On Track for Treasure (13 page)

I
NSIDE THE HOUSE

T
he geese and chickens were making their daybreak noises, but Frances was already awake.

In fact, she was running—sprinting from the barn past the water pump, the chapel, and the yard—heading straight for the Careys' house in the gray dawn light. Her shoes were unbuttoned and her shirttails trailed behind her. She clambered up the stairs to the kitchen door and fell against it.

“Mrs. Carey!” she cried, half out of breath.

The door swung open. “My child, what's the matter?” the Reverend's wife whispered. Behind her were Eleanor and Olive, wide-eyed, their hair still unbraided.

“My brother,” Frances gasped. “He has a fever. . . .” She turned and looked back at the barn.

Without another word, Mrs. Carey was out the door and hurrying toward the barn, with Frances running ahead to lead her. The Carey girls followed, too.

Harold was in his straw bale bed, his face flushed and wet with perspiration. “Frannie,” he moaned. Alexander and Jack were crouched next to him, trying to give him some water from a tin cup.

“He wouldn't get out of bed this morning,” Frances explained, her pulse racing anxiously. “And then I felt how hot his forehead was.”

Mrs. Carey put her hand to Harold's head. “Oh, dear. The boy ought to be inside. Olive, help me carry him, and, Eleanor, gather his things.” One of the Carey girls (the taller one, Frances noted) came over and helped her mother pick up Harold, who only whimpered as he was lifted out of bed. “Frances, he's your brother, so you'll come in with us, won't you?” Mrs. Carey asked.

“Oh, well . . . of course,” Frances said slowly. “But first . . . I have to find his lucky pebble! He loves it, and—and he feels better when he can hold it in his hand! Right, Harold?” As she spoke, she began to search the corners of the barn.

“
Pebble
,” Harold said weakly as he was being wrapped in a blanket. “Want . . . pebble . . .”

“You see?” Frances said. “He misplaced it, and I'm the only one here who knows what it looks like.” Jack and Alexander nodded at that. “I'll bring it to him as soon as I find it!”

Mrs. Carey was becoming impatient. “He needs a cold compress, not a lucky charm. Come on, Olive.”

They took Harold out of the barn while Frances and the boys watched. As he was being carried out, Harold caught Frances's eye and smiled just a little. In another few moments, he was inside the house.

“Whew!” Jack said, turning to Frances. “That was close. Good thing you thought up that business with the pebble.”

Frances let out the breath she'd been holding. “That's for sure.” She needed to stay outside for now; later she'd have a good excuse for getting into the house.

“Now we wait for the next step,” said Alexander. “Let's hope Harold does his part.”

Mrs. Carey smelled a little like oatmeal. Or maybe it was the house, Harold thought, which carried the scent of hot breakfast cooking. He wondered if there was a kind of fever that could be treated with bacon and if there was a way to convince Mrs. Carey that he had it. Because it sure was a bother pretending to be sick. He'd had to run all around the barn with his coat on in order to get his face hot enough to fool the Careys.

He'd kept his eyes squeezed shut the whole time he was being carried inside, but he finally opened them a peek after he'd been tucked in bed. He was in the upstairs room where the other children's beds were. Frances had hated that room, but truthfully it wasn't that bad. In fact, it was kind of nice. He shut his eyes again while Mrs. Carey put cool, wet cloths over his forehead. It wasn't long before he began to doze off, just like a real sick person, and he was awfully proud of his performance.

He woke to see four faces looking down at him. Faces that he knew but hadn't seen in days.

“Harold!” whispered George. “You're here!”

Behind George were Nicky, Sarah, and Anka.

Harold sat up and grinned. “We got your apple message,” he told them as he reached into his pocket for the note that he'd brought. He handed it to Sarah, who unfolded it. It was a list of instructions that Frances and Jack had written out the night before.

Sarah and Nicky looked over the note. “‘Get the key to the schoolroom,'” Sarah read aloud. She shook her head. “The Reverend and Mrs. Carey each have keys, but they keep their sets with them at all times.”

“Is impossible,” Anka added.

“But we can help with the other things on this list,” Nicky said.

Harold nodded, but he felt a lump in his throat. The key to the schoolroom was the most important part! Without it, how were they going to get Eli out?

“You don't look so good,” George said. “Are you sure you're not just a little bit sick, for real?”

“Yeah,” Nicky said. “When you're sick, you get toast with butter and jam.”

“Really?” Harold lay back on the pillows and hoped he still looked feverish. He wondered what kind of jam Mrs. Carey would put on his toast.

