Neighbor

astronomy.

'They're a long ways off,' I said. 'So far off that their light takes years to reach us. And all of them are suns. A lot of them bigger than our sun.' Which was about all I knew about the stars.

Heath nodded gravely. 'There's one up there', he said, 'that I watch a lot. That blue one, over there. Well, sort of blue, anyhow. See it? See how it twinkles. Like it might be winking at us. A friendly sort of star.'

I pretended that I saw the one he was pointing at, although I wasn't sure I did, there were so many of them and a lot of them were twinkling.

Then we got to talking about something else and forgot about the stars. Or at least I did.

Right after supper, Bert Smith came over and said that Rickard had been around asking him some questions and that he'd been down to Jingo's place and that he'd said he'd see Heath just as soon as Heath got back from town.

Bert was a bit upset about it, so I tried to calm him down. 'These city folks get excited easy,' I told him. 'There's nothing to it.'

I didn't worry much about it because I felt sure that Heath could handle things and even if Rickard did write a story for the New York papers it wouldn't bother us. Coon Valley is a long piece from New York.

I figured we'd probably seen and heard the last from Rickard.

But in all my life, I've never been more wrong.

About midnight or so I woke up with Helen shaking me. 'There's someone at the door,' she said. 'Go see who it is.' So I shucked into my overalls and shoes and lit the lamp and went downstairs to see.

While I'd been getting dressed there'd been some knocking at the door, but as soon as I lit the lamp it quit. I went to the door and opened it and there stood Rickard and he wasn't near as chipper as he'd been in the morning. 'Sorry to get you up,' he said, 'but it seems that I'm lost.'

'You can't be lost,' I told him. 'There isn't but one road through the valley. One end of it ties up to Sixty and the other to Eighty-five. You follow the valley road and you're bound to hit one or the other of them.'

'I've been driving', he told me, 'for the last four hours and I can't find either of them.'

'Look,' I said, 'all you do is drive one way or the other. You can't get off the road. Fifteen minutes either way and you're on a state highway.' I was exasperated with him, for it seemed a silly thing to do. And I don't take kindly to being routed out at midnight.

'But I tell you I'm lost,' he said in a sort of desperation and I could see that he was close to panic. 'The wife is getting scared and the kids are dead on their feet…'

'All right,' I told him. 'Let me get on my shirt and tie my shoes. I'll get you out of here.'

He told me he wanted to get to Sixty, so I got out my car and told him to follow me. I was pretty sore about it, but I figured the only thing to do was to help him out. He'd upset the valley and the sooner out the better.

I drove for thirty minutes before I began to get confused myself. That was twice as long as it should have taken to get out to the highway. But the road looked all right and there seemed to be nothing wrong, except for the time it took. So I kept on going. At the end of forty-five minutes we were back in front of my place again. I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. I got out of my car and went back to Rickard's car.

'You see what I mean,' he said.

'We must have got turned around,' I said.

His wife was almost hysterical. 'What's going on?' she asked me in a high, shrill voice. 'What is going on around here?'

'We'll try again,' I said. 'We'll drive slower this time so we don't make the same mistake.'

I drove slower and this time it took an hour to get back to the farm. So we tried for Eighty-five and forty minutes later were right back where we started.

'I give up,' I told them. 'Get out and come in. We'll fix up some beds. You can spend the night and we'll get you out come light.'

I cooked up some coffee and found stuff to make sandwiches while Helen fixed up beds to take care of the five of them. 'The dog can sleep out here in the kitchen,' she said.

I got an apple box and quilt and fixed the dog a bed. The dog was a nice little fellow, a wirehair who was full of fun, and the Rickard kids were about as fine a bunch of kids as you'd find anywhere.

Mrs. Rickard was all set to have hysterics, but Helen got her to drink some coffee and I wouldn't let them talk about not being able to get out. 'Come daylight,' I told them, 'and there'll be nothing to it.'

After breakfast they were considerably calmed down and seemed to have no doubt they could find Number Sixty. So they started out alone, but in an hour were back again. I took my car and started out ahead of them and I don't mind admitting I could feel bare feet walking up and down my spine.

I watched closely and all at once I realized that somehow we were headed back into the valley instead of heading out of it. So I stopped the car and we turned our cars around and headed back in the right direction. But in ten minutes we were turned around again. We tried again and this time we fairly crawled, trying to spot the place where we got turned around.

But we could never spot it.

We went back to my place and I called up Bert and Jingo and asked them to come over.

Both of them tried to lead the Rickards out, one at a time then the two of them together, but they were no better at it than I was. Then I tried it alone, without the Rickards following me and I had no trouble at all. I was out to highway Sixty and back in half an hour. So we thought maybe the jinx was broken and I tried to lead out the Rickard car, but it was no soap.

By mid-afternoon we knew the answer. Any of the natives could get out of the valley, but the Rickards couldn't.

Helen put Mrs. Rickard to bed and fed her some sedative and I went over to see Heath.

He was glad to see me and he listened to me, but all the time I was talking to him I kept remembering how one time I had wondered if maybe he could stretch out time. When I had finished he was silent for a while, as if he might have been going over some decision just to be certain that it was right.

'It's a strange business, Calvin,' he said finally, 'and it doesn't seem right the Rickards should be trapped in this valley if they don't want to stay here.

'Yet, it's a fortunate thing for us, actually. Rickard was planning on writing a story about us and if he'd written as he planned to, there'd been a lot of attention paid us. There would have been a crowd of people coming in?other newspapermen and government men and people from the universities and the idly curious. They'd have upset our lives and some of them taking it somewhat better and the Rickard kids were happy with the outdoor life and the Rickard dog was busily engaged in running all the valley rabbits down to skin and bones.

'There's the old Chandler place up at the head of the valley,' said Jingo. 'No one's been living there for quite a while, but it's in good shape. It could be fixed up so it was comfortable.'

'But I can't stay here,' protested Rickard. 'I can't settle down here.'

'Who said anything about settling down?' asked Bert. 'You just got to wait it out. Someday whatever is wrong will get straightened out and then you can get away.'

'But my job,' said Rickard.

Mrs. Rickard spoke up then. You could see she didn't like the situation any better than he did, but she had that queer, practical, everyday logic that a woman at times surprises a man by showing. She knew that they were stuck here in the valley and she was out to make the best of it.

'Remember that book you're always threatening to write?' she asked. 'Maybe this is it.' That did it.

Rickard mooned around for a while, making up his mind, although it already was made up. Then he began talking about the peace in the valley?the peace and quietness and the lack of hurry?just the place to write a book.

The neighbours got together and fixed up the house on the old Chandler place and Rickard called his office and made some excuse and got a leave of absence and wrote a letter to his bank, transferring whatever funds he had. Then he settled down to write.

Apparently in his phone calls and his letter-writing he never even hinted at the real reason for his staying?perhaps because it would have sounded downright silly?for there was no ruckus over his failure to go back.

The valley settled down to its normal life again and it felt good after all the uproar. The neighbours shopped for the Rickards and carried out from town all the groceries and other things they needed and once in a while