Free The Well-Wishers by Edward Eager Page B

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