But I needn’t have worried about them, for when we got out to the road they were waiting for us, breathing kind of hard and considerably scratched up. The way they’d gone through that brush and all those blackberry patches must have been a caution.
“I am glad to see,” said Butch’s Pa, “that you got back safely.”
“Don’t mention it,” Pa told him coldly, and went on down the road, hanging tight onto my hand so that I had to trot along.
We got back home and went into the kitchen to get a drink of water.
Pa said to me, “Steve, have you got those glasses?”
I dug them out of my pocket and handed them to him. He put them on the shelf above the washstand.
“Leave them there,” he said. “Don’t touch them again—not ever. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
To tell the truth, I would have liked it better if he’d gone ranting up and down. I was afraid that what had happened out there in the woods had made him decide to go to one of the Homestead Planets. I told myself he maybe already had made up his mind and didn’t need to rant.
But he never said a word about the fight with Andy nor about the Homestead Planets and he wasn’t sore at me. He kept on being quiet and I knew that he still was mad clean through and I figured that he was mostly sore at Butch and Butch’s Pa for their having made a complete fool of him.
I did a lot of wondering about what I’d seen down there in Andy’s hayfield. And the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that I had grasped the secret of how the halflings operated.
For I must have been seeing in two different times when I’d been looking at the ladder. I must have looked into the future and seen the ladder slip. Except it never slipped, for the halflings, seeing that it would slip, had made one leg of it settle in the ground. And then, with the ladder sitting solid, it never slipped, of course. The halflings had done no more than look ahead a bit and then righted something that was about to happen before it had a chance to happen.
And that, I told myself, was the basis of good luck and bad. The halflings could spot disaster coming and try to head it off. Except they couldn’t always make it. They had tried to protect Andy when Pa took a lick at him and they had failed. So I figured that they weren’t infallible and that made me feel some better.
For if they could make good luck for Andy, it stood to reason they could make bad luck for the rest of us. All they had to do, if they had a mind to, was to see good luck heading for us and change it into bad.
It might even be possible, I told myself, that the halflings lived ahead of us, by a few seconds or so, and that the only thing which separated us from them was this matter of a different time.
But there was something else that troubled me a lot. Why had I been able to see two different times? It was clear to me that Butch and his people couldn’t, for if they could, they’d have more answers to the halfling situation. They’d been studying it for years, and so far as I could figure, they didn’t know for certain about this two-time business.
It seemed to me, when I thought about it, that Butch’s Pa might have ground better than he knew when he made my glasses. He might have put in something or taken out something or done something he didn’t know about at all.
Or it might be that the human race had a different kind of vision, or maybe just a little different, and when you added the correction for Butch’s kind of vision to our kind of vision, you brought out a thing you couldn’t even guess at.
I tried and tried to get it clear within my mind, but I couldn’t do it. I just went around in circles.
I stayed close to home for several days because I had a feeling that I should be ignoring Butch to uphold the family honor and that is how I missed the big hassle between Fancy Pants and Nature Boy.
It seems that Nature Boy got sick and tired of how Fancy Pants was mistreating that poor, bedraggled cat. So he took one member of the skunk family that had fallen in love with him and he clipped and dyed that skunk to look exactly like the cat. And one day he sneaked over to Fancy Pants’ place and switched the skunk for the cat without anyone seeing him.
The skunk didn’t want to be Fancy Pants’ skunk; he belonged to Nature Boy. So he started beating it back home as fast as he could go, which wasn’t very fast.
Just then Fancy Pants floated out of the door and he saw the skunk going through the gate. He thought the cat was trying to sneak away from him, so he reached out and grabbed it up and rolled it into a ball and tossed it pretty high into the air, sort of careless like, to teach that cat a lesson.
It went up in the air and came down smack-dab on top of Fancy Pants, who was floating out there in the yard a few feet off the ground.
The skunk was scared witless. As soon as it got its claws fastened into Fancy Pants and had some leverage, it retaliated with enthusiasm. And for the first time in his life, Fancy Pants thumped down to the ground and, among other things, he got his clothes as dirty as any other kid.
I would give a zillion dollars to have seen it.
For a while, they figured that they might have to take Fancy Pants out somewhere and bury him for a week or two to make him presentable again. But they finally got him to a point where one could come near him.
Fancy Pants’ Pa went storming down to talk with Nature Boy’s Pa and the two of them put on a ruckus that had the neighborhood chuckling for a week.
And now I was really strapped for playmates. I was still cold-shouldering Butch and I knew better than to take up again with either Nature Boy or Fancy Pants. They both were mean cusses when they set their mind to it. I was sure we hadn’t heard the last of this feud of theirs and I didn’t want to get tangled up in it by being friends with either one of them.
It was plenty tough, let me tell you. Here I was with vacation almost ended and no one to pal around with and my live-it gone. I watched the days slip past and regretted every minute of it.
Then one day the sheriff drove up to the house.
Pa and I were out in the barnyard trying to tinker up a corn binder that was all tied together with haywire and other makeshift odds and ends. Pa had been threatening to buy one for a long time now, but with all the tough luck we’d been having, there wasn’t any money.
“Good morning, Henry,” the sheriff said to Pa.
Pa said good morning back.
“I hear you been having a little trouble with your neighbors,” said the sheriff.
“Not what you would call real trouble,” Pa told him. “I busted one in the snoot the other day is all.”
“Right on his own farm, too.”
Pa quit working on the binder and squatted back on his heels to look up at the sheriff. “Andy been around complaining?”
“He was in the other day. Said you had swallowed some fool story that this new alien family started. About some sort of bad-luck critters he’d been harboring on his farm.”
“And you talked him out of it?”
“Well, now,” said the sheriff, “I am a peaceable man and I hate to see two neighbors fighting. Andy wanted to put you under peace bond, but I said I’d come over and have a talk with you.”
“All right,” invited Pa. “Go ahead and talk.”
“Now look here, Henry. You know the story about them hard-luck critters is so much poppycock. I’m surprised you took any stock in it.”
Pa got up slowly. He had a hard look on his face and I thought for a minute he was about to bust the sheriff. I was scared, I tell you, for that is something no one should ever do—up and bust a sheriff.
I don’t know what he might have done or what he might have said, for at that moment Nature Boy’s Pa came tearing down the road in his old jalopy and pulled in behind the sheriff’s car, intending to park there. But he miscalculated some and he smacked into the sheriff’s car hard enough to skid it ahead six feet or so with the brakes all set.