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Title: Magic or Not?
Author: Eager, Edward [Edward McMaken] (1911-1964)
Date of first publication: 1959
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, undated
   [internal evidence suggests it appeared between 1962 and 1970]
Date first posted: 11 July 2015
Date last updated: 11 July 2015
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1259

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Because of copyright considerations, the illustrations by
N. M. Bodecker (1922-1988) have been omitted from this etext.

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

The quotation in Chapter 6 is from The House on the Hill,
a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935).

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  MAGIC OR NOT?


  Edward Eager





  _For Kip and Jeremy Gould_





CONTENTS


1. THE WISHING WELL

2. THE WITCH'S GARDEN

3. THE SILVER MINE

4. THE WICKED OGRE

5. THE LONG-LOST HEIR

6. THE MOB-LED QUEEN

7. THE SECRET DRAWER

8. MAGIC OR NOT?




MAGIC OR NOT?



1.  The Wishing Well

Laura sat looking out of the window, watching houses and barns and
woods wheel slowly by, as the tiny train chugged uphill.

If you had seen her sitting there, with her square frame and her square
forehead and her square-cut thick dark hair, you would have thought she
looked like a solid, dependable girl, and you would have been right,
but there was more to Laura than that.  Behind the square forehead her
thoughts were adventurous.  Now she bounced on the seat impatiently.
When would they get there?

Her brother James came down the aisle and squeezed in next to her.
"Seventeen minutes exactly," he said, looking at his watch and
answering her unspoken question.  James always knew things exactly.  If
he didn't know, he found out.  Right now he had been in conference with
the conductor.

"Seventeen minutes more, and a whole new life will unfold!" gloated
Laura.  "Oh, James, isn't it going to be wonderful?"

"Wait and see," said James.  He was never one to commit himself.

"Oh, James," said Laura again, in tones of disgust.  Neither she nor
anyone else had ever called James "Jimmy," or even "Jim," but it wasn't
for the reasons you might think.  He wasn't stodgy or prissy or no fun;
James was a leader.  With his broad shoulders and his steady blue eyes
and his firm jaw he looked serious and practical and he was, but that
wasn't all there was to it.  Behind the blue eyes his thoughts were
deep.

"I found out all about it," he went on.  "There're five stops before we
get there.  The trains aren't always dinky little one-car ones like
this; in rush hours there're two cars and sometimes three.  They leave
every hour on the hour.  Here.  Have a timetable."

Laura put the timetable in her pocket and stored the information away
in her mind.  She and James both liked useful facts; you could never
tell when they might come in handy, though why, once they were really
settled in the country, they would ever want to take a train away from
it, Laura couldn't imagine.  To live in the country had been her
heart's desire ever since she could remember, and now they were
actually moving there.  Today was moving day.  In seventeen, no,
fifteen, minutes now, they would _be_ there.  Laura bounced in her seat
again.

"Cemetery!" cried the conductor, and the one car that called itself a
train ground to a halt.  Laura wondered if a town could really be
called Cemetery and what it felt like to live there.  She caught
James's eye and giggled.

"Think how the people's friends must feel, addressing Christmas cards
to them there!" said James, just as if she had spoken aloud.  He and
Laura could often read each other's minds.  Maybe it was because they
were twins, though not identical.

"It's even better than looking alike," Laura often said.  "We've got
identical minds."

"Not exactly," James would remind her.  "Who didn't get A in
Arithmetic?"

"Oh, that!"  Laura would toss her head.  "Who would want to?"

But today her mind and James's were like two hearts that beat as one,
and she knew he was every bit as excited as she was, though he didn't
let on.  It was exciting to be on the train by themselves, and it was
exciting to be moving (though they had done that every October first,
anyway, back in the city), but to be moving to the country was the
excitement beside which all others paled.

The way they were moving was interesting in itself.  First the big van
had left early that morning with all the furniture, then the brand-new
secondhand car with Mother and Father and Deborah who was the baby in
the front seat, and all the suitcases piled in back.  There were lots
of suitcases, and that was why James and Laura had to come on the train.

"And which of us will get there first," Father had said, "is in the lap
of providence.  You've got your key."

Standing on the sidewalk in front of the apartment house and waving
after the disappearing car, Laura had felt suddenly very empty and
deserted, but only for a moment.

"Don't look back," James had counseled wisely, hailing a taxi in an
offhand and independent manner.  And then came Grand Central Station
and crowds, and the fast express train, and changing at Stamford, which
was in Connecticut but didn't look like country at all, and now here
they were on the last lap of the journey that was to bring them to
their first sight of the red house.

They knew it was red and they knew it was old, but that was all they
knew.

All Laura's friends thought she was perfectly foolhardy to be moving
off to the country without looking at the house first, but Laura had
wanted it that way.

After their first weekend of scouring the countryside with their
parents, she and James had decided that house-hunting was not for them.
"The trouble is," said Laura, "we fall in love with each new place, and
then there's always something wrong with it, and we don't take it, and
we're left wondering what would have happened if we _had_!  We can't go
round all our lives being homesick for a lot of houses we've never
lived in!  It's too much to expect."  And James had agreed.

"Remember the wonderful big yellow house with the lake?" said Laura to
James now, as they rode along.

"It had termites," said James.

"And the one that used to be a barn, with the three-story living room?"

"The porch sagged," said James, "and there was a dead fox in the
auxiliary well."

"Do you suppose this one'll be even half as good?"

"It's older.  It was built way back before the Revolution.  George
Washington had his Connecticut headquarters there," James reminded her.

"It must be full of history," Laura agreed.

"Maybe it's haunted," said James hopefully.

"Or magic.  Like Seekings House, where Kay Harker lived," said Laura,
looking down at her train book, which was _The Midnight Folk_, that
wonderful story by Mr. John Masefield.  She was rereading it for the
third time.

"No."  James shook his head regretfully.  "I guess that would be too
much to expect.  You never hear about magic happening to anybody any
more.  I guess it's had its day."

"Are you _sure_?" said a voice.

James and Laura looked up, startled.

A face was regarding them over the back of the seat just ahead.  It was
a girl's face, thin and sunburned, with high cheekbones and wide-set
grey eyes.  Long, straight fair hair hung down on each side of the
face, giving it an old-fashioned appearance.

"What did you say?" stammered Laura.

"I said what makes you so sure?" said the girl the face belonged to.
"Just 'cause magic never happened to you, it doesn't mean it isn't
lurking around still, waiting to turn up when you least expect it!"

"What do _you_ know about it?" said James, with surprising rudeness,
Laura thought.

"A lot," said the girl.  "I ought to.  My grandmother's a witch."

"Humph!" said James, who seemed to have taken a dislike to the strange
girl.

"Wait and see, that's all!" said the girl.  "Drop a wish in the wishing
well, and wait and see!"  And she clambered down from the seat she'd
been kneeling on and went loping long-leggedly past them toward the end
of the car.

Before they could make up their minds to follow, the conductor was
calling, "Last stop!  All out!" and the aisle was clogged with homing
travellers.  By the time James and Laura could catch up their goods and
chattels and the game of Scrabble they'd bought to while away the
flagging hours, the strange girl had vanished.

But from the platform Laura caught sight of her again, all the way
across the station yard.  She was jumping into a big high-shouldered
car that looked ancient enough to be obsolete at _least_.  Laura
couldn't see the person driving the car very well, but she got an
impression of a gaunt, weather-beaten face and flyaway grey hair.

"Look!" she cried, squeezing James's arm and pointing.  "That must be
her grandmother.  She _does_ look like a witch!"

James paid her no heed.  He was striding along with the stubborn look
of practical common sense on his face that he always wore when he
didn't want to be bothered with some girlish foolishness; so Laura held
her peace.

But in the taxicab she brought up the subject again.  "She seemed to
know all about what house we're going to," she said.  "How do you
suppose she knew there's a wishing well?"

"Maybe there isn't," said James.  "She was prob'ly just making the
whole thing up.  Or if she wasn't, well, she heard us say all that
about George Washington, didn't she?  The house must be pretty famous
if he had his headquarters there."

"I don't know," said Laura.  "From what I've heard, he seems to have
slept in a lot of houses.  I guess he was pretty sociable."

They had left the little town behind now, and there were woods and
fields, with a house or two every so often.  The taxicab turned a
corner and James read the sign at one side.  "Silvermine Road!" he
said.  "That's where we're going."

All thought of the strange girl was forgotten as he and Laura peered
ahead, looking for red houses.

And at last they saw one, and it turned out to be the right one, and
the taxicab stopped at the gate.  The house was long and low and there
was a white picket fence with hollyhocks.

"And look!" cried Laura excitedly.  "See the wishing well!"

"I see a well," said James cautiously, paying the cab driver.

There was no sign of the moving van or the family car; so James got out
his key and marched purposefully up the flagged path, while Laura
lingered, looking at the flowers that grew all around the house and
wondering what the uncommon ones were.  She had never had a garden.

But she caught up with James by the time he got the key to turn in the
stiff lock, and they pushed forward together over the threshold into
cool darkness.

To pull up the blinds was the work of but a moment, and then all was
discovery and conquest.

"Dibs on this room!" said James, running up the steep stairway and
finding a long, low, sloping-roofed, dormered bedroom that had been
made by throwing two smaller rooms together.  Luckily there was another
room just like it right next door that could be Laura's; so that was
all right.

And downstairs the living room had an immense fireplace that was big
enough to stand up in (because James tried), with an old-fashioned
crane and a Dutch oven.

"And probably a secret room somewhere to hide from the Tories in!" said
Laura.  But though they pushed and pulled at the woodwork, no panel
slid aside and no door popped open; so they went outdoors again.

James gave the well (wishing or otherwise) a wide berth and a
contemptuous look and strode on to the back of the house, and Laura
followed.  The back yard stretched itself grassily out, with plenty of
room for croquet and badminton both, _besides_ a long flower border at
each side and a rock garden at the far end that merged into a stony
wood that seemed to go on forever.

"'This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks,'"
said Laura.

"Only it's birch and maple mostly," said James, who, though a city boy,
had been a Boy Scout and was knowledgeable about such things.
"There're three acres of land altogether.  I remember, from when Father
signed the deed for the house."

"Who," said Laura, "could ask for anything more?"

Part of James and Laura wanted to stay and explore the wood right now
and see what wild flowers grew there (Laura) and what was the best
place for camping out (James).  But there was another part of them that
couldn't settle down to doing any one thing for very long today, which
is a feeling you may have noticed yourself on your first day in a new
place.

Now James said he thought he'd walk up the road and meet Father and
Mother and Deborah, and Laura said it was too hot for walking and she'd
rather go back inside and explore some more and make plans and
reconnoiter, so they separated.

Inside the house Laura felt wonderfully in charge and monarch of all
she surveyed.  It was like playing house when she was little, only
real.  First she went upstairs to her bedroom and arranged all the
furniture in her mind's eye.  Then she went down to the living room and
pretended it was a winter evening and they were all sitting round the
fire with a north wind howling outside.  Then she went into the dining
room to see what the view would be every morning from the breakfast
table.  After that she felt like sitting down, only there weren't any
chairs; so she went and perched on the front-hall staircase.  But the
stairs weren't very comfortable, and after a bit she began to realize
that waiting alone in an unfurnished house can have its spooky side,
with nothing happening but empty listening silence and motes of dust
filtering through the sunlight and collecting on the floor.

She went outside again and looked up and down the road.  There was no
sign of James.  Still, it was a winding road; probably he'd just turned
round a corner.  Laura decided to stroll as far as the nearest bend and
look for him.  But first she crossed the road to the woodsy, brambly,
thorny thicket just opposite to take another look at the house and get
used to the fact that it was home now.  And it was then that her glance
fell on the well, and she remembered the strange girl on the train
again.

She went back across the road and into her own yard.  The well _looked_
the way a wishing well ought to look, with its small, gabled, vine-clad
roof built over the wellhead and a rope hanging down inside.  Laura
peered over the edge and thought she saw the bucket, halfway down.

"Why not?" she said aloud, to air and grass and roses and a catbird in
an elderbush.

She was the kind of girl who always had a pencil in her pocket, and to
find a scrap of old shelf-paper in the kitchen was the work of a
moment.  But deciding what to wish wasn't so easy.

Being a well-brought-up girl, Laura had read plenty of fairy tales, and
had always been loud in her scorn of the people in them who wasted
their wishes on black puddings and wanting to be beautiful as the day
or have pockets lined with gold.  She had always been sure she could
manage better than _that_, when her time came.  Yet now that it _had_
come, her mind was a blank.

After all, she reasoned with herself, it didn't have to be something
big and important to start out with.  Any common everyday wish would do
for a sample, to test the well and see if it had the right stuff in it.
Then if it did, she could tell James and they'd plan everything out,
and the really important magic of the summer could begin.

Laura had got this far in her thoughts when she heard a shout and a
rattle.  She looked up.  A car was just coming round the bend.  Laura
could tell it was _their_ car by the bicycles strapped to the roof.
And besides, James was riding on the running board (it was an old
enough car to _have_ running boards, not one of your modern streamlined
finny monsters where all attempts to find toehold are a vain mockery).
And Deborah was hanging out a window and calling something
unintelligible in her hoarse bass voice that was always such a shock to
strangers, coming from her pretty baby face.

Laura thought quickly.  Only a second more and they would be there.
And if James arrived on the scene and saw how childish she was being,
she would never live it down.  And Deborah would want to know all about
it and butt in.

Without more ado, she scribbled the first six words that came into her
head.  The words were, "I wish I had a kitten."  It was a dull wish,
but her own.  And if there _were_ magic, and it chose to be difficult
and turn against her, the way magic so often did in books, Laura didn't
see how a wish like that could do any harm.  A kitten would always come
in handy.  She crumpled the paper into a ball, tossed it down the well,
and ran to open the gate.

And then Moving Day began in earnest.

First there were all the heavy suitcases to lug into the house and put
in the right rooms.  And before James and Laura were half finished with
that, the moving van arrived, and all was loud tramping and heavy
breathing and dull thuds and keeping Deborah out from under the
movingmen's feet.

And when the men finally left, there were the suitcases to unpack and
clothes to be put away in bureau drawers, and the china barrels to
unload and all the dishes to be washed and stacked on shelves, and
after that most of the furniture had to be moved from the places where
they'd told the moving men to put it to the other places where on
second thought they all agreed it looked lots better.

It was late in the afternoon when the family assembled dustily in the
living room.

"The things from the apartment look kind of skimpy in all this space,
don't they?" said James.

"Never mind.  We'll find wonderful things here.  There'll be auctions,"
said their mother, the gleam of the antique-hunter in her eye.

"Auctions!" James and Laura savored the word, remembering sundry movies
in which people went to auctions and bought old chests that contained
maps of buried treasure in secret drawers.

"What's an auction?" said Deborah.

"Generally," said their father, collapsing on the sofa and flicking a
curlicue of china-packing newspaper from his right eyebrow, "it is a
snare and a delusion.  Never have I been so weary.  I thought tonight
we'd all go out to dinner.  Now I doubt if I can face it."

Their mother looked round at their tired faces.  "Baths for everybody,"
she announced, "and pajamas and early bed.  There's canned soup in the
carton with the pots and pans."

"You think of everything," said their father admiringly.

The canned soup was tomato and pea mixed, which is delicious.  It was
consumed in silence, save for the crunching of saltines.  And then
everyone staggered upstairs.

Laura was brushing her hair dreamily before her dressing-table mirror
when she heard the hoofbeats.  She ran to the window.

It was night, but the moon had risen.  In the moonlight a black horse
galloped along the edge of the road past the house (keeping off the
pavement, which is bad for horses' hoofs).  And riding the horse, her
fair hair streaming on the wind, was a girl.  It was the girl from the
train.

"She is magic!" gasped Laura.  "Something's going to happen!"

She would have run for the wishing well, but the horse and the girl
were gone now.  The hoofbeats died away in the distance.  Laura decided
she'd sit down on the bed for a minute first.  Then she decided she'd
lie back on the pillow, just for a second.

How long after that it was that she heard the sound, Laura never knew.
It was a creaking sound, just the kind of noise that magic might make
if it were winding the bucket up from its watery depths to get at the
wish.  But would magic do that?  Wouldn't it sooner dive down the well
and grant the wish from there?  Or even more likely, wouldn't it live
at the bottom and catch the wishes as they came down?

She must run to the window again and see what was happening.  Any
second now she _would_.  But sleep was all around her, like a downy,
feathery, pillowy cloud.  She sank into it.

The next thing she knew, it was morning.




2.  The Witch's Garden

It will hardly be believed that Laura didn't leap from her bed with her
first waking thought and rush to the wishing well to see if the noise
in the night had been magic and, if so, what it had accomplished.  But
she didn't.

Waking up for the first time in a new place has a magic of its own that
can drive all other thoughts out of your head, and it was that way with
Laura.

The first thing she heard when she woke up was a lawn mower and the
first thing she thought was, "James!"

It was James's habit always to wake up early and get any dull tasks out
of the way before settling down to the day's round of pleasure.  And
Mother had said last night that "that lawn" was a disgrace and
positively had to be mowed this morning.  And Father had said that
there was an old rusty hand-wheeled mower in the shed that "would do"
till he got another.

Laura jumped out of bed.  Even lawn-mowing has its charms when you've
lived in a city apartment all your life and never had a lawn to mow.
And besides, there is something about the sound of other people's labor
on a sunny July morning that stirs the belated slugabed.

Laura hurried through breakfast and dishes and ran out the back door,
slamming the screen behind her.  Then she stopped short.

Sitting on a rock watching James work was a strange boy.  The boy had
curly yellow hair and a beagle dog.  He was sucking a popsickle, grape
from the color.  He and James were not communicating, but James's back
as he pushed the mower along had a self-conscious look, as if he were
all too aware of his audience.

"Boys!" thought Laura.  "Honestly!  They'd probably just stay like that
all day and never say a word to each other if somebody sensible didn't
come along!"

She walked up to the strange boy.  "My name's Laura," she said.
"What's yours?"

"Kip," said the boy.

"Short for Christopher?" said Laura.

"That's right," said the boy.

James stopped mowing and came nearer, but warily, as if the boy might
bite.

"What's your dog's name?" said Laura.

"Alice," said the boy.

"Why?" said Laura.  As soon as she'd said it, she knew the answer.
"Because she goes down rabbit holes?"

"That's right," said the boy.

Suddenly they all three grinned and relaxed, and after that it was as
though they'd known each other all along.

"We just moved here," confided Laura, "from New York."

"I know," said the boy.  "We live up the road.  I saw the moving van.
My Pop works in New York.  He's in advertising."

"This is a lousy lawn mower," said James.

"I could see that," said the boy.  "I was thinking.  Why don't you
borrow ours?"

"Power?"

"Sure."

"The kind you sit in and drive?"

"That's right."

"Lead me to it."

"Honestly!" said Laura to herself, as she followed them around the
house.  "Practically arms-around-the-neck friends now, and he could
still be pushing that rusty old thing if I hadn't broken the ice!
Honestly, _boys_!  Deliver _me_!"

They walked up the road, the dog Alice trotting on before, looking back
over her shoulder every few steps and smiling to see that they were
still there.  Just around the first bend they passed an old rutted
driveway James didn't remember noticing before.  It wound up over a
hill to disappear in dark woods.  "Who lives there?" he wondered.

"Lydia Green," said Kip.  "She's crazy."

"Crazy?" said James.

"Well, not crazy exactly.  Kind of wild," said Kip.  "She lives with
her grandmother.  She can't do a thing with her."

"Who can't do a thing with which?" said James.

"Neither one," said Kip.

They both giggled.  "Like a couple of fools," sniffed Laura to herself.
Then she had a sudden thought.  "This Lydia.  Does she have long hair?
Does she ride a black horse?"

"Night and day," said Kip.  "My mother says it's a scandal."

"I think we met her on the train," said Laura.  "I think I saw her
again last night.  Her grandmother's a witch, she said."

"Nah," said Kip.  "Just an artist.  She's kind of eccentric, though.
They both are."

"Oh," said Laura.

She would have gone on, to tell about the wishing well and the wish
she'd made, but the boys were deep in talk about power mowers again.
And besides, they would laugh at her.  And besides, they were turning
into Kip's driveway now.

Kip's house was old, but not so old as theirs, and painted light yellow
with white shutters.  His mother seemed to be an understanding type,
and the power mower was secured without hostilities.

Back at the red house, James and Laura took turns using it.  Neither of
them had ever even seen a power mower close up before, and learning how
to run it was exciting, so exciting that Laura again forgot all about
the girl on the train.  The whole back yard and most of the side were
finished before her first fine careless rapture flagged.

"I'll run it awhile now, if you're both tired," volunteered Kip, and he
headed the mower toward the front of the house.

"He's nice, isn't he?" said Laura to James.

"He's a good kid," said James.

"Do you suppose he'll be our best friend?" said Laura.  "Do you suppose
we'll go on wonderful, exciting adventures together?"

"Holy gee!" said James.  "What good does it do, wondering about things
like that?  Wait and see."  He snorted.  "Honestly.  Girls!"

"Hey," called Kip, from the front yard.  "Hey, this is a dangerous
place to leave kittens."

"What?" said James.

"_What?_" said Laura, in a different tone.  She caught her breath and
her eyes shone.

They both ran round the house to where Kip stood by the well.  He had
climbed down from the mower and was bending over something on the edge
of the stone wellhead.

James and Laura crowded close.  What he was looking at was a basket
with a lid, and from under the lid came a mewing sound.

"Let me," said Laura.  She lifted the lid.  Inside the basket was a
squirming piebald bundle that untangled itself and turned into two
kittens, a black one and a white.

"Night and Day," said Kip.

"Shadow and Substance," said James.

"No such thing," said Laura.  "It's Blackmalkin and Whitemalkin.
They're magic."  And then and there she told the other two all about
the wishing well and her wish and the night ride of the girl Lydia and
the creaking sound she'd heard afterwards.

"Double Magic," said Kip.  "You only wished for one.  That's better
than Half by a long shot."

"Oh, have you read that, too?" said Laura, for the book called _Half
Magic_ was one of her favorites.

"Sure," said Kip.  "I guess just about everyone has."

"I don't know," said James.  "Prob'ly they're not magic at all.
Prob'ly it's all a hoax.  Prob'ly that girl Lydia did it."

Laura was turning the handle that wound up the rope that brought up the
bucket.  "She couldn't have," she said, as it came into view.  "There's
my wish, all crumpled up, just the way I threw it in."

"It made a creaking sound when you wound it," said James.  "That's what
you heard last night.  Prob'ly that Lydia crumpled the wish up and let
it down again after she'd read it."

"It would be just like her," said Kip.  "She's kind of crafty."

"I don't believe it," said Laura.  "I'm going to go over there right
now and ask her."  And she marched out of the gate and up the road,
slightly impeded by the kittens that were crawling up her front and
wreathing themselves around her neck.

"Here, let me carry one," said Kip, catching up with her.

"You can take Whitemalkin," said Laura.  "Blackmalkin's mine."

James appeared on Laura's other side.  He was carrying the empty
basket.  "Important evidence," he said, swinging it round his head.
"Exhibit A!"

