Then There Were Five (10 page)

CHAPTER VI

The Citronella Peril

One day Rush went to see Mark by himself. Randy couldn't come; she had to go to the dentist in Braxton, and had departed glowering with rage, disappointment, and apprehension. Also she clung to the unreasonable conviction that Rush shouldn't have gone to see Mark without her. He should have stayed home.

But Rush couldn't see it that way. He'd only have half a day with Mark anyhow, as the morning had all been squandered mowing the lawn.

Isaac wanted to go too, but Rush wouldn't let him. “Meeker's dogs would make hamburger out of you. You stay home. Good boy, Isaac, good old lop-eared boy.” But Isaac refused to be mollified. He tucked the side of his lip between his teeth, which was his way of sulking, and glared at Rush with eyes like hot molasses. And he decided to go away by himself. He'd show them. John Doe (who was more Willy's dog than anyone's) tried to dissuade him, but got nowhere. Isaac went trotting off toward the woods by himself, looking for trouble.

Rush whistled as he rode. This time he carried a bucket, as well as the picnic basket, on his handlebars.

“I know where there are blackberries as big as
that,
” Mark had said. “Only wear long pants, because, boy, are they thorny.”

Rush wore blue jeans and heavy shoes. So did Mark. But the day was so hot that they took off their shirts and left them under the chokecherry tree above the farm with the picnic basket.

“Look,” said Rush, with pride, “I brought some citronella.”

“What's that?”

“Stuff to keep the mosquitoes off. Here, smell.”

“Pew! I'd rather be bit.”

“Oh, no, you wouldn't. You get used to it by and by, and it really works.”

Both boys slathered themselves liberally.

The afternoon progressed satisfactorily. Mark took Rush to new woods; he seemed to know them all like the palm of his hand. The blackberries were almost as large as he had said. For a long time the boys wandered among the brambles, pulling the juicy berries from their clusters, and eating as many as they dropped in their buckets. The branches above dipped in the summer wind; the woods were full of drifting light and shade. There were emerald-green cushions of moss between the oak roots; Mark found a tree toad clinging to the bark of a birch, and Rush found a puffball as big as his head. Woodpeckers drummed on dead wood, and somewhere not far away there were crows calling, “kr-a-a-a, kr-a-a-a, kr-a-a-a.” They sounded ancient and contentious, like moneychangers in the Bible. Rush felt as if he were a thousand miles away from civilization, and he enjoyed the feeling.

“Pretend this is Guadalcanal,” he said. “Those crows are Japs. Their camp is over there somewhere. We're Marines, of course. We have no communications, we're absolutely on our own. A volunteer job at great risk. We have to find this encampment and spy on it. You understand Japanese, see, and you tell me everything they're saying, and I take it down in shorthand.”

Mark caught on at once. “Can't be too careful,” he murmured earnestly. “They may have sentries posted anywhere—”

“Yes, and booby traps, maybe. They're clever, you know. Mustn't underestimate 'em.”

“We're without food and water, too. We have to eat these berries. They're not blackberries. They're—they're—”

“The fruit of the Weehawken tree. An Oriental tree. We're lucky to have found them.”

The berries had an extraordinary savor after that. They simply stuffed them; there was purple all around their mouths.

“You be Jefferson and I'll be McBride,” said Rush. “Quiet now, Jefferson, we're getting closer.”

“Lie down, McBride! A Zero overhead!”

They flung themselves down so hard that Jefferson said, “Ow,” in a loud, normal voice.

“Sh-h-h,” hissed McBride, “see, there he goes!” A hawk floated lazily against the sky.

“A near thing, Jefferson, a near thing. Better take it easy from here on.”

As they crept, bent forward, the sounds of the enemy came clearer. The boys were so intent on the game, and so quiet in its performance, that they leapt with dismay when a startled partridge beat its way out of their path.

They came to a clearing, crawled under some hazel bushes, and found themselves looking down at a farm in a valley. It stood among cornfields like an island at sea, and above these fields the enemy was hovering.

“All right, Jefferson, let's have it.”

And for the next fifteen minutes Jefferson, in a low, tense whisper, interpreted the crows to McBride, who gravely wrote the message upon the palm of his hand with a hazel twig.

