With Freak still on his shoulders, Max heads over to the food carts when the fireworks are over. Freak marvels at the “amazing perspective” he gets on the world from sitting up so high, then suddenly warns Max that Blade and his gang are coming after them. He directs his friend to an escape route with his little feet “like he’s digging into a horse.” Max runs at a full gallop through the crowd, but eventually, Blade and his punks surround them. Not knowing what to do, Max looks to Freak to make a decision, and Freak comes through, pushing Max to run right over one of Blade’s smaller gang members and straight into the millpond.

The mud at the bottom of the pond is “really oozy and deep,” but Max just keeps on going; he is in the water up to his chest before he realizes Freak is telling him to stop. Turning around with difficulty because of the thick mud, which is up to his knees, Max sees that Blade is in trouble, with just his head above the water. When his “punksters” finally manage to rescue him, the angry and humiliated gang leader begins to throw rocks at Max and Freak.

As the rocks rain around them, Freak puts his fingers into his mouth and emits a whistle that is so loud and piercing it hurts Max’s ears. A passing cop car is alerted, and Blade and his punks run away. Max is so deeply entrenched in the mud that the cops have to use ropes to pull him out. When the two boys are safely back on the bank of the pond at last, one of the cops recognizes Max as “Kenny Kane’s boy” and wonders to his partner if “Old Killer Kane” is still in prison. When the policemen ask Freak for his name, the little boy, still on Max’s shoulders, proudly announces, “We’re Freak the Mighty!”

The cops take the boys home and make a big deal about Max and treat him like a hero “for rescuing the poor crippled midget kid.” Max thinks this is funny because, in his mind, Freak rescued him—or perhaps it was just the combination of Freak’s “genius brain and [Max’s] big dumb body.” Gram, a worrier, is concerned about the close call the boys have just had and issues the usual warnings. To Max’s surprise, Grim actually seems proud of him and calls him “son” for the first time ever.

The summer on the whole turns out to be “pretty cool” in Max’s estimation. Freak comes over every morning to wake him up, hollering:

Get outta bed, you lazy beast! There are fair maidens to rescue! Dragons to slay!

In the vivid world of imagination that Freak has created, knights and quests and other elements taken from the stories of King Arthur are significant and have symbolic meanings. In Freak’s eyes, for example, “a dragon is fear of the natural world . . . an archetype of the unknown.”

Of course, archetype and many, many of the other words Freak uses with such ease are completely beyond Max’s comprehension. In an effort to help his less eloquent friend increase his vocabulary, Freak often whips out the tattered dictionary he always carries in his knapsack and makes Max look up words. Max, however, has a hard time with dictionaries and books in general, and he quickly and inevitably becomes bored. When this happens, Freak gives up, reminding himself that intellectual dexterity is not everything; for example, though dinosaurs are known to have had tiny brains, “they ruled the earth for a hundred million years.”