They rounded the bend in the road and turned into the overgrown
driveway that said "Green" on an old faded sign half-hidden by a tangle
of poison ivy.

"What'll you wish for next if the magic's real?" said Kip.  "Do you
suppose you get three wishes each?  Do you suppose _I_ get to wish,
too?  Or would it be just for the actual owners, do you suppose?"

"If it's only three wishes," said James to Laura, "you've wasted one
already.  Kittens!"

"They're _not_ a waste!" said Laura indignantly, stroking Blackmalkin.

"Purr," said Blackmalkin.

"Ickle poo," said Laura, ruffling the fur under its chin.

"Ugh!" said James, turning away from the sickening sight.

The dog Alice trotted before them.  She had welcomed the arrival of the
kittens philosophically, as she did all the strange happenings of the
wonderful human world.  But now suddenly she stopped in her tracks.
Her hackles, if that was the right word, rose.  She whined and muttered
in her throat.  It was eerie.

The three children stopped, too, and looked where Alice was looking.

In the woodsy shadows of the drive ahead, a figure was stumping along.
At first it seemed bent out of all human form, but as it came nearer,
they saw that it was an old woman with flyaway grey hair.  The reason
she looked so lopsided was that she was carrying an easel and an
immense blank canvas and an oversize paintbox.  All three things kept
slipping and had to be hoisted.

"It's the grandmother," hissed Laura to James.  "It's the old witch!"

"Shush," hissed James to Laura.  "Good morning, ma'am," he said aloud,
as the figure came within earshot.  Alice got behind Kip and pretended
to be invisible.

Old Mrs. Green did not appear to have heard James.  She was glaring at
the woods by the side of the drive.  "Maple trees, maple trees," she
was muttering, "that's all there is to paint around here!"  Then she
seemed to notice the three children for the first time and regarded
them with a piercing gaze.  "If you're giving away cats," she said, "we
don't want any.  I can't abide 'em."

Laura was outraged.  "We're _not_ giving them away," she said.  "I
wouldn't give them away for _anything_.  And they're not cats, they're
kittens."

"_That_ won't last," said old Mrs. Green.  "That's the tragedy of it."

"Can I help you carry those things, ma'am?" asked Kip politely.

Old Mrs. Green let the piercing gaze dwell on him for a long time.
"Young man," she said at last, "I've been toting this truck around
since before you were born.  I plan to go on doing it for a few years
still!"  She started past them.  Then she seemed to relent and turned.
"If you're looking for Lydia," she said, "she's in the barn with that
fool horse.  Pesky thing.  _I_ say it's got the evil eye!"  And she
went stumping on down the driveway.  "Maple trees, maple trees, I swear
I'll move to Maine!" the three children heard her muttering.  Then she
was gone.

Laura and James and Kip looked at each other and giggled.  But the
giggle was halfhearted.  Old Mrs. Green was funny, but there was more
to her than that.  Witch or not, she was a character.  Meeting a
character ought to make a promising start to any morning, and yet the
feet of the three children lagged as they went on up the driveway.
Alice hung behind and whimpered.

Around the next bend they came in sight of the house.  It was a biff
house, built in the hideous beetle-browed style of 1905.  Leggy,
unclipped shrubs masked its windows, and overgrown vines clung to the
eaves and had their way with the shingles.

"It must be dark as pitch inside," said Laura.

To one side of the house was a big sagging barn, and coming from its
doorway now was the girl Lydia.  She wore riding breeches, an old
patched flannel shirt, and a frown that deepened as she saw James and
Laura and Kip.

"Oh," she said.

"Well?" said James.

"What do you want?" said the girl.

"As if you didn't know," said James.

Kip was more diplomatic.  "We wanted to have a talk," he said.

For some reason this seemed to make the strange girl Lydia even
crosser.  "Go away," she told him, in what was almost a snarl.  She
turned her back on him and spoke to Laura and James.  "I suppose you've
heard all about me by now.  Nobody in this town has any use for me and
I haven't any use for _them_."

Something about the way she said it made Laura want to be nicer.  She
didn't care if the boys believed or not.  "It worked!" she said,
smiling at the girl and holding up Blackmalkin.

Lydia regarded her coldly.  "What worked?"

"The magic!" said Laura.  "The wishing well, just the way you said!  I
wished for a kitten and got two!"

"Just as if you didn't know _that_!" said James.

"I don't know what you mean," said Lydia.

Laura refused to be dampened.  "This one's Blackmalkin," she said,
holding the black kitten up, "and the other one's Whitemalkin."

"Like _The Midnight Folk_," said Lydia, with her first approach to
being human.

"Oh, have you read that, too?" Laura beamed, and even James relaxed a
little.

"Dozens of times," said Lydia.

"I never heard of it," said Kip.

"You wouldn't," said Lydia, without looking at him.

Laura felt discouraged again.  "The trouble is," she said, "they think
you rode over on your horse in the night and read the wish and left the
kittens there to fool us."

"Do they?" said Lydia.  "What do _you_ think?"

"I thought so, too, for a while," admitted Laura.  Then she made up her
mind.  "Now I don't any more." She touched the kitten's fur.  "I know
_I_ couldn't give Blackmalkin away to _anyone_!  So how could _you_?"

Lydia regarded the black kitten with rather a strange expression.
"Yes," she said.  "Yes, there is that."  Then she seemed to shrug the
whole problem away.  "Well," she said, "so now you know.  You've got
magic.  Have fun with it."  And she started for the house.

"Wait!" cried Laura.

Lydia turned and looked at her.  Laura didn't know how to say what she
wanted to say.  "Couldn't we share it?"

"How do you mean?"

"Couldn't we sort of have our wishes together?  All four of us?  It'd
be more fun."

Lydia looked as though she couldn't believe her ears.  But James was
still suspicious.

"Or even better," he said, "couldn't you show us some of your magic
right here, without any old well?"

The friendliness went out of Lydia's eyes.  "I don't know what you
mean," she said again.

"You have lots of it, lying around," said James.  "You said your
grandmother's a witch."

"Did I say that?" Lydia looked shamefaced, then defiant.  "Well, she
is, sometimes."

"Show us some," said James stubbornly.  Laura could have hit him.  Even
the good-natured Kip fidgeted uncomfortably.

Lydia looked at the ground.  Then she looked up.  "All right," she said
grimly.  "Follow me."

She started past the house, not looking back to see whether they were
following or not.  Of course they were.

Beyond the house was an old tumble-down stone wall with a gate in it.
Lydia opened the gate and went through it and down some steps, with the
others trailing after.

"There," she said.  "Doesn't that look like a witch's garden?"

It did.

None of the three children knew much about flowers, and only Laura
cared about them much, but all of them had seen enough gardens to
realize that mostly they were planted three or six or a dozen of a
kind, in ordered rows or artistic drifts.  Here there were no two
plants alike and they grew every which way, big plants in front of
small ones, vines clambering over bushes.  It was as though nobody
cared where or how they grew, so long as they grew.  Parts of the
garden were weeded, but most of it wasn't.  Some of the plants were
strange looking, almost evil.

"That's a pitcher plant.  It eats flies," said Lydia, pointing.
"That's a Venus's-flytrap.  So does it."

"That's not magic.  That's nature," said James the ex-Boy Scout,
unconvinced.  "You'll have to do better than that."

"All right," said Lydia.  Her jaw was set and her expression was
dangerous.  "All right, I will!"

"What's _that_?" said Kip, wanting to change the subject.  He pointed
to a sprawly, branchy, trailing plant with notched leaves and
cup-shaped purplish-red flowers.

"That," said Lydia, her eyes taking on a dreamy, other-worldly look,
"is crawling rabbitbane.  It's one of the most powerful magic plants
there is.  It's been used by witches from time immemorial."

"What does it _do_?" said James, inexorable.

"It kills rabbits, from the name," said Kip.

"That's right," said Lydia.  "It does.  It'd kill _you_, too, if you
ate it.  It's deadly poison.  But if you _burnt_ it, now..."  She broke
off.

"Now what?" said James.  "What if we did?"

"Well," said Lydia slowly, "there's no telling what might happen.  It
does all kinds of things.  It makes unseen things appear and seen
things disappear.  It transforms people so they're unrecognizable,
overnight.  And if the right person burns it at the right time and
breathes the smoke, it can bring..."  She stopped again.

"What?  What can it bring?" said James.

"A visitor from another world," said Lydia.

"What kind of visitor?  A dear little fairy?" scoffed James.

"A genie?" said Laura.

"A Martian?" said Kip.

Lydia stared at them solemnly.  "I don't know.  Nobody knows.  It's not
in the magic books."

There was a pause.

"O.K.," said James.  "What are we waiting for?  Let's be burning."

There were seven flowers on the plant and all were gathered in a
second.  But burning them didn't prove too easy.  The petals shriveled
and turned black at the edges and several fingers were scorched, but
there was no smoke to speak of (or to breathe).

Then James and Kip made a fire of sticks and paper, and the charred
remains of the crawling rabbitbane were cast upon it.  The blossoms
flared up for a second and were gone, but not before four noses bent
over the fire and sniffed.  James watched to see if Lydia sniffed, too,
and she did.  Then four throats coughed.  There was smoke all right,
but it smelled more like stick-and-paper smoke than anything else.

"Is that all?" said Kip, as careful James stamped out the smoldering
ashes.

"What did you expect, fireworks?" said Lydia nastily.

"I thought it'd be different somehow," said Laura.  "I thought magic
smoke would smell sort of special.  Like in that poem.  You know.
'Whiffs of gramarye!'"

Lydia's face lighted up.  "Do you know that, too?  We seem to have read
all the same things!"

"Yes, we do, don't we?" said Laura, beaming at her.

James broke in on this literary discussion.  "Well?" he said.  "When
does it get going?  When do the little fairies start turning up?"

The light went out of Lydia's face and it looked closed and hard.  "I
haven't the slightest idea," she said.  "Probably never.  Probably we
weren't the right people at the right time.  Or probably it's all a
hoax and I made the whole thing up!"

"Probably," agreed James, grinning at her challengingly.

Laura was alarmed.  "No!" She glared at James.  "That's silly.  It
wouldn't happen right _away_!  More like tomorrow morning, wouldn't you
say?"  She turned to Lydia.

"I don't know anything about it," said Lydia stonily.  "I have to go
feed my horse."  And she stalked away.

There was something about the thin, hunched look of her back and
shoulders as she rounded the corner of the house that Laura couldn't
bear.  She ran after her.  Then when she caught up with her, she
couldn't think of anything to say.  She walked along at her side in
silence.

"Laura and Lydia," she said finally.  "We sound like sisters in a book."

"We don't look it," muttered Lydia.

Laura tried again.  "Are you crazy about horseback-riding?  Does it
sort of rule your whole life?"  For she had met girls in real life and
in books of whom this was true.

Lydia shrugged.  "It's a means to an end."

They were nearing the barn now, and a whinny sounded from inside.
Laura hung back.  "I'm scared of horses," she confessed.

Lydia looked at her.  Suddenly she grinned.  "So am I."

"But you ride all the time!" said Laura.  "Night and day, Kip said!"

"I know," said Lydia.  "That's why."  And she started away.

Laura called after her, stammering slightly, not sure how her words
would be received.  "Could you.... could you come over to our house
tomorrow morning?  I'd.... we'd like you to."

Lydia turned in the doorway.  She wasn't smiling.  She looked as if she
were going to say no.  But she didn't.  "All right," she said.  Then
she was gone.

Laura ran and overtook the boys just as they were turning from the
driveway into the road.  She saw no sign of old Mrs. Green.  Alice the
dog was biffing far ahead of them down the road, as though glad to get
away from the witch's house.

"I don't care what anyone says," said Laura, as soon as she got her
breath back.  "I like her!"

"So do I," said Kip, rather as though he were surprised to hear himself
saying it.

They both looked at James.

"All right, so do I," he admitted sheepishly.  "If only she didn't have
such a chip on her shoulder all the time."

"She's like that in school, too," said Kip.  "That's why nobody gets
along with her."

"I think..." said Laura, stammering slightly the way she always did
when she was very serious, "I think she makes things hard for herself.
I wonder why."

There was a pause.  "Anyway," said Kip, "there's one thing you can't
deny.  She's interesting."

And all agreed.

And then they all went back to the red house and had sandwiches and did
the most un-magic things they could think of all afternoon.


It was nearly dinnertime when Kip went home, but he found his mother
still out working in the garden.  Kip's mother was like that.  She
belonged to the Garden Club.

Kip went and hung over her, wanting to know when dinner would be ready
and what was for dessert, and making distracting desultory conversation
and tracing patterns with his bare toes in the loose gritty black earth
of the rock garden until his mother told him to stop.

He stopped, but not for that reason.  He was staring at a plant that
sprawled over a big rock.  It was a branchy, trailing plant with
notched leaves and cup-shaped purplish-red flowers.

"I didn't know we had crawling rabbitbane, too," he said.

"What?" said his mother.

"That," said Kip, pointing.

"That," said his mother, "is _Callirrho involucrata_."

"Are you sure?  What's its common name?"

"Poppy mallow."

Kip had a sinking feeling.  Still, his mother could be wrong.  The
Garden Club didn't know _everything_.  "_I_ heard," he said, "that it's
called crawling rabbitbane.  I heard it's a powerful magic herb.  I
heard it's been used by witches from time immemorial."

"Humph!" said his mother.  "It's a western wild flower.  I don't think
it's been in cultivation more than fifty years or so.  The only magic
trick it does that _I_ know anything about is sow itself all over the
place!"  Her thumb and forefinger annihilated half a dozen unwanted
seedlings.  "There.  Now come in the house and wash your hands."  And
she went inside.

But Kip didn't follow her.  He sat down on a garden chair and started
thinking hard.




3.  The Silver Mine

When Laura came bounding out of the house next morning with James
following more sedately at her heels, Kip was already there, sitting on
a rock eating a popsickle, orange this time.

"Hello.  You must have got up early," said Laura.

"That's right.  I guess I did."  Kip spoke through a yawn.  "No
particular reason.  I just thought I would.  It was such a nice morning
and all."

"Oh, is that why?" said James.  "I thought maybe it was because you
believed all that yesterday.  I thought maybe you couldn't wait to meet
the dear little fairy."

"James!" said Laura.  "Don't you start talking like that when she
comes."

"Do you suppose she _will_?" said Kip.

"Of course she will," said Laura stoutly.

"I'm not counting on it," said James.  "I don't know if she'll have the
face."

"Stop it," said Laura.  "If you're so sure there isn't any magic, what
are you doing here?  Why waste your time?  Go do something useful.
Chop wood or go fishing."

"Oh, I'm open to conviction," said James cheerfully.  "That reminds me,
though.  I'll be back in a second."  And he went loping toward the back
yard.

Kip finished his popsickle and stuck the stick into the ground.
"Surprise for James," he said.  "Here she comes now."

Laura looked.  Lydia was coming toward them down the road, walking
slowly, not riding the black horse this time.  ("And that's a good
sign," thought Laura to herself.  "It shows she doesn't think she has
to prove anything to us.")

"Hello," she called.

"Hello," said Lydia, coming up to them.

"Hello," said Kip.

There was a silence.  Nobody could think what to say next.

James came round the corner of the house, talking to himself.  "That's
funny," he was saying.

"What is?" called Kip.

"That old lawn mower I was using.  I forgot to put it away yesterday.
Now it's not in the shed or anywhere."

"That's funny," echoed Kip.  "Who would want to steal a rusty old thing
like that?"

James came toward them, walking with his head down the way he always
did when he was concentrating.  He was concentrating so hard he almost
ran into a young maple sapling that stood in the middle of the lawn.
He stopped short just in time and stood looking at it.

"That wasn't here yesterday," he said.

"Don't be silly; of course it was," said Laura.

"No."  James was a very observant kind of boy.  "I made a mental map of
the whole front yard.  That tree wasn't there."

"It must have been.  Trees don't move by themselves!" said Laura.  Then
she caught her breath.  "The magic!  Don't you remember?  It makes
unseen things appear and seen things disappear!  It's _working_!"

"It is?"  Lydia sounded surprised, almost alarmed.

"Sure.  Didn't you think it would?" said Kip, giving her rather a
peculiar look, Laura thought.

James went up to Lydia and held out his hand.  "I apologize," he said.

Lydia looked at his hand as if she didn't want to take it.  Then she
made a grab for it and dropped it again quickly.  "That's all right,"
she muttered, looking away.

"I don't get the point, though," said James, scratching his head.  "Why
would the magic go to all that effort just to take away an old
lawnmower and give us an old maple tree?  We've _got_ enough maple
trees!"

"'Maple trees, maple trees, that's all there is around here!'" quoted
Kip, giggling.  "It's a better maple tree than the lawn mower was a
lawn mower, anyway," he pointed out.

"No, don't you see?" said Laura excitedly.  "This isn't the real magic.
It's just showing us it's here.  So we'll be prepared.  The real
wonderful part'll come later!"

"What was it you said would happen next?" said James to Lydia.

"I don't remember," said Lydia, looking at the ground.

"You _don't_?  I'll never forget!" said Laura.  "It makes unseen things
appear and seen things disappear," she repeated in thrilling tones.
"It transforms people so they're unrecognizable, overnight.  And if the
right person burns it at the right time..."  She broke off, staring
across the lawn.

Deborah was trotting toward them from the woods to one side.  Deborah
was the kind of four-year-old girl who gets up at the crack of dawn and
plays happily by herself for hours, and nobody worries much about where
she is or what she's doing.  Now as she came nearer, Laura uttered a
cry.

"Your hair!  What have you been doing to yourself?"

Where once had been tight black pigtails was short hair cut straight
across in back in the classic style known as mixing-bowl.

"It wasn't me," said Deborah happily.  "It was magic.  I'm transformed."

"That," said James, "is putting it mildly.  Pretty amateurish magic, if
you ask me.  You're unrecognizable all right.  You look terrible."

"_I_ like it," said Deborah, trotting past them to begin another of her
mysterious solitary games under the apple tree at the far end of the
yard.

Kip giggled.

James gave him a sharp look.  Suddenly everything seemed to fall into
place in his mind.  "Uh _huh_," he said grimly.  He strode over to the
maple sapling and checked.  "I thought so.  New-dug earth.  Magic
wouldn't have to do a thing like that."  He went back to Kip.  "Let's
see your hands."

Kip looked as if he didn't know whether to giggle now or not.  He held
out his hands.  They were suspiciously clean, as if he'd just scrubbed
them.

Laura was the last to realize what was in James's mind.  "Oh," she
cried.  "Do you mean it isn't true?"

Lydia pushed past her.  Her eyes blazed at Kip as if she would like to
pummel him.  "Do you mean to say," she said, her voice trembling, "that
you got up early this morning and hid the lawn mower and spent all that
time and work planting that tree and then cut off that little girl's
hair just to play a trick on _me_?"

"No.  It wasn't that.  Honest," said Kip.  "I just didn't want the game
to stop."

"A _game_?" wailed Laura.  "Is that all it was to everybody?"

"I found out that plant wasn't crawling rabbitbane," Kip went on.  "I
found out there's no such a thing.  And I was kind of sorry.  I thought
maybe I could sort of rescue you.  The tree and all that were all I
could think of to do.  I guess it wasn't very good.  But what would you
have done if I hadn't?  When the time came?"

"I don't know," said Lydia.  "I guess I hoped something would turn up.
I guess I hoped if I wished hard enough it'd be true."

"You read the wish in the wishing well and left the kittens, didn't
you?" said James.

"Of course I did," said Lydia crossly.  "I'm sorry now I started the
whole thing.  I'm going home.  Good-by."

"Wait!"  Laura turned on James.  "You think you're so right always.
She didn't do it to be mean.  She did it to make friends.  _Didn't_
you?"  She looked at Lydia.

"Ha!  As if I'd be that soft!"

"You were.  You did."

"All right, I did," said Lydia.  She looked away.  Her voice was
indistinct.  "But it didn't work out.  I can't make friends.  I never
can.  I don't know how."

"You do, too.  We _are_ friends.  _Aren't_ we?"  Laura looked at James
threateningly.

"Sure.  I'm not mad at anybody," said James mildly.  "I just like to
get the facts straight."  He went over to Lydia.  "I apologized once
before.  This time is for real.  Now that we all know the worst about
each other, we can start over from scratch."

Lydia hesitated, still looking at something in the far distance.  Then
she relaxed.  "All right," she said.

"You must have hated giving up the kittens," said Laura.  "You can have
Whitemalkin back if you like."

"I'm sorry about Deborah's hair," said Kip.  "I thought it'd turn out
better.  _She_ likes it, though," he added, his eyes twinkling.

"I don't know what Mother'll say when she sees it," said Laura.  "Still
I guess all's well that ends well."

She looked around at the others.  All of them were smiling.  And then
suddenly the brightness went out of the day.  Now that she had ironed
out the awful crossness and got everybody else's ruffled feelings
smoothed, she had time to remember her own disappointment.

"I _am_ sorry about the magic, though," she said.  "We could have had
all this, and that, too!"

Lydia's hand tightened on her arm.  "Look!" she said.

Laura looked.

Coming down the road was a strange apparition.

An ancient horse pulled an ancient carriage of the type that is known
as a chaise (or in the poem of the same name, a one-hoss shay).
Sitting in the carriage was a lady.  Whether she was old or young was
hard to tell.  Her face was lined but very pretty.  Her dress with its
wide-flowing long skirts was old-fashioned, but its
lemon-yellow-and-scarlet color scheme was youthfully bright, not to say
gaudy.  Her white hair was worn in a towering pompadour topped by an
immense straw hat covered with artificial poppies.  The top canopy of
the chaise was missing (probably age had withered it, thought James),
and the lady carried a flowered parasol to shield her complexion from
the sun.

"A visitor from another world!" breathed Laura.

"Looks as if," said Kip, staring with round eyes.

The lady chirruped to her horse, and it stopped directly in front of
the red house.  The lady smiled at them.  "Good morning, children," she
said.

"Good morning," said James and Kip and Laura.

Lydia stepped forward.

"Did you come because we wished you would?" she said.  It sounded bald,
put like that, but she had to know.

"Well, now," said the lady, "did I or didn't I?  That's a question.
Certainly I have not driven down to the valley for some time.  I think
it is three years now.  Or is it two?  No, I think it is three.  And
certainly this morning _something_ seemed to tell me it was time to
venture forth and look at the world again.  But whether it was your
wish, or the fine summer weather, or something else entirely, I would
not be prepared to say.  But why do you say you wished for me?"

"We were playing a game," said Kip.  "Kind of a wishing game."

"We wished for a visitor from another world," said Laura.

"Another world?"  For a moment the lady seemed to be looking beyond
them, at faraway things.  "Yes, it was certainly that.  A better world
I _don't_ say, but different it _was_.  And slower.  And more gracious,
I like to think."

"When was this?" said James, who liked to get at the facts.  "And
where?"

"Why, right here," said the lady.  "All up and down the valley, when I
was young.  We may have been country people, but we had pleasant times!"

"And you still live right here somewhere?" said James.  There was a
touch of disappointment in his voice.

"Certainly I do," said the lady.  "Pa always said to me, 'Isabella,
whatever happens, never sell the old place.'  And I never have.  I live
across the river and up the hill.  By the old silver mine."

