The Scarecrow by Ronald Hugh Morrieson Page B

surely?’ I pressed. ‘Footprints, fingerprints. Didn’t anything get dropped or something?’
    ‘Hunfortunately, nearly the entire neighbourhood turned out and conducted a search uv the garden; and all hevidence, such as footprints, was hobliterated.’
    ‘Thank God,’ said Les. ‘I mean, good God!’
    ‘What fools!’ I contributed hotly. ‘Why not leave police work to the spechlists? Always some blundering asses around to make it more difficult for the spechlists.’
    Les was blowing his nose and had his entire countenance covered by his handkerchief, but his ears stuck out like bolshevist flags.
    ‘Never fear,’ said Len Ramsbottom, rising from the coop. ‘No heffort will be spared to trace the miscreants.’
    He cleared his throat and I thought he was going to ask something, but to our relief he moved off. Just as he reached the street, Prudence came galloping around the section of iron fence still standing and banged right into him. He was stooping over putting on a bicycle clip and she staggered him.
    I looked at Les, who seemed ill, and I nodded in thedirection of the rhubarb. Les nodded back and we folded our tents like a couple of shaky Arabs.
    That night we sneaked away from Prudence’s party, which was a tame, sissy affair, down to Fitzherbert’s shed to give some scraps to the miscreants. Lest this give rise to confusion, I had better explain that it was by this name, since our conversation with the Law, that Les and I thought of the stolen Lynch fowls. In our ignorance and trepidation we had got hold of the wrong end of the stick again.
    We made a detour on the way to the shed and got a pack of twenty cigarettes out of the slot machine in the doorway of Thompson’s store. Money had suddenly become the least of our worries. Miss Fitzherbert, the tall, mad woman up at the great house, which had pumps, not taps, over the tubs, had told us she would buy all our eggs. It had been Les’s idea to approach her and it was a honey. She asked no questions, but she bolted the door when she went for the money; and, the time it took, our guess was it was buried somewhere.
    There was no power laid on at the mansion and Les and I could always get a cheap dose of the creeps by sneaking up close at night, through the ancient camellias and magnolias, and glimpsing, through a lofty window, the bent, paralysed figure of the legendary Channing Fitzherbert himself, corpse-like in an honest-to-God four-poster. The lamplight beside the shrivelled dome of a head cast an enormous, vulture-like shadow on the wall. Man, it was horrible. We often did it. One night, through divers landing windows, we saw her slowly descending the stairs holding a lamp aloft, and we did not stop running until we made the shed. It was different in the sunlight, standing on the ramp at the back door with the birds twittering in all the oldtrees and under the eaves, but when night fell the whole lay-out would have tickled Count Dracula pink.
    ‘Miscreants,’ said Les, surveying by candlelight the fowls roosting on the old gig. ‘Trust us to pinch something valyoobel.’
    ‘I thought they were funny looking,’ I remarked. ‘What with those bits of black in the wings and that fluff on their legs.’
    ‘Broody resistant,’ said Les. ‘But can’t the buggers lay!’
    The miscreants had settled down to a steady eleven or twelve eggs a day and we were sure of getting two-and-six a dozen. Miss Fitzherbert was buying them all. She must have been preserving them, or something. The old firm of Wilson and Poindexter were on the pig’s back, but they shared an uneasy presentiment of their mount turning into a killer mustang without warning. It may have been imagination, but both Les and I had sensed members of the Victor Lynch gang watching us closely at school. We were more apprehensive of trouble from that quarter than from the police, mainly, I think, because Constable Ramsbottom, for all his great bulk, seemed an absolute goof. He made us feel