Benny and the Bank Robber

by Mary C. Findley



  "How come you stopped the barge if you already had a good horse? And why were you hiding that black bag under your saddle?" Benny kept talking, so fast that Mr. Clancy couldn't have answered his questions if he had wanted to. And he certainly didn't seem to want to.

  "It looked just like the bag Mr. Carlisle put on the train -- and the one that man in the black suit was carrying. What was in all those bags? Or -- was that you pretending to be somebody else again? Were you the one that killed that man at the bank and stole the money?"

  Mr. Clancy had been staring at him all this time without moving. Suddenly he jumped forward and grabbed Benny. He covered Benny's mouth with one hand and with the other pulled out a big, long knife. Holding Benny so tight it hurt, he laid the knife up against his throat and whispered in his ear.

  "I guess you do get to go along with me, after all, Benny my boy," he hissed. "But somehow I don't think we'll make it to Uncle Tom's. The chickens'll be so disappointed."

  Benny and the Bank Robber

  by

  Mary C. Findley

  copyright by Mary C. Findley 2010

  Benny and the Bank Robber

  Scripture quotations are from the King James Version Bible, Public Domain.

  Cover and book design by Mary C. Findley

  Images used herein were obtained from IMSI’s MasterClips/ MasterPhotos copyrighted Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA 94901-5506, USA.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. Exception is made for short excerpts used in reviews.

  Findley Family Video Publications

  "Speaking the truth in love."

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  Prologue: The Empty Look of Death

  Ten-year-old Benny Richardson pushed his dripping brown hair out of his brown eyes and squinted into the heavy Market Street downpour in the heart of Philadelphia. A flood of people, wagons, carts and horses pressed close around them. Benny tugged the black sleeve of his tall, lean father's black coat and flung out his small arm. Benny's brown blazer sleeve became soaked almost immediately and he pulled it back under his father's huge black umbrella.

  "There's mother!" Benny scuffed his toes on the curb, feeling like a racehorse impatient to begin running. He stopped himself before Jonathan Richardson's brown eyes, which rarely missed anything in spite of the thick, gold-rimmed spectacles he wore, could see what he was doing and Benny would be reminded again of how dear shoe leather was. It seemed to Benny that someone who taught at the University of Pennsylvania like his father did should be rich and not have to worry about the cost of shoes. He looked up curiously at his father's neat black beaver hat and tidy suit and his carefully tied gray and red and white striped tie.

  The red and white stripes in the tie reminded him of peppermint and he wriggled a few steps away from the umbrella and his father's restraining arm to try to see better. Benny was almost jostled away from his spot on the curb beside his father. Jonathan Richardson pulled Benny back under the big black umbrella. Through the downpour they waved toward Mr. Paine's grocery store awning where stood a little blur in a dark cloak. A pale blue dress and straw bonnet just peeked out as a small, slender arm waved back.

  Benny tried to squint harder but it was impossible to see his mother's brown wicker market basket at all, much less tell whether any peppermint sticks were in it. After all, she hadn't promised. His favorite sweet was a rare enough treat, and if there were any in the basket he certainly hoped they wouldn't dissolve in the rain before they got across the street.

  "Father, do you think she got the peppermint sticks?" Benny asked as he pulled his coat closer around him.

  "Ah! You see across that street the sweetest, prettiest, best lady on earth, my boy!" His father laughed. "How can you ask about mere candy? Aren't we lucky God gave her to us?"

  "But I like peppermint sticks," grunted Benny.

  "Hold on tight, Ben!" Jonathan shouted to his son as he glanced around and stepped into the street, pulling Benny after him. A crush of bodies and deafening thunder of hooves and wheels on the cobblestones swept in on them and tumbled them like twigs in a swollen river. Out of the general din Benny heard a sudden, terrible sound of horses shrieking and the tortured groan of a wheel brake slipping on wet wood. He gasped as something jerked his arm backward, hurting his shoulder, and spun him in a circle.

  The busy street traffic froze. A weird silence fell, and the only sound was the driving rain. Benny looked around, rubbing his sore shoulder and trying to figure out what had halted all the people and noise and hurry. But it only stopped for an instant. Benny still stood in the middle of the street until people pulled him back to the curb as the rush and crush resumed.

