wanted to push the apple into his hands and tell him to eat it and stop being silly. Boys had such crazy ideas!
“It will be at least ten years before you’re old enough to be an astronaut,” she scolded. “I don’t see why you have to start this soon to shrink your stomach.”
She eyed him thoughtfully in the dim light. Hank was a little on the stocky side. He was almost plump, and his face was so round and cheerful it always looked kind of beaming, like the sun. Maybe it would be good for him to slim down a bit.
She threw the apple into the river. The sound of its splash in the dark water could barely be heard above the ripple of the current. Then she and Hank leaned their heads back against the tree and watched the sky in silence for a while.
All at once Ellie became aware of a new sound. A creaking and dipping of oars came faintly from the shadows on the far side of the stream.
“Somebody’s rowing up the river,” she whispered.
“He’s not going up the river,” Hank whispered back. “He’s going down, toward the bridge. I wonder who it is?”
“I hope he knows about the falls,” she said.
“Gee, that’s right.”
Hank stood up and called, “Hello!”
There was no answer from the person in the boat. Hank ran to the edge of the bank and shouted again. “Hey—whoever you are—you’d better watch out for the falls!”
A sudden rattling, scraping sound, as if an oar had slipped and been jerked back, was the only answer to Hank’s call. The regular dipping sound grew faster and fainter as the boat moved on downstream.
“That’s—queer,” he muttered, peering into the darkness.
The liquid surface of the river reflected light enough to make the outline of a boat visible, but neither Hank nor Ellie could catch sight of it. For a moment Ellie wondered if there really was a boat there on the water. The regular creak and dip of the oars was an eerie sound, growing fainter as they listened.
“He’s hugging the shadows of the other bank,” Hank said. “Now—who would do that? Why would anybody row down the river on a cold, dark night like this, anyway?”
Ellie felt the coldness, suddenly, right through to her bones. She shivered, and wrapped her jacket more tightly across her chest. She opened her mouth to say, “Let’s go in the house and get warm,” but at that very moment Hank pointed to the horizon and shouted, “There they are. Two of them! See?”
The bright satellites began to climb the sky, drifting slowly below the twinkling stars. It was strange to see two of them at the same time, like twin planets gleaming in the heavens. Hank forgot the unseen row-boat while he watched them drift past the Milky Way like candles seen in a snowstorm.
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” he said, when the lights had disappeared on the northern horizon.
Ellie nodded. “It makes you wonder, all right.”
But it wasn’t the two satellites that she was wondering about. The sound of a slammed door inside the empty mill and the creak of invisible oars on the river were far more mysterious to her.
Hank seemed to be lost in outer space. He didn’t say anything as they walked slowly toward the house. But when he climbed onto his bicycle, he came back to earth once more.
“We’ll have to find out about that boat,” he said.
“Oh, Hank, do you think we can?”
“Easily,” he assured her. “Most people who own boats have put them up for the winter. All we’ve got to do is look up and down the bank, and if we find a boat that’s still in the water it will probably be the one.
“And then we can find out whose it is,” Ellie exclaimed. “Gee, Hank, that’s a great idea!”
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