| OCR Text |
Show Twisters . . . 59 with a plan. Stacey thought it sounded too dangerous, but we talked her into trying it by saying we'd go first. Arthur had read about a rescue operation in the Arctic where an Eskimo had used an up-ended dog sled. I couldn't quite picture what he had in mind, but Stacey and I went to work doing what he told us. Grunting, cussing as needed, the three of us lowered Smiley's heavy kitchen table, legs up, through the stair opening until it came to a rest on something solid. I was the first one to drop down on it. With Stacey training the light on me from above, I crept down the slippery-slide slope of the table until I could grab a post. It was easy to swing from there down to the basement floor. Arthur made the same trip. Under his weight, however, the table slipped and the whole thing came crashing onto the cement, barely missing me. He wasn't hurt, but that ended it for Stacey. With all the noise we were making, I decided Mrs. Smiley had either died of a heart attack or had turned her hearing aid to zero. Then Stacey lowered her light to us by tying it to the strings of a smelly old mop she found somewhere. My flashlight had grown so faint we left it upstairs. Slowly at first, Arthur shone the light all around us. There wasn't any sign of Smiley. He lighted up her old-fashioned furnace, which was spooky as anything there in the darkwith its arms reaching out in all directions. Arthur and I sniffed around it, but all we could smell was a musty basement. He next shone the light across Smiley's gleaming rows of canned fruit and tomatoes, onto pieces of old furniture she had stored' everywhere. There wasn't a whole lot of room for walking, but we started out. |
