The Well-Wishers (16 page)

This last was to me, and I biked harder. But Gordy put on a spurt of speed and came up on our other side and stared at the golden-haired girl curiously.

"Don't I know you from somewhere?" he said.

"I've never seen you before in my life," said the girl, not as if she ever cared to see him again, either.

"Yes, you have," pursued Gordy. "I remember you now, from dancing school. You were in the big girls' aesthetic group. You did the Dying Swan. Your name's Muriel Breitenwisher."

"Oh, that," said the girl. "They call me that, but it's not my name. I'm really adopted."

"By
spies?
" said Lydia incredulously.

"That's right," said the girl. "They stole me away when I was a baby."

"From your rightful kingdom, I suppose," said Laura, who had speeded up to join us.

"That's right," said the girl. "That's what the important papers are about. They're my claim to the throne. Hurry!"

This was to me again, and I tried to go even faster. But I was pedaling for two, and she was no light weight on the handlebars. Then, too, we'd already had a long pull from the red house up the whole valley to Journey's End Road, and the backs of my knees ached. Still, I was stronger than Gordy and in better training than Kip, and we gradually drew ahead of them.

But the dqughty Lydia and Laura were still breathing hot on our heels, and now I heard them discussing the situation.

"Do you really believe she's a princess? I don't," said Lydia. "Do you think she's such a raving, tearing beauty? I don't."

"She does look awfully
old,
" admitted Laura.

"Not a day under fifteen, if you ask me," said Lydia.

The yellow-haired girl could hear all this just as clearly as I could, and she did not appear amused.

"Do we have to waste time with these small fry?" she murmured.

Of course I should have stuck up for my friends. But I didn't. I was bedazzled by her azure gaze.

So I said traitorously, "Wait a minute and I'll get rid of them. Hang on tight."

For I had an idea.

Just ahead of us was a spot where they were fixing a hole in Valley Road. The men Had quit work for the weekend and left the road closed off with parked trucks and planks and sawhorses. On our way from the red house we had had to get off our bikes and walk them around.

But I thought I remembered a space between two of the sawhorses, and a rim of still unbroken pavement on the edge of the hole that would be wide enough for a bicycle wheel.

And sure enough, as the blocked-off piece of road came into view ahead, it was just as I'd pictured it. I didn't think any of the others could steer well enough to take the chance, but I was pretty certain I could.

"Now," I said.

"Eek!" shrieked the yellow-haired girl, shutting her eyes.

But we flashed through without joggling a single plank of the barricade.

I looked back in time to see the others skidding to a halt and dismounting. By the time they walked their bikes around, they would be too far behind ever to catch up.

I was alone with the beauteous maiden on the broad highway.

"There," I said.

But I couldn't think of anything more to say after that. I asked myself what Sir Lancelot would do in a case like this, or D'Artagnan, but that wasn't a bit of help.

The books tell all about knights and musketeers rescuing beautiful damsels. But they never put in what Lancelot said to Elaine on the ride home. Or D'Artagnan to Milady de Winter, either.

Maybe the idea is that just simply riding along with your fair lady on your pillion (or handlebars) is supposed to be enough.

I tried to think that it was.

But it was hard holding the thought on the last long hill into town. My legs were just about giving out, and all the yellow-haired girl said was "Hurry!" every other minute.

At the top of the hill I started to turn to the right.

"Where're you going?" she said.

"Town Hall," I told her, surprised. "You want to get those papers to the police, don't you?"

"Wait. Better scout around first. We may be followed. Turn the other way."

So we went to the left, down Main Street.

"Turn again here," she said, at the corner of Elm. So I did, and we wobbled slowly along dodging the umbrageous traffic while the yellow-haired girl glanced mysteriously this way and that, as a fleeing heroine should.

Our town on a Saturday afternoon is generally jammed with just about everybody shopping for the weekend and stopping to say hello to just about everybody else. I don't know how the yellow-haired girl could spot any lurking treasonous spies in that mob, but apparently she could.

