LUCY

Maybe a wishbone won't do it but Lucy will be a boy. Rejected by the gang in the lane as a bowman or even as Maid Marian, as a thief or especially as a detective, Lucy becomes fearless Low and starts looking for malefactors. She's flubbed twice when, perched on absentee Mr. Fandango's wall, she spots two men removing goods from his house and, after some pondering, decides that they're thieves. What to do? A girl would run home, a boy would hide in the van -- so she hides. Anxious moments later, the van arrives in an enclosed yard, the men unload and leave, and Lucy has to find a way to get out and alert the police. Fortunately, she's thin enough to squeeze through the chained warehouse door onto a wharf, fortunately a police launch comes by, and the rest is neighborhood acclaim and a chance to be Maid Marian. ""No,"" insists Lucy, ""I want to be Will Scarlet."" The leader agrees: ""We won't have any Maid Marian. It's better just with boys."" The assumptions are ingenuous and the story's less likely than Robin Hood; at the same time -- precisely the same time -- the dialogue is jaunty and it all happens too fast to be taken seriously. Quite little girls who like action will like it; their big sisters succumb to the same.