"A silver mine!" said James and Laura together.

"Gee!" said James.  "I didn't know there was one."

"Sure," said Kip.  "What did you think the road was named for?"

"Yeah, sure," said James.  "I never thought, the way they've got it all
one word on the signs.  Silvermine."

"Very slipshod," said the lady.  "It would never have been allowed in
my day."

"Only I thought that old mine was all abandoned and fallen in," said
Kip.  "I thought it was played out."

The lady tightened her lips.  "It has certainly not been abandoned by
_me_," she said.  "It may not be working at the moment, and certain
portions may have collapsed slightly, but I should never describe it as
'_played out_.'  Though many a child has played _in_ it, in his day, if
you will forgive the pun," she added.

"Do you _own_ it?" said Lydia.  "Could _we_ play in it?"

"Certainly I own it," said the lady.  "Pa always said to me, 'Isabella,
whatever happens, hang on to Kingdom Mine.  Mark my words, it will come
into its own again some day.'  And so I truly believe.  As to your
playing in it, come any time.  Come this afternoon for tea.  I shall
make my silver cake."

"Isn't it dangerous?" said Laura.  "Playing in the mine, I mean."

"Tush!" said the lady.  "Show me the thing worth doing that _isn't_!"

A stripped-down convertible full of teen-agers whizzed past down the
road, taking the bend on two wheels.  The old horse shied and rolled
its eyes, but the lady spoke to it soothingly and it subsided.

"Humph!" said the lady.  "Don't speak to me of _danger_!  We knew how
to proceed with dignity."  She sighed.  "I believe I have seen quite
enough of the world for this year.  Besides, I must be getting home if
I'm to make my silver cake.  I shall expect you"--and she bowed
formally--"at half-past three."

"We'll be there," said Lydia.

The lady turned her horse, using the reins expertly.  Her eyes swept
over the front garden.  "I see you have a wishing well," she said.

"Yes, but it doesn't work.  We thought it did, but it doesn't," said
Laura.

"Don't be too sure," said the lady.  "You never can tell with wells.
_Good_ day."  She chirruped to the horse and it went trotting with
surprising agility back the way it had come.

"_Well!_" said Laura, when horse and lady were out of sight.

"Was it magic?" said Lydia.

"How could it be?" said Kip.  "She wasn't supernatural or anything.
She was just a person."

"That doesn't signify," said Laura.  "She's from another world, isn't
she?  She said so.  The magic could have made her come, couldn't it?
She _said_ something made her."

Everybody looked at James.  Already he was the leader.

"Magic or not," said James, "we've got an adventure, and that's what we
wanted.  A silver mine.  Wow!"


It was five minutes to three when James and Kip and Laura and Lydia
started out from the red house.  No one could bear to wait any longer.
There had been some discussion earlier about what clothes they should
wear on the adventure.  Laura had wanted to dress up, as it was a tea
party, but the others had been derisive.

"Play clothes for playing in mines," said James, and Laura had seen the
sense in this.  But she carried a bouquet of blue larkspurs as a mark
of esteem.  Alice the dog did not accompany them, having an engagement
elsewhere with a rabbit.

"Which way's the river?" said James, as their feet hit the road.  "I
didn't even know there was one."

"Follow Bonga Bonga the native guide," said Kip, leading the way with
that other old settler, Lydia.

The four children followed where the road wandered, going past houses
and a riding stable and a general store and an old tavern that was now
a tearoom.  Beyond the tavern a road led over a bridge.

They stopped on the bridge and looked down.  Underneath were rocks
mainly, with a thin stream winding among them.

"Call that a river?" said James.

"Wait till spring floods," said Kip.  "It's a river."

Three wild ducks flew over, just to prove it.

After the bridge the road divided, the main trafficky part going on
ahead, while a narrower way turned to the left and went twistingly
uphill.  A sign with a pointing arrow was neatly labeled, "To the
Kingdom."

"That must be it," said Laura.  "She said 'Kingdom Mine.'"

First the road was sort of paved, then it broke down to just a double
wheel-track, with grass in between.  The grade was steep and there was
a general huffing and puffing, particularly from Kip who, while not
fat, was pleasingly plump.  At last came a level stretch, and at its
end a small house, with a mailbox that said "Miss Isabella King" in the
same neat lettering as the sign at the corner.

James and Lydia and Kip collapsed breathlessly on the
pocket-handkerchief lawn, while Laura stood and considered the house.
Everything that took money to do was neglected, but everything that
could be done by one pair of hands was spick and span.  The paint on
the house was peeling, but the walk was freshly swept.  The big
dooryard elm tree was dying, but the small lawn was neatly mowed and
its edges clipped.

Laura had rather thought that Miss Isabella King might be on the porch
to greet them, but there was no sign of her.  Probably she was getting
tea.

James rose from his prone position on the lawn, crossing his long legs
and rising straight up the way he always did.  "Enough of dalliance,"
he said.  "I breathe again.  Let's get with it."  He mounted the steps
to the porch, and since he was the leader, the others followed.

Miss Isabella King was slow in answering their knock, and when she did
appear, she seemed strangely altered from their visitor of that
morning.  She still wore the yellow-and-scarlet dress, though she had
taken off the hat with the poppies.  But her white pompadour was
disarranged as though she had just been lying down, and her face was
pale and her hands fidgeted nervously.  ("And it's _my_ opinion," said
Kip later, "that she had been _crying_.")

"Oh dear," she said.  "I do apologize.  And Pa always said hospitality
is the first duty of a gentlewoman, too!  Nowadays I receive so few
visitors, you would think I would be ready to greet you, and yet the
time had quite slipped my mind!  The fact is, I have had some very
upsetting news by today's post."

"I'm sorry," said Laura.

"Not that I had forgotten you were coming," said Miss King quickly.  "I
have my silver cake all baked and frosted.  That was before the letter
came.  But now I fear I hardly feel up to a tea party.  I thought you
could see the mine and then take the cake home with you when you go."

"Couldn't you tell us what's the matter?" said James.  "Maybe we could
help."

"Oh, I hardly think so," said Miss King, "though it is most kind of
you.  We must not burden others with our troubles."

"But we'd _like_ to know," said Lydia.  "That's if we're not butting
in."

"Oh, not at all," said Miss King.  "You are very thoughtful children.
And here I am, keeping you on the doorstep.  What would Pa say if he
were here?  Come in, come in!"

She ushered them into a tiny parlor that was so crammed with antiques
and bric-a-brac the five of them could hardly fit in.

"You see," she went on when all were seated (James and Kip balanced
precariously on the edges of their chairs lest they brush against some
cherished heirloom), "you see, there is a thing called a mortgage."

"Yes, we know," said Laura.  "We just bought a house."

"Then you know," said Miss King, "that it means paying a certain sum of
money to the bank every month.  And I have not been able to keep up the
payments on mine.  I have tried, but I had not a great deal of capital.
There was a..."  She paused and seemed reluctant to go on.  "There was
a misfortune many years ago.  A large amount of money went out of the
family ... was lost, you might say.  And little by little what was left
has drained away.  And now they write that they are going to foreclose."

"What does that mean?" said Kip.

"It means," said Miss King, "that they will take my home away.  And
where will I go?  And what will I do?"

"Oh," said Kip.

"Couldn't you go to the bank and talk to them?" said James.

Miss King firmed her lips.  "No," she said, "I could not.  I have known
Hiram Bundy since we were young together, though we have not spoken for
many years.  He is a just but hard man, and in this case justice is on
his side."

"It would be!" burst out Lydia indignantly.  "I _hate_ cold, hard
things like justice and banks and business and money!"

"So did I, my dear," said Miss King, smiling, "always.  And see to what
a pass it has brought me.  You should profit from my example.  But how
depressing this must be for you, when what you really want is to
explore the dear old mine and have your adventure!  You'll find it just
beyond the barn and through the gate.  Forgive me if I do not accompany
you.  It would bring back memories of happier days!"  And she touched
her handkerchief to her eyes.

The four children filed solemnly out of the house and across the yard
and past the barn and through the gate in the old stone wall.  They
stood looking down at the Kingdom Mine.

You all know what an abandoned silver mine looks like, and this one was
no different from any other, except perhaps a little smaller.

"It's just a hole in the ground!" said Lydia, disappointed.  "It's just
a ratty old hole!"

"It looks like any old gravel pit," said Kip.

"Maybe there's a Psammead buried in the bottom," said Laura, not very
hopefully, "like in _Five Children and It_.  And we could dig it out
and make it wish the mortgage unforeclosed."

"Ha!" said James.  "Not very likely!  You and your old magic!  You were
so sure this was going to be a wonderful adventure and what do we get?
Doom and gloom!"

Actually the Kingdom Mine was a perfectly good abandoned silver mine,
and at any other time the four children might have found it an ideal
spot for hiding in, and exploring, and getting thoroughly begrimed and
blissful.  But today they were too concerned about Miss King and her
mortgage to think of anything else.  And the sun went behind a cloud to
sympathize with their mood.

Laura, as usual, was the first to get over being depressed and start
trying to _do_ something about it.

"I don't care," she said.  "There is _so_ magic!  You know how in the
stories there're always tasks to do and quests to go on!  Well,
nowadays there wouldn't be dragons and princesses and witches; it'd be
in modern guise, more!  The magic sent her to us and it sent _us_ to
her!  I feel it in my bones!  We're supposed to _help_ her!"

"What could we do?" said Kip.

"I don't know," said Laura.  "Maybe the mine _isn't_ played out and we
could all get shovels and start digging and find silver and make it
pay."

"I don't think silver pays very well any more," said James.

"Why not?" said Lydia.  "People will always buy knives and forks!"

"I think it got kind of debased," said James, "when we went on the gold
standard."

"What's that?" said Kip.

"I'm not sure," said James, "but it was bad for silver.  There was a
lot of fuss about it.  Something about not crucifying mankind on a
cross of gold.  I read it in a book.  But we went on it, anyway.  Then
just lately, we went off it again."

"Wasn't that _good_ for silver?" said Kip.

"I don't think so," said James.  "I think maybe we went on something
else.  Paper, maybe.  No, I think silver's a thing of the past.  _I_
think the thing to do is go see that man in the bank.  That Hiram
Bundy."

And all agreed that that was the only proper course.

"I can't wait," said Lydia grimly.

But all agreed, too, that first they had better stay and play in the
old silver mine awhile, just for the look of things and not to
disappoint Miss Isabella.

And, as so often happens, once they forced themselves to pretend they
were having fun, they began to have it, and the sun came out from its
cloud, and Kip slipped and slid halfway down the shaft on the seat of
his trousers, and Lydia nearly broke her neck when the eighty-second
step in an old rotting wooden staircase she was counting (and climbing)
broke through under her, and Laura found a rock that had a piece of
what she was sure was silver in it, only James said it was probably
only mica.  And all in all, utter pleasure and oblivion prevailed, and
it was only the voice of hunger that spoke at last and reminded them of
Miss Isabella.

They trooped back to the house.  On the porch an appetizing sight
awaited them.

A table was laid for four, with slices of cake on old Wedgwood plates
and glasses of raspberry vinegar and a box tied with scarlet-and-yellow
ribbons.

On the box was an envelope addressed, "To My Four Friends."  James
opened it and read:


    "DEAR CHILDREN,

    Not wishing to be a 'wet blanket,' as the boys say, I have decided
    to 'absent me from felicity.'  Eat heartily and enjoy yourselves.
    The other half of the cake is in the box.

    Yours faithfully,
    ISABELLA CONSTANTIA KING"


There was a silence, except for fork-and-plate sounds.  Then James
spoke rather muffledly.  "Any woman who makes cake like this, a bank
should be proud to support."

"She should be subdivided by the government," agreed Kip, only he was
not sure he had quite the right word.

When the last crumb was eaten and the last wonderful vinegary dregs
drunk, the two girls tiptoed into the house and washed the dishes as
quietly as possible in the kitchen.  There was no sign of Miss Isabella.

"Probably lying down," said Laura.

"With eau de cologne on her forehead," agreed Lydia.

Laura found a paper towel (a surprisingly modern note in that
old-fashioned house) and with her trusty pencil wrote a note to leave
on the kitchen table.  The note said:


    "DEAR MISS KING,

    The cake was scrumptious.  Do not despair.  All is not yet lost.

    Yours faithfully,
    LAURA LAVINIA MARTIN"


And then she and Lydia went outside where the boys were kicking pebbles
along the grassy gravel of the road.

By the time the four children reached the bridge, the sun was already
sinking in the west, and everyone agreed it would be folly to try to
see the wicked banker that day.

"Oh-oh.  And tomorrow's Saturday.  Banks are closed," said Kip.

"What of it?" said James.  "We'll go see him in his house.  He must
live _somewhere_ in town, mustn't he?"

"That's right," said Lydia.  "We'll beard him in his lair."

"Hiram Bundy," said Kip.  "He sounds like a miser in a movie."

"Take that, Hiram Bundy!" said Lydia, making a pass with an imaginary
sword.

And then they went by the general store and four more houses, and the
red house came in sight.  James and Lydia and Kip went running to vault
the picket fence and hurry inside to look up Hiram Bundy in the phone
book.  But Laura lingered.

She went up to the wishing well.  "I don't care if that other wish
_was_ fake," she told it.  "I _know_ there's magic.  I can feel it
working.  And I'm not going to write out wishes from now on.  You can
hear me perfectly well.  You could fix it all up about Miss Isabella's
house if you just would.  Why, I bet if you really tried, you could
have that Mr. Hiram Bundy eating right out of her hand!  So please,
please help us help her."

She leaned closer and listened, but the well did not respond.  Laura
thought at least it might have gurgled.

"I'm counting on you," she told it sternly.

Then she ran into the house.




4.  The Wicked Ogre

It turned out that Mr. Hiram Bundy lived way over on the other side of
town, too far for walking in comfort but a mere trifle for a demon
cyclist.

"Bikes it is, then!" said James.  "Zero hour nine-thirty on the dot!"

And then all separated for the night, to make plans and practice angry
threats and (Laura) to say over all the magic spells that she knew.
She had tried to interest Lydia in working some more witchcraft with
the plants in her grandmother's garden, but Lydia would have none of it.

"I don't want to talk about that," she said.  Moreover, she wouldn't.

And there may have been something wrong with the spells Laura said,
because the next morning after breakfast her mother and father
announced that they were spending the day at an auction and Laura and
James were to stay home and baby-sit with Deborah.

"We can't possibly!  We've got an important mission!" said James.
"Can't you take her along with you?"

"No, we can't," said their mother.  "She'll get up on her chair and
call out things, and the people'll think she's bidding, and the next
thing we know we'll have bought something horrible!"

"Want to go to the auction and bid," said Deborah.

"You see?" said their mother.

So that is the way it was, and ten minutes later their mother and
father went off in a cloud of dust, and ten minutes after _that_ Kip
and Lydia came pedaling up to the house to find James and Laura sitting
in the back yard glumly watching Deborah play something
incomprehensible with acorns and Dutchman's-pipe flowers from the vine
that screened the back porch.

"What are you doing?" said Kip.

"Minding baby," said James bitterly.  And they told the tragic news.

"Why not bring her along?" said Kip.  "She might come in handy.  She
can soothe the wicked ogre with her baby hands."

"Wicked ogre," said Deborah, smiling, as though she were looking
forward to it.

"It's too far for her to walk," said Laura, "and Mother won't let her
ride handle bars."

"_I_ know!" said Lydia.  "I'll take her on my horse and the rest of you
can hitchhike.  That'll be even quicker."

"Horse," said Deborah enthusiastically.

"We're not allowed to ride with strangers, either," said James, still
sunk in gloom.

"They won't be strangers."  Kip was scornful.  "I know everybody in
town, just about.  It'll be a good way for you to meet your neighbors.
It'll be useful and instructive."

So Lydia biked furiously home to change mounts.

She was wearing a dress today instead of her usual old riding breeches,
and Kip was in slacks and a sports shirt.  So while she was gone, James
and Laura changed into their best clothes in honor of the occasion.
But they'd only been living in the country three days, and their best
clothes were somewhat stiff and citified.  Still, so much the better,
thought James.  Misers' houses were probably stiff and citified places.

They were hardly finished changing when Lydia came galloping back.

"Does your horse have a name?" said Laura, wanting to think of it as a
friend and not a savage beast.

Lydia shrugged.  "Why bother?  It's not like a person.  I told you,
it's just a means to an end.  It's just a horse."

"Horse," said Deborah again, reaching up to it lovingly.

So Lydia lifted her onto the horse's neck, while Laura shuddered and
turned away.

But the horse seemed to like Deborah, and its evil eye turned kindly,
and Deborah put her arms round its neck and crowed with delight.

"I'm afraid she's born to the saddle," said Lydia.  "I'm afraid she's
one of those girls that horseback-riding's going to be her whole life.
Like those goons at the riding stable."

The other half of the cake Miss Isabella had given them was still in
its box with the yellow-and-scarlet ribbons, and it was James who
suggested they take it with them and present it to Mr. Hiram Bundy as a
peace offering.

"If he gives in," he said, "it'll be his just reward, and if he
doesn't, it'll be heaping coals of fire."

And so they started out, twenty minutes late but with hopes high.

The hitchhiking proved to be more hiking than hitching at first,
because all the cars that went by either Kip didn't know or they had no
room for three.  And James's and Laura's stiff, citified clothes began
to feel hot and scratchy.  It was James who tore his jacket on a thorn
and it was Laura who stepped into a bog in her best shoes.

Lydia walked her steed alongside and made conversation for a time,
while Deborah called "Get a horse!" at them every few minutes
derisively and laughed and laughed.  But then Deborah decided she
wanted to gallop and was so insistent that Lydia gave in, and they went
rocking on far ahead.

And at last the other three got a ride as far as town with a woman Kip
knew who told them all about a cake sale the Methodist Church was
giving in aid of indignant widows (or it sounded like that).  And that
was useful and instructive.

In the town they found Lydia and Deborah.  Lydia had tied her horse to
a lamppost and they were both eating strawberry ice cream cones.  It
was Deborah who had spilled her cone down her front.

Naturally then, the others had to have mid-morning sustenance, too.
They stood on the curbstone silently licking and dripping the ends of
their cones into the gutter.  Several of the passing motorists did not
seem to appreciate Lydia's horse's taking up a parking place.

"It's that crazy Green girl," one woman was overheard to say.  "Just
running wild all over town.  Somebody ought to do something!"

At this Lydia's face darkened, and she threw the rest of her cone
away--but carefully, into a trash can.  "Let's go," she said.  So they
did.

This time Kip and Laura and James got a ride with a man Kip knew who
sold paper clips and stapling machines to the stationery store.  He did
not seem to want to talk about paper clips or anything else.

He set them down at the corner of Chickadee Drive, which was the street
Mr. Hiram Bundy lived on, at number eighteen.  Lydia and Deborah were
already waiting at the corner.

"Chickadee Drive!" said James, as they went up it.  "That doesn't sound
like a mean old miser.  He ought to live in Wolfpit Hollow!"

"Crooked Lane," said Laura.

"Skunk Street," said Kip.

Lydia didn't say anything.

Number eighteen, when they came to it, didn't look particularly like a
mean old miser's house, either.  It was a perfectly ordinary
contemporary colonial split-level ranch house, just like any other,
except maybe bigger and richer.  An immense lawn surrounded it, with
lots of shrubs clipped to look like other things than shrubs.  Lydia
silently tied her horse to a tree by the road, and they went up the
walk.

A nondescript woman answered their ring.  "Well?" she said, looking at
Laura's muddy feet dirtying the mat.

"We want to see Mr. Bundy," said James.

"Why?" said the woman.

"It's a business matter," said James.

"It's a matter of life and death," said Kip, at the same time.

"It's a life-and-death business matter," said Laura.

"Mr. Bundy is very busy.  I doubt if he's at home," said the woman.
"Summer people," she added, under her breath, contemptuously.

"We're not either!  We all own our own homes!" cried Kip, outraged.

"Newcomers!  Commuters!" muttered the woman, disappearing from view.

While she was gone, Laura tried to clean off Deborah's
strawberry-ice-cream front with her handkerchief, but she only made it
worse.  Then she didn't know where to put the creamy handkerchief.  She
was hiding it behind a potted plant on the porch when the woman came
back and eyed her suspiciously.

"He can give you three minutes.  Follow me," she said.

The five children followed her stiff back through a hall and into a big
study or library.  Mr. Hiram Bundy was seated behind a huge desk that
was covered with papers.  Laura couldn't decide whether he looked like
a mean old miser or not.  His eyes were shrewd but his mouth was not
unkind.

"Well?" he said, only half looking up from his papers.  "If it's
banking business, banking hours are on weekdays.  If you wish to open
an account, you must be accompanied by a parent or guardian."

"It's not that," said James.  He hesitated.  "It's kind of hard to
begin," he admitted sheepishly.

Mr. Hiram Bundy put down his papers.  His eyes traveled over them all
slowly, taking in Deborah's strawberry front and not missing James's
torn jacket and Laura's muddy shoes.

"If you are begging," he said briskly, "I do all my giving through
organized charities."

This was more than Laura could stand.  "We're not beggars..." she
began.  But she was interrupted.

Lydia had pushed forward and was looking at a big picture in a goldish
frame that hung behind Mr. Bundy's desk.  "Why, you've got one of my
grandmother's pictures," she said.

Mr. Hiram Bundy's expression changed.  "You are Agatha Green's
granddaughter?"

"Yes I am," said Lydia defiantly.  "I'm Lydia Green."

"Dear me," said Mr. Bundy.  "I had no idea.  Do be seated, all of you."
He could not have been more cordial.  "Your grandmother," he went on to
Lydia, "is a remarkable woman.  Without exaggeration I think I may say
one of America's truly _great_ women.  She paints a maple tree as I've
seldom seen it painted!"

At these words Kip looked at Laura and giggled, but not out loud.

"Now then," said Mr. Hiram Bundy, "what may I have the pleasure of
doing for you?"  And he beamed around at them all.

It was this moment that Deborah chose to very nearly spoil everything.
She trotted forward and looked at Mr. Bundy.  Then she turned to the
others.  "Wicked ogre!" she said, pointing at him and grinning from ear
to ear.

The smile left Mr. Bundy's face.  "What's that?" he said.  "What was
that?"

Throwing precaution to the winds, Laura stepped forward.  Now that
Deborah had gone that far, she might as well go the whole way.

"She called you a wicked ogre," she said, "because that's exactly what
you are!  How can you bear to foreclose Miss Isabella's mortgage and
leave her with no home and nowhere to go?"  She broke off, her cheeks
crimson.

"I see," said Mr. Bundy.  He did not sound angry, only concerned and
regretful.  "I understand your indignation," he went on, "and it does
you credit.  I have known Miss Isabella King for many years, though we
have not spoken recently.  Believe me, I respect her as much as you
evidently do.  But she is elderly and, if you will forgive me, no
longer in full possession of her faculties...."

James had had enough of this.  He stepped forward and put the cakebox
with its yellow-and-scarlet ribbons on Mr. Bundy's desk.  "Just taste
that cake," he said.

Mr. Bundy looked at him grimly.  "Are you giving me orders, young man?"

