Wanderville (11 page)

Y
ou can get ham in a can!
Jack couldn't believe it. And now he had three cans in his coat pocket. Plus two tins of beans and some Diamond brand matches stuffed in the top of his shoe. The soaring feeling continued as Jack stepped out of the store. It was sort of like the days he'd get paid at the factory, when he'd always get an itch to go spend it. This was like scratching the itch, only better. He couldn't wait to talk to Frances, because he was sure she had the feeling, too.

But instead she looked frantic. “Where's Harold?” she whispered. “He's not here!” She paced up and down the sidewalk in front of the store. By the time Alexander came out from the store, Frances was pale and Jack was uneasy.

“He's not here!” she said again.

“Maybe he just wandered down the street,” Alexander said, trying to keep his voice calm. He tried to keep pace with Frances as she strode along the sidewalk. “You said that sometimes he just doesn't stay still, so he could have—”

Frances stopped short and grabbed Alexander's arm. “Look,” she whispered. “Oh, no.”

There, across the street, was the Pratcherds' black wagon.

Jack caught up with Alexander and Frances, but he stopped, too, when he saw the wagon.

“Do you think . . . ?” he asked Frances.

Her eyes were big and anguished. “We have to see,” she whispered. She darted behind a nearby horse-cart. The two boys followed her, and then they all crept slowly around it to get a closer look across the street.

Alexander looked first and took a sharp, quick breath. Jack and Frances peered around next and saw why: There was Mrs. Pratcherd, talking to the sheriff and another woman.

“Mrs. Routh,” Jack whispered under his breath. The woman from the train—the one who wasn't
cruel. But she was married to the sheriff. And she would recognize him and Frances. And Harold, too, wherever he was.

Frances grabbed his sleeve as she took another step beyond the cart they were hiding behind, and another. She was still trying to get a closer look at the wagon, which had no windows, except for one in the back. . . .

And that was where they saw Harold. He saw them, too, and he pressed his palms against the glass.
Help
, he mouthed, his eyes wide.

Frances clasped a hand to her mouth, but a sound still escaped: a hoarse, desperate shriek.

Jack seemed to feel his own blood rushing cold and swift as Mrs. Pratcherd glanced up. And Mrs. Routh saw them, too, and then the sheriff, who looked Jack in the eye and then gazed right past him to Alexander. The sheriff's face was hard as he stepped in their direction.

He heard Alexander behind him.
“Run!”

Frances didn't move for a second.

“Come on!” Jack said. He grabbed a handful of her coat and yanked it.

“Harold . . . ,” she gasped as she began to stagger into a run.

“We'll be no good to him if we're caught. Come
on
!”
The last thing Jack wanted was for Frances to wind up in that wagon, too. He couldn't let anyone else disappear.

Then they were off, following Alexander through the alleys, with the sheriff behind them.

When they crossed the bridge this time, Jack saw Alexander head straight into the woods instead of clambering down the creek bank, and he managed to catch Frances's arm and pull her toward the detour.

“Where are we going?” she cried.

“Following Alexander into the woods,” Jack managed to say, though he was nearly out of breath. “If we went along the creek—”

Frances suddenly understood. “We'd be leading the sheriff right to Wanderville,” she finished.

Taking the woods was the longer route, but it was easier to lose the sheriff there. The three ran so hard their breathing was ragged. Once, when they stopped to gasp a mouthful of air, they could hear Sheriff Routh crashing through the leaves behind them.

“We've got to keep running,” Jack said, panting hard.

He again picked up the pace, the heavy cans in his pockets knocking against his rib cage.

Suddenly, he had an idea.

He stopped midrun and put a finger to his lips. Then he turned and threw one of the heavy cans as far as he could into the woods in another direction from the one they were headed. After a moment he threw the second can. They could hear the first one thud and roll through the leaves. The second one hit a small branch with a loud crack.

For a moment nothing happened. And then they heard the sheriff's clumsy footfalls head in the direction where Jack had thrown the cans.

“He thinks we went that way,” Jack whispered.

The three walked as quietly as they could until they found a branch of the creek and crouched down out of sight against the bank.

Alexander's shoulders slumped in relief. “We lost him,” he said. “We—”

“Shh!” Frances said. “Listen.”

It was the sheriff's voice, far away but still in the woods. A thin echo rang with each word.

“
I know you can hear me
,” he called.
“I'll get you soon enough!”

They didn't hear the voice after that. But they had every reason to believe the words were true.

W
hen they returned to Wanderville, nobody wanted to talk about what had happened.

Alexander went straight to his tree perch near the rope swing. Jack grabbed the hatchet and went over to the campfire, and Frances sat on the courthouse log staring intently at the rows of rocks her little brother had lined up.

Jack picked up the flint and began to work on it with the hatchet. They had matches for lighting a fire, of course, but he needed to occupy himself and he was glad to have a reason to hit hard things against each other. His brain felt hot, and he could hear a dull roar in his mind. He couldn't save Harold and he couldn't save Daniel and he couldn't control the fire, but maybe if he kept hitting flint on steel, something would happen. When he nicked his thumb on the hatchet, he hardly felt it.

