Free The Well-Wishers by Edward Eager

prisoner in the cellar at the bottom of the shaft and haunt him and make ghost noises till he was scared and undermined, and then when the others came, we would tell him all about himself and how awful he was, and not let him out till he begged and confessed and promised to reform. It would do him a lot more good than fists, and be more lasting, too, I thought.
    That was my plan.
    But do you remember when you were little and you made a booby trap for someone and then went away and left it, how often as not it was you yourself who forgot and came through that door later and brought the water down on your own head and the pail, too, half the time?
    You would not think a thing like that could happen to a person old enough to be in six-one-A, would you? Well, it can.
    Because first I thought I would watch for Dicky from the upstairs front windows, where there's a better view. And then I got interested in the shapes of the pine trees in front of the house and thought I'd make a drawing of them. And then I was so busy drawing that I didn't hear Dicky come through the woods till he was almost at the front door. And
then
I went running downstairs in the almost darkness, and dodged round the chest in my headlong haste, and stepped right in the middle of the little rug.
    And you know what happened.
    The pillows at the bottom of the shaft did their duty and I found myself unkilled. But I had fallen with my leg under me, and when I tried to straighten it, my ankle felt like a thousand knives stabbing, and I could still wiggle my toes, so I thought it probably wasn't broken, but I was sure it was strained or sprained or both.
    I remembered Laura's warning, and I knew the magic was up to its old tricks, teaching moral lessons again. And it was then that I heard Dicky LeBaron come up on the front stoop.
    He hesitated. Of course I couldn't see him hesitating, but I could feel it. Then I heard him cautiously, creepily, creakingly open the front door.
    Now was my chance, moral lessons or not. "Beware," I said, making my voice deep and ghostly. "Dicky LeBaron, your time has come."
    I heard Dicky gasp. Then he must have summoned up superhuman courage. Because I heard his footsteps come closer to where the yawning hole gaped.
    I waited till his head showed, and then I made the worst face I could and uttered a low moan. The way my ankle felt made that part easy. But I didn't find out till later that what with the shaft's having once led to a coal cellar, my face and hands were covered with coal dust and black as a hobgoblin's. And that helped.
    Dicky took one look and let out a yell. I heard him scramble to his feet and run out of the house and jump from the stoop. And then I heard voices outside.
    "What you doing round here, Dicky boy?" said the first voice. "Playing with the goody-goodies?"
    "What'd you run away from us for, Dicky boy?" said the second voice. "Didn't you know we'd follow you?"
    I knew those voices. It was Dicky's horrible high school friends. But they didn't sound as friendly with him as I'd have expected them to. I began to wonder if maybe when they were alone with him and didn't have anybody else to bully, they bullied
Dicky.
    "It's haunted. There's a ghost in the cellar," I heard Dicky gasp out.
    "What d'you take us for, Dicky boy?" said the first high-schooler. "You think we'd believe a thing like that?"
    "You trying to get rid of us, Dicky boy?" said the other. "Don't you want us to meet your high-toned friends?"
    "All right, see for yourselves," Dicky said.
    There were heavy footsteps now, and a second later three faces looked down the hole. "Beware," I started to say again. But my ankle was really throbbing now, and maybe that's why my voice cracked and went up high.
    "That's not a ghost," said the first high school boy.
    "That's a girl," said the second one.
    "It's that crazy Lydia Green," said the first one.
    "Gee. It
is
Lydia Green," said Dicky.
    "Poor Dicky boy. Scared by a girl," said the second high school boy