The sheriff broke into a run. “By God!” he said. “It isn’t even safe to drive out into this corner of the county!”
The two of us ran along behind him. I was running just because there was some excitement, but I figure maybe Pa was running so he could help Nature Boy’s Pa if the sheriff should take it into his head to get feisty with him.
And the funny thing about it was that Nature Boy’s Pa, instead of sitting there and waiting for the sheriff, had jumped out of his car and was running up the slope to meet us.
“They told me I’d find you here,” he panted to the sheriff.
“You found me, all right,” said the sheriff, practically breathing fire. “Now I’m going to—”
“My boy is gone!” yelled Nature Boy’s Pa. “He wasn’t home last night …”
The sheriff grabbed him and said to him: “Now let’s take this easy. Tell me exactly what happened.”
“He went off yesterday, early in the morning, and he didn’t show up for meals, but we didn’t think too much of it—he often goes off for an entire day. He has a lot of friends out there in the woods.”
“And he didn’t come home last night?”
Nature Boy’s Pa shook his head. “Along about dusk, we got worried. I went out and hunted for him and I didn’t find him. I hunted all night long, but there wasn’t any sign of him. I thought maybe he’d just holed up for the night with one of his friends in the woods. I thought maybe he’d show up when it got light, but he never did.”
“Well, all right,” said the sheriff, “you leave it to me. We’ll rouse out all the neighbors and organize a hunt. We’ll find him.” He said to me: “You know the lad? You did some playing with him?”
“All the time,” I answered.
“Lead us to all the places where you played. We’ll look there first.”
Pa said: “I’ll start phoning the neighbors. I’ll get them here right away.”
He ran up the hill toward the house.
In an hour or less, there were a hundred people gathered and the sheriff took them all in hand. He divided them into posses and appointed captains for each posse and told them where to hunt.
It was the most excitement we’ve ever had in the neighborhood.
The sheriff took me with the posse he headed up and we went down Dark Hollow. I took them to the place where we were digging out the lizard and the place where we had started to dig ourselves a cave and the hole in the creek where Nature Boy had made friends with some whopping trout, and some other places, too. We found some old tracks of Nature Boy’s, but there was no fresh sign, although we hunted up and down the hollow clear to where it flowed into the river, and we trailed back come night, and I was tuckered out.
And a little scared as well.
For an awful suspicion had come to me.
And no matter how hard I tried to keep from thinking of it, I couldn’t help myself, for all the time I was trying to remember if the hopper in that time machine had been big enough to take a kid the size of Nature Boy.
Ma fed me and sent me up to bed and later she came up and tucked me in and kissed me. She hadn’t done that in years. She knew I was too big to be tucked in and kissed, but she did it anyhow.
And then she went downstairs and I lay there listening to some men who still were out there in the yard, talking among themselves. Some of the others still were hunting and I knew that I should be out there hunting with them, but I knew Ma wouldn’t let me go and I was glad of it. For I was tired all through and the woods at night can be a scary place.
I should by rights have gone straight to sleep. Any other night I would have. But I lay there thinking about that hopper in the time machine and I wondered how long it would take before someone told the sheriff about the ruckus between Fancy Pants and Nature Boy, and I thought perhaps they already had. And if so, the sheriff probably was looking into it right now, for the sheriff was nobody’s fool.
I wondered if I should tell him myself if no one else had. But that was one fight I didn’t have any hankering to get tangled up in.
Finally I went to sleep and it seemed to me I hadn’t been asleep any time at all when something woke me up. It still was dark, but there was a red glow shining through the window. I sat up quick, with my hair standing half on end.
I thought at first it might be our barn or the machine shed, but then I saw it wasn’t that close. I skinned out of bed and over to the window. That fire was a big one and it wasn’t too far up the road.
It looked as if it was on the Carter place, but I knew that must be wrong, for if bad luck like that struck anyone, it wouldn’t be Andy Carter. Unless, of course, he was loaded with insurance.
I went downstairs in my bare feet and Ma was standing at the door, looking up the road toward the blaze.
“What is it, Ma?” I asked.
“It’s the barn on the Carter place,” she said. “They phoned the neighborhood for help, but all the men are out hunting Nature Boy.”
We stood there, Ma and me, and watched until the blaze almost died out, and then Ma hiked me off to bed.
I crawled underneath the covers, weak with this new excitement. I wondered why we should tag along for months with nothing happening, and then all at once have it busting out all over.
I lay there and thought about Andy Carter’s barn and there was something wrong about it. Andy had been the luckiest man in seven counties and now, without any warning, he was having bad luck just like the rest of us.
I wondered if the halflings might have gone off and left him, and if that was the case, I wondered why they had. Maybe, I told myself, they had gotten plain disgusted with Andy’s meanness.
It was broad daylight when I woke again and I jumped straight out of bed and climbed into my clothes. I rushed downstairs to see if there was any word of Nature Boy.
Ma said there wasn’t, that the men were still out hunting. She had breakfast ready for me and insisted I eat it and warned me about wandering off or trying to join one of the searching parties. She said it wasn’t safe for me to be out in the woods with so many bears about. And that was funny, for she had never worried about the bears before.
But she made me promise I wouldn’t.
As soon as I got out, I zipped down the road as fast as I could go. I had to see the place where the Carter barn had burned down and I just had to talk with someone. And Butch was the only one left that I could talk to.
There wasn’t much to see at the Carter place, just burned and blackened timbers that still were smoking some. I stood out in the road a while and then I saw Andy come out of the house and he stood there for a minute looking straight at me. So I got out of there.
I went past Fancy Pants’ place real fast, hoping I wouldn’t see him. At the moment, I didn’t want a thing to do with Fancy Pants.
When I got to Butch’s place, his Ma told me he was sick in bed. She didn’t think it was catching, she said, so I went up to see him.
Butch sure looked terrible lying there—more like a runty hoot owl than he ever had before—but he was glad to see me. I asked him how he was and he said he felt better. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell his Ma, then told me that he’d got sick from eating some green apples he’d pinched off the Carter orchard.
He’d heard about Nature Boy and I told him in a whisper the suspicions I had.
He lay there looking at me solemnly and finally he said to me: “Steve, I should have told you this before. That is no time machine.”
“No time machine? How do you know?”