Read Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze for Free Online

smelt of mint and water. On a morning like that you couldn’t help but hope, no matter if you was bone-soaked and hungry and a child.”
    â€œWhen did they find you, though?” demanded Oliver, breaking Cuffy’s silence.
    â€œSoon after that. Very soon. My father he’d been down there twice during the night, but his lantern had blew out, and we couldn’t hear his shouting for the racket of the storm. In the morning we could, though, and he and Uncle Fisher got a rowboat and launched it well upstream and across on the diagonal and fetched us off the bank and we was safe!”
    Randy took a deep sniff from the coffee canister which she had forgotten about during the story.
    â€œWhat I can’t see is why you never told us this before,” said Oliver.
    â€œModesty, I bet, that’s why,” said Randy. “Because she saved that boy’s life. Isn’t that why, Cuffy?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know. Just never thought of it I guess.”
    â€œCertainly not. It was modesty,” said Randy, convinced. “Some people are that way; if it was me I’d boast. But you still haven’t explained that pin.”
    â€œOr about the guy’s curls,” said Oliver. “Did you get them cut for him?”
    â€œCourse I did,” said Cuffy. “Nothing to it. A day or two later I took him berrying with me; and it just so happened that I knew of a good burdock patch, and I collected a fine bunch of burrs and did a job of hairdressing on Francis, paying special attention to the bangs. ‘Now, France,’ I says (because that’s what we’d took to calling him), ‘don’t you tell no lies, but just try not to say exactly how you got these burrs in your hair.’ He handled it pretty good. ‘Why, Mama,’ he says, ‘you never saw so many burrs, and I just got all messed up in ’em. I had to get down so low under a barbwire fence.’ (That was true, too, only the fence wasn’t right near the burrs.) ‘I don’t know what I’da done if it hadn’t been for Evangeline.’ (No one called me Cuffy then, naturally.) ‘She’s saved my life twice, she has.’ Well, I admit that none of that was real lies, but it wasn’t the honest truth, either, and it wasn’t very honorable of us.” Cuffy looked searchingly at her audience.
    â€œOkay, Cuffy dear,” said Randy. “We understand the moral. But what about the pin?”
    â€œSo naturally Francis had to have his hair cut short. I’d done a real thorough burr-matting job; his mama, Mrs. Wellgrove, had tears in her eyes all the time Papa was shearing him. ‘My baby is gone,’ she kept moaning. ‘My little prince is gone forever.’ I’m sure it was partly that word ‘forever’ that made Francis grin the way he did, pleased as Punch. And when the curls was laying on the floor around the chair and Papa finished up the job, there wasn’t nothing of the prince about Francis: he was just a redheaded, snub-nosed boy, nine years old and no nonsense about it.… So then the pin. It was a pin of Mrs. Wellgrove’s and she thought the world of it, always wore it; but the morning that Papa got us off that island and Francis told her how I’d saved his life (course he exaggerated it a lot) she unpinned it from her collar right then and there, took Mr. Wellgrove’s photo out of it, and fastened it onto my dress. ‘Think of us when you wear this,’ she says, ‘and how we’re always grateful to you.’… She was a real emotional impulsive lady. Mr. Wellgrove, now, he was different. He come up to get his family in September, and he was a big, jolly man with a dark red face, a prosperous brewer. His mustache was yellow, I remember, and he brought presents to us all, wonderful presents: a music box for me, I know, with a bird on top, and a Made-in-Germany doll with gold hair and eyes that