"Just taste it," said James.  He was deadly serious.

Mr. Bundy looked down at the cakebox.  Something about the
yellow-and-scarlet ribbons seemed to strike a chord.  He undid them
slowly, opened the lid, and looked at the cake.  He crumbled off a
corner and nibbled.  Then he broke off a larger piece and chewed.  Then
he raised his voice.

"Mrs. Cheeseman!" he called.

The nondescript housekeeper appeared.

"Taste that cake," said Mr. Bundy.

"Oh, Mr. Bundy!" said the housekeeper.

"Taste it," said Mr. Bundy.

The housekeeper tasted it gingerly.

"Notice the texture?" said Mr. Bundy.  "Moist, spongy, a bit of
substance to it and yet not heavy?  And not powdery and dry or bodiless
fluff, either!"

"Very nice, I'm sure," said the housekeeper with a sniff.

"Very nice.  Very nice," mocked Mr. Bundy.  "I tell you, _there's
cake_!  Now go back to your kitchen and throw away your nasty soulless
ready-mixes and cut yourself a real slice of that and eat it slowly and
_study_ it!  And save me the rest for supper.  That will do."

The housekeeper withdrew, bearing the cakebox and giving the five
children a look as she passed.

"Well?" said James.  "Would you say that a woman who can bake a cake
like that was in full possession of her faculties or not?"

Mr. Bundy cleared his throat.  "To be sure," he said.  "Miss Isabella
always had a light hand with a cake.  From a girl.  But there are other
factors to be considered.  She has been growing more and more eccentric
of late, I hear.  I am afraid it runs in the family.  She had an aunt
who became very peculiar in her old age.  Very peculiar indeed.  That
was many years ago.  But now they say Miss Isabella is going the same
way.  Consider her mode of dressing, for one thing.  And her manner of
speech has grown quite fantastic at times, they tell me.  And then
there is that old horse-and-buggy, getting in the way of traffic.
Frankly, there have been complaints.  Please believe me that this is no
mere matter of money.  The bank could afford to let the payments slip.
And certainly Miss Isabella will not be homeless.  Some suitable place
will be provided for her.  A convalescent home, perhaps."

"Do you think she'd like that?" said James.  "What she wants is to be
in her own house, with her own things."

"And her own silver mine," said Laura.

"Ah yes, that old mine," Mr. Bundy smiled sadly.  "There have been
complaints about that, too.  Certainly it is an eyesore, if not
actually a danger to the neighborhood children..."

"_We_ played in it and _we_ survived!" said Kip.

"No."  Mr. Bundy shook his head decisively.  "I am afraid that from all
the evidence we must conclude that Miss Isabella is no longer mentally
capable of conducting her own affairs.  Of living, in a word, her own
life.  And so it is with a clear conscience, though with genuine
regret, that we have been forced to come to this decision.  The place
must be sold."

Lydia had not spoken for some time.  Now suddenly she burst into
speech, and, once started, it did not seem as if she would ever stop.

"You make me sick," she said.  "You make me sick.  Just 'cause my
grandmother paints pictures that you like, you don't care what _she_
does or how strange _she_ goes around looking!  I tell you, _our_ house
is twice as fallen down as Miss Isabella's, and _we_'re not _poor_!
But oh no, _that's_ all right, 'cause Granny's a genius!  I'm not
saying she isn't.  But what about other people who _aren't_ geniuses
and remarkable women of America and just don't happen to like
everything everybody else likes and just want to go on living their
lives in their own way?  Oh, I _bet_ you've had complaints!  You've
prob'ly had complaints about _me_, too!  'That crazy Green girl.  Why
doesn't somebody _do_ something?'  What _I_ say is, why don't people
mind their own business and leave us alone?"

She stopped, not because she had finished but because something seemed
to get in the way of her going on.  She turned and looked out the
window.  Her shoulders seemed to be shaking.  Laura ran to her and
threw her arms around her.  Lydia tried to shake her off, but Laura was
tenacious and would not be shaken.

James and Kip looked at the floor.  Mr. Hiram Bundy got up from his
chair.  "There, there," he said, almost absently.  "There, there."

There was a silence.  Mr. Bundy walked up and down the carpet.  When he
spoke, it was in a low voice.  "There may be something in what you
say," he said.  "I confess you have put the matter to me in a new
light, though I can hardly take the responsibility..."  He broke off.
"What am I saying?  Of _course_ I can take the responsibility!"  He
straightened his shoulders.  "I _will_ take the responsibility!  I
shall tell the board tomorrow morning, and they can like it or lump it!"

Lydia turned from the window.  She did not meet his eyes.  But she
said, "Thanks."

James held out his hand in a manly way.  "Sir," he said, "you won't
regret this decision."

"Then it's all right?" said Laura.

"You may tell your friend," said Mr. Hiram Bundy, "that she may
disregard the letter from the bank and remain as she is, at least for
the time being."

"Oh!"  Laura beamed at the others.  "Isn't it wonderful?  The magic
worked!"

"Yes," said Mr. Bundy, sitting at his desk again.  "I guess it did."

Deborah had been sitting on the floor playing one of her mystic games
with the pattern of the library carpet and some pennies she'd found in
her pocket.  Now she seemed to sense a change in the atmosphere and
looked up and around the room.  "Isn't the ogre wicked any more?" she
said.

"No," said Mr. Bundy from his chair, "he is thwarted."

"Oh."  Deborah looked thoroughly disappointed.  Then she trotted over
to where Mr. Bundy sat and put out her hand and touched his cheek.
"Poor," she said.

Kip giggled and whispered to Laura.  "She's soothing the ogre with her
baby hands!"

"Shush," said Laura.  It was too solemn a moment.

"And now," said Mr. Bundy, eying James's jacket and Laura's shoes
again, "since you seem to have had rather a desperate journey getting
here, perhaps I can offer you a lift home in my car?"

"Do you drive fast?" said Laura.

"Yes," said Mr. Bundy with considerable zest, "I do.  Will you come?"

Deborah drew herself up to her full height proudly.  "_They_ can," she
said, "but _I_ have my _horse_!"

And so it was that a few minutes later the town was startled by the
sight of Mr. Hiram Bundy's commodious sedan fairly zooming along, with
Lydia and Deborah galloping behind it, all the way down Elm Street.

"It's that crazy Green girl," said a woman passer-by.  "She is actually
_chasing_ poor Mr. Bundy's car.  Somebody ought to do something!"


When they got back to the red house, first of course there was hunger
to be placated (jam sandwiches and milk) and then of course all
thoughts turned to Miss Isabella King and breaking the good news to her.

Deborah had only with difficulty been pried from the horse long enough
to take nourishment, and now naturally she had to ride to Miss King's.
But Lydia walked the horse all the way on this trip, for everybody had
far too much to say to everybody else for them to be separated for a
moment.

Magic was the burden of Laura's song.  "_Now_ do you believe?" she kept
saying.

"I don't know," James told her finally.  "It seemed to me what Lydia
said had a lot to do with it.  That was some speech, kid."

"Forget it," said Lydia gruffly.

"It was a wonderful speech," said Laura.  "But maybe it was the magic
that helped her say it."

"Rave on," said James.

"Mr. Bundy knew there was magic working," said Laura.  "He admitted it."

"Maybe he was just humoring the village idiot," said James.

They had crossed the bridge now and come to the fork in the road.
There was a black sedan parked by the turnoff, and Laura thought it
looked familiar.  The others seemed too busy puffing up the twisty,
dusty, winding trail to notice, and Laura held her peace.  After all,
one black sedan was very much like another.  And if she was right, it
was more evidence to store up.

But when they reached Kingdom House, voices were heard coming from the
parlor window.  "I knew it!" said Laura, aloud.

"Shush," said James.

With one accord the five children tiptoed to the porch and peeked in.
Mr. Hiram Bundy sat in the tiny parlor, balanced precariously on the
edge of a chair with an empty Wedgwood plate balanced precariously on
his knee.  Miss Isabella King sat opposite him, pouring tea.  Her face
was wreathed in smiles, and the children knew somehow that their good
news did not need to be broken.

"Your temper does not seem to have improved with the passing years,
Hiram," Miss Isabella was saying.

"Dang it, Isabella, I'm still out of breath," said Mr. Bundy.  "Why
_will_ you insist on living off on a rocky crag where a decent car
can't penetrate?  Curse and blast it, I have to consider my springs!"

"At _your_ age, Hiram," said Miss Isabella sweetly, "I should think you
would.  Have another slice of cake."

As Laura watched Mr. Bundy take the slice of cake from Miss Isabella,
she suddenly gasped (noiselessly) and made excited signs to the others.
They all tiptoed off the porch again and ran to the brink of the silver
mine, James taking care that Deborah didn't fall.

The others sat on the edge and dangled their legs over, while Laura
walked up and down in her excitement and told them.

"It _is_ magic.  I know it now," she said.  "I didn't tell you.  Last
night I wished on the well.  And I said I wanted Mr. Bundy to eat out
of Miss Isabella's hand.  And you saw what just happened.  That proves
it."

"Unless it's a quincidence," said Kip.

James thought this over.  "I guess it's too much of a one," he said.
"I guess maybe there is magic, in a way."

"Of course it's 'in a way,'" said Laura.  "It's _modern_ magic.  It
would have to move with the times like anything else, wouldn't it?  The
way I figure is, it has to be unselfish.  Modern magic is doing good
turns to people.  Only they always come out right--that's where the
magic comes in.  Those first wishes didn't work because they were
selfish.  Then the magic gave us another chance when it sent Miss
Isabella.  And we came through!"

"Gee!" said Kip.  "If that's right, we can go on helping people right
and left, all summer!  We can hold the whole town in the hollow of our
hand!  We can do good turns to _everybody_!"

"Whether everybody likes it," said Lydia, a bit grimly, "or not!"

"We little know," said Laura, "the power we wield!"

"We can be malevolent despots!" said Kip.

"This," said James, "will take some thinking out.  Let's go back to the
house and think right now."

The five children got up and started away from the mine.  They had got
as far as the barn when Laura stopped.  "Wait," she said.  "Look!"

Mr. Bundy and Miss Isabella had come out onto the porch.  Mr. Bundy was
bending over in a low bow.

"What's he doing," said Kip, giggling, "biting the hand that fed him?"

"No," said Laura, rapt.  "He's _kissing her hand_!"

Another moment and Mr. Bundy went tramping down the twisty trail and
Miss Isabella went back inside.  She appeared to be singing to herself.

"Well?" said Laura.  "Has everybody seen enough?  Shall we go home?"

"Horse," said Deborah happily.




5.  The Long-Lost Heir

"How'll we get organized?" said Kip next morning, as the four children
sat under the apple tree behind the red house.  "Shall we go out and
hunt for the magic or let the magic come to _us_?"

Everybody looked at Laura.  After all she was the one who had realized
there _was_ magic in the first place.

"Well," said that priestess of the unseen slowly, wrinkling her
forehead, "I don't see that it much matters.  I think we ought to just
go about our daily life and keep our eyes peeled for when opportunity
knocks."

"Good," said James.  "Then let's go explore that river.  I've always
wanted to track one to its source."

But the others rejected this.  "What good turns could we do _there_?"
said Lydia scornfully.  "We don't want to waste our magic on mere
_beavers_!  Let's go where there're people."

And all agreed that town was where there were the most of these.

"Ought we to speak to the well first?" Kip wondered, as they went down
the path to the gate.

"How can we till we know what we want to wish?" said Lydia.

"We might drop it a hint," said Kip.

Laura paused by the wellhead.  She looked down sternly at the
mysterious depth below.  "You know," she told it meaningfully.  And
they started up the road.

The first part of their journey was unproductive.  All they met were a
milkman who seemed quite happy in his work and sundry squirrels who
appeared equally well adjusted.  And the houses they passed looked
serene and untroubled under the morning sun.

"Maybe we ought to start ringing doorbells," said James.  "Maybe we
ought to have a door-to-door campaign.  _Somebody_ must have a problem!"

Laura shook her head.  "It'll come when it comes.  You can't force it."

A man came walking down the road toward them, and the four children
quickened their steps.  Maybe now the adventure would start.

But the man's face, as he came nearer, was wreathed in smiles and he
swung a hickory stick jauntily.  "What weather!" he cried.  "Glorious.
Up at six.  Did three miles already.  Mean to do three more.  Makes you
glad to be alive, doesn't it?"

"Sure, I guess it does," said Kip, rather dispiritedly.

"No good we can do _him_," said James, when the man had passed.

"Not a care in the world," agreed Lydia bitterly.

A car slowed up beside them and a woman looked out.  "Want a ride?  Hop
in," she said.  So they hopped in.  Maybe this time opportunity would
really knock.

But the woman's face was plump and jolly and her voice had the ringing
tones of utter optimism.  "Isn't it a glorious day?" she said.  "So
cool for July!"

"Here we go again," muttered James to Lydia.  "'What weather!  Makes
you glad to be alive!'"

The woman had overheard.  "It certainly does!" she cried.  "You took
the words right out of my mouth!"

"Don't despair," muttered Lydia to the others.  "Maybe she wears a
painted smile to hide a breaking heart."  She raised her voice.  "But
don't you sometimes feel," she said, "that it's all a mockery?  When
you've got troubles down inside, doesn't a wonderful day like this make
you feel _worse_?"

"It certainly doesn't!" said the woman.  "Times I feel like that, I
just jump in my little car, throw out the clutch, and away I go!"

And she suited the action to the words, zooming along the road blowing
her horn and waving at the other motorists and now and again singing
snatches of song, "I Love Life" and "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella."

"Whew!" said James, when the enthusiastic woman had finally set them
down at the corner of Main and Elm.

"'You took the words right out of my mouth,'" quoted Kip, giggling.

"The trouble with this town," said Lydia, "is that everybody's too
darned _happy_!  Nobody needs a helping hand at all."

It may have been that the magic overheard these hapless words and took
its revenge.  Or, as Kip said afterwards, it may have been a
quincidence.

But hardly had he and Laura and Lydia and James taken three steps down
Main Street when a voice hailed them.

"Oh, children!" were its insulting words.

Kip and Laura and Lydia and James looked up and down the street.  No
children seemed to be in sight.

"Oh, children!" said the voice again, and this time there was no
mistaking whom it meant.  A woman was standing in the door of the art
supply store, looking straight at them.  Her arms were piled high with
framed masterpieces.  "Children," said the woman for the third time, "I
am in charge of arranging the pictures for the sidewalk art show and my
team hasn't showed up.  I know you won't mind helping.  It's a civic
project."

"Oh," said James and Kip and Lydia and Laura.

"You boys can just carry these screens around and space them by the
curbstone," said the woman, "and the girls can help me hang the
pictures."

"What's it all in aid of?" said James, who had heard this phrase
somewhere.

"Why, it's to encourage our local amateur artists!" said the woman.  "I
guess we'll show people our town's got talent!  Anybody can enter and
just about everybody _has_!"

As the four children surveyed the crowded interior of the art store, it
did indeed look as if this were true.  There were forty of the big,
heavy screens for James and Kip to place strategically along Main and
Elm Streets, and each screen could display six pictures.

And as Laura and Lydia and the women dealt with these, Laura began to
feel that perhaps too many local artists had been encouraged.  Some of
the pictures were good, but there were the usual woolly landscapes and
studies of squinting sinister Arabs and stalwart Indian chiefs.  And
there were others so modern and strange that Laura and the woman
couldn't decide which way was up and which way was upside down.  But
somehow Lydia always knew.

And so the morning wore on and the sun grew hotter, and perspiration
dewed each brow, and the magic didn't see fit to come to their aid or
make the minutes go by any faster.  By the time the tardy members of
the woman's team arrived to take over, nearly two hours had passed, and
James and Kip and Laura and Lydia agreed that it was time to cheer
their flagging spirits with hot butterscotch sundaes.

Kip and Lydia led the way to the other drugstore, not the best one nor
the fairly good one, but the old one that hardly anybody ever went into
any more.  Kip felt sorry for it because its interior was dim and dingy
and fly-haunted, and Lydia liked it because it had old bottles of red
and green water in the windows and the woman clerk always acted so
surprised when any customers came in at all.

"Honestly, some of those pictures!" said Laura ten minutes later,
licking the last strings of butterscotch from her spoon.  "Why, any of
us could do one as good as _those_!"

"Let's!" said Kip.

Everybody looked at everybody else.

"She said anyone can enter," said James.  "Who are we to be behindhand?"

There was an investigating of pockets.  James and Laura had
twenty-seven cents between them, and Kip, who had treated them all to
the sundaes, had the change left over from two dollars (money he had
earned mowing lawns).  Lydia had nothing at all.

Altogether there was enough to buy a drawing pad and a box of crayons,
and the reluctant woman clerk was summoned again from the dark beyond
where she preferred to stay.

After that there was concentrated silence for a while, but then James
and Kip began looking over each other's shoulders and snickering and
pushing each other's elbows and at last crumpled their papers up and
announced that they couldn't draw for nuts.

"It's harder than it looks," James admitted.

Laura persisted for a while.  She had a marvelous scene in mind, blue
sky and green trees and white houses, all fresh and new-washed, the way
they had looked early that morning when she had come along the road,
but somehow the crayons refused to cooperate.  And no magic touch came
to guide her faltering hand, either.  At last she too crumpled up her
picture and looked idly across the table at Lydia's.  Then she looked
again.

Lydia had used only the black crayon, and at first what she had done
seemed like just a lot of meaningless lines and curves, but when Laura
looked a second time, she saw that the curves were eyes and that the
picture was dozens and dozens of pairs of eyes that seemed to be
looking straight at her and that somehow added up to form a pattern and
even seemed to say something, though Laura wasn't sure just what.

The others were looking at Lydia's picture now, too.

"That's good," said James judicially.

"No it isn't," said Lydia.

"I didn't know you could draw," said Kip.

"I can't.  It's just doodling," said Lydia.  She made as if to crumple
up her paper like the others.

"Don't!" said Laura, snatching it away.

And then the drawing was forgotten (for the moment) as they all pushed
back their chairs and got up, and Kip knocked a nickel against the
glass counter-top to lure the woman clerk from her inner fastness.  He
paid for the art materials, and the four children started for the door.
And it was then that they found the long lost heir.

"Aren't you forgetting your little brother?" said the woman.

James and Kip and Laura and Lydia looked around.  The woman did not
stay for an answer but retreated into the gloom at the rear.

It was Lydia who saw the little boy first.  He was a very little boy
and he was sitting silent and contented on the floor in a far corner of
the store, playing with a celluloid pinwheel.

"Well, for heaven's sake!" said Lydia.  "Are you lost?"

"Lost," said the little boy contentedly.

Lydia went up to him.  "Can't you find your mother?"

"Mother," said the little boy, throwing his arms possessively round one
of Lydia's legs and beaming up at her angelically.

"Aw!" said Lydia, her iron soul melting.

"He _is_ lost," said Laura.

"Or strayed," said Kip.

"We'd better take him to the police station right away," said James.

"No!" cried Laura.  "Don't you see?  It's the magic working at last!
It's our good turn for today.  It must be.  We're supposed to find him
and take him home _by ourselves_!"

James was studying the little boy.  "He's dressed awful fancy," he
said.  "He's probably the long-lost heir to untold millions."

"Only the richest velvet is allowed to touch his satin skin," said Kip,
giggling.

"Exactly!" said Laura.  "We'll restore him to his sorrowing parents and
earn priceless rewards!"  She lowered her voice.  "He's probably been
kidnaped and held for ransom.  This place is probably a thieves' den in
disguise!  It _looks_ like it!  That's probably why they never seem to
want any customers!"

And the others agreed that this was only logical.

"But the woman wanted us to take him," objected Kip.

"She's probably the kidnaper's downtrodden wife, like Nancy Sikes,"
said Laura.  "She was probably feeling remorseful.  She might change
her mind any minute and betray us to the gang!  We've got to get out of
here!  Come on!"

"Come on!" repeated James, chirping encouragingly at the little boy.

"Carry," said the little boy, holding up his arms trustingly.

"Oh!" cried Lydia, melting again.  She scooped the little boy up in her
arms and held her cheek against his.  "Oh, tweety wee swummy doodle!"

James and Kip looked away in disgust.  Laura marveled.  She would never
have recognized Lydia in this guise.

But this was no time to be standing here marveling.  "Hurry!" she
breathed.  And the four children stole out of the drugstore (or
kidnapers' den), Lydia carrying the long-lost heir.

Once in the everyday light of Main Street, things didn't seem quite so
perilous, and Laura remembered something.

"Wait here," she said.  "I have to go straighten that last picture I
hung."

"Honestly!" said Kip.  "At a time like this!"

"Psst," James hissed in his ear, and gave him a meaningful look.  The
two boys squinted across Main Street at the art store and watched what
Laura did.  Lydia was too busy exchanging endearments with the little
boy to notice.

"There," said Laura a second later, rejoining them.

"Now what?" said Kip.

"Back to the wishing well, I'd say," said James, "and bring it up to
date, just to make sure."

So they turned their steps toward Silvermine Road.

Luckily a woman offered them a lift before they'd gone a block, and as
luck would have it, it was the same optimistic woman who had brought
them into town that morning.  Now she proved to be not only optimistic
but inquisitive.

"Well!  Something new has been added!" she cried enthusiastically.  "Is
that your baby brother?"

"Brother," said the little boy contentedly, and the four children did
not correct him.  If that was the way the magic wanted it to be, so be
it.

"Where'd you find him?" went on the woman.

"He was waiting in the drugstore," said Laura.  After all, that was
perfectly true.

The woman set them down at the red house, and Laura was first to reach
the wishing well.

"We found the long-lost heir all right," she told it.  "Now let us get
him back to his ancestral acres and earn the reward."

The wishing well gave its usual reply (silence).

"What next?" said Kip.  "How do we know where to take him?"

"Why not ask him?" said Lydia.

"That's right," said James.  "We never thought of that."

The four children formed a circle round the long-lost heir, who was
sitting contentedly on the grass blowing his pinwheel.

"Where do you live?" asked Laura.

"Home," said the long-lost heir.  And that was all they could get out
of him.

"So much the better," said James.  "Now it's up to the magic to show
what it can do.  He can play with Deborah in the meantime.  Let's have
lunch."

But when they went inside, it turned out that James and Laura's parents
had gone to Stamford to another auction and taken Deborah with them.
The note they had left went on to say that sandwiches were to be found
in the refrigerator, and these, when scrupulously divided, made a
frugal repast for five.

"And now," said James, "let's go explore that river.  The magic'll find
us wherever we are.  No sense in sitting around waiting.  A watched
well's no better than a watched pot."

"What about _him_?" said Laura.  "We can't leave him alone here and
he'll be too heavy to carry."

"I don't mind," said Lydia in her newfound character of little mother.

"You won't have to," said Kip.  "They've got an old rowboat down at the
tearoom that we can prob'ly hire.  I've still got fifty cents left."

And when they arrived at the tearoom (Lydia trundling the heir in the
garden cart), it turned out that the people would gladly accept fifty
cents down and the rest on trust; so _that_ was all right.

As the four children (and the heir) shoved off from shore, the sound of
a fire engine was heard in the distance, and James and Kip briefly
regretted not being on dry land and able to chase after it on their
bikes.  But the sound died away in the distance and was soon forgotten
in the joy of watery exploration.