For she suddenly said, "I was right. We
are
being followed. Quick. Stop here. Never mind the bicycle. Come on. We can lose ourselves in the crowd."

She had already jumped off and was getting in the lineup at the box office of the town's one movie theater.

What was playing was Moose Hardtop in a torrid love drama called "Branded Souls," and under any other circumstances wild horses couldn't have dragged me to see it.

But a darkened, crowded movie theater
would
be a good place to hide, though expensive. I would be alone in the romantic darkness with the beauteous maiden, too.

So I left my bike recklessly abandoned at the curb and dug in my pockets for what cash I had, and managed to scrape together enough for two tickets by owing three cents to the box office lady, who is an old and trusting friend.

The last thing I saw before we went through the door was Laura and Lydia and Gordy and Kip, pedaling madly up in front of the movie theater and then stopping short with baffled expressions as they saw us start inside.

I would like to say that I felt remorse at this sight, but I didn't. I was too busy thinking about the yellow-haired girl.

I did not notice any spies.

I followed the beauteous maiden through the door and handed our tickets to the man. Blinking in the sudden half-darkness of the inside lobby, I turned to my companion with an airy word.

And then I blinked some more, for another reason.

Someone was already there before me.

A lanky, flat-chested teenager with a ducktail haircut had materialized out of the shadows and was clutching the yellow-haired girl's hand in his hot, damp palm. I knew his palm would be hot and damp because I knew the boy. His name is Harold Tillinghast, and I could not despise him more.

"Muriel, baby! You got here after all!" he was saying.

"Didn't I tell you I would?" said the yellow-haired girl, now revealed in her true false colors. "Papa locked me in, but I told you I'd get away somehow. This little boy helped me," she went on, adding insult to injury.

"Why, you!" were the words that rose to my lips as light dawned.

"Thanks a lot," said the girl brazenly. And she took Harold Tillinghast's arm and they went down the aisle together and sat in the front row and held hands. I know they held hands because I followed them. I was so stunned it was all I could think of to do.

And then I realized, and hurried back up the aisle for fear they would think I cared.

I stood irresolutely in the back of the theater as the dread truth went on sinking in. It was all a snare and a delusion. The yellow-haired girl wasn't a princess or adopted; she was just Muriel Breitenwisher. And there weren't any spies. It was all just a trick so she could get to the movies and meet Harold Tillinghast.

I stood there facing these humiliating facts. And I knew how Kay in
The Snow Queen
must have felt after the ice had entered his heart.

I saw Muriel Breitenwisher in all her utter baseness, a fickle flirt who would toy with a man and then cast him aside like an empty rind. And I knew that what was true of Muriel was, probably just as true of any other girl and that I would never trust womankind again.

Not only that, but it had cost me a dollar and seventy-seven cents, not counting the three pennies I still owed the box-office lady.

Not only that, but Muriel Breitenwisher had called me a little boy.

I had half a mind to march right down the aisle to where she sat, and demand my money back. But that would be stooping.

And I didn't dare go outside, because Laura and Kip and Gordy and Lydia would be there waiting, and want to know all about it, and the thought of telling them the truth, and the questions they would ask, was too shaming to contemplate.

I stood there, while on the screen the mile-high face of Moose Hardtop bent over the mile-high face of Trillium O'Toole and murmured sweet nothings in her ear, and for a "minute it all got to be too much, and I almost forgot I was a man.

But I pulled myself together and went downstairs to the lounge, where the gum machines and pinball games are.

Of course I didn't have any money left, but I pulled all the handles in hopes that an unplayed nickel might be lying in wait, and even pushed the coin-return button on the pay telephone, just in case. But to no avail.

It seemed as if everything were against me. And the worst part was trying to figure out why the magic had done it.

I supposed, now it had made a man of me, it figured it might as well teach me to know a man's sorrows as well as a man's joy, but it seemed to me it was teaching me the hard way. I know that hard knocks are supposed to be maturing, but I have also heard of people who have grown up too fast, and it seemed to me the magic had made that happen to me. Spiritually, I mean.

I sat down in a chair and stared at the nearest gum machine.