Meanwhile, the others began to make their beds and tidy the bedroom. Harold couldn't believe how neatly and cheerfully they worked. Back at the orphanage in New York, making beds was a dreaded task because it could never be done quite right and the matrons would always yell about the covers being lumpy. But here, even George knew how to make the corners tuck in perfectly. Nicky was humming a merry-sounding song as he swept the floor, and Sarah and Anka shook pillows in rhythm to the tune. It looked almost fun. No, it
was
fun.

Harold wished Frances and Jack and Alexander could see what it was like in here. Maybe they wouldn't have to leave! They could all live together in the house and then go out to visit Wanderville. Of course, that depended on whether they would be allowed to play out there. Harold had a feeling the Careys wouldn't approve, which meant they'd have to sneak over. But then, they weren't supposed to lie—did sneaking count as lying?

Thinking about all this made Harold's head feel hot for real. It wasn't a good feeling, but at least maybe now he'd get extra jam on his toast.

By the afternoon Harold had consumed not only toast and jam, but some hot soup, a mug of tea that smelled like cinnamon, and a dish of applesauce. It was all delicious, but it was a little boring to sit there with Mrs. Carey watching him take every bite and slurp every spoonful.

Later, he was allowed to go downstairs and sit in the kitchen while the other children worked. Harold and Nicky peeled potatoes for supper while Anka and Sarah sliced cucumbers to make pickles. Before long, Nicky and George began to hum again, a song Harold didn't know.

“Let's sing the Rock Candy Mountain song!” Harold suggested. “With the part that Ned Handsome made up about Wanderville!”

Sarah wrinkled her nose. “You mean that old hobo song?”

George shrugged. “I don't remember how it goes.”

So Harold started to sing:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, all the sheriffs are stone-blind,

And the children from
Wanderville don't pay 'em any mind. . . .

But nobody was joining in, and Harold couldn't sing so well when he had to sing all by himself. He let the song trail off into a mumble.

“No more song about sheriff and orphan train,” Anka said, frowning. “Hate to think of those things.”

“We live here now,” George said. “Not Wanderville.”

“But—” Harold protested.

“We have new songs,” Nicky said. “The Reverend taught us this one. . . .”

With banner and with badge we come,

An army true and strong,

To fight against the hosts of rum,

And this shall be our song.

Then Sarah and Anka and George joined in:

We love the clear cold water springs,

Supplied by gentle showers.

We feel the strength cold water brings.

The victory is ours.

If you asked Harold, the song wasn't as jolly as the hobo song. You had to sing it like you were marching, and from the way it plodded along, it was like marching in mud.

But he tried to learn the song, and two other songs that Nicky and the others had learned. They were all about how cold water was better than liquor, but
everyone
knew
that
, Harold thought. He'd never tasted liquor, of course, but he knew it smelled exactly like shoes on fire. Couldn't folks tell the difference between that stuff and cold water? Why did they need so many songs to explain? And as good as cold water was, it wasn't
nearly
as delicious as rock candy, especially not a Rock Candy Mountain.

That night, Harold lay in bed—
his
bed, Mrs. Carey had told him. His stomach was full and happy, but everything else felt funny. He kept looking around—like he was searching for something, but he didn't know what. He could see, out the window and in the moonlight, a glimpse of the barn where Frances and Jack and Alexander were working on the next part of their plan. That was good. But he couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. Was it because Frances wasn't here? Or was it because of what he'd seen behind the shed, when that farmhand hit Mr. Pike again and again? Nobody in this house talked about Mr. Pike or Eli. Harold thought about Eli stuck all by himself in that schoolroom. Could he hear them making their beds and singing their songs?

Something on the bedroom windowsill caught his eye. He went over to pick it up. It was Anka's little wooden doll, the one she'd brought to the first Wanderville back in Kansas. It had stood in a special spot there, on a shelf in the trees that had made the place feel like a real house, only better. Harold knew that Anka had brought the doll with her when they'd left Kansas. He'd figured the next time he saw it, it would be in a place that felt like home.

But this wasn't home. He knew that now.

T
O STEAL A KEY

J
ack couldn't stop going over all the details in his head that night. According to the list they'd sent into the house with Harold, the first thing they needed was the key to the schoolroom. But, of course, it was up to the kids in the house to get it and unlock the door. He looked out across the yard to the lighted windows of the house. What if nobody could get the key? The whole plan depended on that part.

At least Jack and Frances and Alexander had the next few things on their list. The kids from the house had slipped them into the supper basket—a sheaf of writing paper, a pen, and ink. Now the three of them in the barn were working on the next part of the plan.

