The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,51
a few minutes we heard the steps coming back again. They went by not twenty yards away on the other side of us, it sounded like. Then they died out again.
Miss Harrington sucked in a shaky breath. “The lousy bastards,” she says, kind of whispering.
We didn’t hear anything for a long time then. It got dark. You couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t even see Miss Harrington’s bosom, when I was lying right against it.
“I’m scared,” I says. “I wish Pop was here.”
“I’m scared too,” she says. “But not quite that bad.”
“They couldn’t see us now,” I told her. “Mebbe we can sort of sneak around and get back to the house.”
“Do you know which way it is?” she asked.
“Sure,” I says. I pointed. “That way.”
We stood up and looked around, and I wasn’t so sure. It was all pitch-black, and one direction was like another.
“Least I think it’s that way,” I says. “The lake should be right over there.”
We started out walking real slow and feeling our way, trying not to make any noise. But we kept bumping into trees and limbs. Miss Harrington hurt her feet, stepping on things.
“Damn it,” she says. “By God, this is one for the book. This is the most. Wandering round in a crummy jungle in a G-string and no shoes.”
“What’s a G-string?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she says. “Or next to it. Ouch! Goddam the crummy limbs, anyway!”
We went on. We didn’t find the lake. Even if we got to it, I thought, the only way we’d know was when we walked off in it, it was so dark. Pretty soon I knew we was going the wrong way, or maybe just going around in a big circle.
And pretty soon me and Miss Harrington got separated in the dark.
“Where are you?” I called out.
“Over here,” she says.
I tried to tell by where her voice was coming from, and started that way. But then the next time she sounded further away in another direction. “Billy,” she was saying. “Billy, where are you?”
Then in a few minutes I couldn’t hear her at all. “Miss Harrington,” I yelled, and didn’t get any answer. I was lost. And she was lost too. There was no telling which way we had been going. I got real scared and started to cry, and then I tried to run. I slammed into a tree trunk and it knocked me down. For a few minutes I just laid there and bawled like a little kid.
I didn’t even have Sig Freed, and it reminded me that maybe he was lost too. There wasn’t even any telling how much timber country there was down here, and maybe they would never find me or Miss Harrington.
After a while I got up and walked some more. I didn’t have any idea where I was any more, or how long it had been since I’d got lost from Miss Harrington. It must have been two hours, anyway, I thought. I started to cry again, thinking about her, and just walked along with tears running down my face. Then after a while something struck me as peculiar. I wasn’t running into trees any more.. The stuff I was in was in rows, and it was smaller. I felt it. It was cornstalks. I must be in Uncle Sagamore’s cornfield, and that was right behind the house. I stopped crying and started to run, right straight up one of the rows, feeling the long leaves brushing against me on both sides, and when I popped out of the end of it there was the house with a light burning in it.
And that wasn’t all. There was a light down at the edge of the lake by Uncle Finley’s ark, and a couple of cars and an ambulance and a truck, and there was six or seven men milling around. The light was coming from gasoline lanterns they was carrying. I cut down that way, still running, but I give out of breath before I got there and had to slow down to a walk.
As I came up I could see some of the men was ones I knew. There was the sheriff and Booger and Otis and Pearl. Booger and Pearl was helping another man load a stretcher into the ambulance. Uncle Sagamore and Otis and Pop was trying to unload a rowboat off the truck. It dropped, and everybody cussed. The sheriff was just standing around cussing to anybody that would listen.