“After we get to be good friends,” said the thing to Johnny, “we can look at one another and it won’t matter then, for we’ll know what we are like inside and not pay attention to how we look outside.”
And Johnny, standing there, thought how they must look awful, not to want him to see them, and the thing said to him, “We would look awful to you. You look awful to us.”
“Maybe, then,” said Johnny, “it’s a good thing I can’t see in the dark.”
“You can’t see in the dark?” it asked, and Johnny said he couldn’t and there was silence for a while, although Johnny could hear it puzzling over how come he couldn’t see when it was dark.
Then it asked if he could do something else and he couldn’t even understand what it tried to say and finally it seemed to figure out that he couldn’t do whatever it had asked about.
“You are afraid,” said the thing. “There is no need to fear us.”
And Johnny explained that he wasn’t afraid of them, whatever they might be, because they were friendly, but that he was afraid of what might happen if Uncle Eb and Aunt Em should find he had sneaked out. So they asked him a lot about Uncle Eb and Aunt Em, and he tried to explain, but they didn’t seem to understand but seemed to think he was talking about government. He tried to explain how it really was, but he was pretty sure they didn’t understand at all.
Finally, being polite about it so he wouldn’t hurt their feelings, he said he had to leave, and since he’d stayed much longer than he’d planned, he ran all the way home.
He got into the house and up to bed all right and everything was fine, but the next morning Aunt Em found the matches in his pocket and gave him a lecture about the danger of burning down the barn. To reinforce the lecture she used a switch on his legs, and, try as hard as he could to be a man about it, she laid it on so hard that he jumped up and down and screamed.
He worked through the day weeding the garden and just before dark went to get the cows.