He was late then, and every little while one of us would stick his head around the edge of the barn to see if he wasn't coming up the driveway from Park Street. We might as well have sat still, for you never can tell which way he will come. Pa says that Skinny is like the wind, which bloweth whither it listeth. I don't exactly know what he meant but that is what he said, or something like that. It was quiet in the orchard. There was hardly a sound except the buzzing of insects in the sunshine, and somehow that only seemed to make it more quiet and dreamy. Suddenly Bill Wilson stood up on the sloping shingles and gave such a warwhoop that it almost made the bark rattle on the trees. When Bill turns his voice loose it is something awful. We looked up to see what it all was about. He had grabbed Benny Wade by the hair and, giving another yell louder than the first, was pretending to scalp him. Bill always likes to play Indian. Benny didn't want to be scalped. Although he is two years younger and not nearly so big, he grabbed Bill around the legs and held on until they both slipped and went tumbling down the steep roof to the ground, where they sat, with the rest of us laughing down at them. Just then we heard another warwhoop, sounding from up the hill somewhere, beyond the orchard. Bill and Benny scrambled to their feet, and we all looked and listened. We saw nothing for a minute or two. Then something darted through the gate, which leads into the orchard from the hill; dropped down out of sight behind the fence, and commenced crawling backward toward the nearest apple tree. Every few seconds, it would raise up long enough to point something, which looked like a gun, at the enemy. "Great snakes!" whispered Bill. "What's that?" But we could tell in a minute without asking, for when it reached the tree it stood up and peered around the trunk, aiming a stick and pretending to fire. We knew then that Skinny was on the way. "It's Skinny!" shouted Benny, throwing a stick at him. Skinny waved one arm for us to be quiet, then began to wriggle back to the next tree. Making his way slowly from tree to tree, with a quick dash he finally reached the roof, where he felt safe. "That was a close call, Skinny," said Bill. "I heard a bee buzzin' around out there in the orchard, a few minutes ago." "Bee, nothin'!" Skinny told him, still pointing with his gun and looking around in every direction. "They pretty near had me surrounded." That was the beginning of this history, which tells all about the doings of the Band, that set all the people talking about us for miles around.