then at last I heard steps in the hall and someone pushed the chest away. It was Dicky, and he was laughing. And when he told me what had happened, I knew the magic in the house had answered my prayer.

What he was laughing at was the sight that had greeted him when he finally emerged on the roof.

What he had seen was Stinker and Smoko running down the hill and yelling and jumping and beating at themselves while around and upon them a cloud of hornets nibblingly preyed.

Because the thing in the chimney had been the hornets' ancestral home, and Stinker had pulled it right out. And if that wasn't the house answering my prayer and producing magic right out of itself at just the right time, I'd like to know what it was! I couldn't convince Dicky about that, though. He said it was just hornet nature.

Dicky had a few random stings from some hornet homebodies that were still clinging to the old neighborhood when he passed by, but otherwise he was unharmed, save for scraped places and soot. He handed down a chair for me to stand on and helped me out of the cellar and out onto the stoop. A distant yelling was all that remained of Stinker and Smoko, and now it died on the breeze.

"Good riddance," said Dicky.

"I thought you liked them," I said.

"Not much," he said. "They didn't like me much either. They just wanted somebody to order around, mostly. I guess at first it made me feel big, going around with a couple of big wheels. Then I guess it got to be a habit. Now I guess maybe I broke it."

For the first time he smiled at me, sort of a sheepish grin, and I smiled back. Then we remembered Deborah, and we stopped smiling and started searching.

The first thing we heard was a guggling noise, and the first thing we found was poor Gordy, scrob-bled and gagged and tied to a tree. A bruise on his cheek bore witness that his spirit had been willing, no matter how otherwise the flesh.

And the spirit was still in him, because when I got him untied he thought at first Dicky was one of the kidnap gang and started for him with both fists.

Dicky held him off with one hand, his arms harmlesssly windmilling, while I explained to him and soothed him. And just as he was getting calmer, Laura and James and Kip came plodding up the hill together and the boys thought Dicky was beating Gordy up and jumped on him, and there were more windmilling arms that I had to limp through and untangle before I could start explaining all over again.

"I told you so" were the words of Laura when she learned how my adventure had panned out. And when she heard about Deborah, her righteous fury knew no bounds.

"If anything's happened to my little sister," she said to me, "I'll never forgive you."

I felt guiltier than ever, but Dicky spoke up. " I don't think they'd actually hurt her. And they couldn't have taken her far. They didn't have time."

So then all five of us began scouring the woods to find where the hapless victim lay helplessly stashed.

It was Dicky who heard a murmuring drone, and he signaled to us, and we came up and all of us found her together. The luckless kidnappers had tied her hand and foot and left her in a hollow tree. She seemed quite happy there, playing one of her mysterious games and talking to herself.

"I am a baby squirrel," she was saying. "Soon mother squirrel will come and feed me nuts."

We untied her and plied her with questions and felt her all over for broken bones while she squirmed and giggled with utter ticklishness.

"Were the bad boys mean to you?" said Laura. "Did they scare you?"

Deborah considered. "No," she said finally. "They were quite nice." She is too young to have any taste, as yet. But Laura smothered her with sisterly hugs, all the same.

"You poor thing, it must have been awful."

Deborah freed herself. "I liked it," she said. "I was a baby squirrel."

The boys and Laura still seemed suspicious of Dicky, even after I'd told them all he had done, and Dicky was standoffish with
them.
But he and Deborah got along fine. She took his hand and talked to him about baby squirrels all the way home. Dicky had once trained one as a pet; so they had a lot in common.