on the bank watching me, because he didn’t like water, and I was wading around and practicing swimming not far from the bank, where it was about waist-deep. And all of a sudden I hit a warm place in the water.
The lake itself wasn’t real cold, of course. Just kind of cool and nice, about right to swim in, but I could sure tell the difference when I hit this warm spot. It wasn’t very big. I moved a couple of feet and I was out of it. I thought maybe I’d just imagined it, so I felt around and by golly I hit it again. It wasn’t hot; just warm, like bath water. It was kind of spooky, and what made it so funny was that I’d been swimming and wading around here in this very spot for nearly a week and it hadn’t been here before.
It just didn’t make sense, any way you looked at it. It couldn’t be the sun that was causing it, because the sun was shining on the whole lake. And if it was a warm spring bubbling out of the ground, why hadn’t it been here those other days? I swam all around to see if I could find another one like it, but it didn’t happen anywhere else. But every time I’d come back, it was still there.
After a while I got out and put my clothes on and went up to the house to ask Uncle Sagamore and Pop about it. They might have some idea why there’d be one little warm spot in a cool lake. But they wasn’t there. It seemed to me like they had the funniest habit of just disappearing so you couldn’t find ‘em anywhere. I looked all around and waited, but they never did come back, so I dug some worms and went fishing, figuring I could ask ‘em that night at supper.
But that was the day the rabbit hunters came, and there was so much happened then I forgot all about it.
It was about an hour before sundown when I went up to the trailer to see if Miss Harrington was ready to go swimming.
Dr Severance was lying in one of the chairs with a drink in his hand.
He looked at me and turned his head towards the door of the trailer, and says, “Hey, here’s Weismuller.”
Miss Harrington came out. She was wearing the candy-striped romper outfit again, and had her purse. “Hello, Billy,” she says.
“Kid, you really slay ‘em,” Dr Severance says. “You must be a heavy spender. Or is it your breast stroke?”
“Oh, shut up,” Miss Harrington told him.
We started off through the trees, headed for the point up the lake. We’d gone maybe a couple of hundred yards and was walking along a trail where the bushes was pretty thick, with me going ahead and Miss Harrington coming behind because she was afraid of snakes, when all of a sudden I came around a bush and into a little open place, and there was a man in it.
He was just easing along real slow, looking all around through the trees, and when he saw me he jerked his head around and stared at me with his eyes real hard. He was wearing a Panama hat and a double-breasted suit, and he had a tommy gun in his hands, the kind they carry in comic books.
Hey, punk, where’d you come from?” he asked.
From Uncle Sagamore’s,” I says. “What you doing?”
“Huntin’ rabbits,” he says. “You seen any around?”
“Not today,” I says, but he wasn’t paying any attention. He had turned and was looking up the hill. I looked too, and that’s when I saw the other one. He was about fifty yards away and was dressed just like this one, and he had a tommy gun too. He motioned with his arm, and jerked his head.
“Shhh. I think he sees one,” the first man said. He turned and slipped up that way, and they went out of sight into some more trees.
“Don’t make any fuss,” I says over my shoulder to Miss Harrington. “They’re going to sneak up on a rabbit.”
She didn’t say anything.
I looked around, and by golly she was gone. I didn’t see her anywhere. It was funny. She’d been there a minute ago, right behind me.
“Hey, Miss Harrington,” I says, sort of low so I wouldn’t scare the rabbit away.
She didn’t answer. She just wasn’t anywhere around. I knew she couldn’t have gone on ahead, because I was standing in