We didn't have time to think of that scare then, we were so scared of what would happen to us if the Graveyard kids caught us. I guess we didn't think of the Poor Farm crazy folks at all.
So pretty soon Bony began to drop back, and we caught up with him. It was thundering and lightning hard now and the wind was blowing the way it does just before a big storm—big whoofs that throw up the dust in thick waves and make the trees bend low down and shake the leaves out of them—and Bony was crying again. Swatty shouted at him, but we couldn't hear what he was saying, the wind and the thunder and trees made so much noise. I looked back and saw that the Graveyard kids were right after us and then—Bony fell down!
He didn't fall flat. He fell half and took half a step and then turned and fell sideways, and when he tried to get up he couldn't. I ran a little bit before I stopped, but Swatty stopped short and when I looked back he was trying to drag Bony up again. There was an awful flash of lightning, one of the kind you can't see for a minute after, and then a bang like a thousand cannon, only keener, and a big tree at the side of the road just split in two and one half fell across the road. I guess maybe I cried a little, but I didn't stop to do it; I ran back to Swatty and Bony and grabbed hold of Bony's other arm and helped Swatty drag him.
I don't know what happened to the Graveyard Gang. I guess they got scared of the storm and went home but we didn't think of that then, All we thought of was to get Bony away in a hurry. It was awful! The lightning and thunder were just glare, glare, glare! and bang, bang, bang! and no rest in between, and the wind was bending the trees almost down to the ground and holding them there stiff, not swaying. I was just bellering and yanking Bony by the arm and saying, “Oh, come on, Bony! Oh, come on, Bony!” over and over. Swatty was shouting at me all the time, but I couldn't tell what he was saying, but he pulled more at his arm of Bony than I pulled at mine, and then I saw he was taking him off the road, because there was a house right where we were and he wanted to get him to the house.
Just when we got Bony onto the porch of the house it began to rain. It didn't rain down, it rained straight across, like the lines on writing paper, and it didn't rain a little—it rained all the rain there ever was or will be, I guess. The rain came into that porch like water shot out of a fire hose nozzle, just swish-swash against the front of the house and then up to your ankles on the rotten floor of the porch. And then, when there was a white flash of lightning I saw where we were. We were on the porch of the Haunted House!
All the kids knew about the Haunted House. The way I knew about it was because we used to go out the Four Mile Road nutting and then we used to see it. Anybody would know it was a haunted house just by looking at it. The glass in the windows was all gone and boards, any old boards, were nailed across the windows, and the doors were either nailed up or broken in and hanging crooked on one hinge. The paint was all off and the chimneys had toppled over and the bricks and mortar were all scattered down the roof and some on the porch roof. The shingles were all curled up and there were bare patches where they had blown off.
It was a big house, two stories and a half, and there was a porch all across the front, but at one corner the porch post had rotted down so that the porch roof sagged almost to the floor there, and the rest of the roof was all skewish. The floor of the porch where we were was all dry-rotted and some of the boards were gone, and the grass and weeds grew up through the floor everywhere. The yard was all weeds, as high as a man, and tangled blackberry bushes, and at night, so Swatty and all the kids said, something white used to come to the windows and stand there, and you could hear moans. It was a haunted house all right. All the boys knew that and all the boys kept away from it. And there we were, right on the porch and the rain just drowning us.