After discussion, Willard suggested, “I got a better idea. Instead of you pullin out of the Allies, you could still pretend to be Allies but be a…one of them…Dawny, what do ye call them fellers?”
“Double agent,” I offered.
“Yeah,” Willard said. “You could be a double agent, and find out for us all their plans and secrets, and that way we’d always beat ’em.” Our night meetings were illuminated only by the light of a single-wick kerosene lantern, and in the light of that lantern Sammy’s face—all our faces—took on expressions of wicked anticipation. Willard concluded, “If they’re so dumb they don’t know that mark on ye could stand for us as well as them, you won’t have no problem.”
Thereafter, to our pleasure, and to the gradual erosion of the power of the Allies, Sammy pretended to be a steadfast member of the enemy and even ingratiated himself to the inner circle of tyrants—Sog, Larry, and Jim John—to the extent that he became not just an Ally but a member of their inner council. His undercover activities were subtle: in baseball games it looked like an honest error when he allowed a ball to miss his glove and score an Axis run or when he looked at a called third strike that just edged the plate and put him out. In trench warfare, the Allies could not understand how we knew their troop movements beforehand, or why none of their sneak invasions were truly sneaky.
The Allies, it goes almost without saying, were foul-minded and immoral. “Let me tell y’uns some of the real nasties,” Sammy said to us, and reported on various of the debaucheries that went on in the tree house, principally involving Betty June Alan, who was rather wayward and no better than she should be, even with her own brother, Sog. But all of the Allied girls, apparently, were required to participate in acts that Sammy had the decency not to describe in the presence of our good Axis girls. Learning all these things about the Allies’ private goings-on didn’t give us any advantage over them except a chance to feel morally superior to them. Certainly we had our own appreciation of risqué humor and the usual sexual braggadocio as only the inexperienced can spout it, but we never did anything.
Sammy’s greatest performance of double-agentry was when he learned of the Allies’ plan to abduct our Gypsy. It was a daring scheme hatched privately by Larry and Sog, and Sammy just happened to have been in the second of the two pens of the double tree house, and eavesdropped on Larry and Sog talking in the other pen. The essence of their conversation had been that they had become jaded with the charms of their Allied girls. Perhaps Betty June Alan was too readily available and had lost her mystique. They decided that capturing the prettiest of the Axis girls would not only be a coup for the Allies but would afford them some “fresh meat,” as Sog had been heard to express it.
Gypsy had developed such a fondness for Old Jarhead, the mule that Willard had mysteriously provided for the Dingletoons, that she had taken to using it as a riding animal whenever she went to visit her friend Ella Jean or even to “pick her up” for a ride to school. Not that any of us needed riding animals to get from one place to another; everything in Stay More, even the outlying hollers and districts, was within reasonable walking distance. Nobody had to walk as far as I did when I was on my rounds delivering the Star or collecting news for it, but everybody did a lot of walking. Gypsy wasn’t lazy by any means. She just grew so fond of Old Jarhead that she liked to ride the mule, bareback, no bridle, up the steep trail that was a shortcut between the Dingletoon place and the Dinsmore place, and there Ella Jean would climb up behind her and the two girls would ride Old Jarhead to school. Miss Jerram had a strict rule: no mule at school, but Gypsy would tether it out of sight along the bank of Swains Creek.
Gypsy was still in mourning for Mare, of course; she still would be, for months or even years or even forever. Nobody but Ella Jean and I knew that she was. She did her best to conceal her occasional crying spells. Willard Dinsmore was crazy about her, but a bit too shy to let her know. He was always polite and pleasant to her and doing little things for her, but he assumed that such a pretty girl wouldn’t be interested in a scrawny bespectacled plain and homely guy like him—not knowing that her only lover, Mare, had been even plainer and more homely. It was all I could do, sometimes, to keep myself from taking Willard aside and telling him the true facts of the matter in order to give him a goad to pursue his infatuation with her.