  "That cart was 'way overloaded!" shouted the man who had grabbed Benny's sore shoulder and hustled him out of the street. Strangers pressed around him. All of them were strange, every one. Just faces and voices making sounds, so many sounds all at once against the city noise.

  The still form of a man lay on the cobblestones in a pool of dirty water, its face hidden by men lifting it and carrying it out of the street. It came to rest at his feet. Finally Benny saw something he thought he knew. Something familiar, but suddenly even stranger than the crowd of unknown faces. Something that had been bright and alive and close to him only a moment ago. Benny looked into Jonathan Richardson's face, white and streaked with red. It looked so empty.

  "Where are his spectacles?" Benny asked. No one paid any attention to him.

  "Never should have taken that corner so fast!" exclaimed a voice out of the confusion of voices. Benny looked around. He twisted out of the half-hearted grasp of the man who had brought him to the curb. His gaze searched the puddles and muck at the edge of the street.

  "Driver musta been blind or drunk!"

  Still Benny could not see what had happened to his father's spectacles. Certainly it would be hard to see a glint of gold in the driving rain, but they had to be here somewhere. Benny felt he had to find them.

  "Driver's fault completely -- no question!"

  Benny stared at his father. Maybe if he found the spectacles and put them on, his father's face wouldn't look like that. Maybe it wouldn't look so strange, so empty. He hardly reacted when his mother's arms snatched him up and hugged him tight against her blue dress with the tiny white polka-dots that felt like little soft bumps against his face. The bonnet she had just finished "making over" with new blue velvet ribbons and tiny pink silk roses drooped over her wet golden curls as she pulled him even closer and pressed her face against his. Her blue eyes, too, were fixed on his father's empty white and red face.

  Benny thought of the Bible verse that said, "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee." Jonathan Richardson had quoted that verse many times. "God will always be with us, Ben," he had said. "Whatever else may change in our lives, He'll always take care of us."

  "Mother, Father's lost his spectacles," Benny insisted. Men picked up his father's body, holding an umbrella over it as if Jonathan Richardson would mind getting wet.

  "It doesn't matter, darling," his mother murmured, trying to lead him away. Benny buried his head against the front of his mother's dress. Then he jerked his head up again.

  "But we have to find them," Benny protested. "We need to find them."

  "Benny, darling, your father doesn't need them anymore," his mother said brokenly, pulling him along. Benny kept searching the gutter, the sidewalk and the street as they moved away. He didn't even not
ice when his mother's market basket slipped from her hand, spilling peppermint sticks, white and red, into the gutter.

  Benny flopped down on the front steps of their Philadelphia apartment. His eyes studied the gutter, the sidewalk, the street. They always did that, every time he went outside, since the cart accident. He had spent a lot of time sitting on the steps or walking around the street since then. Benny had not gone to school in two weeks. Pastor Souder and many of his father and mother's adult friends had filed in and out of their small apartment just off Market Street. Some of them were visiting now. They always went into the parlor to talk to Benny's mother.

  Benny was seldom allowed in the parlor. Even when he was he had to sit silently in his uncomfortable best clothes and not say or do anything. He had therefore not wanted to be in on these visits. All he knew was that his mother cried a lot, people talked a lot, and many times people took away things that had belonged to his father: books, clothing, even the desk and chair from the corner of the parlor that his father had called his "study."

  Lately more things had been disappearing, pieces of furniture that hadn't been just his father's, all their books except their Bibles, the fancy china and the silver tea set they used for special occasions. The apartment was becoming pretty empty. Benny wondered where the people who had come today were going to sit because the parlor furniture was all gone now.

  A large cart lumbered to a halt in front of the apartment. Benny pulled his eyes slowly up to look at the powerful draft horses scuffing their great hooves restlessly against the cobblestones as the driver held them in check. The driver wore a red and white neck cloth. It looked oddly bright against his dull brown shirt collar and grimy neck. Something small, gold and shiny caught Benny's eye along the side of the cart. Benny rose slowly to his feet. He stumbled across the sidewalk and stood right in front of the driver as he jumped down from his seat on the cart.

  "Those are my father's spectacles," Benny said in a dull voice, pointing at the twisted gold wire thing caught in the slats of the footrest the man had just stepped on. "Can I have them back, please?"

