The Scarecrow Read Online Free

was only half-full. Les told me he went along the back of the fowlhouse and over the fence into the neighbour’s yard. He went down the path to the street and lit out into a four-minute mile, sack over shoulder and all. I should have gone with him. It must have taken me twenty minutes to cover three hundred yards of gully bed. A blow-by-blow account of my travail in that virgin gully is to be avoided at all costs. Only three out of six big, strapping fowls survived the journey. Whether they drowned, suffocated or just plain had their brains beaten out is anybody’s guess. At last, exhausted, via swampy, never-used lanes, watched by spooky trees, I reached our secret hideout in Fitzherbert’s shed.
    There had been eleven fowls crammed into Les’s sack. When I arrived they were dozing fitfully up on the old gig in the back corner of the big shed, like flooded-out campers billeted in a grandstand. Les had lit the candle, thereby summoning up a sinister gallery of hooded, bobbing figures to join the spiders around the walls.
    I was drenched from head to toe and stiff with mud and blood. I stripped clean off and we washed every stitch of my clothes in the trough behind the shed. The night did not seem so warm, stark naked, but the breeze was velvet. The moon wasin the gutter of the sky with its parking lights on and the pines grouped around the stile and along the fence between the paddock and the ruined Fitzherbert mansion were skinny old men leaning on their walking sticks.
    We wrung the clothes out and hung them from rusty nails around the walls of the shed, and I went and sat in the pile of lucerne hay. Les and I had gone swimming in the ‘nuddy’ time and time again, but it had never given me a feeling like this before, a feeling too delicious by far to be anything but evil. I wanted to make the feeling get worse, so I lit a cigarette, completely unconcerned whether tobacco stumped your growth or not. The school of thought which maintained tobacco stumped your growth was probably quite wrong anyway, I thought to myself. If you believed everything you read about what to eat and what not to eat, don’t do this, don’t do that, and you listened to everything every screwball told you, a guy was going to end up too scared to move, I reasoned.

Chapter Two

    A watery solution of mist and sunlight grudgingly included Smythe Street in its early morning tour of inspection. It winced as it itemised, in a slapdash fashion, the rusty tin bath-tubs, stoves, lavatory pans, hot-water cylinders, etcetera, which cluttered up our yard behind the house. The square concrete building across the street from our tumbledown dwelling was fleetingly beautified with a lemon sheen. Soon it became possible to read the inexpertly painted inscription on the double doors of the big shed down at the end of our yard. D. H. POINDEXTER ANTIQUE DEALER AND VALUER . Although energetic efforts at erasion had been made it was also possible to discern in larger letters, DESERT HEAD FOR JUNK . We never found out who had the nerve to paint that derisive slogan on our shed. Actually the D. H. stood for Daniel Herbert. Some democratic birds began to bang snails on such parts of our roof as they consideredin good enough shape to withstand the impact, and it could be said the business of seeing through another day had been officially opened.
    Sunday was always a pretty grim morning for D. H. Poindexter (my old man) and my big brother Herbert, and Uncle Athol, but this Sunday I was right up with the field. While my eyelids were still at half-mast, recent events and the pending repercussions thereof hit me like a wet spade. Les and I had worked out every detail, but it took my subconscious mind to single out the key point of the whole manoeuvre. Hate and excitement can foul up anyone’s judgment, but that old subconscious sure knows its onions. How, it said to me, spreading its hands pityingly, how in the name of God do you expect to get away with it? Victor Lynch