Or, really, it was Frances who was doing most of the work. “My hand's getting numb!” she complained as she finished writing out another page. She was huddled over a makeshift desk that they'd made from a wooden crate, scribbling furiously by lantern light. “Why am I doing this again?”

“So we can put those pages in the schoolroom as a decoy and make it look like Eli completed his punishment,” Alexander reminded her. “If we just unlocked the schoolroom and let him out, there'd be trouble.”

“I know why
we're
doing it, silly,” Frances grumbled, straightening the growing stack. “What I want to know is why
I
have to be the one to write all the pages! Is it because it's
my
little brother's fault that Eli's locked up?”

Jack laughed. “No! It's because you can write the best. And the fastest.” He felt a little sorry for Frances, but she was filling the pages in no time—with the words to nursery rhymes, old songs, poems she must have known by heart from her
Third Eclectic Reader
. Of course, if Reverend Carey ever read the pages closely he'd know that they weren't the sermon he'd assigned Eli to write out fifty times. But Jack would make sure Eli was free before the Reverend even read the first word.

“I'm running out of things to write,” Frances said with a sigh. “I've written out ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb' six times in a row!
Now
what?”

“Just write whatever comes to mind,” Jack suggested. “You've only got a couple of pages left to go!”

Frances nodded wearily and dipped her pen into the inkwell, then went back to writing.

Alexander had started pacing again, the way he always did when he talked about plans. “We'll sneak into the house tomorrow and get the pages to Eli. Then the next time the Reverend checks on him, he'll start to read the pages. That'll be Eli's chance to slip out.”

“And then we'll shut the schoolroom door on the Reverend and lock it from the outside,” Jack said.

Frances looked up from her writing and glared at him. Jack knew she didn't approve of this part of the plan—she thought it was mean.

“We'll lock it just for a minute or two, Frances, I promise,” Jack said. “Just long enough to give Eli a chance to escape . . .”

“And just long enough to let Sarah and Nicky and Anka and George gather their things,” Alexander said. “And then we'll all hit the road.”

At breakfast the next day, Harold kept his eyes on the keys on Mrs. Carey's belt. Last night, he had seen her give them to one of her daughters (he still didn't know who was who), who in turn had taken a bowl of soup into the schoolroom for Eli. But then Olive or Eleanor gave the keys right back, and as far as he could tell, there was never a chance to just
take
the keys. What could he do?

The Reverend sipped his tea at the head of the table. “Children, one of you has taken a pen and ink from my study,” he announced. “Some paper, too. For what purpose do you need these things?”

Harold tried not to look over at Sarah too quickly. She had taken the writing things last night and packed them in the supper basket to send out to the barn kids. She turned a little pale but remained silent. So did the other kids.
They don't want to lie
, he realized.

But then George spoke up. “I borrowed them, sir. I was teaching Harold the Cold Water Army song, and I wanted to write down the words. Right, Harold?”

“Right.” Harold nodded.

“Very well,” said Reverend Carey, giving both boys a stern look. “But you must ask before you borrow something.” He stood up and excused himself from the table, and a moment or two later, Harold heard him close the door to his study.

“Thanks,” Harold whispered to George. He was both glad that George was still his friend and sorry that he had to lie for his sake—just as Eli had.

As the children cleared the dishes from the breakfast table, Harold noticed one of the Carey girls—Eleanor, he thought—placing a bowl of oatmeal on a tray.
For Eli
, Harold realized. He hung back and watched Eleanor get the key from Mrs. Carey and walk down the hall toward the schoolroom. Then he followed her with his quietest footsteps.

He watched her unlock the door with the key and go inside. The door was wide open, he realized—could he slip into the schoolroom without her noticing? His legs felt shaky as he took the first steps. But then he pretended he was a ghost floating and invisible as he tucked himself behind the open door. It worked! Eleanor hadn't seen him.

“You're sure taking a long time to finish your punishment, aren't you?” she said to Eli.

“Yes, ma'am” was all Eli said in reply.

Eleanor must not have liked being called
ma'am
, because she muttered “Suit yourself” and set the bowl down hard.

Harold watched from behind the door as she walked out. He did it! He had gotten into the schoolroom and he hadn't even had to steal the key! Now all he had to do was—

The door shut at that moment with a loud
thud
. And then Harold heard the key turning in the lock. Locking it.

Uh-oh.
Harold had been so excited about sneaking into the schoolroom that he had forgotten how the door worked. Now
he
was locked inside, just like Eli.

Eli looked over from his desk and gave a wry half smile. “Are you being punished, too, Red?”