  The man started and turned to look at the crumpled bit of metal, then at Benny. Benny had not noticed that Pastor Souder and his mother and the other visitors had come out onto the apartment steps just then. The man wrenched the ruined spectacles out of the footrest and stared at them for a moment. Then he turned pale, threw the spectacles down at Benny's feet and turned to lurch back up onto his seat. Professor Trenton, one of Benny's father's friends from the university, lunged forward and seized the man by the collar, yanking him right off the cart step and throwing him to the ground. Benny picked up his father's spectacles.

  "Look, mother," he said, "I found father's spectacles."

  After the police had taken away the cart driver Benny' mother had made him come inside and Pastor Souder and the others had talked some more. Benny sat on his bed and stared at the wall, holding his father's spectacles. He kept them near him for the next several days, until one day his mother sat him down and told him that they were going away.

  "We are going west, Benny darling," his mother had told him. "We'll live with your Aunt Caroline and Uncle Tom on their farm in Missouri."

  "We're going to move?" Benny had demanded. "You just made up your mind? Shouldn't we read the Bible and pray?"

  "I have prayed and read God's Word, Benny," his mother had answered. "I have talked things over with Pastor Souder and your father's friends. I believe this is what God wants us to do. We have to leave Philadelphia."

  When his father had been alive there had been "family conferences." Jonathan Richardson had sat everyone down with a Bible and they had prayed, read the Scriptures, and asked God for wisdom about what to do. Even Benny had been allowed to give an opinion. But this – this thing that was going to change everything -- it was already decided without him.

  "God called Father to be a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania," Benny had argued. "He said it was God's will. Father said we would always be taken care of as long as we were doing God's will."

  "Darling, darling," his mother had said, hugging him very tightly, "Your father isn't here to teach at the college anymore. We don't have any more money, and no way to get any."

  "I don't understand!" Benny had shouted. "Pastor Souder and the others kept saying we had to find the cart, the man who hit Father. I found him, didn't I? Didn't that make any difference? They said he would have to give us a lot of money."

  "It was wonderful how you found him, darling," his mother replied. "But the man didn't have a lot of money. He drank a great deal, apparently, and had caused a lot of accidents before. They took his cart and horses and sold them, but they weren't worth a great deal, and he owed many other people money. There was very little for us. Uncle Tom and Aunt Caroline have asked us to come live with them. Aunt Caroline says the country is beautiful out there. They have cows, and chickens, and pigs, and cornfields, and we'll all help take care of them."

  "Cows and chickens and pigs?" Benny echoed scornfully. "We go to hear orchestras play and listen to father's friends speak at the university. We hear about paintings and books and history. We go to see plays and operas. Why would you think I would want to see cows and chickens and pigs?"

  "Benny, we have to go," his mother said, her eyes brimming with tears. "We have to." She tried to embrace him but Benny pulled away.

  "I don't understand why we have to. If you'd even talked to me about it once, asked me what I think, maybe together we could have thought of a plan to stay in Philadelphia."

  "What plan would you have given, then?" His mother asked, standing up very straight and stepping away from him. "I'm sorry I didn't ask before, darling. If you know a way we can pay our rent, buy our food, get coal for the stove and oil for the lamps, please tell me."

  "I could get work," Benny suggested. "I see lots of boys my age doing errands, working at odd jobs, delivering papers."

  "But those boys don't go to school," Benny's mother said gently.

  "I haven't gone to school since father died," Benny pointed out.

  "That is temporary," Benny's mother said sternly. "Your father would not want you to grow up an ignorant street urchin. You know we saw those boys at the rescue mission all the time. They swear and they are dirty and disrespectful. They care nothing about God, but only come to the mission for a free meal, a bed, or to escape a cruel master. Besides, they only earn enough to keep themselves alive, and that very poorly. I want you to grow up serving and loving God. To do that you must have schooling."

  "Well, it looks like God doesn't care much about us, so why should I worry about serving Him?" Benny snapped.

  "God does care, my darling," his mother said. Benny was almost sorry for what he had said when he saw he had frightened his mother with his coldness. "We cannot understand his ways just now, but we will understand later. And we are going away to Missouri."

  "Even if you don't care what I think, I don't want to leave Philadelphia," Benny shouted, "and I don't want to live on a farm!"