Under the bridge by the tearoom the river was narrow and trickly, and
the boat bumped against rocks.  But around the first bend was a wide
lakelike part edged with waterlilies and dark with ducks that scattered
before them, making the air sound with their wingbeats.  Kip shipped
the oars and let the boat drift awhile.  The sun was warm and the water
sparkled.  Lilies were picked and frogs caught and let go again.
Perfect peace was enjoyed by all.  The long-lost heir slumbered in
Lydia's lap.  Perhaps some others slumbered, too.

How many hours went by in soporific floating will never be known.  But
James was not one to forget a cherished goal for too long.

"Let's go," he said suddenly, stirring himself.  "'Out of the hills of
Habersham, down the valleys of Hall!'"

"Only we're not; we're going _up_stream," pointed out Kip practically.

James rowed for a while, but what Kip had said proved all too true, and
he made small headway against the current, for now the river grew ever
more deep-gorged and dramatic and rapids-y, and the rocks were big and
sharp and hazardous.  Around another bend a roaring waterfall appeared
ahead, blocking their way.

"This is too much of a good thing," said James.  "We'll have to
portage."

He picked out a safe-looking landing spot and Lydia set the long-lost
heir on the shore.  That is how his trousers got muddy behind.  The
others clambered out after him, and James and Kip managed to get the
boat out of the stream.  They carried it while the girls went on ahead.
At the waterfall everybody stopped and Kip showed the others how to
walk behind it.  That is how the long-lost heir's shirt got so wet.

But whatever comes down must have been up, and this is true of shore as
well as water.  So next to the waterfall were rocky heights to scale,
and Laura helped the boys get the boat up these.  Every once in a while
Lydia had to help, too.  When she did this, she set the heir down, and
every time she did, he began to crawl.  That is how he got muddy in
front and lost a shoe.

All this took a long puffing time, but luckily there was a sunny
clearing at the top and everybody collapsed with moans of languor and
lay prone or supine for a while, making desultory conversation.
Everybody except the heir.  Having had no work to do, he was still
fresh as a daisy and crawled around them in a circle, inspecting the
local plant and insect life.  That is how he got the mud on his face
and the leaves in his hair.

Next to the clearing was a broad calm level stretch of river, and it
was James who got his breath back first and suggested that they board
the boat once more.  This time Lydia rowed.  As she pulled away from
the bank, the others thought they heard a fire siren again, but the
noisy waterfall was still too near for them to be sure.

Ever and anon along their course the four children had seen houses on
the bank, comfortable country-ish places surrounded by all the natural
beauties of wood and water.  Now as they rounded the next bend, they
saw a house of another color.

Its color was pink, but that was not the only unusual thing about it.

It was big and modern and low and glassy and no expense had been
spared.  There were greenhouses and tool houses and summerhouses
galore.  No remnant of the original woods had been allowed anywhere
near it.  As for the river, it had been neatly dredged and made to look
as much like an artificial swimming pool as possible, with all the
lovely natural rocks carted away.

Where the woods had once been, all was bland rolling lawn and paved
driveway.  And in the driveway were parked not one, not two, but three
sports cars.  One was a Porsche, one was a Jaguar, and one was a
wonderful new kind neither of the boys had ever seen before.  They
stared at it with the round eyes of utter car-worship.

"I've got to see this closer," said James.  "Pull for the shore,
sailor."  And Lydia did.

There was a neat dock, of course, with a diving board.  But as the boat
drew alongside, a woman in a cap and apron came from the house and ran
toward the dock, waving her arms in a fussy and henlike manner.

"Go away," she said.  "No trespassing.  This is private property."

"We're sorry," said Kip pleasantly.  "We thought this was a public
river."

"We thought we had riparian rights," added James.

"None of your big words!" said the woman.  "The nerve!  Nasty
sight-seers, coming to spy on Madam in her grief.  Morbid, I call it!"

"We're sorry," said Kip again.  "We'll be going, right away."

At this moment the long-lost heir leaned out of the boat.  "Fussy," he
said.

"She certainly is!" said Lydia.  "As if we'd hurt her old dock!  Let's
go."

But the woman on the dock was staring at the heir.  "Master Harold!"
she cried.  "Found!  Found at last!  Come to Fussy!"  And she held out
her arms.

"Won't," said the long-lost heir, turning away.

"Wait a minute," said James.  "Is this your nurse or something?"

For answer, the heir made a face and hid behind Lydia.

The four children hesitated.  But the woman did not.  She began waving
her arms and screaming hysterically.  "Kidnapers!" she cried.
"McTavish!  Call the men!  Call the Madam!  Set the dogs on them!"

A man came running with a rake.  He gave a whistle and more men
appeared, with two great Baskerville-looking hounds.  The man with the
rake caught the side of the boat and pulled it against the dock.

"You needn't bother," said Lydia, with frigid dignity.  "I can land
perfectly well."

But nobody heard her because quite a crowd had collected by now and
everyone was talking (or barking) at once without seeming to make any
sense whatever.  The word "kidnapers" was frequently heard.

A richly dressed lady came running from the house and joined the group.
She was just about the prettiest lady any of the four children had ever
seen.  As Kip said afterwards, movie stars weren't in it with her.  And
the girls agreed that that was putting it mildly.

But right now her lovely face was distorted with emotion, and sounds of
a peacock-like nature issued from her marble throat as she beheld the
boat and its contents.

"What have you done with my baby?" she cried.

The four children regarded the muddy, damp, leafy,
one-shoe-off-and-one-shoe-on heir and had to admit in their minds that
they might have returned him in better condition.

"They stole him!" cried the woman called Fussy before anyone else could
answer.  "Dirty, common children they are!  They stole him while my
back was turned!"

This was too much for Lydia.  Dirty she might be, but common never.
"The idea!" she said.  "We saved him from a den of iniquity, that's
all!"

"And brought him back to his ancestral acres," added Kip.

"By magical means," put in Laura.

"Your back must have been turned a good long while," said James.  "We
were in that drugstore twenty minutes at _least_ and never saw hide nor
hair of you."

"Oh, the horrid fibbers!" cried the Fussy woman.  "I _may_ have passed
the time of day with a friend, but I wasn't gone thirty seconds."

At this everyone began talking at once again.  The dogs, which as James
put it later seemed more basking than Baskerville, added to the
confusion by wreathing around people's legs, barking happily.

A man came up to the group.  He was as handsome as the lady was
beautiful and as richly dressed.  At first his face looked drawn and
worried, but as he listened it relaxed, and when he spoke, Laura
thought she saw a smile starting at the corners of his eyes.

"Just a minute," he said.  "I suggest we could discuss this better on
dry land and indoors.  And with only the immediate parties concerned
present."

The child Harold was handed ashore, not without a determined struggle
on his part to remain in the boat, and borne off an unwilling prey to
the ministrations of the Fussy woman, though Laura thought the Fussy
woman looked as if she would rather have stayed.  The crowd of men
dispersed, taking the dogs (still barking) with them, but first tying
the boat to the dock.  James and Laura and Kip and Lydia followed the
lady and gentleman into the house and through a plant-ridden hall to
the living room.

The living room was long and low and furnished in the finest chromium,
with decorative pieces of driftwood sitting on all the tables.

"Sit down," said the father of the heir.  "Begin at the beginning."

And Laura did, beginning farther back than James wished she would.  She
told all about the magic and the adventures so far and how they planned
to spend all the rest of the summer doing good turns to everybody.

"Very interesting," said the man.  "But if bringing my son home was
your next good deed, may I point out that you might have done it with a
little more dispatch?  He has been missing for _eight hours_!"

"Oh dear," said Laura.  "Has he?"

"Good grief!" said James.  He turned to Kip.  "And tonight's the night
we're all due at your house for dinner!  We'll be late."

"That," said the man, "can be arranged.  But not yet.  Go on.  Tell me
more."

"We've been just frantic!" said the lady, before James could.  "We had
the police out and the Volunteer Fire Brigade and everything!"

"We thought we heard sirens," said James, "but we were too busy to take
much notice."

"You were too busy," said the man.  "I see.  Go on."

"It was even broadcast on the radio!" the woman interrupted again.

"And one interesting clue turned up," said the man.  "A woman phoned us
that she had given a lift to some children with a little boy.  They
_said_ he was their little brother."  And he looked at the four
children.

"We let her think that," said Laura, "to save time."

"To save time," repeated the man.  "Interesting.  And what did you save
the time _for_?  What were you too busy _doing_?  If I may ask."  His
tone was grim, but Laura did not think he was really very angry.

"We were tracking the river to its source," said James.  "I guess we
went to sleep for a while, too.  And that's quite a climb along by the
waterfall.  It's a tough trip."

"Poor little baby!" said the mother of the heir.  "He was just
exhausted."

"Ahem," said her husband.  "As to that, I cannot see that my son has
suffered any irreparable harm.  In fact, he seems to have enjoyed the
whole thing thoroughly.  I've no doubt a few more tough trips and a
little less Fussiness (and here Laura could have sworn he winked at
them) would do him a great deal of good.  However"--and here his face
became stern again--"I suggest that when you do your next good deed,
you _finish_ it before starting some other adventure.  And when in
doubt, ask a policeman."  He relaxed.  "And now, since the _long_-lost
heir is at _last_ returned to his sorrowing family, I should think a
celebration is in order.  What would you like?"

"We didn't do it for a reward," said James.  "Not mainly."

"We did it for the glory of it," beamed Laura.  "And to test the magic."

"But if you _do_ want to do anything for us," said James, "a ride in
that car would be dandy."

"Not the Jag or the Porsche but the other one," said Kip.  "You could
take us home and kill two birds with one stone."

"That," said the gentleman, "I was meaning to do anyway.  However.  We
shall see.  In the meantime, come along."  He grinned at them.

The lady, too, managed a smile, but it was a pale and wan one and her
heart was not in it.  You could see that she was thinking of their
muddy feet on her good rugs (except that the floors were not carpeted,
being all of glossy imported imitation-marble tiling).

As for the boat, Kip said he thought he could bribe the older boy next
door to pick it up after dinner that night in his family's station
wagon; so all loose ends were taken care of.

The strange and wonderful sports car proved to be all that James or Kip
could have desired.  You would not have thought that all four children
and the man could fit in, but somehow, what with laps and squashing,
this was managed.  And luckily part of the road home was straight and
broad and un-trafficky and the man could really let it out.  The entire
undertaking was not much of a reward to Laura, but she shut her eyes
and bore it.

James was thoughtful as they walked up the path to Kip's house (after
saying good-by to the man and his car).  "I don't know," he said.  "It
seems to me the magic could have done better.  If there _is_ magic."

"We're not going to start all that again, are we?" said Laura.  "Of
course there's magic.  It took us right there to the heir's home,
didn't it?"

"It _took_ us there," said James.  "But _right_ there you couldn't say.
As far as I can see, all we did was make the long-lost heir lost
_longer_.  He'd have been rescued ages ago if we'd let well enough
alone."

"But we had the fun of doing it," said Laura.  "Anyway, maybe that
drugstore _is_ a thieves' den.  Maybe something awful would have
happened to him if he'd stayed there another minute."

"Or maybe the magic put him there in the first place," said Kip, "to
teach us a moral lesson."

"Ugh!" said James.

"Anyway, you got your ride in your old sports car," pointed out Lydia.

"That's true," said James.  "There _is_ that."

Lydia was coming to dinner at Kip's house, too.  It was Kip's mother's
idea that all the families should get acquainted.  Lydia's grandmother
had been asked, but had declined.

And yet when the four children entered the living room, there was old
Mrs. Green with the others.  There seemed to be an air of excitement in
the room, and all the parents and guardians were looking at the
children in rather an odd way, as if they wondered what they would do
next.

"Where have you been?" said Kip's mother.  "We've been waiting and
waiting.  I suppose you've heard the news?"

"Oh, did you hear about it, too?" said Kip.  "On the radio, I suppose.
And the fire engines and all.  Well, don't worry.  It all ended fine."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Kip's mother.  "I meant
about the sidewalk art show."

"What?" said Laura, remembering something.

And it turned out that her guess was right, because what she had done
that morning when she ran across the street and pretended to straighten
a picture was enter Lydia's drawing in the show, and it turned out that
the judges had been very impressed by it and had given Lydia a special
award for the most promising work by a student.

Lydia's first reaction when she heard was one of fury, which was
typical.

She turned on Laura.  "How dare you put that in without telling me?"

But Laura had known Lydia long enough now to be undisturbed by her
wrath.  "I just thought I would," she said airily.  "I knew you never
would yourself.  You'd rather feel unappreciated and that nobody cares.
But it's nice when you find out that you aren't and they do.  Isn't it?"

"Yes," said Lydia after a minute.  "I guess it is."  But she still
looked stunned.  "They can't mean it," she said.  "It was just
doodling."

"Would," said her grandmother, "that I could doodle as well.  Why
didn't you ever tell me you could draw?"

"I didn't know I could," said Lydia.  "If I can."

"You can," said old Mrs. Green.  "Not that you don't have a lot to
learn still.  I suppose if I'd paid more attention, I might have
guessed you had it in you.  I'm a selfish old woman.  Still, I suppose
it's too late to change."

"Are you sure you won't stay for dinner?" said Kip's mother.

Old Mrs. Green looked for a minute as if she would almost like to.
Then she shook her head.  "I haven't dined out in years.  No point in
starting now.  Thanks just the same.  I'm a cantankerous curmudgeon and
let's leave it at that."  And she stumped away, looking more
wild-haired and witchlike than ever.

Laura looked after her.  It seemed to her that Lydia and her
grandmother had a lot in common.  Still, it was wonderful how the magic
had brought Lydia out.  Maybe if it got a chance, it could bring old
Mrs. Green out, too, and smooth her down and brighten her up.  Maybe it
would be worth while _giving_ it a chance and letting it try.

She came to herself to find everyone looking at her and laughing.

"What is it?" she said.

"Dinner is served," James told her.  "Kip's mother just told you for
the third time.  Where've you been?  Come on down to earth and let's
eat."

And they did.




6.  The Mob-led Queen

It was the next afternoon, as the four children were sitting by the
wishing well planning what good deeds to perpetrate next, that James
and Kip suddenly pricked up their ears ("just like a couple of old
pointer dogs," as Lydia put it) at the magic sound of sports car upon
the breeze.  And the father of the long-lost heir came speeding round
the bend and stopped at the gate in the picket fence.

"The rest of the reward," he told them, grinning, as they clustered
round the car.  And he handed out four small packages and wouldn't take
no for an answer, but zoomed away before even Lydia could get her
outside wrapping undone.

The four packages contained a gold wrist watch each, and the four
children were suitably grateful.  Moreover, they got the point.

After that, whenever they encountered the father of the heir in town,
he would sing out, "What time is it?" and the four children always
knew.  But when he would go on to ask how the magic was coming, and
when on another occasion they met Mr. Hiram Bundy and he asked the same
thing, there was less to report.

The next few days were ordinary ones, as _will_ sometimes happen in
even the most magical of vacations.  No further lost people were found,
and no strangers came tapping at the door except a woman who wanted to
know where the Butterworths lived and a boy who was working his way
through college selling subscriptions to _The Saturday Evening Post_.

Laura was sure these might be more visitors from another world in
disguise and wanted to follow them and see where the trail might lead,
but James counseled against it.

"We don't want to start overreaching again," he said, "the way we sort
of did last time.  Let the magic take its course from now on.  It'll
let us know when it's ready."

But as the year turned on and July got to be August, Laura grew more
impatient.  The four children sat on the sun-warmed rocks at the foot
of Kip's mother's rock garden one afternoon and discussed the situation.

"Don't worry," said Kip.  "It's probably just building up to something
big.  This is probably just the calm before the storm."

"We want to keep on our toes, though," said Laura.  "You never can tell
when it'll strike.  Look at that art show!"

"Honestly!" said James.  "You give the magic all the credit!  You
wouldn't think maybe a little talent had something to do with it?"

"It took the magic to bring it out," insisted Laura.  "Didn't it?"  She
turned to Lydia.

Lydia was a changed person these days.  Wherever she went, she had a
pencil in her hand and a drawing before her.  If no pencil was handy,
she used whatever was.  Now she was tracing a design in the earth with
a pointed stick.

"It's the knowing there's some point to it.  That's the thing," she
said after a minute.  "In school, before, the kids always said, 'Why
d'you draw such crazy pictures?'  And the teacher was always telling me
to paint from nature!"

"I know," said Kip sympathetically.  "It's like when I try to write
stories and they tell me to write what I know about!  If I _knew_ about
it, what would be the point of _writing_ it?"  He broke off, as voices
were heard from the garden above.  "Oh glory!" he muttered.  "I forgot.
Mother has to show Mrs. Witherspoon the garden today.  I meant to
escape."

"Mrs. _Gordon T._ Witherspoon?" said Lydia.  "Help!"

"Who's she?" said James.

"She's president of the Garden Club," said Kip, "and she's _horrible_."

"Ghastly," agreed Lydia.

"Why's she called Mrs. Gordon T. Witherspoon?" said Laura.  "How many
Mrs. Gordon Witherspoons are there?"

"One," said Kip, "is enough."

And as James and Laura peered up through greenery at Kip's mother's
guest, they had to agree in their minds that one of her would be ample.

"My dear," Mrs. Gordon T. Witherspoon was saying, eying an
inoffensive-looking plant with disfavor, "you don't grow _that_, do
you?  It's nothing but a pest!"  And transfixing the plant with the
point of her shooting stick, she dragged it from the earth, roots and
all, and cast it upon the path.

Kip's mother's face grew pink and she pressed her lips together, but
said nothing.

Mrs. Witherspoon went on stalking about the garden and criticizing its
contents in a forthright and unabashed manner, while the four children
scrooched down and hoped to escape notice.  Either they did, or Mrs.
Witherspoon was the type who thinks children shouldn't be heard or seen
either, for she treated their presence with a marble disdain.

"Now maybe she'll go," whispered Kip, when Mrs. Witherspoon had
disparaged the entire garden.

But she didn't.  She settled down on a garden seat as though she
proposed remaining there for some time.  "And now my dear," she said,
"as to the real reason I wanted to speak to you.  It's about next
week's town meeting.  We property owners must band together and block
that new school!"

Kip's mother's face grew pink and she pressed her lips together again.
But "What do you mean?" was all she said.

"Why, my dear," said Mrs. Witherspoon, "hadn't you heard?  The town
wants to build a great big new school right here on this road!  And you
know what that will mean!  Children running over the lawns all hours of
the day; we won't have a minute's peace.  Think of the traffic!  Those
noisy buses.  And _real estate values_"--here her voice took on the
important tone of one who deals with a sacred subject--"will go _down_!"

Kip's mother was looking really angry now.  But "I think we need a new
school," was all she said.

"Let them build it somewhere else, then!" said Mrs. Witherspoon
grandly.  "Though personally I don't see the necessity.  The more
schools we have, the more people will want to move here, and we'll lose
our lovely old village quality.  New York people," she added in tones
of distaste.

"_I_ came here from New York," said Kip's mother rather coldly.

"To be sure, my dear," said Mrs. Witherspoon, "but you've fitted in
beautifully.  No one would ever know.  As a matter of fact, Mr.
Witherspoon's people lived in Brooklyn Heights at one time.  But that
was years ago.  It's this new element we want to discourage."

"That means us," muttered James to Laura.

Lydia threw them a loyal look, and Kip made a strangling motion in the
direction of Mrs. Witherspoon.

Kip's mother was standing up now.  But she kept her voice polite.  "I'm
afraid I don't agree with you at all, Mrs. Witherspoon," she was
saying.  "We need that new school and I'm going to fight for it as hard
as I can.  All my friends are, too."

"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Witherspoon grimly, surging to her feet,
"you may find yourself in a very small minority.  A very small minority
indeed!  Most of the responsible people in town generally agree with
_me_!"  And she stumped away toward the front gate and didn't even
speak to Kip's father when he arrived home just then from his commuting
train, though he raised his hat politely.

"Honestly, Fred," the four children heard Kip's mother saying to Kip's
father a few minutes later, while he soothed her with a cooling
cocktail, "I was so mad I could hardly see.  She'll do it, too.  She'll
steam-roller that new school right out of existence, no matter what we
do.  Half the town follows her just like a flock of sheep!"

"And that's the truth," said Kip, as he and Laura and Lydia and James
wandered away from the house and into the road.  "Mrs. Witherspoon just
about runs this whole neck of the woods."

"She's a regular old queen," said Lydia.  "A regular old mob-led queen."

"What's that?" said James.

"It's Shakespeare," said Lydia.  "It means she led the whole mob.  I
think."

"That's Mrs. Witherspoon!" agreed Kip.

"I hadn't heard about this school," said James.  "Do we need it?"

"Yes," said Kip.  "We do."

"Then let's do something," said James.  "Let's get all _our_ friends to
come to town meeting and vote on our side."

"Who could we get?" said Kip practically (though ungrammatically).

"There's the long-lost heir's parents," said Laura.

"Summer people," said Kip.  "And weekends.  Probably never go to town
meeting at all."

"There's Miss King."  But even hopeful Laura could see that gentle Miss
King would stand small chance against Mrs. Gordon T. Witherspoon.

"Mr. Hiram Bundy?" suggested James.

Kip shook his head.  "He's a public figure.  Probably has to stay
nonpartisan."

And it was then that Laura saw their way clear before them.  "Then I
guess it's up to the magic," she said.

"That's right," said Kip.  "I was forgetting for a minute."

"This could be the big thing it's been building up to," admitted James.

"You mean we could get it to work on Mrs. Witherspoon?" said Lydia.

"How?" said Kip.  "Make an image of her and stick pins in it?"

"_No!_" cried Laura in horror.  "That might make her _worse_!  If she's
the way she is now, think what she'd be like with shooting pains!"

Everybody did, and shuddered at the thought.

"We could make an image and be _kind_ to it," said Lydia.  "Like the
children in _The Wonderful Garden_."

"Sure," said Kip, "and soothe it and pet it and lay flattering unction
to its soul!"

At the thought of soothing and petting an image that looked like Mrs.
Witherspoon, all four gave way to giggles.  Laura was the first to
recover.

"No, don't you see?" she said.  "That's exactly what we'll do, only we
won't use any old image.  We'll do it _directly_.  To _her_!"

"You mean we could do her good turns," said James.

"And dance attendance on her and minister to her every wish," said Kip.

"Why not?" said Laura.  "Then when she gradually gets used to us,
she'll see how nice school children can be, and she won't mind having
the school nearby at all!"

"I never thought," said Lydia, "that I'd ever go to any trouble for
that old school!"

"But it won't be," said Kip.  "It'll be a new one.  Wait and see.
Shall we start right now?"

"Better give her a chance to cool down," said James.  "It's getting
late, anyway.  Better begin first thing in the morning."

"Let's go tell the well," said Laura.

And they went and told it in no uncertain terms.

The rest of that evening was spent in planning their campaign.

"We ought to go bearing gifts," said James.  "Only what could we take?
What have we got that she hasn't got?"

