Everett merely took an appalled look and ran.
The swift defection gave Nora a somewhat exaggerated idea of her predicament. If she had thought the matter over, she would have realized that Mrs. Bailey was—to be sure—annoyed at having her charge vanish. But Mrs. Bailey would not rend her limb from limb. Nora would, at worst, have suffered a severe scolding and perhaps certain deprivations at lunch.
But the sound of Mrs. Bailey’s calling and the sight of her driving one-handed, together with her own sense of guilt, plus the unnerving effect of the Right of her companions, set Nora in motion. She darted from store front to store front on River Avenue. The car approached, inexorably.
Then, just as Nora felt sure she would be overtaken, the car pulled up. Mrs. Bailey went into the fruit store. For Mrs. Bailey was combining two tasks: hunting for her escaped ward and running an errand she had planned for later in the day. Mrs. Bailey was not much concerned about Nora, in fact merely vexed. For when Netta herself had been eleven years old, the streets were her home.
In something like panic, Nora fled across the Pine Street intersection and saw, beyond, a possible refuge. It was one she had seen under construction in the summer and investigated, with several nervous schoolmates, in the fall. She had not known it was still accessible.
What she saw was an open manhole, protected by portable iron guardrails and marked with red flags and a red lantern. The manhole was an entrance to the nearly finished, but not yet used sewer under River Avenue. Watching while great sections of concrete pipe were lowered into the trench had been one of Nora’s occasional occupations on the way home from school. No longer ago than Columbus Day, with five other sixth-graders, Nora had taken advantage of the absence of the laborers and descended the ladder.
They had found a vast, endless tunnel stretching ahead, with gray light seeping in, at Spruce Street and Oak, at Plum and Hickory and presumably at West Broad. The sepulchral echo of their voices had soon caused all but Bill Fennley to scramble back up the ladder. Bill, however, had actually walked through, clear to Hickory. It was generally conceded to be the most remarkable example of daring in the school year.
Nora went down the ladder like a shot.
Underground, it didn’t seem quite so cold. Traffic on the broad thoroughfare rumbled oddly. The great, whitish tunnel led away to infinity, with blurs of light in the distance, just as it had been on Columbus Day. There was a little water in the very bottom of the huge pipe, now, but not much. Old lady Bailey, Nora realized, would never find her now.
The fact restored some of the girl’s aplomb. If she wanted to, she thought, she could stay right there until her family came home. It would be a long wait and she didn’t have a watch but maybe she could tell by the sun, though the sun, she realized, was beginning to get weaker as the clouds thickened.