Minga produced the letter; with one eye on the distant house, the two rereading it together, enjoying the sense of secrecy, half giggling at the queer spelling and altogether excited over their plan. The black round script ran thus:
"The gang stops work at five. The guards goes first to git the truck ready to take us bak to the pen! If you come threw about that time, I will beat it to your car and take the chance. Go slow till I jump; if I catch on, go like hell; go like hell anyways. There is a curve ahead to the right, but that is what you want, as the guards got motorcycles. So no more at present. Give the duck that brings this fifty cents and oblige
"You Know Who."
As Minga read, the two young faces suffused with a thrilled fire; weeks ago at the trial Minga and Dunce had decided to abduct Terry. The legal aspects of the thing hardly occurred to them. This sort of thing was done in the movies successfully, why not in actual life? Their plan was to snatch the boy from the road-building gang sent out by the state's prison to the stone crusher on the Western Shore where road-making was in progress. Terry was then to be conveyed in their automobile to the deserted Stone Oven of Revolutionary fame near Bear Mountain. Here, where a little stream wandered through the bracken, he could be driven to every day and supplied with food until it should be safe to convey him to a night train and ship him to the West. Minga and Dunce had worked out the thing with dime novel detail, with dramatic appreciation of its flavor and dash, until the project ceased to have its original motive of saving Terry and gradually became their own twentieth century private automobile adventure. They had a charmed sense of thrill and a pleasant feeling of outwitting such staid and sober folk as Watts Shipman. It was not at all uncharacteristic of young persons, not at all uncharacteristic of the time, not at all uncharacteristic of the laughable enigma of human nature that at the very moment that the two were starting out to do something entirely discreditable, inevitably wrong, that they should be resolving with all the power and imagination of their young souls to adjust themselves better to the world they lived in. If it occurred to Minga and Dunce that as a first step in their new resolutions the Terry abduction was hardly judicious, they put the idea aside; each felt committed to the thing; neither knew how to withdraw.
It was the early July that is still reminiscently June. Orioles and tanagers were still flashing through the Hudson River green, rose-breasted grosbeaks and indigo birds had only just moved on to other mysterious leafage. The fields and hills were dusted with silver daisies and amid slopes of feathery grass coreopsis began to toss golden crowns. Out on the country roads the deep woods began to show, through their mystical vistas, tall towered carillons of speckled lily bells, and mountain laurel tossed pink shells on clumps of foam-lit dark. The car whirled along rocky bits of road where tall plantains, and milkweed and fireweed, things of orange and rose and scarlet plume burned along the ditches of water-worn gravel, or by the lichened gray of ranging stone walls. It all spelled myriad fecundities, ripe gay plant life, a thousand dusts and washes of seed, a thousand marchers of hidden atoms, a thousand caravans and progression of strange mysterious pollen. The rich Chord of Summer was resolving throughout the countryside, played by a hand that goes lovingly back each year to the old hymn of begetting, and birth, and death! The old, old hymn of creation that sings us all in and out of being.
A gypsy camp on a rocky hillside back of the road showed dingy tents, and the tethered horses and empty hooded wagons stood in a sea of wild roses and buttercups. The gypsies, rather modern, with a decided tendency to fireless cookers and hair-nets and graphophones, were brown and smiling in indolent gypsy leisure. Minga stared upon them with awe; she dimly got their Pagan raison d'être, their rising to sunrise, their sleeping in cold stars and dew; the girl looked delightedly upon the strong bodies of little, half-naked children, and though daintily clad herself, she got a sense of the primal poetry and rags of the vagabond women who looked not too respectfully out to the showy car.
"Pretty lady, have your fortune told," called out one old hag. The gleaming lawless faces said impertinent lawless things, the teeth glittered, and the eyes were saucy. Minga was for halting the car and climbing down for this experience, but her companion restrained her.
"Ah, don't!" begged Dunstan disgustedly. "Say, they're fresh. Don't monkey with 'em, they have diseases, they're always horribly dirty. Don't go near them," shuddered the boy; "they make me crawl, somehow."
The old crone sitting by a steaming kettle swung on a pole looked out to them leeringly. That she could have heard their comments seemed incredible to the two in the automobile, but the black gaze seemed to read their very souls.
"Ah—Mates," the old woman called out teasingly, meaningly, with a curious warning.
"Mates," then as the impudent curious eyes surveyed them, this woman made a strange gesture, pagan, clairvoyant and authoritative. "Mates," she screamed after them, "there's a dead body between ye; it joins ye, Mates, Mates."