"I could bake my butterscotch brownies," said Laura.  "Only she
probably has scads of servants tempting her with tasty viands all day
long."

"It's like picking out a Christmas present for somebody who has
everything," said Lydia.

"I guess we'll just have to take her our own sweet selves," said Kip.

And in the end that is mainly what they did.

Only Laura _did_ bake her butterscotch brownies and took a neat box of
them along, just in case.  And Lydia took along pencils and a drawing
pad, but then she would probably have taken these no matter where they
were going.  And Kip took along his instant-developing camera.  And
James took along a half-worked-out idea in his mind.

Kip and Lydia led the way, because they knew where the mob-led queen
lived.  But as they left James and Laura's back yard, Kip suddenly
smote his forehead.

"I was forgetting," he said.  "Gordy!"

Lydia groaned.

"Who's Gordy?" said James.

"Gordon T. Witherspoon, Junior," said Kip.

"You mean she has _young_?" said Laura.

"Just one," said Kip.  "Gordy."

"What's he like?" said James.

A discussion followed between Kip and Lydia as to whether Gordy was
worse than his mother or just a little bit better.  And they couldn't
agree as to exactly what was so awful about Gordy, either.  It wasn't
that he was sissy and he wasn't downright mean, exactly.

"He's kind of white," said Kip, "and he forgets to close his mouth."

"He's got big hot wet hands," said Lydia.  "I remember from that
ghastly dancing school, when we were young."

"He hangs onto you," said Kip.

"He gets terrible ideas," said Lydia.  "Still, maybe he won't be there."

"That's right."  Kip brightened.  "He's generally away.  Private
schools and camps.  You can see why."

Laura paused as they went by the wishing well and gave it a final word.
"This is the most important wish yet," she told it.  "More important
than the one about Miss King even.  The whole future of our country
depends on it.  We've got to be educated."

And they set out.

Mrs. Witherspoon's stately mansion lay just down Silvermine Road,
approached by way of a long curving sweep of black-top driveway.
Surprisingly enough, no one stopped the four children as they went
along this.  An army of gardeners was visible, but each one was too
busy raking and clipping and operating sprinklers to notice.

"One thing she _doesn't_ need," commented Kip, "is her lawn mowed."

Mrs. Witherspoon was entertaining a friend in the garden.  Her aspect
as she looked up was more forbidding than usual.  But the four children
summoned their courage and went straight up to her.

"Would you like some butterscotch brownies?" said Laura, holding the
box out.  "They're scrumptious."

Mrs. Witherspoon did not take the box.  "If it's Girl Scout cookies,"
she said, "I took six dozen just the other day, and you weren't to come
back for a year!"

Laura was incensed.  "It certainly isn't," she said.  "_Mine_ are
_homemade_!"

"Well, I don't want any," said Mrs. Witherspoon, "unless it's in aid of
an accredited charity.  No peddlers allowed."

James pushed in front of Laura.  "We're not peddling," he said.  "We're
making a friendly call.  We think neighbors ought to be neighborly.
Isn't there some little thing we could do for you?  Just name it.
Would you like a sketch of your house by a prize winner in the art
show?"

Lydia had already put pencil to pad.  But Mrs. Witherspoon made a sound
that in anyone less grand might have been described as a snort.

"The idea!" she said.  "My house has been painted by famous artists.
You can tell that little girl to stop drawing.  You won't get a penny.
Not a penny."

"Oh, there's no charge," said James.  "It's free.  Just part of our
friendly home service."

"Humph!" said Mrs. Witherspoon.  "That's what they all say, at first.
You don't fool me for a minute.  Not a minute."  She advanced toward
them, glaring threateningly.

"That's fine," said Kip.  "Now stop right there.  Don't move.  Smile."
His camera clicked.  Mrs. Witherspoon had not smiled.  "Now if you'll
just wait a second while I develop it..."

Mrs. Witherspoon put a hand to her forehead.  "This," she said, "is
persecution."

"You poor thing, does your head ache?" said Laura.  "Would you like me
to rub the back of your neck?"

Mrs. Witherspoon was trembling, whether with rage or fear it was
difficult to say.  "Don't you dare," she said.  "Don't you dare.  You
march right off this property before I call the police."

Everybody looked at James.  Even he didn't seem able to think of any
more friendly home services.  "I guess it's no use," he said.

"Yes," said Laura, "what's the good of being kind to somebody who won't
be kind back?"

"_I_ don't think she knows _how_," said Lydia.

"Why, the impudence, I never heard!" said Mrs. Witherspoon.

"I'd slap her hands!" chimed in her friend.

The four children retreated the way they had come.  "You see, Adele,"
they heard Mrs. Witherspoon saying as they departed, "that's the way
it'd be all the time.  Bad, impudent children trespassing on our
grounds.  Juvenile delinquents.  We've got to block that school."

"You're right, Florence," said her friend.  "I wasn't sure before, but
after what I just heard, you're right!  I'm changing my vote!"

"Now see what we've done!" said James, when they were safely behind a
bay of concealing shrubbery.  "We've made things worse.  We've lost one
of the few votes we had, even."

Everybody sat down on the grass in dejection.

"What'll we do _now_?" said Kip.

"Have some butterscotch brownies," said Laura.

There was a pause.  Nobody could think of any bright ideas and besides
all mouths were full.  A voice broke the silence.

"What are you doing?  Huh?" it said.

The four children looked up.  A boy was staring at them over the top of
the nearest shrub.  His hair and eyelashes were light and his jaw was
slack.  James and Laura knew at once that it could only be Gordy.

"Can I have a cooky?  Huh?" said that scion of grace and culture.

"Sure, help yourself," said Laura, passing him the box.

"Say, these are good," said Gordy explosively, through a mouthful of
cooky.

James got up, dusting crumbs from his knees.  "You can have what's
left," he said coldly.  "We're glutted."  He started for the gate and
the others followed.

"Where you going?  Huh?" said Gordy, tagging right along.  He put a
hand on James's shoulder.  James waited for him to take it off again,
but he didn't.

"_Est-ce ncessaire que ce_ goon come along _avec_ us?" he muttered to
the others.

"_Quel horreur!_" said Lydia.

"_Pourquoi_ not?" said kind Laura.

"Sure.  _Il est_ harmless," said Kip.

"What you talking?  French?" said Gordy.

"No, Choctaw," said James nastily.  Inside he was seething.  Not only
was their whole day a grisly failure, but now they were saddled with
this boring nincompoop.  Everything was utterly and completely ruined.
And they couldn't even have the satisfaction of going to the well and
bawling it out or pleading with it to try harder, because the thought
of letting a churl like this Gordy in on the magic was too degrading to
contemplate.

"Whaddaya say we go swim in the reservoir?  Whaddaya say?" said Gordy
at this moment.

"Grow up, Gordy," said Lydia shortly.  "With the whole river free to
swim in, why do you want to go pollute the water supply?"

"'Cause it's more fun," said Gordy simply.  "Sometimes the man chases
you."

James and Lydia rolled their eyes at each other.  What would they do
with this mindless incubus?  "Whaddaya say we walk to Wilton?  Whaddaya
say?" growled James in bitter mockery.

But Gordy was too thick-skinned to notice when he was being made fun
of.  Either that, or he had got used to it.  "Okay," he said, beaming
toothily.

And it turned out that was what they did.  Or at least they started to.
James wasn't quite sure where Wilton was, but he knew it was the next
town.  It ought to be a good long walk, he thought to himself savagely,
as he stumped along the road.  Maybe Gordy would get tired and go home.
Or at least it would help kill the rest of this depressing morning.

But it turned out that Gordy knew a short cut through the woods.  And
it turned out that he could shinny up a tree better than James and
almost as well as Kip.  He got dirtier than any of the rest of them,
too.  Maybe it was because he was so white to start out with.  Black
collected under his nose and among his whitish eyebrows.  This ought to
have made him look even worse, but somehow it didn't.  Somehow it made
him look more like a man and less like a mouse.  Pretty soon Laura and
Lydia were chatting along happily with him, almost as though he were
human.

"Honestly.  _Girls!_" muttered James to Kip out of the side of his
mouth.  "No discrimination."

But as time wore on, even James was almost beginning to get used to
Gordy.  Until they came on the house in the woods.

They came on it about ten minutes after they left the main road.  They
went over a wooded hill that was still thick with last fall's oak
leaves and there it was below them, little and old and grey and
forgotten.  A tangle of creepers framed its door.  Maple tree branches
pressed against the windows as though any minute they would break in
and grow right _through_.  Even from a distance you could tell that
nobody lived there, and that nobody _had_, for years and years.  Laura
broke off what she was saying, and she and Lydia and James and Kip
stood gazing at the house in awe.

"Hansel and Gretel," breathed Lydia.

"Snow White," added Laura.

"Whaddaya know?" said Gordy, his voice sounding unusually loud.  "I
never saw that before.  We must have got off the path."

"Maybe it wasn't _here_ before," said Laura.

"Huh?" said Gordy.

"Maybe it's only here on special days," said Laura.

"Once every hundred years," said Kip.

"Or when special people walk by," said Lydia.

"Whaddaya mean?" said Gordy.  "You talk crazy." He picked up a stone.
"Whaddaya bet I can't hit one of the windows from here?"

It was then that James gave Gordy up for the second time, and
completely.  He didn't trust himself to say anything.  He just turned
his back on Gordy and walked away, thrusting his hands in his pockets
for fear he would hit him.

Lydia's reaction was different.  She took Gordy by both shoulders and
whirled him around to face her.  "What's the matter with you?" she
said.  "Is that all you can think of when you see a wonderful old house
like that, breaking its windows?"

Gordy looked surprised.  "Well?  What am I _supposed_ to think?"

"Don't you have any finer feelings at all?" said Lydia.  "Are you just
_base_?  You might think all kinds of things.  You might think about
history, and time, and all the years it's stood there and all the
people who've lived in it.  You might think of poetry:

  '"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller.'

or 'The House on the Hill':

  'They are all gone away,
  The house is shut and still,
  There is nothing more to say.'"


Gordy was sincerely baffled.  "I don't get it.  It's not on a hill,
it's in a valley.  What's so awful if I break a window?  They're mostly
smashed in already, anyway."

Lydia rightly ignored this.  "Or," she said, "it might make you think
of magic."

"Huh?" said Gordy.  "Magic is for kids."

"Oh, _is_ it?" said Laura, joining in.  "That's all you know!"

"Yipes!" said James despairingly to Kip.  "That does it.  Here we go!"

Now Laura and Lydia were telling Gordy all about the well and the magic
and the adventures so far, except that they left out about the mob-led
queen, out of consideration for his feelings, base though they might be.

Gordy stood looking from one to another of them with his mouth open,
waiting for the signal to laugh.  Then it dawned on him that they might
be serious.

"You crazy?" he said.  "You mean it?"  He saw that they did.  "Okay.
If you're magic, c'mon!  Show me some magic tricks!"

"We can't," Laura told him.  "We've got the well working on an
important wish now.  It's too secret to talk about.  Trying to make it
do anything else would distract it."

At this, Gordy's behavior sank to lower depths.  Uttering a jeering
laugh, he went prancing and hooting down the slope toward the house,
waving his arms in a manner that James could only call asinine.  The
others hurried after, from some instinct to protect the house from this
mindless mockery.

"Look, ma, I'm magic!" yelled Gordy.  "Abracadabra!  Allez-oop!"  And
he made an amateurish magic pass at the door of the house.

It was then that it happened.

Slowly, creakingly, the door swung inward and remained invitingly (or
forbiddingly) open.

Everybody looked at everybody else.

"A quincidence?" said James.

"Or the wind," said Kip.

"Maybe it isn't," said Laura.  "Maybe it's the magic still working on
that wish.  Maybe we're meant to go in."

"What connection could this place have?" said James.  "Anyway, the
magic wouldn't work through _him_!  It wouldn't stoop to it."

"Maybe it would," said Laura.  "You never can tell with magic.  It's
very democratic."

Gordy was standing rooted to the spot.  His face (between the patches
of dirt) looked whiter than ever.  "Whaddaya say we go on home?" he
said now.  "Whaddaya say?"

This craven utterance awoke James's courage.  "Come on," he said.  He
and Kip strode forward manfully into the house, and the girls and Gordy
followed.

Inside all was dust and neglect and the nibble marks of squirrels.  Yet
the walls were covered with wonderful old paneling that was only
slightly damaged, and what furniture there was standing about looked
old enough to be antique at _least_.  The greenery pressing against the
small windows outside shut out most of the light, but as the eyes of
the five children became accustomed to the darkness, Lydia suddenly
gasped and pointed.  "Look!"

Everyone looked.

In the dust on the floor of the hall was a footprint.  It pointed away
from them.  Beyond it was another and another.  The trail led straight
across the hall and into a room on the right.

"D'you suppose we're meant to follow?" said Laura, dropping her voice
to a whisper.

"What if whatever it is is still in there, _waiting_ for us?" said Kip.

"It isn't," said Lydia.  "It came out again.  Look."  Sure enough,
another trail of footprints led back out of the room and across the
hall to the front door.

After that they felt better.  "Come on," said James.  "Maybe these
prints don't mean a thing.  Maybe they've been there for untold ages."

"They haven't," said Lydia, always the sharpest-eyed, "or there'd be
dust in them.  There isn't any at all, hardly."

"It still could be last month," said James, "or last year.  A year's
dust would be nothing to the dust of centuries."

With bated breath the five children tiptoed across the hall and peered
into the right-hand room.  It was empty of people (or ghosts) and
almost empty of furniture.  But across the room a little old desk stood
against the wall and the footsteps led straight up to it.  Loud with
relief, the five children raced across the room and James tried the
lid.  But the desk was locked.  There was a keyhole but no key.

"This is maddening," said Laura.  "We're _meant_ to get inside.  I
_know_ we are!"

But though they searched that room and the next one and then, growing
braver, ventured upstairs and ransacked the whole house, it was a
fruitless quest.  Several old rusty keys turned up, but none that would
fit the mysterious keyhole.

Gordy, growing ever more impossible again as he grew braver, was all
for breaking in the lid, but the others stopped him.

"You _can't_," said Lydia.  "It's old.  It's beautiful."

"Yeah, if you like that kind of thing," said Gordy.  "We've got a whole
room full of 'em at home.  My mom's crazy about all that stuff."

Laura was studying the desk.  There were initials on the lid, in
ornamental brasswork.  "M.A.," she read.

"A.M., _I_'d say," said Lydia.

"They're sort of twined together so you can't tell which," said Kip.

There were some books and papers piled on top of the desk, and James
started rooting among these to see whether the key were lying dormant
beneath them.  He picked up the top bunch of papers to move it away.
Then he stood staring at what he held in his hands.

What he held in his hands was a newspaper, a _New York Times_.  And it
wasn't yellowed with age or musty with time, either.  Its pages were
crisp and white and its ink was fresh and black.  It was folded to
handy carrying size, as though someone had just laid it down.  James
looked at the date.  Then he looked again.

"August 8, 1957," he said.

"That's today," said Laura, who always knew what date it was.

"Yes," said James.  "It is."

He dropped the paper.  There was a silence, as the eeriness of this
sank in.

"Those footprints," said Kip.

"Somebody _was_ just here," said Lydia.

There was another silence.

Gordy was the first to give utterance this time.  What he uttered was a
howl that was only half in fun.

"Wow," he said.  "Lemme outa here!"

Panic, even when it's partly put on, is catching.  Pretty soon it isn't
put on at all any more; it's the real thing.  Now prickles of fear
stirred each scalp.  The next instant there was a rush for the door.
Pushing and jostling and tumbling into each other, the five children
raced out of the house.  In the open air, relief found expression in
yells.  They went on running across the clearing and up the woodsy
slope.  It was Gordy who tripped over a root and fell down.

He got up again and took a step.  Then he looked surprised and his face
turned white and he grabbed hold of a maple sapling.  The others
stopped and came back.

"It's my ankle," said Gordy.  "I think I must have done something to
it."

"You've cut your knee, too," said Kip, pointing to where blood welled.

"Sorry," said Gordy.

"That's all right," said James.

"You couldn't help it," said Lydia.

The cut, when examined, proved painful but not too deep.  Laura bound
it up with her handkerchief.  A tourniquet was voted unnecessary.  And
now all agreed that the thing to do was get back to the main road as
quickly as possible and try to hitch a ride.  The trouble was that the
quickest way back led past the house.  But as no menacing form, ghostly
or otherwise, had issued from its door and come in pursuit, there
didn't seem to be anything against this.

"Silly of me to get scared," said Gordy.  "Prob'ly just a tramp."

"Tramps always read the latest _New York Times_, of course," said James
sarcastically.

"Maybe it was a bird watcher," said Lydia, "on a nature ramble.  If we
could find the house and start exploring it, somebody else perfectly
respectable could, too, couldn't he?  Prob'ly he's miles away by now."

But all the same, when James and Kip had made a seat of their hands and
Gordy had hoisted himself onto it, the five children gave the house a
wide berth and passed it in a slow procession at the farthest edge of
the clearing.  And everyone breathed easier when it was left behind.

Gordy, it was later agreed by all, behaved surprisingly well through
the whole ordeal.  Though it was plain that his knee and ankle were
hurting him all the time, he tried not to wince when James and Kip
jounced and jostled him.  And he kept on making jokes the whole way.
The jokes he made were no better than his conversation generally was;
still, it was sporting of him to try.

As they went along, Laura and Lydia held a conference about the
mysterious house and the locked desk.

"It must _mean_ something," said Laura.  "Otherwise, the magic wouldn't
have led us there.  Only what could it have to do with the new school?
That's the wish we're _on_!"

"I don't know," said Lydia.  "You never can tell with magic.  Maybe
it's just laughing at us."

"Do you mean," said Laura, "that it fixed things so we had to bring
Gordy along and then made him fall down on _purpose_?"

"I wouldn't put it past it," said Lydia.

"Anyway," Laura consoled herself, "the way Gordy looks now, we won't
have any trouble hitching a ride."

"Every time we take somebody along with us," agreed Lydia, "we seem to
bring him back sort of damaged."

And in truth, Gordy at this moment did indeed resemble a refugee from a
deadly invasion at _least_, with one knee in an incarnadined bandage
and the other black with leaf mold.  Falling down hadn't helped his
dirty face either, except that under and between the dirt he was now
whiter than ever with pain.

His companions looked only slightly more distinguished.  Perspiration
spangled Kip's brow, and James's shirttail was coming out.  Lydia had
torn her dress on a broken cedar branch and Laura had walked into a
tangle of wild raspberry and had definitely brier-patch legs.

Altogether it was a grisly sight that confronted the general public ten
minutes later when the five children burst through a final thicket of
black alder and out onto the main Wilton road.

A hundred feet down the road a stately limousine was advancing toward
them, headed in the direction of home.  Without hesitating, Lydia
stepped forward and barred the way, holding up one hand commandingly.
James wished she had waited for something more modest, a Volkswagen or
at most a Rambler.

The limousine swerved to avoid Lydia and at first seemed to be going to
pass them by.  But then a voice cried out from within.

"Can that be Gordy?" were its horrified words.

"Surely not!" said a second voice.

"It _is_!  Craddock, stop the car!" cried the first voice.  The
chauffeur stepped on the brake, pushed the reverse button, and the car
glided backwards, coming to a halt directly in front of the five
children.

From its luxurious depths glared a face on which the hot flush of rage
struggled with the ashen cheek of fear.

James took one look at the face.  "Help!" he said.  He meant it in more
ways than one.

"Gordy, Gordy!" cried the owner of the face.  "What have they done to
you?"

Gordy smiled toothily (and a bit shakily).  "Hi, Mom," he said.

A confused period followed.

There were cries of accusation and abuse from Mrs. Witherspoon and her
friend (for of course it was they), interspersed with expostulations
from Gordy, as the chauffeur helped him into the car.  When James and
Kip tried to help, too, Mrs. Witherspoon rose to new heights of fury.

"Don't you touch him!" she cried.  "Bullies!  Haven't you tortured the
poor boy enough?"

"Aw gee, Mom, no!" said Gordy.  "It wasn't like that!"

His mother brushed this aside.  "Then they've led you into mischief,"
she said, "and that's just as bad!"  She turned to her friend.  "It's
just as I was saying, Adele.  Juvenile delinquents.  Bad influences.
Hooliganism."

"You're right, Florence," said her friend.

"Gee, Mom, no, you've got it wrong!" said Gordy.  "They've been swell.
Whaddaya say we give them a lift, too?  Whaddaya say?"

"Certainly not," was what Mrs. Witherspoon said.  She leaned from the
car to address James and Kip and Laura and Lydia.  "You are the worst
children I have ever seen," she told them.  "If ever I find you
molesting my family or trespassing on my property again, it will mean
Juvenile Court!  Drive on, Craddock."

And the stately limousine glided away.  The last the four children
heard of it was the voice of Gordy wailing down the wind that gee, Mom,
now everything was spoiled, and, "Whaddaya say we go back and
apologize?  Whaddaya say?"

James and Laura and Lydia and Kip were left at the side of the road,
staring at each other in utter anticlimax.  And they didn't even have
the spirit to hail the next passing motorist but started plodding
homeward in silence and on foot.

"Who'd think," said Lydia after a bit, "that she'd be right there in
the first car that came along?  It'd take the magic to manage a thing
like that!"

"It certainly would," agreed James bitterly.  "If you ask me, that
magic's _black_!"

"Or else something's gone wrong with it and it's unworking," said Kip.

"Unless it's just doing it to make it harder," said ever-hopeful Laura.
"So we can push on nothing daunted and prove how really noble we can
be."

"What's the use?" said Lydia.  "She'll be more against the school than
ever now, even."  And this, while not too clearly put, was all too
plain to all.

"Still," said Kip, after another quarter-mile, "I don't think we ought
to give up.  I think we ought to do what we said before.  I think we
ought to talk to everybody."

"And there's still that house," said Laura.  "And those footprints.  I
don't think the magic just put them in.  I think they're supposed to
_lead_ us somewhere, only it's too much for our mortal minds to grasp!"

"At least we can try, I suppose," said James.  But he did not sound
very hopeful.

Still, for the next few days try was what they did.

That very evening they went to call on the father of the long-lost
heir.  He listened with interest to their problem and seemed
particularly attentive when they told about finding the house in the
woods.  But he made no comment till the end of the story.

Then he said, "All right.  If you ask me, you kids _deserve_ a good
school.  You can count on me.  I'll be there at town meeting with bells
on."

The lovely movie-starish lady had come into the room in time to hear
the last of the discussion.

"Oh, Gregory," she said, "are you sure you want to get mixed up in all
this?  We came to the country to get away from it all!"

The man looked at her.  "Yes," he said.  "Yes, Brenda, we did.  But you
can't get away from _everything_, you know.  You have to get away _to_
something, or where are you?"

"I think that's very true," said James approvingly.

The next day they called on Miss Isabella King.

They found her entertaining Mr. Hiram Bundy with tea and cookies.  The
cookies were homemade shortbread and were enjoyed by all.  As Kip said,
they made Lorna Doones look sick.

Miss King was indignant when she heard Laura's story.

"For shame!" she said.  "I never heard of such a thing.  Who _is_ this
Mrs. Gordon T. Witherspoon?  I don't believe we've met.  Some newcomer
from the suburbs, I presume?"

