satchel except hold it. I had to run, so I did.
I took off for the low place in the stone wall between
Ark’s place and the Salberins’ property, and it was hard to
see where I always came up and hoisted myself over the
wall, but I could hear Goodwife Filster behind me, her thick
feet thumping on the ground, and suddenly I had the idea of
vaulting over the wall on my hands, so I did exactly that –
the first time I ever did it – and I sailed over the wall on one
hand, holding the satchel in the other, just as something
struck the top of the wall by my hand and threw up sparks
as it went by. It looked like her hatchet, but I didn’t want to
find out for sure, so I hit the ground on the other side and
almost lost my balance and the satchel, too, but I managed
to keep running. I thought I could hear Ark shouting my
name way back behind me, but it didn’t make much difference
to me right then.
As I tore across the Salberins’ flower beds and headed
for the rail fence between their place and the Wylmeens’
property, I heard someone scrambling over the wall behind
me, screaming something like “evil spawn” over and over.
For a moment, I wondered if Goodwife Filster had always
been strange in that way, and if she was really crazy or was
just so angry she couldn’t think straight anymore, and
maybe having her bakery burn down was just the last straw.
She had always been mean but never really awful or
strange like she was now.
I reached the rail fence, slowing down just enough to
climb over it with one hand because it was too high to vault
over. I couldn’t seem to get a grip on the wood for a
moment, but I heard her shout, “Evil spawn!” right behind
me, and in moments I was over the fence and on my back
in the Wylmeens’ tomato bed. I scraped my leg on a tomato
post in falling over the fence and the satchel banged my
nose, but none of it hurt very much and I had a lot more to
think about right then than a scratch. I also thought that I
didn’t have the faintest idea of where I was going to go, but
I just wanted to get Goodwife Filster and her torch away
from Ark and Widow Muffin and our shoe shop. That was
all that mattered.
I got up and started running across the tomato bed and
into the cucumber vines, but it was dark and my foot caught
in a bunch of vines and I fell Hat on my face and knocked
all the wind out of my lungs. I still had the satchel, so I
started to get up and run again, but I fell down right away
because my ankle felt like someone had stuck it with a red-
hot iron. I heard someone scramble over the fence and land
on the ground a dozen feet behind me, so I got up again but
couldn’t run on my bad leg or even hop on my good leg, and
I fell again and said the very same bad word I’d heard the
fisherman use, the very same word Ark had told me never
to say again, and I said it real loud.
And that’s when I heard Mud coming.
The Wylmeens call their dog Mud because he has the
same color coat as the mud in the road after a heavy rain.
He comes up almost to my shoulders and has eyes that glow
white when he sees something he wants to kill, and the
Wylmeens haven’t been very good about teaching Mud not
to kill everything that comes into his yard. He killed a
wolverine one year in an hour-long battle, and the
Wylmeens stuck the carcass on a post by the road, where it
stayed until Mud figured out how to get it down and tore it
into little pieces. I sometimes slip through the Wylmeens’
garden because I figured out how to get to the other side