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edged along our street every evening, bumper to bumper. People craned their necks for a glimpse of anything they could see. Flashbulbs popped from backseats. Mrs. Dowdel’s cobhouse blocked most of the view. But people could see the glow of her campfire like an eerie halo above.
    “You children,” Mother said in a weary voice, “keep completely out of this. Where’s Ruth Ann?”
    In a day or two the police chief and the newspaper were swamped with reports of strange lights in the night and sudden sounds.
    We Barnharts were used to sudden sounds by now. It was the hunting season, at least in Mrs. Dowdel’s mind. Pintails, mallards, teals, the first of the migrating Canada geese often flapped their last over her property. Any time before dark you were apt to hear the full voice of a twelve-gauge shotgun. Then something on the wing would stop short in the sky and drop like a rock. And whether it was actually pheasant season or not, it was too late to warn the pheasant.
    Another week or so, and rumors of the ghost princess began to blend with last year’s big news. People remembered how the Russians had sent their two Sputnik rockets into orbit, one with a dog riding in it. This brought back the topic of flying saucers.
    Mrs. L. J. Weidenbach, the banker’s wife, granted an interview with the
Piatt County Call.
She spoke for the membership of the Daughters of the American Revolution, saying:
    “The Russians are perfectly capable of disguising one of their spies as the ghost of an Indian princess or anything else of either sex, not to mention a flying dog. The enemy is already among us. We’re probably radioactive already. We must keep our eyes peeled and support our troops.”
    Over on the high school side, the kids were abuzz. They’d all trespassed on the haunted melon patch at one time or another. But nobody could finger the couples who’d left the Thunderbird wine and picnic blankets and transistor radios behind when the Kickapoo Princess scared them off. A few began to remember they’d seen something they couldn’t put a name to in the melon patch. They milled in the school halls and couldn’t settle. Test scores dropped. A Boy Scout troop working toward Eagle said there ought to be a badge for Ghost Spotting.
    The whole matter might have died down, with football season and corn-husking and high school homecoming on the way. But things took another turn on a certain moonless night. And it wasn’t Boy Scouts. It was girls, a bunch of them. I slept through most of it, up till the screaming and gunfire. But by daybreak the whole town had all the particulars.
    Though high school sororities weren’t allowed, there
was
one, run by a redhead named Waynetta Blalock. Her mother had been a Lovejoy, and they owned the hybrid seed corn and the grain elevator. The sorority was Iota Nu Beta, which some people said stood for I Oughta Know Better.
    This was the time of year Iota Nu Beta initiated new freshmen girls. Not Phyllis. She said herself she wasn’t eligible since she couldn’t wear makeup and only had two skirts. Waynetta had said all over school that Phyllis was “poor as a church mouse and anyhow not
from
here.”
    Even down in the grades we heard all about the plans for a secret Iota Nu Beta initiation. Waynetta personally leaked word that it would take place in the vicinity of the Haunted Melon Patch.
    On that moonless Friday night, according to eyewitnesses, the Iota Nu Beta girls met out behind our house, by our car. We had a car. We just didn’t have gas money for it, and it burned a quart of oil if you hit the starter. It was a 1950 Nash four-door. We called it the Pickle because of its shape. Also it was green.
    From over by the parked Pickle the sorority girls could see across the cannas. There Mrs. Dowdel slumped asleep before her dying fire. Out there on flat ground she must have looked like the Rock of Gibraltar. Her shotgun lay broken open and was beginning to slip off her knees. The scene was