He would have told me more about his time machine, but there was an interruption.
While we had been talking, Fancy Pants’ Pa and me, the Fancy Pants dog had run a cat up a maple tree. That is the normal situation for any cat and dog—unless Fancy Pants is around.
For Fancy Pants wasn’t one to leave a situation normal. He reached up into the tree—well, he didn’t reach up with his hands, of course, but with whatever he reaches with—and he nailed this cat and sort of bundled it up so it couldn’t move and brought it down to the ground.
Then he held the dog so the dog couldn’t do more than twitch and he put that bundled-up cat down in front of the twitching dog, then let them loose with split-second timing.
The two of them exploded into a blur of motion, with the weirdest uproar you ever heard. The cat made it to the tree in the fastest time and nearly took off the bark swarming up the trunk. And the dog miscalculated and failed to put on his brakes in time and banged smack into the tree spread-eagled.
The cat by this time was up in the highest branches, hanging on and screaming, while the dog walked around in circles, acting kind of stunned.
Fancy Pants’ Pa broke off what he was saying to me and he looked at Fancy Pants. He didn’t do or say a thing, but when he looked at Fancy Pants, Fancy Pants grew terribly pale and sort of wilted down.
“Let that teach you,” said Fancy Pants’ Pa, “to leave those animals alone. You don’t see Steve here or Nature Boy mistreating them that way, do you?”
“No, sir,” mumbled Fancy Pants.
“And now get along, the two of you. You have things to do.”
I got this to say for Fancy Pants’ Pa: he gives Fancy Pants his lickings, or whatever they may be, and then he forgets about it. He doesn’t keep harping at it for the rest of the day.
So Fancy Pants and me went down the road, me shuffling along, kicking up the dust, and Fancy Pants floating along beside me.
We got down to Nature Boy’s place and he was waiting out in front. I knew he had been hoping someone would come along. There were a couple of sparrows sitting on his shoulder and a rabbit hopping all around him and a chipmunk in the pocket of his pants, looking out at us with bright and beady eyes.
Nature Boy and I sat down underneath a tree and Fancy Pants came as close as he ever does to sitting down—floating about three inches off the ground—and we talked about what we ought to do. Trouble was, there wasn’t really anything that needed any doing. So we sat there and talked and tossed pebbles and pulled stems of grass and put them in our mouths and chewed them, while Nature Boy’s pet wild things gamboled all around us and didn’t seem to be afraid at all. Except that they were a little leery of Fancy Pants. He is, when you come right down to it, a sort of sneaky rascal. Me they are fast friends with when I’m with Nature Boy, but let me meet them when I am alone and they keep their distance.
I can see how wild things might take to Nature Boy. He is fur all over, real sleek, glossy fur, and he wears nothing but that little pair of pants. Turn him loose without those pants and someone would be bound to take a shot at him.
So we sat there wondering what to do. Then I remembered that Pa had said a new family had moved onto the Pierce place and we decided to go down and see if they had any kids.
We went down the road to the old Pierce place and it turned out there was one just about our age. He was a sort of runty little kid, with a peaked face and big round eyes and kind of eager look about him, like a stunted hoot owl.
He told us his name and it was even worse than Nature Boy’s and Fancy Pants’ names, so we had a vote on it and decided we would call him Butch. That suited him just fine.
Then he called out his family and they stood in a row, like a bunch of solemn, runty owls roosting on a limb, while he introduced them. There was his Ma and Pa and a little brother and a kid sister almost as big as he was. The rest of them went back into the house, but Butch’s Pa squatted down and began to talk with us.
You could see from the way he talked that he was a little scared of this farming business. He admitted he really was no farmer, but an optical worker, and explained to us that an optical worker designed lenses and ground them. But, he said, there was no future in a job like that back on his old home planet. He told us how glad he was to be on Earth and how he wanted to be a good citizen and a good neighbor, and a lot of other things like that.
When he started to run down, we got away from him. There ain’t anything more embarrassing than a crazy adult who likes to talk with kids.
We decided that maybe we should show Butch around a bit and let him in on some of the things we had been doing.
So we struck off down Dark Hollow and we didn’t make much time because all of these friends of Nature Boy were popping out to join him. Before very long, we were a sort of traveling menagerie—rabbits and chipmunks and a gopher or two and a couple of raccoons.
I like Nature Boy, of course, and I’ve had some good times with him, but he has spoiled a lot of fun as well. Before he showed up in the neighborhood, I did a lot of fishing and hunting, but that is all spoiled now. I can’t shoot a squirrel or catch a fish without wondering if it is a friend of Nature Boy’s.
After a while, we got down to the creek bed where we were digging out the lizard. We’d been at it all summer long and we hadn’t uncovered very much of him, but we still figured that some day we might get him all dug out.
You understand that it wasn’t a live lizard we were digging out, but a lizard that had turned to stone a zillion years ago.
There is a place where the stream runs down a limestone ledge and the limestone lies in layers. The lizard was between two of those layers. We’d got four or five feet of his tail uncovered. But the digging was getting harder, for we were working back into the limestone ledge and there was more of it to move.
Fancy Pants floated up above the limestone ledge and got himself set as solid as he could. Sitting there, he hit that limestone ledge a tremendous whack, being very careful not to crack the lizard. It was one of his better whacks, busting up a lot of stone, and while Fancy Pants rested up to take another one, the three of us piled in and threw out the busted rock.
But there was one big piece he had loosened up that we couldn’t move.
“Hit it just a tap,” I told him. “Break it up a little and we can get it out.”
“I got it loose,” he said. “It’s up to you to get it out.”
There was no sense arguing with him. So the three of us wrestled at the rock, but we couldn’t budge it and Fancy Pants sat up there, fat and sassy, taking it easy and enjoying himself.
“You ought to have a crowbar,” he told us. “If you had a crowbar, you could pry that rock out.”
I was getting sick and tired of Fancy Pants, and so, just to get away from him for a while, I said I’d go and fetch a crowbar. And this new kid, Butch, said he’d go along with me.
So we left Nature Boy and Fancy Pants and climbed up to the road and started out for my place. We didn’t hurry any. It would serve Fancy Pants right if he had to wait, and Nature Boy as well, for all his showing off with his animals.
We walked along the road and talked. Butch told me about the planet he had come from and it sure was a poor-mouth place, and I told him about the neighborhood, and we were getting to be friends.
We reached the Carter place and were walking past the orchard when Butch stopped dead in the middle of the road and went sort of stiff, like a hunting dog will go when he scents a bird.
I was walking right behind him and I bumped into him, but he just stood there with those eager eyes agleam and his entire body tense—so tense it seemed to quiver when it really didn’t.