At the end McBride arose with a strange, quiet smile.

“Here you are, Jefferson, take the message back to the commanding officer. I rather think that news about the reinforcements may be useful to him. So long, old man.”

“Why? What the heck, aren't you coming too?”

McBride shook his head and winced a little. “They got me, pal,” he said, and died; very cleverly, with a spiral twist like in the movies.

Mark was admiring. “Gee, I never would have thought of that. You did it good, too.”

Rush waved aside the compliment. “I'm hungry, aren't you? And the basket's way back near the farm.”

“I have to milk first. Come on; you help me get in the cows and I'll give you a lesson.”

Rush had a new respect for Mark after the milking lesson.

“Why, I thought it would be just like turning on a faucet,” he said in amazement. “Nothing to it, that's what I thought. Just a simple twist of the wrist.”

“That's what everybody thinks until they try.”

Mark gave the lean black cow a loving swat on its hindquarters and picked up the bucket.

Next they fed the pigs, collected hens' eggs, finished up the dozen-odd chores that Mark left till the last minute on his precious Wednesdays. By the time they climbed the hill to the chokecherry tree the sun was already setting, and they were famished. They did not speak while they were eating, they were too hungry. They simply sat there, chewing, and watched the sun go down. It left its light behind it long after it had gone; the western sky was a flood of gold. The swallows came up into the air, their wings as sharp as scissors; and before the swallows had left the bats too had begun to fly. At first it was difficult to tell which was which, they both swooped and fluttered, and zigzagged and curved with the same reckless style.

“Aerobatics,” said Rush. “Unless I'm mistaken that bat just did a perfect Immelmann.”

“What the heck is that?”

“A kind of loop the loop, I believe,” replied Rush, who really was not sure, but who liked the sound of the word “Immelmann.”

The two boys lay on their backs on the hillside, full of food and peace. Below in the hollow, the dreary farm was drowned by the dusk. Now and then one of the Meeker dogs barked: they had deep, hollow voices, that always sounded as if they were barking in a cellar. Overhead, the sky was gradually filled with stars.

“Watch,” said Mark mysteriously. “I predict that within five minutes you will see a shooting star. Before half an hour's up you will have seen at least twenty or twenty-five.”

Rush laughed. “I hope you sent your order in early.”

“Don't worry,” said Mark, still mysterious. “I fixed it up for you. Just keep watching, and you'll see.”

Rush lay idly staring up at the sky and all its thousand points of light. Suddenly one of them sped across the dark, bright as a firefly, but sure of its goal as a bird.

Rush sat up abruptly. “Say!”

Mark smiled. “Lie down; keep watching.”

Almost at once there was a second star-flight, and a third. A prickle of superstition crept over Rush's scalp.

“Come across, now; what's the secret?”

“When you've counted twenty-five I'll tell you.”

“There's something very fishy about this,” growled Rush. Long before the half hour was up he had counted twenty-five.

“Okay, come clean.”

“Well, I kind of hate to. For a minute I almost thought I was running the show. But it's only because it's the eleventh of August.”

Rush was still mystified.

“I don't get it.”

“Didn't you ever hear about the Perseids?”

“No. What are they?”

“They're the shooting stars you've been looking at. Every August they come, the sky is full of them. Specially around the tenth. I've counted more'n a hundred some nights.”

“I never knew that. Look, there goes another!”

“Lots of shooting stars come again around the middle of November, the Leonids, but somehow I always forget to look for them then.”

“Gee, I learn more from you than I learn in a whole year at school,” said Rush admiringly, and Mark was more than happy to hear these words of praise.

“I learn a lot from you, too,” he said. He wanted to say: I've learned what it's like to have a friend, but of course he didn't because he was afraid of sounding sappy.

Mark knew the constellations too. He showed Rush (who didn't know anything except the Big Dipper) the patterns of Cassiopeia's Chair, and Scorpio. For a long time they wandered together in the glittering meadows overhead.

Rush came back to earth first.

“I'd better go—”

“What's the matter, why?”

“Well, I wouldn't like you to get in trouble. Oren wouldn't like to find me here,” Rush said, and added candidly, “and I wouldn't want him to.”

