The Slippery Slope

'I'm not a baby!' cried a familiar voice from under the villain's long, black automobile, and the two elder Baudelaires watched with pride and relief as Sunny emerged from behind the tire Violet had punctured, and ran to hug her siblings. Klaus had to take his glasses off to wipe the tears from his eyes as he was finally reunited with the young girl who was his sister. 'I'm not a baby!' Sunny said again, turning to Olaf in triumph.

'How could this be?' Count Olaf said, but when he removed the cover from the casserole dish, he saw how this could be, because the object inside, which was about the same size and weight as the youngest Baudelaire, wasn't a baby either.

'Babganoush!' Sunny cried, which meant something along the lines of, 'I concocted an escape plan with the eggplant that turned out to be even handier than I thought,' but there was no need for anyone to translate, as the large vegetable slid out of the casserole dish and landed with a plop! at Olaf's feet.

'Nothing is going right for me today!' cried the villain. 'I'm beginning to think that washing my face was a complete waste of time!'

'Don't upset yourself, boss,' said Colette, contorting herself in concern. 'I'm sure that Sunny will cook us something delicious with the eggplant.'

'That's true,' the hook-handed man said. 'She's becoming quite a cook. The False Spring Rolls were quite tasty, and the lox was delicious.'

'It could have used a little dill, in my opinion,' Hugo said, but the three reunited Baudelaires turned away from this ridiculous conversation to face the Snow Scouts.

'Now do you believe us?' Violet asked Bruce. 'Can't you see that this man is a terrible villain who is trying to do you harm?'

'Don't you remember us?' Klaus asked Carmelita Spats. 'Count Olaf had a terrible scheme at Prufrock Prep, and he has a terrible scheme now!'

'Of course I remember you,' Carmelita said. 'You're those cakesniffing orphans who caused Vice Principal Nero all that trouble. And now you're trying to ruin my very special day! Give me that Springpole, Uncle Bruce!'

'Now, now, Carmelita,' Bruce said, but Carmelita had already grabbed the long pole from Bruce's hands and was marching across the net toward the source of the Stricken Stream. The man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard clasped their wicked whips and raised their shiny whistles to their sinister mouths, but the Baudelaires could see they were waiting to spring their trap until the rest of the scouts stepped forward, so they would be inside the net when the eagles lifted it from the ground.

'I crown myself False Spring Queen!' Carmelita announced, when she reached the very edge of Mount Fraught. With a nasty laugh of triumph, she elbowed the Baudelaires aside and drove the Springpole into the half- frozen top of the waterfall.

There was a slow, loud shattering sound, and the Baudelaires looked down the slope and saw that an enormous crack was slowly making its way down the center of the waterfall, toward the pool and the two tributaries of the Stricken Stream. The Baudelaires gasped in horror. Although it was only the ice that was cracking, it looked as if the mountain were beginning to split in half, and that soon an enormous schism would divide the entire world.

'What are you looking at?' Carmelita asked scornfully. 'Everybody's supposed to be doing a dance in my honor.'

'That's right,' Count Olaf said, 'why doesn't everybody step forward and do a dance in honor of this darling little girl?'

'Sounds good to me,' Kevin said, leading his fellow employees onto the net. 'After all, I have two equally strong feet.'

'And we should try to be accommodating,' the hook-handed man said. 'Isn't that what you said, Uncle Bruce?'

'Absolutely,' Bruce agreed, with a puff on his cigar. He looked a bit relieved that all the arguing had ceased, and that the scouts finally had an opportunity to do the same thing they did every year. 'Come on, Snow Scouts, let's recite the Snow Scout Alphabet Pledge as we dance around the Springpole.'

The scouts cheered and followed Bruce onto the net. 'Snow Scouts,' the Snow Scouts said, 'are accommodating, basic, calm, darling, emblematic, frisky, grinning, human, innocent, jumping, kept, limited, meek, nap-loving, official, pretty, quarantined, recent, scheduled, tidy, understandable, victorious, wholesome, xylophone, young, and zippered, every morning, every afternoon, every night, and all day long!'

