And right away the other guy says, 'I like my friends.'
Terry Orme smiled, a little, and said, 'I guess that about covers it.' He looked at me. 'You must read a lot, huh?'
'Now you're talking about man's best friend. A good book will never let you down no matter how often you go back to it.'
He looked down at his little hands.
'You'd get along with Mike Ransome,' he said.
'He read a lot?'
'Yeah.' Terry hopped down from his bed and started to pace across the leopardskin rug.
'What's Ransome's job?' I asked, but he didn't seem to hear me.
All three foot four of him stalked back and stopped in front of me. Something was bugging him bad. I don't mean just his natural frustration over being a freak. A kind of enigmatic anger and fear kept playing over his face like a little girl jumping rope.
'The marks watch me scramble around in that apesuit and they think I'm a real monkey,' he said. 'But as far as I'm concerned I'm making a monkey out of them.'
I nodded. I figured he would look at it that way. It gave him a slice of superiority. God knows he needed it.
'I wouldn't have this job if I didn't like it.' He was getting defiant now. Defiance for defense.
'I like climbing around. You see and hear things. Things you'd never dream of.'
The little warped soul was climbing out of the cracked shell. He was growing bigger in his own eyes all the time. Society had put him down all his life, had looked at him and grinned and said 'Look at the freak.' He got back at them by spying on their tawdry secrets. Come right down to it, the poor little bastard was probably nothing more than a frustrated Peeping Tom.
'Is that what you were doing tonight?' I wondered.
He said yeah. Then he seemed to shrink inside himself again. He went back to his little bed and climbed up on it like a child.
'The law has taken over the bunkhouse for their headquarters,' he told me. 'That Ferris cop was in there going around and around with Franks a little while ago. Franks wants Ferris to give him the go-ahead on opening up the Swamp Ride again.'
'But Ferris still wants to play Sam Spade in there, huh?'
'Yeah. And can you imagine the trade the lot's losing by keeping it closed? The marks are just panting to get in there and see the spot where old man Cochrane was found.'
I was disgusted. 'As a business manager that Franks is some shrewd cooky.'
'It ain't Franks,' Terry said. 'He just does what May Cochrane tells him to. Everybody knows that.'
I said, 'Jesus.' There were times when May made me want to throw up.
Terry was watching me with an odd look. I had an idea that the word that got around had reached him and he knew that I had once been married to May. He asked me something out of the blue.
'You getting soft on Billie Peeler?'
I wondered if Terry had a crush on Billie, in his hopeless little way. I said, 'Uh-huh.'
He looked at his little hands again. 'She's a good kid. We worked together in K. C. a couple years back. She-'
There was a quiet knock of noise from somewhere outside the tree house, but close by. I glanced at Terry. He gave me a start. His delicately small face was frozen terror.
I didn't say anything. I got up and walked over to the open doorway and stepped onto the porch and looked around.
Most of the lights were off in Neverland and I couldn't see much for the maze of phony leaves and the shadows they cast. A single spot was blazing over the deserted Swamp Ride dock and it made the placid water look like cold splitpea soup. I didn't see any sign of movement.
'Who is it?' Terry's thin voice piped behind me. 'Is it a guy or a girl?'
'Just a noise in the night, I guess,' I called back. 'I don't see anyone.'
I didn't see anyone when I turned back into Tarzan's hut either. Terry Orme had vanished.
I took a rowboat back to Treasure Island the next morning before the lot opened. Silly I guess, but being out there by myself made me feel at home. If any marks or sweep-up men had been around they would have spoiled it for me. Then it would have been just another Neverland attraction.
I beached the boat a few yards astern of the
'Ah,' I said, quoting Long John Silver. 'This here is a sweet spot, this island. A sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on.'
Funny, but that's how I felt-like a kid again.
They had done a very nice job with the layout. They had humped up three scrubby little dirt hills and each one had a skull-and-crossbones sign planted at its base: Mizzenmast Hill, Spyglass Hill and Foremast Hill. Then they had Flint's Stockade, where Jim Hawkins and Captain Smolett, Doctor Livesey and Squire Trelawney had held off Silver's cutthroats.
A sign reading _To Flint's Treasure Pit_ pointed down a woody path and I followed it into a sunny glen. The Treasure Pit was at the foot of a hardwood ridge. It was a shallow hole in the ground with a spade and a broken pick stuck in the dirt, and a tangle of blocks and tackle and an old half-buried sea chest with the name _Walrus_ on it.
That familiar atavistic feeling of being watched nudged me and I turned around and looked at a little scrub rise a few yards away. I didn't see anything and I shrugged it off and started to turn back into the path.
A wildman leaped right through a palmetto screen and landed like an animal smack in front of me. Honest to God I nearly wet myself.
He had a wild mop of gray hair and a beard to match and he was dressed in old bits of sailcloth and skins that were held together by brass buttons and rawhide thongs.
He hunched and hunkered and giggled and scratched himself and made erratic gestures with his hands. He shuttled toward me crabwise. And damned if I didn't back off.
'Who the hell are you?' I nearly yelled it at him.
'I'm poor Ben Gunn, I am. And I haven't spoke with a Christian these three years.'
I could have kicked myself. Of course they had to have a Ben Gunn on the island. They probably had a one- legged character making like Long John Silver too. I started to laugh.
'Man,' I said. 'I nearly dropped my load when you jumped out like that.'
The actor chuckled and straightened out of character. He was about my tall but there wasn't much heft to him. He looked as wiry and agile as a young Italian acrobat.
'It gets 'em all,' he said delightedly. 'Especially the young stuff. I can make them leap halfway out of their panties.'
'Let me know the next time you make one leap,' I said. 'They won't let me in the nautch show.'
He laughed. 'You're Thaxton, aren't you? The new chap with the hots for Billie?'
I looked at him. I wasn't sure how I wanted to take that.
He slapped me on the back.
'Just clowning, boy. Don't get sore. Billie's a good kid.'
'That's what Terry Orme told me,' I said. 'Maybe I should start to wonder just how good Billie is.',
'You know Terry?' He looked mildly surprised.
'We're roomies up in the tree house. He lives there because he doesn't like people around. I'm there because I'm tap city.'
'No kidding,' he said. 'I never knew Terry bunked up there.' He smiled and shrugged. 'Well, he's not the only screwball around here. I bunk aboard the
'Oh. The guy who reads a lot. Shake, brother.'
'You too?' He looked pleased about it. 'What do you think of R. L. S.?'