"She's president of the Garden Club," said Kip.

Miss King sniffed.  "In my day we felt no need of garden clubs.  Our
gardens _grew_.  Without regimentation, to use one of your modern
terms.  Dear me.  I have not been to town meeting in more years than I
like to think.  However, under the circumstances, I shall certainly
attend.  You have _my_ vote.  _And_ Mr. Bundy's," she added, with a
strong look at her visitor.

Mr. Bundy looked uncomfortable.  "Come now, Isabella," he said.  "I am
to be chairman of that meeting.  I must remain impartial."

"You can't," said Miss King.  "On a subject like this, no one could.
Surely you can say something in your speech that will help to influence
people.  You could wink."

"I could not," said Mr. Bundy.

"You could do _something_," said Miss King.

Mr. Bundy hemmed and hawed, but when last seen (by the four children),
he seemed to be giving in.

Later that day they tackled Lydia's grandmother.  She seemed surprised
that they should have thought of her.

"Are you sure you want me on your side?" she said.  "No town meeting's
ever agreed with me yet!"

"But you're a famous woman of America!" said Laura.

"Humph!" said old Mrs. Green.  "So much the worse, if so!  Just 'cause
I'm an artist, they think I'm queer!  I _am_, too!  A plague on the
pack of 'em, I say!"

Lydia was looking at her grandmother as if she were just beginning to
understand her.  "But you'll be there, won't you?" she said.

"If you want me," said her grandmother, "I suppose I'll have to."

After that there didn't seem to be any more important people to ask.
But every day, right up to the day of the meeting, the four children
spoke to any strangers they met.  Some of these seemed interested, but
others (probably followers of Mrs. Witherspoon) were curt and huffy.

And every night Kip's mother and father held indignation meetings with
the families of other children in the school.  James and Laura's
parents attended these and made a lot of new friends in the town, but
otherwise they didn't seem very hopeful.  Mrs. Witherspoon, everyone
agreed, would prevail.

"You watch," said Lydia.  "She'll lead the whole mob, just the same as
always."

And at last the fateful night fell.

One thing Mr. Hiram Bundy had insisted on.  Since the fate of the
school concerned the town's children most of all, it seemed only right
that for this one town meeting the children should be there.  And the
authorities (after some opposition from Mrs. Witherspoon's friends)
agreed.

James and Laura and Lydia and Kip and their friends and relations
arrived at Town Hall early and took a place well forward on the left
side of the aisle.  Lydia's grandmother had accepted a ride with
Laura's family, much to everyone's surprise.  She did not say much, but
there was a gleam in her eye.

The four children were too excited to sit still, particularly James and
Laura, who had never been to a town meeting before.  They kept screwing
around in their seats and staring back up the aisle, watching the
citizens file into the hall.

Mr. Hiram Bundy was already on the platform.  He appeared nervous,
particularly after Miss Isabella King made a superb entrance in an
old-fashioned black lace dinner gown and swept forward to an aisle seat
in the front row, where she could keep an eye on him.

The hall was beginning to fill up now, and it was interesting to see
how the two factions tended to separate and sit on opposite sides.  You
could tell Mrs. Witherspoon's followers by their purse-proud,
self-righteous expressions.

A certain stir was caused by the appearance of the long-lost heir's
father and mother and a group of their friends, all looking much more
worldly and sophisticated than anyone else in the room.  You could tell
that they had just driven up in sports cars on their way home from
cocktail parties.  They were laughing as they entered the hall, but the
father of the heir shushed them in disciplinary fashion.  He waved at
the four children and grinned, before shepherding his flock into seats
on the left.

And still Mrs. Gordon T. Witherspoon was not in evidence.  People were
beginning to stir and mutter restlessly, and on the platform Mr. Hiram
Bundy was consulting his watch for the third time.

"If that isn't just like her!" Kip's mother was heard to say.  "She
knows nobody'd dare to begin without her!"

From her front aisle seat Miss King gave Mr. Bundy an encouraging nod.
He half rose from his chair and hesitated.  Miss King nodded again,
more commandingly.  Mr. Bundy gave a little cough and held up his hand
for silence.

And then, in a rustle of printed chiffon, Mrs. Witherspoon hurried down
the aisle.  Gordy followed.  He was limping slightly, but appeared
cheerful.

"Whaddaya say we go for a soda afterwards?  Whaddaya say?" he called to
the four children, just as though the whole town weren't sitting there
hanging on his every word.

James didn't know what to say.  He hated to ally himself with this
feckless boob in front of all these people.  Still, he hated to hurt
Gordy's feelings, too.  It wasn't his fault he came from a bad
environment.

"Maybe," he answered, not meeting Gordy's eyes.  Mrs. Witherspoon's
friends had saved her front-row seats, across the aisle from Miss King,
and were now greeting her with nods and becks and wreathed smiles.  But
Mrs. Witherspoon went right past them.  Her face was pink and she
seemed flustered.  She went straight to the edge of the platform where
Mr. Hiram Bundy was standing.  Mr. Bundy leaned down and they conferred
together.

"Dear me," those in the front rows heard Mr. Bundy say.  "It would be
rather irregular."

"Be firm, Hiram!" called Miss King.

Lydia's grandmother did not agree.  "Let her speak," she boomed out in
her deep voice.  "Have to listen to her sooner or later, anyway.  Might
as well get it over with!"

Mr. Bundy held up his hand for silence again.  Mrs. Witherspoon turned
and faced the assembly.  She seemed embarrassed and reluctant, yet
determined.

"I think most of you know," she began in her loud voice before which
clubwomen quailed, "my feelings on the subject of this new school.  I
still feel that some other location would have been preferable.
Somewhere in a less desirable residential district.  And I certainly
think the utmost care should be exercised in choosing its design; so
that our beautiful countryside will not be marred by the intrusion of
an eyesore!  However"--and here her voice took on an aggrieved
note--"my own son has recently struck up an acquaintance with certain
public school children."  Her eyes rested for a moment on James and
Lydia and Kip and Laura, not benevolently.  "And he _insists_..."  She
broke off, as if she did not like the sound of this last word.

"Go on, Mom.  You're doing fine," prompted Gordy, grinning at her
toothily from the front row.

Mrs. Witherspoon chose another word.  "He has _decided_," she went on,
"that he wishes to enroll in the public school this coming fall.
Naturally where Gordy leads, others may follow.  And if the trend is to
be toward public education, certainly we want all the best advantages
to be available.  So, under the circumstances, I am forced to withdraw
my objections."

"Go on," prompted Gordy again.

"And I hope all my friends will do likewise and all pull together to
make our new school the best school in the county," said Mrs.
Witherspoon in a rapid gabble, as though repeating a lesson.  And she
blushed hotly and sank into the right-hand front aisle seat.

There was a buzz in the hall that grew to a roar.  Laura had an idea.
She began to clap her hands.  Everybody joined in the applause until
Mr. Hiram Bundy had to rap for order.

James was feeling small.  He had been ashamed to speak to Gordy, and
all along Gordy was being a benefactor.  He looked at Gordy now.  Gordy
typically seemed to bear no resentment.  He was grinning more toothily
than ever and shaking hands over his head at James, like a champion
prize fighter.

Of course after Mrs. Witherspoon's speech there was hardly need to take
a vote.  Some of her former supporters on the right side of the aisle
got up and left the building.  Other die-hards remained to vote "no" as
loudly as they could.  It was said afterwards that Mrs. Witherspoon's
friend Adele didn't speak to her for a year.  But most of the people
who had followed her like sheep before, just because she was Mrs.
Gordon T. Witherspoon, went right on following her now that she was
behaving more like a human being.  The motion to build the new school
on Silvermine Road was passed with an overwhelming majority.

After the meeting Mrs. Witherspoon seemed to be in a trancelike state
and even allowed herself to be led to the drugstore for a soda with
Gordy and the others.  She answered politely when Kip's mother spoke to
her and suffered in silence through a harangue by Lydia's grandmother
on the subject of free education.

Just about everyone in town had crowded into the drugstore (the best
one tonight, not the fairly good one nor the kidnapers' den).  Miss
King was there, being treated to a strawberry sundae by Mr. Bundy.  She
seemed to be enjoying it, though she pointed out that the ice cream was
not hand-frozen nor flavored with real vanilla beans, as it would have
been in _her_ day.

Even the long-lost heir's father looked in for a minute with his
friends to buy more cigarettes.  On his way out, he stopped by the big
table where Laura and Lydia and James and Kip and the others were
sitting.  "Congratulations," he said.  "I guess you kids didn't need
any help after all.  Looks as if you've got your magic working again
fine!"

"Say!" said Gordy, when he had gone.  "Next year's going to be keen,
isn't it?  Whaddaya say we have magic adventures every day?  Whaddaya
say?"

"Whaddaya say?" echoed James weakly.

And then the drugstore began to indicate that it wanted to close.

But of course everyone was still too excited to go straight home to
bed; so James and Laura's family and Lydia and her grandmother stopped
off at Kip's house to talk for a while.

"I still don't understand it," said Kip's father to the four children.
"You managed to fix the whole thing when none of us could think how.
What did you _do_?"

"Oh, nothing," said Kip, shifting uncomfortably.  He noticed that their
parents were looking at them in that same peculiar way again, as if
they wondered what they'd do next.

"What was all that about magic?" said the mother of James and Laura.
"Who was that man who came up to the table?  Isn't he the same one who
gave you those watches?  Who _is_ he?"

"And that wonderful old lady with Mr. Bundy," chimed in Kip's mother,
"in that black dress that came out of the Ark.  How did you get to know
all these people?"

"It's a sort of game we've been playing," began Laura carefully,
knowing that no parent could truly understand.  "We call it magic
because it almost seems as if it _is_, sometimes."  And she told a
little of what had been happening, but not much.

"Well, magic or not," said her father, "it certainly worked.
Congratulations."

"Oh, that's all right," said James.

A little later, when the grownups had gone to raid the icebox and the
four children were alone, he turned to the others.  "You know," he
said, "we've got a problem.  What are we going to do about Gordy from
now on?"

"Don't you sort of like him now?" said Laura.  "I thought it was
wonderful the way the magic's started improving him already."

"Sure, I guess it has," said James.  "Sure, I guess I do.  Only he
seems to think now he's our best friend or something.  Do we have to
take him along with us on everything we do after this?  Would the magic
expect us to be _that_ noble?"

After some discussion it was agreed by all that it would probably be
all right with the magic if in future they let Gordy be their _almost_
best friend and come on magic adventures with them _some_ of the time,
but not always.

"That's if there're any more adventures to _come_ on," said Lydia.
"This one felt kind of final, somehow.  It was the big important wish
we wanted, and the whole town sort of got in on it, and it came true.
Maybe that's the end."

Laura shook her head decisively.  "There's still the house in the
woods," she said, "and that desk without any key.  The magic wouldn't
leave loose ends lying around like that.  It never does.  Everything's
put there to add up and come out right, like the problems in arithmetic
books.  We just haven't figured it out yet."

"What we have to do is find the unknown quantity.  Call it X," said
James, who was of a mathematical turn of mind.

"No, don't," said Lydia, who wasn't.

"Anyway," said Kip, "it'll prob'ly all come out in the wish."

"Yes," said Laura.  "It will.  Wait and see."

There didn't seem to be anything else for them to do.  But it was a
long wait.




7.  The Secret Drawer

Of course they had good times in the meantime.  Who could help it in a
fine country summer?  But good times without magic do not make chapters
in books, at least not in this kind of book; of course there are other
kinds.

Suffice it to say that the hours did pass in one way or another, until
one day it was only mid-August and the next it was suddenly almost
September and Labor Day loomed ahead, and after that there would be
school, only not in the new schoolhouse yet, because work on it was
just barely starting.  The four children often stopped by to see how it
was coming, but so far all there was to see was a hole in the ground.

As for the wishing well, Laura called a wish or two down once in a
while to stimulate it and let it know they hadn't lost interest, but
she didn't like to make a habit of it.  She had heard of wells running
dry, and wasn't there a proverb about not going to the well too often?

August twenty-eighth was the day the magic finally did begin again,
because Laura wrote it down in her diary later on to be remembered
forever.

How they all happened to be there that day, no one could afterwards
decide.  It wasn't like them to go on family rides.

Yet there they were, Laura and Lydia and James and Kip squashed
together in the back seat, and James and Laura's mother and father in
the front with Deborah.

It was their mother who saw the sign.  As their father said, she could
spot them a mile off.

The sign said, "Auction Today."  It was posted in front of a building
called the High Ridge Community House.

James and Laura's mother clutched their father's arm.  "Couldn't we?"
she pleaded.

"Honestly, Margaret!" said that long-suffering man.  "I thought we
finally had the house all fixed up!"

"There might be bargains," murmured their mother.  At that magic word,
of course all resistance crumbled, and their father parked the car and
they all scrambled out.

The auction was being held on the back lawn of the Community House, and
the various things for sale were scattered in an abandoned-looking
fashion about the grass.  At one end of the lawn the auctioneer was
about to deal with a bundle of sage-green plush curtains, and the
mother of James and Laura hurried to get a closer look.  She hated
plush and had been heard to say that sage-green was an abomination unto
the Lord, but to your true auction lover, the voices of good taste and
common sense are as the tinkle of sounding brass.

The four children were not true auction lovers and could not have
despised the sage-green curtains more; so they wandered about the lawn
looking at the other things on display, in the hope of finding
something more interesting.

There were the usual cut glass and hand-painted china, the usual walnut
beds and scrollwork whatnots, the usual dusty books that look
intriguing but turn out to be sets of John L. Stoddard's lectures and
the Elsie series.  There was a high chair and some battered toys and an
old croquet set with a broken mallet.

Laura felt depressed, as though everyone in a family had died and his
life were being laid open for the general public to peer at.  Deciding
she'd had enough of the auction, she let the others wander on without
her and turned to go back to the car.

It was then that she saw the desk, sitting all by itself in a corner of
the lawn.

She stopped short and cried out, with a note in her voice that made
Lydia and James and Kip come running.  Then they, too, stopped.

The four children stood in a circle, looking down at the desk.  So far
as they could tell, it was an exact copy of the one they'd seen in the
house in the woods.

"Is it the same one, do you think?" said Lydia.

"No," said Laura.  "This one's got a crack in the lid.  The other one
didn't."

"It's got the same initials," said James.  "M.A. or A.M."

"No it hasn't," said Lydia, always observant.  "This one has the M on
top.  The other one had the A."

"It could be a quincidence," said Kip.  "They probably made hundreds of
desks like these."

"Not in those days," said James.  "That was before mass production.
Craftsmen turned them out one by one.  No two alike."

"This one's got a key in the lock," said Lydia.  "Could we borrow it
and see if it unlocks the other one, and then bring it back?"

"Maybe we're meant to," said James.  "Maybe we were led here by unseen
hands for that very purpose."

"Maybe we're meant to look inside first," said Laura.  "Anyway, I'm
going to."

Four hands reached out.  It was Laura who turned the key and opened the
desk.  Inside were what seemed to be dozens of little drawers and
pigeonholes, all empty, because Laura looked and so did James and Kip
and Lydia.

But in the looking, there was crowding and jostling and people's hands
got in the way of other people's fingers; so that the four children
couldn't tell afterwards whether someone had knocked against something
or someone else had pushed something else.

However it happened, and whoever touched what, suddenly a partition
that had looked solid before gave way and the secret drawer appeared.

It was probably meant to pop open when somebody touched a spring, but
perhaps the wood of the desk was warped; in any event it slid only a
little way out and then stuck.  Nobody could be sure whether or not
there was anything in it, but James afterwards swore he saw a corner of
white paper.

Before anyone could pull the drawer farther open and make certain,
there was an interruption.

"Really!" said a lofty voice.  "This item is _sold_!"

The children turned.  A tall willowy lady with long earrings was
regarding them with a steely and glittering eye.

"We were just looking to see whether it's antique or not," said Laura,
which was the first thing that came into her mind.

"Really!" said the lady again, more loftily than ever.  "I wouldn't
have a modern piece in my shop!"

"Oh, are you an antique dealer?  Whereabouts?" said James, his mind
racing.

"My card," said the lady, handing him a bit of pasteboard.  "And now
stand aside, please.  Don't handle.  This way, boys."  And the lady
bossily supervised while two workmen appeared and carted the desk away
from the children's hungry gaze and into the back of the lady's station
wagon.

James handed the card around for all to see.  "At the Green Lantern,"
it read.  "Luella Chippenhepple, Proprietor."

"The Green Lantern?" said Lydia.  "I know where that is.  Over on Route
Seven."

"Mother says their prices are _exorbitant_!" said Laura.

"Do we have to _buy_ it?" said Kip.  "I've only got $1.13."

"I thought," said James, "we could just go over there and sort of
browse.  Maybe we could get a look inside the drawer."

"Or we could take a wax impression of the lock," said Kip, "like
detectives in books."

"How do they do that?" said Lydia.  "What kind of wax do they use?"

"I don't know," said James, "but we could study up."

"One thing we can do right now," said Laura, "is find out where that
desk came from.  The auctioneer'd know."

But the auctioneer was busy right now.  He continued to be busy for
nearly two hours.  The four children went and sat by James and Laura's
mother in the front row, and didn't fidget or beg to leave the way they
usually did, but waited patiently till the end.

Deborah and her father were not so patient and kept appearing from the
direction of the parking lot and giving imploring looks, but the
majority ruled.

When the auction was over, and James and Laura's mother was the proud
possessor of a copper saucepan that needed returning and a clock with
only one hand that had stopped long ago at five minutes past some
unknown hour, the four children tackled the auctioneer.  The auctioneer
was old, and right now he was weary.  "All this lot came from a house
up in Ridgefield," he told them.  "Where it was before that, I couldn't
say."  But when he learned which item they were interested in, his face
changed.  "That there desk?" he said.  "That's different.  I know that
there desk well.  It's been under my hammer time and time again.  First
time was back when I was a boy, learning the trade.  That's how I
remember.  Came from Silvermine it did, when the red house was first
sold up."

"The red house with the wishing well?" said Laura, breathless.

"That's right," said the auctioneer.

Everyone looked at everyone else.

"You see?" said James.

"It all connects," said Kip.

"Didn't you know it would?" said Lydia.


Next morning all was gobble and splash till breakfasts were eaten and
chores done and the four children could escape and set out for Route
Seven and the Green Lantern and Miss Chippenhepple and the desk.  But
as they issued from the gate of the red house (on bikes and Lydia's
horse), another cycling figure was seen far down the road.  From the
way the bicycle wobbled, it could only be Gordy.

"Help!" said James.

Gordy had been coming over to see them nearly every day since the night
of the town meeting.  The four children usually received him with good
grace and most days found themselves actually glad to see him.  But
today, somehow, the thought of him was too much.

"We said he didn't have to be in on everything, didn't we?" said Lydia.

"Let's hide," said Kip.  And all, even tender-hearted Laura, agreed.
Bikes were propped against the fence, the horse hastily tied to a tree,
and the four children dashed for the woods.

They were hardly in time.  Gordy biked into the yard just as Laura, the
slowest runner, flopped down behind a spicebush.

He looked around at horse and bikes and called their names a few times.
In the woods, nobody said anything.  Nobody looked at anybody else,
either.  Gordy hesitated, puzzled, seemed about to wait, got off his
bike, then finally got on it again and slowly pedaled away.

The four children came out of hiding.  By now everyone was feeling
sorry, the way you always do, but still no one talked about it.  The
long ride to Route Seven was accomplished almost in silence.

The Green Lantern, when they arrived, looked every bit as fussy and
expensive as they had known it would.  As they hesitated before its
entrance, the door opened and two workmen issued forth.  They were
carrying the desk.  Miss Chippenhepple followed, bossing them fussily.

James found his tongue.  "That desk," he said.

"Sold," said Miss Chippenhepple.

"Who to?" said Lydia ungrammatically.

Miss Chippenhepple's voice took on a note of pride.  "As a matter of
fact," she said, "I picked it up for Mrs. Gordon T. Witherspoon.  And
now, was there anything special?  Because I am about to close the shop
and deliver it personally."

Four silent heads shook.  Once again the desk was loaded in Miss
Chippenhepple's station wagon and she drove away.

"Mrs. Witherspoon," said Laura.  "It all keeps connecting."

"Of course that settles it," said Lydia.  "We'll have to let Gordy in
on it now."

"Sure," said James.  "That's why the magic did it this way.  It's
paying us back and we deserve it."

"Yes," said Kip.  "We're supposed to do good turns, and hiding from
Gordy was the opposite."

Everyone grew weary on the long uphill-and-down-dale ride home, but
none complained.  And hardly had they reached Silvermine Road when they
met Gordy himself, biking down to see _them_ again.  He beamed at them
in utter friendliness, as usual.  If he suspected their base behavior,
he did not mention it.

But he seemed less excited than they had been when he heard what had
happened, maybe because he hadn't had so much experience of the magic
as they had.

"Your old desk's prob'ly at the house now," he told them.  "That Miss
Chippenhepple was just driving up when I came away."

"What are we waiting for?" said James.  "Let's go take a look."

"Sure," said Gordy.  "There's just one thing.  Mom."

"You mean she still doesn't like us," said Lydia.

"I wouldn't say _that_," said Gordy.  "I've told her what swell kids
you are.  But I think we ought to let her get used to the idea awhile.
I don't think she ought to actually _see_ you just yet.  Whaddaya say
we wait till the coast is clear?  Whaddaya say?"

Everyone agreed to approach Mrs. Witherspoon's house with utter caution.

But as they came stealthily around the last curve of the driveway a few
minutes later, a loud voice and an uppity one were heard from the
direction of the rock garden.

"It's all right," said Gordy.  "She's showing that Miss Chippenhepple
her creeping palsy, or whatever the latest plant is."

"Crawling rabbitbane," said Laura to Lydia.

"'Manypeeplia Upsidownia,'" said Kip.

Everybody giggled.

"Shush," said James.

They entered the house in silence and followed Gordy into a room on the
right of the hall that was the Antiques Room, he told them.

It certainly lived up to its name.  It looked more like part of a
museum than a room people were supposed to live in.  Highboys and
lowboys and Dutch cupboards and hutch cupboards lined its walls.
Little tables of all sorts were dotted about its middle.  There were
chairs here and there, but most of these had velvet ropes strung from
arm to arm; so that no one would forget himself and sit in one of them.

The four children paid small heed to any of these, because there
against the far wall was the desk, sitting by itself in a cleared space
as though it were on display.  They went up to it.

"Hurry!" said Laura, who was nervous in Mrs. Witherspoon's house.
"Let's borrow the key and go see if it fits the lock of the other desk
now."

Maybe if they had done that, the story might have ended differently.

But "No," said James.  "I think we're supposed to look in the secret
drawer first.  Otherwise, why did the magic show it to us?"

Everyone thought he knew just where the secret drawer had been.  As
before, four hands reached out.  This time Gordy's hand reached out,
too, for who could resist trying to be the one who finds and presses
the spring?

Five minutes later everyone was still trying.  The drawer still
remained stubbornly concealed.  Tempers were getting cross and voices
were getting louder.

