“Quick!” Poetry cried. “Down!”
We stooped low behind the elderberry bushes and waited for the car to pass.
“Hey!” I said to us. “It’s slowing down. It’s going to stop,” which it did. The same rattling old jalopy. In a split jiffy we were scooting along the fence row to a spot about twenty-five feet farther up the lane. And there we crouched behind some giant ragweeds and goldenrod and orange-rayed, black-eyed Susans—Pop having ordered me a week ago to cut down the ragweeds with our scythe, and I hadn’t done it yet. I nearly always cut the goldenrod too, on account of Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member of our Gang, is allergic to them as well as to the ragweeds and he nearly always uses this lane going to and from school.
My heart was pounding in my ears as I crouched there with Poetry, he in his green-striped pajamas and I in my plain yellow ones.
“Get down!” I hissed to him.
“I am down,” he whispered.
“Flatter!” I ordered him, “so you won’t be seen! Can’t you lie flat?”
“I can only lie round,” he answered saucily, which, under any other circumstances, would have sounded funny, he being so extra large around.
“Somebody is getting out,” Poetry whispered.
“How many are there?”