Sog Alan and Larry Duckworth planned to waylay Gypsy on the trail up to the Dinsmore house, before she was within earshot of the house in case she hollered. Sammy heard them talking about just how they’d do it: Sog would pull her off the mule, Larry would stuff a gag into her mouth, they’d tie her up with rope, leaving her legs untied, and make her walk off through the woods to the bluffs that rise above Banty Creek, low bluffs with ledges leading into caverns where the ancient Bluff Dwellers had made shelters.
Sammy reported the conversation between Larry and Sog, when Larry had wondered aloud, “But then what? How long d’ye aim to keep her in the cave?”
“As long as we wanter,” Sog had said. “Until we caint think of nothin else to do with her.”
“And then what? Just let her go? She’d be sure to tell on us.”
Sog had pondered this, as if it hadn’t occurred to him. “Maybe she’d like us so much by then,” he had boastfully suggested, “that she wouldn’t want to tell nobody.”
“What if she hates us instead?”
“Then I reckon we’d just have to do away with her.”
“You mean kill her? That’d bother some folks.”
“Naw, wouldn’t nobody miss her.”
But Willard, you can be sure, when he heard Sammy’s tale, was one person who would miss her. He was furious, and I thought he would lose his self-control and reveal to the others his true feelings for her. He had to take a while to calm himself down and plan a course of action.
First he had to make sure that Sammy had done his listening in secret, without any detection from the conspirators. He didn’t want to get Sammy into trouble if they knew who had tipped us off. Then he had to decide whether or not to tell Gypsy, and he decided not to tell her—not because he was too shy to talk to her, but because if he told her, she might not want to go through with our plan to foil the abduction. We kept the whole operation a secret from all except the inner council of the Axis: Willard, Joe Don, Sammy, and myself. We were each armed with a cane spear, and of course I had my slingshot. In view of the enormity of the crime we were going to foil, it would have been nice if we’d had firearms, but all such had disappeared in the War Effort Scrap Drive, even our trusty BB guns. We had a complete arsenal of wooden rifles, wooden pistols, wooden machine guns, wooden mortars, wooden flamethrowers, wooden bazookas, wooden bowie knives, wooden bayonets, and even a wooden howitzer, but while all of these were essential to our warfare with the Allies, they wouldn’t do any harm in a “real” situation. I did, however, prepare myself for the mission by filling my overall pockets with some good smooth stones for my slingshot. I was never allowed to use actual stones in my slingshot during our battles with the Allies, but had to content myself with stale biscuits, various berries, or peanuts.
Sammy could not find out for us just what particular morning the conspirators were planning to kidnap Gypsy. All we knew was that it would be a school morning. Willard recruited one of the Axis littluns, his kid brother Jim George, only seven but fleet of foot, to begin hiding out at the foot of the trail as it turns up the mountain from the Butterchurn Holler road. Willard himself would be concealed at the top of the trail, Joe Don and me spread out along the middle of the trail at strategic intervals. Whichever one of us caught sight or wind of the Allied captors would alert the others by the whistle of the bobwhite, which we practiced in advance to make sure that even Jim George knew how to pucker and whistle it. I had been hearing the same notes on Latha’s radio as part of a commercial for a soap, “Rinso White, Rinso Bright, Happy Little Washday Song.” Of course there actually were a good many bobwhites (Colinus virginianus, or quail) in our purlieus, so we hoped that no real bobwhite
would be a-calling at the time we had to broadcast the signal. I hoped that I would have the privilege of being the first to use it.
Day after day we staked out that trail early in the morning before school, and had whatever fun there was in watching Gypsy atop Old Jarhead climbing the trail each morning on her way to pick up Ella Jean. We began to wonder—or Willard and I exchanged speculations—that Sammy might have either got his facts wrong or had made up the whole thing as some kind of hoax or even—dared we say it? Sammy might have been doubling back in his double-agentry, and was concocting the whole thing as part of an Allied plot.
Joe Don told us that Gypsy might soon have to stop riding Old Jarhead, because the Dingletoons would need the mule to do their spring plowing, a job that would fall mostly to Joe Don and leave the poor old mule too tired to furnish transportation for Gypsy and Ella Jean. We were just about ready to give up the vigil when, one morning, the bob-white whistle came from the post of Joe Don himself, and we gathered up our spears and sneaked to his post, where he announced, pointing, “Sog and them are a-hiding right down yonder.”
