Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze Read Online Free PDF

that lots of people and even, once, a cow, had gotten caught in that current and drowned. So we left the place alone; and anyway we was allowed to play and swim all we wanted in the part of the river nearest the farm; it was safe there, and shallow and the water moved slow; some days, terrible hot days in July or August, we stayed in all afternoon long, and there wasn’t a one of us couldn’t swim.
    â€œSo one day long about the middle of August I found myself with no one else to play with but this pesky Francis Wellgrove; it was a tossup in my mind which would be worst, him or nobody. But I was a sociable girl, and I decided I’d try to stand him for a playmate just this once. Marcella and Homer had drove up to Indian Rocks with Papa to sell a load of melons. Mrs. Wellgrove and Ethel had gone to Madison to see the doctor, and Mama was in the house with Aunt Nettie, putting up preserves. Corn? Tomatoes? Don’t remember. Albert Edward was too young to play with, and Evadna Cheever had the whooping cough. It was real lonesome. ‘Let’s go swimming,’ I says to Francis. It was awful hot. So we put on our suits (mine was an old blue dress) and went down to the river. Francis could swim, though not so good as we could, and it was all right when he wasn’t ducking me or throwing mud. By and by we came out and went walking along the bank looking for cardinal flowers and lobelia—one’s so red and one’s so blue!—and we found a lot and picked a lot, and walked along the riverbank talking and quarreling and slapping at gnats and pretty soon we came to the islands and we went on walking.… But on one of these islands there was a little house, or shed, all fallen in and broken—been there years, I guess—and Francis he saw it and said, ‘What’s that house for? Who built it? What’s in it?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I says. ‘I never was to it; none of us was.’ And then I told him why, and about the dangerous current and all and how we never went in the water at that part of the Sac even to wade. So then he wanted to get ahold of a boat, but there wasn’t no boat anywhere I knew of, and he kept on fussing and fussing about that house and saying there might be something valuable in it, money or old bones or a gun or something; and he wanted me to swim across with him and explore it. Course I wouldn’t, and I told him he couldn’t, but I could see he was getting his dander up, and first thing I knew, all of a sudden, he threw down his bokay of flowers and jumped in the river and started to swim! Right away it was over his head and the current started rushing him downstream fast as an express train, and I ran along the bank still holding onto my bokay and yelling at him to come back. He couldn’t, though, and halfway across he got panicky and screamed for me to help him, with his face white and all his long hair streaming out like a mermaid’s; he began to gulp and breathe water and I knew I’d have to go after him if he wasn’t to drown but, oh, heavenly day! Was I ever scared! So I ran down the bank to below where he was, and then I jumped in, praying out loud, and tried to swim across. That water! It seemed to be alive, like a big strong snake, it pulled so! But luckily I got ahold of Francis, grabbed him by his long hair, in fact, as he went past, and then when he tried to clutch and hang onto me, I slapped him hard as I could in the face and told him to lay still, there was no use trying to beat the current across or back. Don’t know how I had the sense, but I figured if we just kept quiet and let it take us, we’d wind up somewheres. Did, too. One of these little islands had a dead tree leaning out from it. We fetched up on that, so hard it knocked the breath clean out of us, and then we had to take it sideways, hand over hand, with our legs half washing away from us, till we reached the island itself.