Free Rufus M. by Eleanor Estes Page B

back fence and sat in the light from the kitchen. Joey reached up and felt around for a big bunch of grapes for him. And Joey also gave Rufus the apple they had meant for Miss Myles. He wondered how they had forgotten to give it to her.
    "Go to Miss Myles's?" asked Rufus.
    "Uh-huh."
    "The lady in the red automobile?"
    "Yeah."
    "Rufe," said Jane, "can you talk?"
    "Sure," said Rufus. "I got a tongue, ain't I?" And he stuck out his tongue and wagged it at them.

6. Eyes in the Pipes

    "Something must be done about the sewers," said the Town Improvement Association. "And something must be done about the drains at the street corners so we do not have all this mud!" they cried, and they did not stop campaigning until the town finally decreed that new sewers must be dug and that new drains must be made. Therefore one day men with pickaxes and shovels moved up and down the streets, digging deep, trenchlike ditches and lining the sides of the streets with big, round, dark red clay pipes.
    Rufus was happy when at last the workers reached Pleasant Street and Ashbellows Place. The air smelled of gas fumes all the time and of damp red dirt. Since Rufus was the first one home from school, he was the first to see that the sewers had reached their street.
    "A tunnel!" he shouted, and he stooped over and entered the first red pipe, crawling through it and then the next and the next, all the way down the street. Sometimes the pipes fitted together neatly and there would be two or even three pipes to crawl through without seeing the sky.
    When the other children in the neighborhood came home from school, they were delighted, too. No longer need they go over to Clark Street for crawling through the pipes. Here were their own, right here! Everybody wore tremendous holes in the knees of his stockings as the game of stump-the-leader took on new life.
    "Follow me!" yelled Rufus, balancing precariously on the shiny rounded surface of one of the pipes and leaping down to crawl through the next.
    Moreover there were ditches in the middle of the road to race through when the men had finished their work and gone away. Before they left they always placed smoky red lanterns and tar torches every few feet along the high piles of freshly turned dirt. Of course, there was a watchman to keep things in order while the workers were gone, but he stayed in, or near, a little wooden toolshed at the corner of Elm Street. Red and green lanterns hung from the door of it. There were a great many colored lights now, including the regular purple carbon street lamps along Elm Street, and it was a pretty sight to see them all flickering on a dark night.
    "Like Christmas," said Rufus.
    People had to stay on the side of the street they found themselves on. For instance, if you were on the Moffats' side of the street and wished you were on Mr. Buckle's, the oldest inhabitant's, side, you had to go all the way to Elm Street or Rock Avenue to cross over; that is, if you were a grown-up. Children, of course, had no difficulty scrambling up the hill and down into the ditch and up the other side. But grown-ups had to stay on the side of the street they were on.
    Jane liked this commotion as much as Rufus. "Hello!" she yelled at the oldest inhabitant. "Hello!" he yelled back, putting his hands to his mouth and making a funnel with them, as though he were miles away at sea.
    These pipes and ditches stayed in a state of semicompletion for a long time on the Moffats' street. The trenches were dug, the pipes were ready to be installed, but there they stayed. The men who were working on them had not come for some weeks.
    "They forgot this block," said Rufus happily, for the sewers had been finished on every other street in town. All the streets had a gentle swell along the middle where the new sewers had been dug. But on the Moffats' street the pipes were still there to crawl through, the dirt hills made good slides to belly flop down when the snow and ice came, and the ditches were