“Let’s get ’em!” I said, excited.
“No,” said Willard. “We have to catch ’em in the act. We caint just take for granted they’re gonna do it.” He turned to his kid brother Jim George and asked, “Did ye see her yet?”
“Yep, she’s on her way.”
We got as close as we could to the Allies’ ambush, and waited. We could see Sog and Larry hiding behind trees alongside the trail, Larry holding some rope and some cloth to gag her with.
She came into view, lazily perched on the slow mule. Gypsy was one beautiful girl, and the way her dress was hiked up her legs as she sat astride that old mule made her an easy temptation to a couple of lechers like Sog and Larry. They saw her and we could almost detect their evil drooling and panting.
We waited. Willard was going to give us the signal, and we couldn’t move until he did.
Sog and Larry jumped. Sog reached up and pulled Gypsy off of Old Jarhead, and Larry hit the mule with his rope to make the mule take off. But Old Jarhead just stayed there, wondering what was going on. Gypsy began cursing, and I was surprised she knew some of those words. I had a good rock in my slingshot, but Sog was holding Gypsy tight while Larry cut off her cursing by stuffing the rag in her mouth, and I couldn’t get a clear shot at either of them without hitting her. Half a dozen other Allies came out of the woods, armed with cane spears, but I was too busy to notice just who they were…except Sammy.
Willard made his signal, then sprang for Sog and pulled him away from Gypsy and threw him to the ground. Joe Don hit Larry on the face with one hand while plucking the gag from his sister’s mouth with the other. Then he hit Larry again, hard enough to knock him down. “Git Old Jarhead and git gone!” he said to Gypsy. She tried to climb back on the mule, but Sog shoved Willard down, and grabbed her. Willard got to his feet and pulled Sog away from Gypsy and wrestled him to the ground.
The other Allies rushed us, and even Sammy made a show of being on their side, and gave me a harmless poke with his spear, and grabbed for my slingshot. I remembered all the times when as much younger kids he and I used to throw rocks at each other. We were never friends. So I hit him on the shoulder with a mighty swing, pulling my punch at the last instant, the way I’d seen actors do in Western movie barroom brawls. I wasn’t a fighter, anyway, not for real, at least: in the play-like battles of the trenches and foxholes I could sham an affray with the best of them, but, as befits a newspaperman preferring the power of the pen over the sword, I didn’t have much experience with real fighting.
The Axis were outnumbered. While Willard was holding his own against the older and bigger and tougher Sog, and Joe Don was having little trouble with Larry, the Axis couldn’t handle those man-to-man combats when they had a bunch of Allies surrounding them with jabbing spears. Willard could only swat at the spears with one hand while trying to hit Sog with the other, and it wasn’t good enough: Sog knocked him down repeatedly. One of the Allies actually punctured Joe Don’s arm with a spear, and it was bleeding, and Larry was getting the best of him.
Two of the Allies were holding me on the ground while Sammy pretended to kick me. I lay there as if I were witnessing the whole thing from a distance, imagining a description of it in a news item for the Star: ALLIES FOILED IN KIDNAP PLOT BUT WIN FIGHT WITH AXIS. Gypsy had not succeeded in remounting Old Jarhead but was instead joining the fight herself, slapping any Ally who came within reach of her roundhouse palm. Four Allies had to use their spears from the four directions of the compass to keep her at bay long enough for Larry, who had conked her brother cold with a rock, to stuff the gag back in her mouth and tie her up.
Willard had lost his glasses and couldn’t see too well without them, and got his face in the way of a haymaker swing from Sog, which knocked him out. Little Jim George and I remained the only Axis still conscious. “Git help!” I urged him, and he took off up the trail, but two Allies ran him down.
It was all over for us, and for poor Gypsy, who was now bound and gagged and about to be taken off to some cave and subjected to unspeakable molestations.
“Leave her alone!” I said from my horizontal position on the ground.
Sog took time out from his preparations for departure to step over and kick me in the face. It hurt like hell, and I think his toenail gouged my cheek. “Hey Ernie,” he said to me, “didn’t that broken arm not learn you nothing?”
