“Well, sure,” said Pa, “I suppose it is. But if we are quick about it and get out right away, Andy never need know.”
So we crawled underneath the fence and went over the pasture and crossed into the woods so we could sneak up on the place where we had seen the halflings.
The going was a little rough, for in places the brush was rather heavy, and there were thick blackberry patches with the bushes loaded with black and shiny fruit.
But we sneaked along as quietly as we could and we finally reached a point opposite the place where we had seen the halflings.
Butch nudged me and whispered fiercely: “There they are!”
I put the glasses on and there they were, by golly.
Up at the edge of the hayfield, just beyond the woods, stood Andy’s hay barn, really just a roof set on poles to cover the hay that Andy didn’t have the room to get into his regular barn.
It was a rundown, dilapidated thing, and there was Andy standing up there on the roof, and some packs of shingles sat on the roof beside him, while climbing up a ladder with a bunch of shingles on his shoulder was Ozzie Burns, the hired man. Andy was reaching down to get the shingles that Ozzie was carrying up the ladder, and at the foot of the ladder, hanging onto it so it wouldn’t tip, was Mrs. Burns. And that was the reason none of them had been around—they were all down here, fixing to patch up the shingles on the barn.
And there were the halflings, a good two dozen of them. A bunch of them were up on the roof with Andy and a couple on the ladder with the hired man and a couple more of them helping to hold up the ladder. They looked busy and energetic and efficient, and every single one of them was the spitting image of Andy Carter.
Not that they really resembled Andy, for they didn’t. They were actually wraithlike things that seemed to have but little substance to them. They were little more than a smoky outline, but those smoky outlines—every single one of them—was the squat, bulldog outline of Andy Carter. And they walked like him, with a belligerent swagger, and all their motions were like his, and you could sense the meanness in them.
In the time that I was gaping at them, Ozzie Burns had handed the shingles up to Andy and clambered up on the roof beside him and Mrs. Burns had stepped away from the ladder, not needing to hold it any longer, since Ozzie was safe up on the roof. I saw the ladder was standing on uneven ground and that was why she’d had to hold it.
Andy had been crouched down to lay the pack of shingles on the roof. Now he straightened up and looked toward the woods and he saw us standing there.
“What are you doing here?” he roared at us, and started down the ladder.
And now comes the funny part of it. I’ll have to take it slow and try to tell it straight.
To me, it seemed the ladder separated and became two ladders. One was standing there against the hay barn and the other left it, and the top of this second ladder began to slide along the roof and was about to fall and carry Andy with it to the ground, just as sure as shooting.
I was about to shout for Andy to look out, although I don’t know why I should have. If he fell and broke his neck, it’d have been all right with me.
But just as I was about to yell, two halflings moved fast and this second ladder disappeared. It had been sliding along the roof and was about to fall, with a second Andy clinging to it and beginning to look scared—and then suddenly there was just one ladder and one Andy instead of two.
I stood there, shaking, and I knew what I had seen, but at the moment I wouldn’t admit it, not even to myself.
It was, I told myself, as if I had been looking at two separate times—at a time when the ladder should have fallen and at another time when it had not fallen because the halflings hadn’t let it. I had seen good luck in actual operation. Or the averting of bad luck. Whichever it might be, it all came out the same.
And now Andy was almost at the ladder’s foot and the halflings were coming down from off the roof in a helter-skelter fashion—some of them jumping off and others dropping off, and if they had been human instead of what they were, there would have been a flock of broken legs and necks.
Pa stepped out of the woods into the field and I stepped along with him. We knew we were walking into trouble, but we weren’t ones to run. And trailing along behind us were Butch and his Pa, but both of them looked scared and you could see they had no heart for it.
Then Andy was down off the ladder and walking straight toward us and he sure was on the warpath. And walking along beside him, in a line on either side of him, were all those halflings, and they kept in step with him and swung their arms like him and looked as mean as he did.
“Now, Andy,” said Pa, trying to be conciliatory, “let us be reasonable.” But it was quite an effort, I can tell you, for Pa to speak that way. He hated Andy Carter clear up from the ground and he sure-God had his reasons. Andy had been a rotten neighbor for an awful lot of years.
“Don’t you tell me to be reasonable!” yelled Andy. “I been hearing all this talk about how you are blaming me for what you call hard luck. And I tell you to your face it ain’t hard luck at all. It’s plain downright shiftlessness and bad management. And if you think you’re going to get anywhere with all this talk of yours, you are just plain crazy. You been taken in by a lot of alien nonsense. If I had my way, I’d run all those stinking aliens right the hell off the planet.”
Pa took a quick step forward and I thought he was about to clobber Andy. But Butch’s Pa jumped forward and grabbed him by the arm.
“No! No!” he shouted. “There’s no need to fight him! Let us go away!”
Pa stood there with Butch’s Pa hanging to his arm and I wondered for a minute which one he would clobber, Butch’s Pa or Andy.
“I never liked you,” Andy said to Pa, “from the first day I saw you. I had you figured for a bum and that is what you are. And this taking up with aliens is the lowest thing any human ever did. You ain’t no better than they are. Now get off this place and don’t you ever dare set foot on it again.”
Pa jerked his arm and sent Butch’s Pa staggering to one side. Then he brought it up and back. I saw Andy’s head start moving to one side, dropping over toward his shoulder, and for a second it looked like he had the beginning of two heads. And I knew that I was watching another accident beginning to unhappen, although it was no accident, for Pa sure meant to paste him.
But they weren’t fast enough to get Andy’s head tilted out of danger. They weren’t dealing this time with a slowly sliding ladder.
There was a solid crack like someone had hit a tree with an axe on a frosty morning, and Andy’s head jerked back and his feet came off the ground and he went tincup over teakettle, flat on his back.
And there were all those silly halflings standing in a row, with shocked looks upon their faces, as if they couldn’t quite believe it. You could have bought the lot of them for no more than half a buck.
Pa turned around and held out his hand to me and said: “Come on, Steve. Let’s go.”
He said it in a quiet voice that was clear and level, and there was, I thought, a note of pride in it. And we turned around, the two of us, and we walked away from there, not hurrying any and not even looking back.
“I swear to God,” said Pa, “I’ve meant to do that ever since I laid eyes on him fifteen years ago.”
I hadn’t noticed what had happened to Butch or to his Pa and I wondered where they might have gone to, for there wasn’t hide nor hair of them. But I didn’t say anything to Pa about it, for I had a hunch he might not be harboring exactly friendly feelings toward Butch’s Pa.