"My hand was on this panel before," said Lydia, "and I think it kind of
slid."

"_I_ just closed this drawer," said Kip, "and I think that did it."

"Get out of the way," said James succinctly (and rudely), pushing his
hand between theirs to shove at a bit of ornamental carving.

The delicate desk fairly vibrated under their combined probing.

With part of her mind Laura thought she heard the sound of a car
driving away.  But she was too busy twisting at the knob of one of the
drawers to let the impression sink in.  She was sure this was what
she'd been doing before.

Still, maybe it was the memory of what she had half heard that made her
look up a moment later and glance at the doorway.

The others looked up only a second after Laura did.  Their voices broke
off.  Mrs. Gordon T. Witherspoon was standing in the entrance of the
room regarding them.

At first Laura didn't think she looked so cross as usual.  But then she
wondered how she could have thought this, for now Mrs. Witherspoon was
frowning in awful majesty and her voice, when she spoke, was terrible.

"Gordy!" was all she said.  It was enough.

"Hi, Mom," said Gordy sheepishly.  "You know everybody here, don't you?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Witherspoon, not sounding a bit glad of it, "I do.
Gordy, what are you thinking of?" she went on.  "You know you are never
to play in this room!  The idea, mistreating my lovely new early
Victorian desk!  Tell your friends good-by this minute.  Outdoors," she
added threateningly.

The four children slunk past Mrs. Witherspoon and out the front door.
Laura did not dare to ask now if they might borrow the key.

But once in the front yard Gordy appeared quite cheerful.

"Sorry," he said.  "She still isn't used to the idea of you yet."

"We noticed," said Lydia.

"It'll be all right, though," said Gordy.  "I think she's going out to
dinner tonight.  I'll phone you when it's safe to come back."

"Better not make it too late," said James dubiously.  "We can't always
get away after dark."

"Oh, do you let them order you around?" said Gordy.  "I never do."

The others treated this idle boasting with the silent contempt it
deserved.  The thought of not letting yourself be ordered around by
Mrs. Witherspoon was too absurd to contemplate.

"No peeking inside," warned James sternly, "till we're all here."

"Scout's honor," promised Gordy solemnly.  Then he went in.

This solution wasn't very satisfactory to the four children.  Still, no
other seemed to offer itself; so they all trailed back to James and
Laura's house and waited to see what would develop.

They waited and waited, through lunch and all afternoon.

Lydia and Kip hung about long after James and Laura's father came home
and dinner noises began in the kitchen and politeness counseled them to
leave.  And then finally they _did_ leave and were late getting home to
their own dinners, and still there was no word from Gordy.  The
telephone had kept ringing all afternoon, but always it was for James
and Laura's mother.

After dinner it started getting dark fast, for the days were beginning
to close in.  James and Laura sat looking out as dusk turned to night
and the moon shone down.

It was nearly nine o'clock when the call came at last.  James got to
the telephone first, but he held the receiver out so Laura could hear,
too.

"It's okay," came the voice of Gordy.  "Hurry up.  Hoot like an owl
four times and wait till the lone wolf howls."

"We'll try," said James doubtfully.

But to their surprise, their parents made no objection when they asked
if they could walk down to Gordy's house.

"After all, it's a moonlight night," said their father.

"Don't be _too_ late," said their mother.

It was the same at Kip's house.

As for Lydia's grandmother, of course she hardly knew whether Lydia
came or went when she was painting a picture or planning the next one,
which was what she was doing now.

The four children met in the road.  Kip had brought along a flashlight,
but Lydia made him turn it off; so it would be more mysterious.  The
moon just then chose to go behind a cloud and Lydia repented.  But wild
horses would not have made her say so.

Even when the moon came out again, the road looked strange, as country
roads do at night.  Near things seemed nearer and far things farther.
The bushes that screened Mrs. Witherspoon's grounds were spooky.  When
Kip hooted like an owl, it did not make them seem any less so.  Laura
and Lydia huddled close together.

But the lone-wolf howl that followed sounded so exactly like Gordy in
its rather bleating tones that the delicious terror evaporated and
everybody laughed.  It was a friendly laugh, though.  Good old Gordy,
it said.

Good old Gordy was waiting for them in the open front door as they came
up to the house.  They all turned right into the Antiques Room.  This
time there was no pushing and jostling.  Under James's direction, all
five children took hold of the lid of the desk at once and opened it
carefully.

And this time there was no vain search for the secret drawer.  The
secret drawer was already ajar.  In the crack that showed, an edge of
whitish paper could be seen.

"Somebody must have touched the spring after all, before," said Kip.

The drawer still seemed to be stuck and wouldn't come out any farther,
but James was able to catch hold of the edge of the paper and drew it
out gently, for it was old and stiff and the edges were yellowed and
crumbly.

Then he seemed to stop and think.  "You read it," he said, and handed
it to Gordy.  That was to make up for a lot of things.

Gordy seemed fully sensible of the honor.  Lydia thought that he
blushed.  He opened the paper's crackly folds and looked.  Then, "It's
all faded," he said.  "I can't make it out.  _You_ read it."  And he
handed it back.  Let James be the leader.  He was content to follow.

James looked at the paper and its faded, old-fashioned copperplate
handwriting.  "It says 'Eternal Friendship,'" he said, "with a kind of
garland around it.  And a date, '1850.'  And then there're two
signatures.  'Mehitabel Anne King.  Anne Mehitabel King.'"

"M.A.," breathed Laura triumphantly, "and A.M.!  Like on the two
desks," she added, as if anyone needed to be told.

"King," said Kip.  "Any relation to Miss Isabella, I wonder?"

"And then down below there's another date," said James.  "Eighteen
ninety-one.  Forty years later.  And a kind of poem."  His eye traveled
down the page.  "I don't think it's very good."

"Never mind that," commanded Lydia.  "Read on.  Out loud.  No skipping
ahead."

James read the poem.

  "'Alas, that one of two should roam
  Afar from friendship's childhood home!
  Let him who finds, in friendship's name,
  Restore the truant whence it came.
  And he who makes these twain be one,
  If it be done by light of sun,
  I wish him joy upon the well
  From joyless Anne Mehitabel.
  But if it be by shine of moon,
  Then he may gain a special boon:
  My ghost shall grant his wish entire
  And he shall have his heart's desire.'"


"Clear as mud," said Lydia.

"What does it mean?" said Kip.

"It's very simple," said James.  "There were these two girls and they
had these two desks.  Then I guess one of them moved away and took her
desk with her.  Then afterwards I guess she was sorry."

"And her ghost goes on worrying about an old desk?" said Lydia.
"Before I'd be so paltry if I were a ghost!"

"I think there's more to it than that," said Laura.  "I think it's a
kind of symbol.  It says about the wishing well, too!  It all goes
right on connecting!"

"What are we supposed to do next?" said Kip.

"Take this desk back to the other one, of course," said James.
"'Restore the truant whence it came,' it says."

"How do we know it came from there?" said Lydia.  "If this desk's been
sold around a lot of places, the other one could have been, too."

"I don't think that matters," said James.  "'Make these twain be one,'
it says.  That's the important thing.  So we move this desk down to the
house in the woods.  Then we get a wish."

"Better than that," said Lydia.  "It's moonlight out," she reminded
them.  "'But if it be by shine of moon...!'  Our 'heart's desire,' it
says!"

"Gee," muttered Kip.  "I wonder what my heart's desire is.  I never
thought."

"But we can't just take Mrs. Witherspoon's desk," said Laura.  "It
would be stealing."

"Oh, that," said Gordy.  "That's all right.  I'll explain to Mom.
She'll understand."

Laura wondered if she would.  It didn't seem very like her.

"How'll we get it there?" said Kip.

"There's my horse," said Lydia.  "Does anyone have a buggy?"

Nobody had.

"Deborah's wagon!" James cried suddenly.  All agreed that this was an
inspiration.

James went out the door with Kip after him.  Neither one gave a thought
to the spookiness of the road this time.  They had too much on their
minds.  James's only concern was whether his parents would hear him
taking the wagon from the garage.

But he needn't have worried.  "Home already, dear?" his mother called
from a window.

"We just want to borrow Deborah's wagon for a minute," James said,
wondering what he'd say when his mother asked him why.

But "Very well, dear," was all she said.  James couldn't understand it,
unless the magic were beginning to operate already.

The two boys felt silly, pulling a kid's wagon down the road in the
moonlight, but they felt even sillier on the second lap of the trip.
Gordy and the girls had moved the desk onto the front stoop, and to get
it from there to the wagon was the work of but a moment.  And no
faithful servants heard and came to the defense of Mrs. Witherspoon's
property, either.

But the desk was too big to fit in the wagon and had to be turned on
its side (carefully out of regard for its fragile antiquity) and lashed
in place with some rope Gordy found in the basement.

This made rather a top-heavy wagon to pull, and someone had to keep
running along on each side of it and bending over to steady it from
tipping, which was difficult enough on Silvermine Road, but on the
trafficky route to Wilton it was maddening.  Kind grownups kept
stopping to ask what they were doing and if they needed any help, and
rude teen-agers made jeering remarks.

All in all it was a relief when they came to the spot where the short
cut turned off through the woods.  Only now they had to abandon the
wagon and edge the desk along by hand.  The boys spelled each other at
this, two hauling while the third went ahead to clear the way of
clutching branches.  Beech branches were the worst.  The procession
moved slowly uphill, stumbling over rocks and stones and trees.
Luckily the desk escaped serious mishap.

Luckily too Kip still had his flashlight and Lydia played this upon the
scene.  But as they drew near the house in the woods, Laura made her
switch it off.  The poem had specified moonlight and Laura felt that it
should be unadulterated.

And now all idle chatter broke off, and they covered the last climb in
silvered silence.  Kip and James and Gordy maneuvered the desk through
the narrow doorway.  Inside it was darker, for the small old-fashioned
windows of the house let in only a few random moonbeams.  The five
children stopped for a minute to rest and catch their breaths.  There
was a new feeling in the air, a kind of solemnity.

Gently James and Kip moved the desk into the inner room and set it down
next to the other.

Laura stepped forward.  She altered the position of the desks a little;
so that the moonbeams from the window above fell on both of them.  She
unlocked Mrs. Witherspoon's desk and opened the lid.  Somehow it seemed
to be the thing to do.  Then she tried the key in the lock of the
other.  It fitted and turned, just as she had known it would.  She
opened the second desk and moved away.

The five children stood looking at the two desks shining in the
moonlight.

There was a step on the stair.




8.  Magic or Not?

For a long minute no one dared to look.

Then, slowly, all heads turned.

The person who stood on the stairway, where it came down into the room,
was in darkness, but a slanting ray of moonshine showed her hooped
skirt.  Her face was in shadow, but the moon glinted on her dark hair.

James was the first to find his voice.

"Are you Anne Mehitabel or Mehitabel Anne?" he asked huskily.

"I am Anne Mehitabel," said the person (if it was a person).  Her voice
was faint and yet clear, sweet and yet ringing, as one might expect of
a ghost.

"Were you sisters?" said Lydia.

"Cousins," said the ghost (if it was a ghost), "but brought up
together, closer than sisters, for a time."

"And then something happened," guessed Laura.

"A misfortune," said the presence (whatever it was).  "There was
trouble.  A quarrel about money."

"That's always the worst land of quarrel there is, Pop says," said Kip.
"'Specially between relatives."

"Your father says rightly," said the figure.  "It was indeed the very
worst kind of quarrel.  And then I went away and we never spoke again,
though I lived so very near, in the red house with the wishing well."

"Where we live now," said Laura.  "Couldn't you have said you were
sorry and made it up?"

"By the time I was sorry, too long a time had gone by and I was too
proud.  Once she came to my door and I would not answer.  That was the
worst thing.  And then, sooner than you would believe, we were old.
They said I grew queer then.  Some shunned me for a witch.  But some
came to me.  They said I had magic power.  They believed the things I
wished on the well came true.  Perhaps it was so.  Perhaps I helped
them.  But magic or not, I could never use my power to help myself.
The one wish I made over and over again ... that I would forget my
pride ... that never came true."

"The well's still like that," Kip told her.  "The wishes we made for
ourselves never panned out."

"It still works fine for good turns, though," said Lydia.  "We've been
using it all summer."

"That's how we found the desk," said James, "and got your message."

"Or maybe you already knew that," said Laura.  "Maybe it was you
leading us on, all along?"

"Perhaps it was, in a way," said the voice from the staircase.  "Just
before I died, I came upon the old drawing of Friendship's Garland that
Mehitabel and I had made.  And I wrote the rhyme and made my last wish
on the well.  I wished that in time to come someone new would chance on
the power of the well and use its magic until at last the spell of my
old selfishness would be broken and the lost would be found and the
wrong I did would be undone.  And now that it has happened, perhaps
Mehitabel Anne's ghost will forgive mine."

"I still don't understand why you cared about bringing that old desk
back," said Lydia.  "I don't see where it enters in."

"Open the secret drawer," said the voice.  "All the way."

"We can't," said Kip.  "It's stuck."

"Force it," said the voice.

James took hold of the edge of the drawer and pulled.  Suddenly it shot
forward.  The others crowded round to see.  There was a packet inside
that had got jammed against the roof of the drawer.  That was why the
drawer wouldn't come all the way out before.

"Open it when I am gone," said the voice, "and you will know the
answer."

"Is the magic in the well finished now?" said Laura.  She couldn't bear
to think that it was.

"The spell _I_ put upon it has run its course," said the voice from the
staircase, "but you never can tell with wells.  Sometimes they renew
themselves.  Some of the magic from the good turns you did may have
leaked back into it.  It might start it up again any day."

"Like priming a pump."  James nodded sagely.

"What about the last wish?"  Gordy spoke for the first time.  "It's
shine of moon out.  What about the heart's desire?"

Everyone glared at him, to show they thought this was terribly crude
and in bad taste.  Still, reasoned Laura, why was it?  After all,
wasn't it what they all were thinking?  Gordy might not have much
delicacy, but he certainly got to the point.

"Open the other secret drawer," said the voice.  "Read what you will
find and see if it merits the description."

The four children ran to the second desk.  There was no trouble finding
the secret drawer this time, for they all knew where it should be and
it opened easily at the first touch.  There was a paper inside with
four names on it, James and Laura and Lydia and Kip, in the same faded
copperplate handwriting as in the Friendship's Garland poem.  James
took up the paper, but before he could open it, something made them all
turn again toward the stairway.

The figure was gone.

The four children (and Gordy) rushed to the foot of the stairs.  They
were in time to see a curious thing.  In the faint glimmer of moonlight
they could just make out the dim figure of the lady climbing the stair.
And as she neared the top, another identical figure appeared, moving
toward her.  For an instant the two ghostly forms seemed to merge.
Then all was blackness.

"Mehitabel Anne forgave her," breathed Laura.  No one ventured a foot
on the stair.  All five, even Gordy, knew when a thing was finished and
when not to inquire further.

Laura and Lydia and James and Kip moved back to the brightest patch of
moonlight.  James opened the folded paper.


"Wasn't it smart of the magic to figure out what our heart's desire
really was?" said James next afternoon, as the four children and Gordy
were assembled in the front yard of the red house.  "And here all along
I thought what I wanted was a tape recorder."

"_I_ thought I wanted a course at the Art Students League," said Lydia.
"But I guess that can come later.  What we did get is dandy for now."

"The house in the woods to belong to the four of us forever, for our
very own," breathed Laura as though she still couldn't believe it and
had to keep repeating it to remind herself.  "Who could ask for
anything more?"

"If the magic starts up again, it can be our secret witch's hut where
we do our good-turn sorcery," said Lydia.

"And if it doesn't, it'll make a dandy clubhouse," said James.

Kip hadn't said anything.  "What's the matter?" Lydia asked him.
"Wasn't it your heart's desire, too?"

"Oh, sure," said Kip.  "I guess it'd be just about anybody's."  But he
seemed pensive.

"The most wonderful thing," said Laura, "is that money that was jammed
in the drawer of the other desk all these years.  That money that Anne
Mehitabel took away with her, all that long time ago."

"She certainly went the long way round, returning it," said James.

"But it worked out just in time," said Laura, gloating over the happy
ending.  "Now Miss Isabella's the last surviving member of the family
and it'll all come to her and she'll never have to worry any more."

"I didn't think she'd have to, anyway," said Lydia.  "I thought she'd
prob'ly marry Mr. Hiram Bundy any day now and live in the lap of
luxury."

"I don't think she wants to," said Laura.  "I don't think he does,
either.  I think they'd both rather go on the way they are, with him
coming to tea and her bossing him around.  I think they're set in their
ways.  And now they can _stay_ set."

"The only thing that bothers me," said James, "is about the heart's
desire thing.  The paper _said_ the house in the woods belongs to us
now, but how could the magic go giving things away like that?  There're
laws about property!"

Kip stood up.  "I know," he said.  "That's it.  That worried me, too.
That's why I went to Town Hall this morning and looked up the deed."

"Well?" said Laura.

"Well," said Kip, almost unwillingly, "it used to belong to the King
family, way back.  That part of it's fine."

"Sure," said Lydia.  "That's prob'ly how the desk happened to be there
in the first place."

"All right," said Kip, "but it's been sold a lot of times since.  And
you know who owns it now?  The lost heir's father!"  He let this sink
in.

"You mean...?" began Laura, and stopped.

"He could have been there that first day," said James, "inspecting his
property."

"He's prob'ly the one who left that _New York Times_," said Lydia.  "He
prob'ly heard us come in, and everything we said."

Kip nodded.  "And you know what?  I found out all about him.  That wife
of his is an actress."

"She is?" said Laura, as a dread possibility occurred to all.

"And you know what else?" went on Kip.  "I biked over there this
morning and looked.  There's a full-length mirror at the top of those
stairs!"

"You mean it was all just somebody playing a part?" said James.  "You
mean it was all done with mirrors, there at the end?  What would be the
point?"

"Humoring the dear little children with their magic games!" said Kip
bitterly.

"But she never even seemed to _like_ us," wailed Laura.  "She wouldn't
be bothered, doing all that!"

"Imagine learning all those lines!" said Lydia.

"She'd have done it if he told her to," said Kip.

"But that would mean..." said James.  He stopped at the thought of all
that it would mean.

"Start figuring from the beginning," said Kip.  "That's what _I_ did.
Say the heir's father _was_ in the house somewhere and heard us.  He
knew we thought the first desk was magic."

"But _nobody_ could have known we'd find the second desk at the
auction," said Laura.

"_He_ might have," said Kip unhappily, and yet seeming to enjoy it,
too, in a way.  "He might have stopped at the auction to look around,
just the way we did.  And then he saw the desk and realized it was like
the other one, and that gave him the idea."

"Then he'd have to have written that poem," said Laura, "and put it in
the desk right there."

"Or--no!  You know what I think?" said James excitedly.  "I don't think
that poem was even _in_ the desk then!"  He turned on Gordy.  "We
didn't see it till later, at _your_ house, and then it was sticking
right out!  Did the heir's father come to your house that day?"

Gordy's face was toothily honest as he shook his head solemnly.  "No,
we don't even know him.  _Nobody_ came."

Lydia was staring at Gordy now.  "_You_," she breathed.  "_You_ were
there with that desk the whole afternoon!  While we waited and waited!
No wonder it took so long!  You could have been making up that poem
then!"

"_Me?_" said Gordy, his voice going up high and bleating.  "Whaddaya
think I am?  I couldn't even rhyme two lines!"

"Then your mother..." began Lydia.  Then even she broke off.  The
thought of Mrs. Gordon T. Witherspoon's going to the effort of getting
old yellowed paper and faded ink and making up a poem and writing it
out in imitation copperplate handwriting, for the benefit of any child
but her own, seemed too absurd to contemplate.

"Why, _everybody_ would have had to be in on it, when you come to
think," said Laura.  "Our parents and everybody!  Otherwise, how could
anyone be sure we'd stop at the auction and see the other desk?"

"Start at the beginning again," said James.  "The heir's father could
have been in the house in the woods that day.  Maybe he wanted to give
us more of a reward, besides the watches.  He knew about the magic.  He
could have told our parents and Mrs. Witherspoon and everybody!  Maybe
even the auctioneer!  He could have had both desks and put the other
one in the auction just so we'd see it!"

"Don't!" wailed Laura.  "I don't want to hear about it.  And even if
all that were true, what about Miss King's money?  And Anne Mehitabel?"

"That's if there ever _was_ an Anne Mehitabel," said Lydia.

"Well, yes, there was," admitted Kip, "and a Mehitabel Anne, too.  I
looked _them_ up in the town records, too."

"Well, then?" said Laura.  "_Nobody_ could have arranged all that."

"That old, _old_-looking money," said Lydia.

"There're ways of making money look old," said James.  "Miss Isabella's
a deserving case.  Everybody's been wondering how to take care of her.
If Kip could look up old Mehitabels in the town records, so could
anyone else.  The whole town might have clubbed together!"

"Mr. Hiram Bundy," said Kip.

"Probably the Chamber of Commerce," said Lydia bitterly.

"Why," said Laura, "it'd have to have been the biggest conspiracy since
Aaron Burr!"  Then her square jaw suddenly looked even squarer and she
shook her head.  "No," she said.  "No, it's too much.  And anyway, what
about the good deeds all summer?  And the wishes that worked out?
_They_ were magic all right.  And if one part was magic, it stands to
reason the whole thing must have been.  And that's what I'm going to
believe."

James's face brightened.  "Besides," he said, "suppose it _was_ a
conspiracy.  Think of all those people who didn't even know each other.
It'd take magic to make them all get together and work out a thing like
that in the first place!"

There was a pause, as the good sense of this sank in.  Kip's troubled
frown smoothed itself out.  Laura relaxed.  Lydia began to smile.

"Well, magic or not," she said, "it's been a wonderful summer."

"It certainly has," said Kip.

"I didn't know I _could_ have a good time like this," said Gordy rather
shyly, as though he didn't want to push himself forward but he had to
speak out.

"Oh, nonsense," said Laura idly.  "You must have had lots of good times
and lots of friends, at all those different schools you've gone to."

She was sorry afterwards she'd said it, for a peculiar expression came
over Gordy's face.  He looked away and dug a bare toe in the earth.
Then he looked back at her.  "Oh, not so many," he said.

There was another silence.

"I wonder if the well's still magic," said Lydia.

"No," said Laura, "it isn't.  I tried this morning.  It was a good
turn, too.  I was brushing Deborah's hair and I wished she'd be cured
of all those cowlicks.  But it was snarlier than ever."

"Oh well," said James, "maybe the pump just isn't primed enough yet.
Maybe it'll decide to renew itself some other day.  Right now I'm
willing to take time out."  He yawned and stretched out on the grass in
the sun.

Everyone else felt the same, contented and lazy and willing to lie back
and rest up from the magic for a long time, maybe even till next summer.

Then suddenly Lydia sat up indignantly.

"I just thought," she said.  "Gordy!  You should have had a wish last
night, too, with the rest of us!  You didn't get any heart's desire at
all!"

The same peculiar expression came over Gordy's face.  He looked away
and dug his toe into the earth again.  Then he beamed around at them
all toothily (and lovingly).

"I guess I already had it," he said.






[End of Magic or Not?, by Edward Eager]