There is nothing wrong, of course, with having a pledge, and putting into words what you might feel is important in your life as a reminder to yourself as you make your way in the world. If you feel, for instance, that well-read people are less likely to be evil, and a world full of people sitting quietly with good books in their hands is preferable to a world filled with schisms and sirens and other noisy and troublesome things, then every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, 'The world is quiet here,' as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good. If you feel that well-read people ought to be lit on fire and their fortunes stolen, you might adopt the saying 'Fight fire with fire!' as your pledge, whenever you ordered one of your comrades around. But whatever words you might choose to describe your own life, there are two basic guidelines for composing a good pledge. One guideline is that the pledge make good sense, so that if your pledge contains the word 'xylophone,' for example, you mean that a percussion instrument played with mallets is very important to you, and not that you simply couldn't think of a good word that begins with the letter X. The other guideline is that the pledge be relatively short, so if a group of villains is luring you into a trap with a net and a group of exhausted trained eagles, you'll have more time to escape.

The Snow Scout Alphabet Pledge, sadly, did not follow either of these guidelines. As the Snow Scouts promised to be 'xylophone,' the man with a beard but no hair cracked his whip in the air, and the eagles sitting on both villains' shoulders began to flap their wings and, digging their claws into the thick pads, lifted the two sinister people high in the air, and when the pledge neared its end, and the Snow Scouts were all taking a big breath to make the snowy sound, the woman with hair but no beard blew her whistle, making a loud shriek the Baudelaires remembered from running laps as part of Olaf's scheme at Prufrock Prep. The three siblings stood with Quigley and watched as the rest of the eagles quickly dove to the ground, picked up the net, and, their wings trembling with the effort, lifted everyone who was standing on it into the air, the way you might remove all the dinner dishes from the table by lifting all the corners of the tablecloth. If you were to try such an unusual method of clearing the table, you would likely be sent to your room or chased out of the restaurant, and the results on Mount Fraught were equally disastrous. In moments, all of the Snow Scouts and Olaf's henchfolk were in an aerial heap, struggling together inside the net that the eagles were holding. The only person who escaped recruitment — besides the Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire, of course — was Carmelita Spats, standing next to Count Olaf and his girlfriend.

'What's going on?' Bruce asked Count Olaf from inside the net. 'What have you done?'

'I've triumphed,' Count Olaf said, 'again. A long time ago, I tricked you out of a reptile collection that I needed for my own use.' The Baudelaires looked at one another in astonishment, suddenly realizing when they had met Bruce before. 'And now, I've tricked you out of a collection of children!'

'What's going to happen to us?' asked one of the Snow Scouts fearfully.

'I don't care,' said another Snow Scout, who seemed to be afflicted with Stockholm Syndrome already. 'Every year we hike up to Mount Fraught and do the same thing. At least this year is a little different!'

'Why are you recruiting me, too?' asked the hook-handed man, and the Baudelaires could see one of his hooks frantically sticking out of the net. 'I already work for you.'

'Don't worry, hooky,' Esmй replied mockingly. 'It's all for the greater good!'

'Mush!' cried the man with a beard but no hair, cracking his whip in the air. Squawking in fear, the eagles began to drag the net across the sky, away from Mount Fraught.

'You get the sugar bowl from those bratty orphans, Olaf,' ordered the woman with hair but no beard, 'and we'll all meet up at the last safe place!'

'With these eagles at our disposal,' the sinister man said in his hoarse voice, 'we can finally catch up to that self-sustaining hot air mobile home and destroy those volunteers!'

The Baudelaires gasped, and shared an astonished look with Quigley. The villain was surely talking about the device that Hector had built at the Village of Fowl Devotees, in which Duncan and Isadora had escaped.

'We'll fight fire with fire!' the woman with hair but no beard cried in triumph, and the eagles carried her away. Count Olaf muttered something to himself and then turned and began creeping toward the Baudelaires. 'I