“What’ll we do?” Dragonfly’s trembling whisper asked me, but I already had my arms up, and in a second he had his spindling arms pointed in different directions toward the ceiling.
“Get ’em up!” I whispered to all of us, and I thought that, if we got a chance, we’d make a dive for the open kitchen window and head for camp terribly fast.
Poetry’s fat forehead was puckered with a very stubborn pucker, and before I knew he was going to do what he did, he did it, which was—he yelled into the other room, “Come on out onto the front porch and get us!” only, of course, we weren’t on the front porch, and it didn’t make sense at all until a little later.
As you know, Poetry’s voice was changing, and part of the time it was a bass voice and the other part of the time, it was a soprano, on account of he was old enough to be what my pop called “an adolescent,” which is what a boy’s voice is like when adolescence happens to him. Part of what Poetry said was in a man’s voice and sounded pretty fierce, but right in the middle of the sentence his voice changed, and it was like a scared woman’s voice, the kind that would have made Dragonfly think it was a ghost’s voice, if he had heard it in the middle of a dark night in an old abandoned house.
To make matters worse, Dragonfly sneezed again, and we knew we were found out for sure. It must have been darker in the room where we were than it was in the kitchen or something, or else John Till really thought we were out on that front porch, ’cause all of a sudden he left the sink where he’d been pumping water on his fish, and whirled around with his big knife in his hand, straight out of the kitchen and through the main room, dodging the table in the middle, and the Morris chair, and made straight for the front porch.
It was our signal to make a dash for the kitchen and the open window, which we did, Poetry letting the baby-sized radio plump down on the rollaway bed, and even as I led the way to the kitchen window in a mad dash, I noticed that the radio’s side panel which he had closed, dropped down, which is what turns it on.
Most of us got to the window at the same time almost. My acrobatic goat grabbed the kitchen table, and shoved it into the doorway between the kitchen and the main room so as to block Hook-nose’s way if he tried to come back quick and stop us. Poetry was out first, and then Dragonfly, and then Circus, and last of all, I, Robinson Crusoe, who in the split jiffy they were getting out first, got a glimpse of the swell big stringer of fish John Till had caught, and which were, right that second covered with water in the sink. The large northern pike was especially very pretty and I thought that before I left the North this summer, I’d want to catch a big fish, have it mounted by what is called a taxidermist and put it on the wall of my room back at Sugar Creek.
I didn’t understand why John Till—as soon as he found out we weren’t out on that porch but had tricked him—didn’t come dashing madly back and jump over the table in the doorway and grab the last ones of us to get through the window, but he didn’t and I was too scared to stop to find out why.
So we swished around the corner of that cabin, made four dives in the direction we knew the broken-twig trail went, and went dashing through the still-sprinkling rain, through the wet shrubbery and under the trees that were dripping water like a leaky roof, and headed for camp.
Boy, was I ever glad we had our trail of broken twigs to go by. When we got to the first one, Dragonfly, whose feet were getting pretty wet, like all of ours were, stopped and made a grab for his nose, and I knew he was allergic to something—maybe to too wet feet. When he’d finished his fancy sneeze, he said, sniffing at something he couldn’t see, but which he knew was there, “I still smell something—d-dead!—something in that direction over there!”