Tchitch!
Tchitch!
went the sound of the flint.

Why doesn't Jack just use the stupid matches he swiped?
Frances wondered. To her the
Tchitch! Tchitch!
sounded like an endless reprimand, one she deserved to hear. She couldn't believe she'd let Harold get caught. Or that she'd let herself get carried away. She knew she should have stayed outside the mercantile, held Harold's hand instead of snatching up things with her own.

She pulled the stolen things out of her pockets and shoe tops and tossed them on the ground. Crumpled parcels of crackers. Bent cheap spoons. It hadn't been worth it.

Tchitch!
Tchitch! Tchitch!

Jack was sweating from his efforts. Nearly ten minutes now and the hatchet had made only a tiny spark that barely managed to singe the tinder.
Tchitch!
All Jack wanted was for
one
thing to turn out right today.
Tchitch! Tchitch!

He hit the flint harder and harder.

“Jack.” Alexander had come over to the campfire. “Let me do it, all right?”

Jack sighed and set the hatchet down.

“Don't bother,” Frances muttered just loud enough for the boys to hear.

“What?” said Alexander.

“I said
don't bother
!”
she shouted suddenly. She was on her feet now, marching over to Alexander. “Don't act like you can
fix
things! You've ruined everything!”

Alexander straightened and glared at Frances. “What are you talking about?”

“It's your fault Harold got caught!” she said, circling him. “It was
your
idea to let him stand guard! We should never have stayed here.”

“Well, why didn't
you
offer to stand guard?” Alexander fired back. “Since
you
were the one who was so high-minded about not stealing . . .”

Frances tried to lunge at Alexander, but Jack stepped in her path.

“Quit it now!” Jack yelled. “Both of you! There's no changing what happened! Go saw your timber if all you're going to do is blame each other.”

Frances stepped back from Jack with a shove, but she seemed to calm down a little. “I just want to get my little brother back,” she said.

“All right. So what do we do now?” Jack asked. He and Frances looked over at Alexander.

“What we do now is . . . ,” Alexander began. He paused and took a deep breath. “Well, we can't go back to Whitmore, because the sheriff will find us. And we can't go to the ranch, because Mrs. Pratcherd saw us. And, well, I mean, there really aren't enough of us for a rescue party. . . .”

Frances raised her eyebrows. “There aren't?”

“Just think about all the cowboy stories where they round up a posse, which is at least twenty cowboys.” Alexander was talking very quickly now. “When we get more kids here in Wanderville, then we can—”

“What?” Frances cried. “This isn't some cowboy story! This is my little brother we're taking about!”

“I know,” Alexander said. “I just . . .”

“You just
give up
, right?” Frances shouted. “You act like you're so brave when you talk about defending this place, but when something real happens—something bad—you just shrug? You think we should just
wait
until someone else shows up and hope that they'll help us?”

“Don't forget that I
helped
you
,”
Alexander said, looking at both Frances and Jack. “You never would have made it out here on your own if it hadn't been for me.” His eyes met Frances's and he stared hard until she looked down. “You know that's the truth!”

“That's not the point,” Jack said. “You said the other night that we were all together here. Here in Wanderville.”

Frances nodded. “Our home,” she said.

Alexander said nothing for a minute. He walked over to the sitting log and shoved it with his foot.

“I don't know who I was fooling,” he said. “I wasn't smart to think up Wanderville. I was lonesome. When I was at the ranch, it felt just like when my pop worked at the mill until he died—and I didn't want that to happen to me. That's what made me want to leave. I escaped, and it was bad out here at first. It was all I could do to not die from the cold. So I imagined a place for myself. Not just a house—where you sleep where you're told and eat what they give you, and you're still not anyone—but a town.” His voice wobbled a little. “And then it seemed like once I thought that up, I could think up anything. Reasons for stealing, for instance. I know that's not exactly what the word
liberating
means.”

“It means ‘to free,'” Jack broke in. “It means having liberty. That's why we're in Wanderville, right? We want to be on our own and not beholden to anyone who treats us as nothing more than mouths to feed.” He had begun to pace back and forth between the big rock and the sitting log. “Or . . . or mules to be trained. We're not wicked or wretched or dumb. We're not to be pitied or reformed or sent off, placed out
like the rubbish, just because we're kids! Like we're not yet people
somehow. Like we're nothing but little shadows who work and work. But we're not! Not any of us . . . and not Harold.”

He stopped, suddenly self-conscious. But Alexander was nodding, and Frances's eyes were shining. They both looked to him as if to say
go on.

“Which is why we won't stand to have him taken away,” Jack continued. “We've got to liberate Harold.”

“You mean . . . rescue him?” Frances's eyes were brimming with tears.

“Yes,” said Jack. “Rescue him. And I know just how we're going to do it.”