“It’s impossible!” I stormed. Then I tried to calm myself, “It’s a joke,” I said. “Someone played a joke.”
I searched my mind for someone who might have done it and I couldn’t think of anyone who’d go to all the trouble involved in that sort of joke. There was George Montgomery, but George was a sobersides. And Belsen, but Belsen was too wrapped up in music to be playing any jokes. And Dobby–it was inconceivable he’d ever play a joke.
“Some joke!” said Helen.
Nobody in the neighborhood, I told myself, would have done a trick like that, Everyone knew I was counting on those dahlias to win me some more ribbons.
“I’ll knock off early,” I told her, “and see what can be done about it.”
Although I knew there was precious little that could be done about it–just haul the thing away.
“I’ll be over at Amy’s,” Helen said. “I’ll try to get home early.”
I went out and saw another prospect, but I didn’t do too well. All the time I was thinking of the dahlias.
I knocked off work in the middle of the afternoon and bought a spray-can of insecticide at a drugstore. The label claimed it was effective against ants, roaches, wasps, aphids and a host of other pests.
At home, Billy was sitting on the steps.
“Hello, son. Nothing much to do?”
“Me and Tommy Henderson played soldier for a while, but we got tired of it.”
I put the insecticide on the kitchen table, then headed for the garden. Billy trailed listlessly behind me.
The boulder was there, squarely in the middle of the dahlia patch, and every bit as big as Helen said it was. It was a funny looking thing, not just a big slab-sided piece of rock, but a freckled looking job. It was a washed out red and almost a perfect globe.
I walked around it, assessing the damage. There were a few of the dahlias left, but the better ones were gone. There were no tracks, no indication of how the rock might have gotten where it was. It lay a good thirty feet from the alleyway and someone might have used a crane to hoist it off a truck bed, but that seemed most unlikely, for a heavy nest of utility wires ran along the alley.
I went up to the boulder and had a good, close look at it. The whole face of it was pitted with small, irregular holes, none of them much deeper than half an inch, and there were occasional smooth patches, with the darker luster showing, as if some part of the original surface had been knocked off, The darker, smoother patches had the shine of highly polished wax, and I remembered something from very long ago–when a onetime pal of mine had been a momentary rock collector.
I bent a little closer to one of the smooth, waxy surfaces and it seemed to me that I could see the hint of wavy lines running in the stone.
“Billy,” I asked, “would you know an agate if you saw one?”
“Gosh, Dad, I don’t know. But Tommy would. He is a sort of rockhound. He’s hunting all the time for different kinds of rocks.”
He came up close and looked at one of the polished surfaces. He wet his thumb against his tongue and rubbed it across the waxy surface to bring out the satin of the stone.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I think it is.”
He backed off a ways and stared at the boulder with a new respect.
“Say, Dad, if it really is an agate–if it is one big agate, I mean, it would be worth a lot of money, wouldn’t it?” ‘
“I don’t know. I suppose it might be.”
“A million dollars, maybe.”
I shook my head. “Not a million dollars.”
“I’ll go get Tommy, right away,” he said.
He went around the garage like a flash and I could hear him running down the driveway, hitting out for Tommy’s place.
I walked around the boulder several times and tried to estimate its weight, but I had no knowledge I could go on.
I went back to the house and read the directions on the can of insecticide. I uncapped and tested it and the sprayer worked.
So I got down on my knees in front of the threshold of the kitchen door and tried to find the path the ants were using to come in. I couldn’t see any of them right away, but I knew from past experience that they are little more than specks and almost transparent in the bargain and mighty hard to see.
A glittery motion in one corner of the kitchen caught my eye and I wheeled around. A glob of golden shimmer was running on the floor, keeping close to the baseboard and heading for the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink.
It was another of the outsize ladybugs.
I aimed the squirt can at it and let it have a burst, but it kept right on and vanished underneath the cabinet.
With the bug gone, I resumed looking for the ants and found no sign of them. There were none coming in the door. Or going out, for that matter. There were none on the sink or the work table space.
So I went around the corner of the house to size up Operation Wasp. It would be a sticky one, I knew. The nest was located in the attic louver and would be hard to get at. Standing off and looking at it, I decided the only thing to do was wait until night, when I could be sure all the wasps were in the nest. Then I’d put up a ladder and climb up and let them have it, then get out as fast as I could manage without breaking my fool neck.
It was a piece of work that I frankly had no stomach for, but I knew from the tone of Helen’s voice at the breakfast table there was no ducking it.
There were a few wasps flying around the nest, and as I watched a couple of them dropped out of the nest and tumbled to the ground.
Wondering what was going on, I stepped a little closer and then I saw the ground was littered with dead or dying wasps. Even as I watched, another wasp fell down and lay there, twisting and squirming.
I circled around a bit to try to get a better look at whatever might be happening. But I could make out nothing except that every now and then another wasp fell down.
I told myself it was all right with me. If something was killing off the wasps it would save me the job of getting rid of them.
I was turning around to take the insecticide back to the kitchen when Billy and Tommy Henderson came panting in excitement from the backyard.
“Mr. Marsden,” Tommy said, “that rock out there is an agate. It’s a banded agate.”
“Well, now, that’s fine,” I said.
“But you don’t understand,” cried Tommy. “No agate gets that big. Especially not a banded agate. They call them Lake Superior agates and they don’t ever get much bigger than your fist.”
That did it. I jerked swiftly to attention and went pelting around the house to have another look at the boulder in the garden. The boys came pounding on behind me.
That boulder was a lovely thing. I put out my hand and stroked it. I thought how lucky I was that someone had plopped it in my garden. I had forgotten all about the dahlias.
“I bet you,” Tommy told me, his eyes half as big as saucers, “that you could get a lot of money for it.”
I won’t deny that approximately the same thought had been going through my mind.
I put out my hand and pushed against it, just to get the solid and substantial feel of it.
And as I pushed, it rocked slightly underneath the pressure!
Astonished, I pushed a little harder, and it rocked again.
Tommy stood bug-eyed. “That’s funny, Mr. Marsden. By rights, it hadn’t ought to move. It must weigh several tons. You must be awfully strong.”
“I’m not strong,” I told him. “Not as strong as that.” I tottered back to the house and put away the insecticide, then went out and sat down on the steps to do some worrying.
There was no sign of the boys. They probably had run swiftly off to spread the news through the neighborhood.
If that thing was an agate, as Tommy said it was–if it really was one tremendous agate, then it would be a fantastic museum piece and might command some money. But if it was an agate, why was it so light? No ten men, pushing on it, should have made it budge.
I wondered, too, just what my rights would be if it should actually turn out to be an agate. It was on my property and it should be mine. But what if someone came along and claimed it?