He drew back his foot to give me another, more vicious kick. The proverbial stars exploded in the blackness of my skull.
Chapter eleven
When I came to, I was staring up at Gypsy’s pretty face. She was no longer bound and gagged, and she was smiling at me. She was holding the reins to her mule, who was beside her. Joe Don and Willard were also sitting up, staring at her while they slowly got their bearings back. She waited patiently while the three of us regained consciousness, but it was clear she was bursting to tell us something. “The marveloustest thing happened!” she said. And finally she told us the story.
When the three of us had been rendered unconscious by the goons, who had then started off with their prize, Gypsy, a rifle had fired. Gypsy hadn’t known what it was at first, because it had been a long, long time since any of us had heard the sound of a rifle. But it had sounded right nearby, and then the owner of the rifle had appeared, standing in the trail with his feet planted as if he dared anybody to get past him, looming like some giant above mere mortals and mischievous kids, his long beard making him look like one of the Greek gods if not Zeus himself. Gypsy had recognized him from her brother Joe Don’s descriptions: he was a certain privacy-preferring old man known to the Allies as a Nazi spy.
“Howdy, boys,” he had said pleasantly to all of them, and had added, glancing at Gypsy, “and you too, young lady.” He had continued to stare at her, and at her friends flat out on the ground, including one, her brother, who was his friend also. He had continued speaking to Gypsy, “I don’t reckon ye could answer me with that rag in your mouth.”
He had pointed the Winchester at Larry and had said, politely, “Kindly take the rag out of her mouth, and undo those ropes.”
When the gag had been removed from Gypsy’s mouth, and Larry had been untying her, ole Dan had asked her, “Are you okay? Have ye been harmed any?” She had nodded her head to the first question and had shaken it to the second.
The old man had tickled Sog under the chin with the barrel end of the Winchester. “You,” he had said. “I reckon you’re the one started this whole mess, aren’t ye?” Sog had glowered at the old man but had said nothing. “I asked ye a question, boy,” Dan had told him, and had traced his Adam’s apple with the tip of the rifle.
“Yeah,” Sog had said proudly, “I started it.”
“You’re the same one,” Dan had observed, “who’s always snooping around my place, because you think I’m a Nazi spy. Aren’t ye the one?”
“That’s right,” Sog had said. “T
hat’s me.”
“You’ve invaded my privacy,” Dan had said. “And my daughter’s privacy. Do you know, I could easily have shot you? If you weren’t careful, you could discover a bullet hole right there between your bushy eyebrows, and wonder how ye got it. So I’ll tell ye here and now: I have done had enough of you! I don’t want any more of you! Get gone and don’t let me see ye again.”
Sog had sullenly taken off, and his Allies had gone with him. And ole Dan had waited just long enough to see that the three of us were beginning to revive before he had bid her good day and disappeared himself.
When Gypsy finished telling this, I exclaimed, “It sure is great to have him on our side!”
“He aint on our side,” Joe Don corrected me. “He just aint got no use for no foolishness, no matter which side it comes from.”
Willard said, “Well, they’ll think twice before they try a stunt like that again.”
The Allies began to behave themselves, comparatively. At school that day Miss Jerram could not help noticing that all of us were dirty, scuffed, and disheveled, and that those of us on the Axis side of the aisle seemed to have gotten the worst of it. “Have you Armies been fighting again?” she asked.
“Yes’m,” Jim John Whitter admitted. “And we won, this time!”
“That’s a lie,” I yelled at him. “You lost, on account of—”
“Hush, Dawny,” Willard commanded me.
But the Allies smugly refused to accept the notion that the Battle of Dinsmore Trail, as we came to call it, had been an Allied rout. Just as other battles of ours had been inconclusive owing to forces beyond our control—baseball games had been rained out, or a crucial engagement in the trenches had been interrupted by mothers calling their children to do chores or to eat supper—the Battle of Dinsmore Trail had been suspended by divine intervention in the form of a Zeus-like god who sided with the Athenians against the Trojans. The Allies believed—and rightly so—that they had already won the battle until he came along.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 86