Free Corpses at Indian Stone by Philip Wylie Page A

the water, people on the imported sand, and in boats, looked at Aggie and broke into laughter. The recent nervous strain they'd undergone made that laughter unduly vehement. Aggie turned red to the roots of his hair. He pushed ahead, as if against tangible resistance, through the crowd and into the Plum family locker. He undressed. With a grimace of determination, he decided to eschew the jersey. He came out in blue trunks.

    Beth had been waiting for him, maliciously. "We're going to initiate you into the Indian Stones free-style swimming and poker--" she began. Then she stopped.

    Some men who seem powerful in their clothes are male caricatures in a bathing suit. Others are the opposite, and Agamemnon Telemachus Plum was such a person. His shoulders sloped steeply and his chest seemed rounded. Dressed, he gave the impression of being a little bit underweight. Undressed, he was revealed: a man knotted with lean muscle, a man with the build of an acrobat, a man of visible, formidable strength. His loose-jointed way of walking became graceful, almost sinister, like the sleek, precise movements of a big cat. It dawned upon everybody that Aggie, "at perhaps a hundred and sixty pounds and five feet nine and a half, was, as Beth later said, "dynamite in the physical culture department. "

    Aggie knew that the sight of the man who subtended the professorial clothing was creating a sensation, but the knowledge did not remove his blush. He had wanted to join the people and swim with them. Now, he wanted to get away. There' were several canoes lying bottom up on a slide beside the dock. Aggie looked at them. "I wonder if I could borrow somebody's . . . ?" His voice trailed off.

    "Take mine, Aggie," Ralph Patton said. "The blue one. How'd you get that brawn, boy?"

    Aggie answered, "Thanks, Ralph," and no more.

    They all watched him. They couldn't take their eyes away. His appearance was dramatic, very nearly appalling, in view of their previous ideas about him. He turned the canoe over and slid it into the water. He picked up a paddle. He stepped lightly aboard, dropped to one knee just forward of the stern seat, and dipped his paddle. The canoe came to life. It. flew in the water. Five strokes took him out of earshot and twenty out of sight, around the first of several small islands.

    "Good Lord!" Ralph exclaimed. "Did you ever see anything like that!"

    Beth was sitting quite still, staring at the widening wake. She pulled off her bathing cap and shook her black hair in the sunlight. "We've got that little guy all wrong,"
    she said. "He's dangerous."

    Mrs. Drayman agreed--in a way. "He isn't little, even."

    Beth went on talking, as if to herself: "No. Not little. Not anything like what I thought. I wonder how he learned to paddle like that?"

    Wes Wickman, the state trooper, who had read one of Aggie's books at college, could have given a partial answer; Aggie had learned it seal-hunting in kayaks, pushing dugouts into the Everglades and up the reaches of the Amazon, and raging through Alaskan white water in canoes like the one that had just vanished.

    Jack Browne, off duty for the moment, lay back on the sand and said somewhat jealously--inasmuch as he had been an athlete, "One of those outdoor guys! Tum up their noses at tennis--and spend a month trying to get a snapshot of a tillagaloo-bird on her nest! No wonder he was so interested in the deadfall. Could have built it himself!"

    Beth whirled. "That's no kind of thing to say! So could you! You're no slouch in the outdoors, yourself! So could I! I was Deerfoot, in the Girl Pioneers. I can pitch tents and make smoke signals. He's wonderful--and you're just envious!"

    Jack chuckled. "Darned if I'm not! I think I'll have to get the professor to give me some lessons in paddling. He's gone after Danielle, I guess."

    Beth stared at Jack. "I don't get it!"

    "Before you came along-Danielle took off in her canoe--that way." The dark-haired girl put on her cap again. "Let's swim,"