“He doesn't come home till late Wednesday nights. Honest.” Mark sat up suddenly. “Would you like to know why? I could show you. Come on, Rush. Only you must promise never to tell.”

“I promise,” said Rush, curiosity winning, as usual. “Tell me what it is.”

“No, I'll show you. Come on.”

“But where?”

“Up the hill a ways. In the woods.”

“Well, okay, but let's put some more citronella on. The mosquitoes have found out about us.”

They crawled under the fence again and crossed the pasture. There was a smell of pennyroyal. The woods were very dark ahead.

“What can Oren be doing in the middle of the pitch-black woods at night?” Rush wondered aloud. “He could be hunting possums, except they don't have 'em around here. He could be collecting moths, but it's not very likely. He could be operating a counterfeiting machine (much more likely), or hiding stolen money, or lying in wait for an enemy (he probably has quite a number), or—”

“Tisn't any of those,” Mark said. “Though it's against the law, all right.”

They were in the woods now, and creeping through the undergrowth. Rush, at Mark's heels, wondered how he could find his way so easily. The dense, tree-filled darkness seemed to be full of presences: whispers, murmurings, a snapped twig beneath a ghostly foot, a sudden breath of air against the cheek, as though someone—something—invisible had hurried by.

“Spooky,” whispered Rush, and laughed softly to hide the fact that he felt shivery.

“Is it? Guess 'tis. I've been in these woods so much I know 'em like my own backyard and like 'em a lot better.”

They stole on. Branches snapped in Rush's face, moths whirred past his ears, and he got a mouthful of cobwebs. Far away he heard the soft, strange voices of owls.

“What's that?”
he cried suddenly, stopping dead in his tracks and grabbing hold of Mark.

Ahead of them something stood unmoving in their path: something large and low that glowed with a cold, unearthly light. Rush was certain that he saw a ghost at last; he could actually feel the hair rising on his head.

But Mark was laughing.

“That's fox fire,” he said. “It's only a dead stump. Sometimes dead wood gets like that when it's damp: phosphorescent. See.” He chipped off a piece of the rotten wood and held it up. “It keeps on shining when you touch it.”

Rush held the piece in the palm of his hand: a little witch light with no warmth.

“I've seen phosphorus in the ocean on a summer night,” he said. “Tiny points of light like stars all along the water-line, but I never knew about this. Randy'd like it.”

“We'll show her sometime. Keep quiet now, we're not far off. You'll have to keep
awful
quiet. They'd skin us alive if they caught us.”

Rush felt a delicious mingling of fear and curiosity: one part fear to three parts curiosity. He crouched like an Indian, stepped on tiptoe, hardly breathed as he walked.

In a few minutes they could smell smoke, and heard voices, a man laughing.

“Easy now,” whispered Mark, putting a restraining hand on Rush's arm.

Inch by inch they crept forward. There was a light somewhere spraying out through the leaves: the shifty, uncertain light of a fire in the open. Smoke bit into their nostrils.

Rush caught his foot on a dead branch and stumbled with a crash.

The two boys froze. They were so still that they could hear their own heartbeats, and the dark seemed to prickle with a thousand tiny lights.

After a long second Mark let go of his breath in a sigh.

“They didn't notice. Lie down on the ground.”

Cautiously they let themselves down until they were stretched flat on their stomachs.

“Kind of inch forward like a caterpillar,” Mark said. “Follow me.”

Little by little they made their way toward the light. It was scratchy and uncomfortable. Leaves got into Rush's eyes, nose, and mouth. He kept spitting out spiders, webs, twigs, and other foreign bodies. His stomach was scratched unmercifully and he put one hand down on a decayed, wet toadstool with a shudder of horror.

Soon he was aware that Mark had stopped crawling, was lying still just ahead of him; and that the lights and voices were now very close. Inch by inch Rush crawled up beside him.

He saw that they were lying at the edge of a little bluff looking down into a pocket (perhaps another abandoned quarry) in the hillside. Somewhere there was a tinkle of running water. The boys were so close to the occupants of the hollow that the screen of beech leaves and ferns that protected them seemed very frail security to Rush.