She made one last, hopeful attempt to remove the plate. "Nope," I said sternly, "that wouldn't be cricket."
She shook her head vigorously. "Not cwicket," she corrected me. "Ant!"
David, about this time, developed the habit of coming home with the pockets of his overalls stuffed full of dry bread. I grew tired of finding bread crumbs all over the house, but nothing I could say would prevent him from coming home the next day with his pockets full again. He was extremely reticent about the matter, but we finally discovered that the teachers in the cafeteria watched the children to be sure that they ate their lunch, and that David, not inclined to eat his bread, jammed it into his pockets so that the teachers would think he had eaten it.
After weeks of trying unsuccessfully to prevent David from bringing home pocketsful of bread crumbs, I sighed and gave up. I decided to be philosophical about it--to be glad it was the bread, and not the main course, he got rid of in that fashion. Some things, after all, could be worse than a pocketful of bread--a pocketful of spaghetti with tomato sauce, for instance!
Our first Hallowe'en in Banning was spent in fear and trembling. Pranksters could do us so much damage! We had tormented visions of fourteen cabins with windows smeared and streaked with soap. Each cabin has at least four windows, and we weren't at all eager to clean soap off that many windows.
Anything that children or ruffians might do would be inevitably worse than anything that could have been done to us in Los Angeles. We had, as a matter of fact, the normal citizen's amount of risk--multiplied by fourteen!
We were lucky, though. Aside from a few "trick-or-treaters," on whom we lavished candy and cookies in fervent gratitude that they were hungry, rather than full of mischief, no one bothered us except little Moejy, he of the small ears, the close-set eyes, and the tiny head with nothing in it.
What Moejy did was a masterpiece of malevolence, even for him.
We went to bed about ten o'clock. There were still two vacancies, but we were sure they would be filled within a couple of hours at the most. We slept through the night, though, without once being roused by the bell. And in the morning, we saw why no one had disturbed us.
There, draped grotesquely over our neon sign, and obscuring it completely from sight, was David's tent.