And it was then, with hope at its lowest ebb and without even the solace of a comforting Chiclet, that I smelled the menacing smell.

I couldn't think what it was, at first. I had lived in the country too long. Out where our house is we do our cooking by electricity and there are no gas mains. But there are some in town.

And I had lived in New York City where our stove had a pilot light, and I knew what the smell of escaping gas is like. And now I remembered.

I sniffed the air and followed my nose, and it seemed to me the smell was strongest at the place where the floor and the outside wall met. It seemed to me I could hear a hissing sound, too, but I didn't wait to make sure. I went up the stairs three at a time and ran to tell the ticket-taking man.

At first he didn't believe me, but I kept talking till he started for the lounge to look for himself. Then I went racing down the aisle.

The magic had sent me to rescue the yellow-haired girl, and now that there was actual danger, I was going to rescue her whether she liked it or not.

She and Harold Tillinghast were sitting slumped down in their seats, and his arm was round the back of her chair. But I went right up to them and grabbed her by the hand.

"Come on!" I said.

"Well, really!" said the yellow-haired girl.

"Hey!" said Harold Tillinghast.

"Shush!" said the audience of enraged movie-lovers.

But I pulled her out of her seat (and away from Harold Tillinghast's encroaching arm) and started dragging her toward the exit door.

"Let me go!" she said.

"No," I said.

She pulled back, but I was stronger (though smaller) and kept pressing onward. A second later we burst through the door and out into the un-noxious air of Elm Street.

"Let me go!" the yellow-haired girl said again.

"All right, I will now," I said. I dropped her hand and turned to leave, but a much heavier hand fell sternly on my shoulder and a voice said, "Oh no, you don't!"

I looked up and saw the angriest fat man (or the fattest angry man) I had ever seen in my life.

"So I found you!" he said.

"Hello, Papa," said the yellow-haired girl.

And I knew the fat man could only be Mr. Breitenwisher. He didn't look like an ogre, or a spy either. Chiefly he looked like an angry father.

"So you're Harold Tillinghast," he said, raking me with a contemptuous look.

"No, I'm not," I said. For there was no one I would less rather be.

"Humph!" he said, not heeding. "A pretty poor specimen, I must say! Haven't I told you to stay away from my daughter?"

"No, you haven't," I said, but he wasn't listening. He was glaring at the yellow-haired girl.

"Muriel Breitenwisher, you come here to me," he said. "I'll teach you to go to the movies behind my back with Harold Tillinghast when we get home!" he went on, more forcefully than clearly. He turned back to me. "As for
you,
Harold Tillinghast, I'll teach you to kidnap my daughter!"

"I didn't," I said. "I wouldn't for anything." I was sorry now I had ever
seen
his daughter.

"Don't try to deny it," said the enraged parent. "With the guilty evidence right there on you for all to see! Does this fit the hole in your trousers or not?" And he waved in my face the piece of torn blue jean that I had last seen abandoned among the roseate thorns of the tower.

"It's circumstantial evidence," I said. "I can explain everything."

"You'll explain to the police," said Mr. Breitenwisher. "You'll explain to juvenile court!"

Out of the corner of my eye I had seen Laura and Lydia and Kip and Gordy, huddled in a group nearby and listening round-eyed to the scene.

Now Laura sprang forward to my defense, and the others followed. It was good of them, particularly after the way I'd been acting to
them,
but I wished they wouldn't. It just added to the mortification of the moment.

"You leave my brother alone," Laura cried indignantly. "All he did was save the Princess from your ogre-ishness!"

"What?" said Mr. Breitenwisher.

"Why did you adopt her in the first place, just to shut her in a tower and feed her bread and water?" said Gordy.

"I didn't," said Mr. Breitenwisher.

"All they were doing was taking the important papers to the police," said Kip.

"What papers?" said Mr. Breitenwisher.

"So she could get her rightful throne back from you international spies," said Lydia.

"One moment," said Mr. Breitenwisher. He bent an eye on his golden-haired offspring. "Muriel, have you been telling fibs again?"