“Faster!” my excited mind ordered me. But I quickly realized I couldn’t save myself by just being fast. I’d have to be smart too, like a cottontail outsmarting a hound.
Remembering how cottontails disappear in a thicket if they can, then circle and go right back to where they were before, I turned left like Little Tom had done and raced madly back toward the tent and the creek and the plastic clothesline.
But it wasn’t a good idea. The big bully of a boy heard, or saw me, or something. I hadn’t any sooner shot out into the open and dashed between a pair of brown slacks and a pink lady’s dress of something hanging on the line than I heard panting and flying feet behind me and knew I would have to be even smarter than a cottontail.
“You dumb bunny!” a savage voice yelled at me. “I’ll make short work of you. Stop, you little thief! STOP!”
Right then was when my world turned upside down for a while. That fierce, very angry voice yelling at me was NOT the voice of Big Bob Till, but of somebody else! I realized that it was somebody who, if he caught up with me, might not know that I wasn’t Tom Till and I would get one of the worst thrashings a boy ever got. “What,” I asked myself, as I panted and dodged and sweat and grunted and hurried and worried—“what will happen to me?”
I made a dive around the wall-type tent, planning to dart into the path that went through the forest of giant ragweeds to the bridge. At the bridge I would rush up the incline on the other side and gallop across.
As soon as I would get across the bridge, I’d leap over the rail fence, hurry through the woods to the spring, swing into the path made by barefoot boys’ bare feet, and in only a little while after that I’d be across the road from “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox and would be safe.
I took a fleeting glance over my shoulder to see who was chasing me, and say! my pursuer was not only not Bob Till but wasn’t a boy at all—instead he was a woman wearing brown slacks and a woman’s hat!
Boy oh boy, was I ever in the middle of a situation! In that quick over-the-shoulder glance I noticed that her hat was straw-colored and looked a lot like the kind Little Jim’s Mom wears to church. Even in that quarter of a jiffy while I was seeing her over my shoulder, I noticed that the hat was the same color as the ripe wheat on Big Jim’s Pop’s farm and that there were several heads of wheat slanted across its left side instead of a feather like lots of women’s hats have on them.
What on earth! Why was I, Bill Collins, a husky hard-working farm boy with muscles like those of the village blacksmith—“as strong as iron bands”—running from just one helpless woman—just one!