Anybody Can Do Anything Read Free Page B

circles. Then Mary, still kneeling, pulled herself into the mouth of the flume but holding on tight to each side. “You’d have to go belly buster,” she said speculatively as she measured herself with the opening.
    “What do you mean ‘you’?” I said. Mary didn’t answer.“Daddy said flumes are dangerous,” I said edging still further away from it.
    Mary said, “He didn’t mean this flume, Betsy dear, he meant flumes that go into dams or end up in waterfalls. Of course, those flumes are very, very dangerous, but this old thing,” she patted the flume like an old dog, “is perfectly safe. Just look at it, Betsy.”
    Cautiously I again knelt and peered down into the long green tunnel and it did seem much safer. At least it was perfectly quiet and I couldn’t hear the roar of any waterfalls.
    “Let’s just slide a little way in it and then crawl out again,” Mary suggested.
    “You go first,” I said.
    “Now, Betsy, dear,” Mary always called me “Betsy, dear” when she was going to will me to do some ghastly thing. “I’m the biggest and strongest so I’d better stay outside and hold your feet and help you.”
    “You go first,” I repeated stubbornly.
    Mary said, “This is going to be more fun than anything we’ve ever done. We’ll slide down just like a train in a tunnel. Zip and well be at the bottom. Crisscross your heart you’ll never tell anyone about our secret chute.”
    As I crisscrossed my thumping heart, I had a sudden fleeting feeling that all this had happened before. Mary’s eyes sparkled. She said, “We’ll bring Cleve and Gammy up here and when they aren’t looking well jump into our chute and when they try to find us well be at the bottom of the mountain.” We both peered into the flume again. Referring to it as “our chute” seemed to make it less dangerous and it didn’t seem quite so bottomless and scary now.
    Mary said, “If a bear or anything should chase us we could jump right in this chute and it’d never catch us.” I said, “But where does it come out?” Mary said, “Oh, probably in a big pile of sand.” One summer when we were camping in the mountains we had played on an old ore chute that ended in a pile of sand, but I didn’t think of that at the time, and thought that maybe Mary really knew where this chute ended. “How do you know?” I asked.
    She changed the subject by looking up into a tall pine tree close at hand. “I wonder if we could fix some kind of a rope that would pull us back up the hill?” she said. I said, “We could fix one of those pulleys like we fixed to send notes on.” Mary said, “Oh, Betsy, you’re so smart!” That’s just what we could fix and then we’d slide down, pull ourselves up,slide down, pull ourselves up. Up, down, up, down. Why we could even charge like the merry-go-round at Columbia Gardens,” she added as a final persuasion. Why didn’t all that up-down stuff make me remember the experiment in perpetual motion? How could I have been such a dupe and a dope?
    Mary said, “Come on, Betty, hurry and get in before Gammy and Cleve get here. You know Gammy said she’d walk up this way before supper.”
    I climbed in headfirst. “Grab my feet,” I yelled at Mary. But it was too late. The hot dry pine needles were very slick. In a second I had slithered out of reach. Down I went into the long, endless green tunnel. “Help, help, Mary, help!” I shouted and the words came roaring back at me, “Hulp, hulp!” as though I were shouting into a giant megaphone. The flume grew steeper and steeper and I gained momentum until I was whizzing along, my lard pail bumping the side, my straw hat over one eye. “Help, help, help!” I called again and again to Mary but there was no answer.
    Once I slowed down and got stuck in a flat place where there were no pine needles. With swimming motions I tried to get started again but only succeeded in getting a large sliver in my thigh. I pulled my legs up under me and tried