Escape to the World's Fair

by Wendy McClure

  “Really?”

  “Ain’t much worse for us than it’s always been,” Owney said. He’d pulled a corner of one of his trouser patches loose, and he fiddled with it idly.

  “Matter of fact, my brother and I were probably going to sleep in here anyway,” Chicks said. “Since it’s got some straw and all.”

  “Right . . . and when you consider that we got to eat our fill of oranges,” Finn added, “I have to say our lot in life has actually improved somewhat.”

  “Yep,” Dutch agreed.

  “Oh . . . okay,” Alexander said, sounding relieved. “That’s good.”

  Frances couldn’t pretend to ignore all this anymore, and she turned to face Finn and the other older boys. “Are you just saying that to be nice?” she asked. “Because you don’t have to be nice to Alexander.”

  Finn shook his head. “It’s all the same to us, I tell you. We were being sent off to work in some wretched factory before we met you. And now we’re still being sent off to work in some wretched factory. Only difference is, we got oranges now.” He smiled a thin, sad smile.

  “Too bad none of us are going to Wanderville,” Chicks said. “It sounded real nice.”

  “But we can still go—” Alexander started to tell him, but Chicks just shook his head.

  “Our mama still needs us to work to pay off her debts. Same with Dutch’s pa, and Owney’s folks.”

  Frances had nearly forgotten that the boys’ families owed money to Edwin Adolphius—or someone who worked for him. That must be an awful feeling, she thought. They were all quiet for a moment, and Frances wondered if Alexander was thinking the same thing she was. These boys didn’t mind sleeping in filthy straw in a livestock pen. They were a lot worse off than she and Harold and her friends.

  Finally Alexander spoke up.

  “What if you could just pay those debts?” he asked the older boys. “Instead of having to work them off.”

  “How?” Dutch muttered. “With what money?”

  “Reward money,” Alexander said. “Like the money we’re going to get at the World’s Fair. If we can all escape from this boat, that is.”

  Frances caught her breath in surprise and saw Jack and Eli turn around, intrigued. It was an interesting idea—all of them working together to escape the steamboat! And if they split the money, it would help these boys. Maybe she was wrong to think Alexander was so selfish.

  “Hmm,” Finn said, looking at Alexander. “Tell us more.”

  Jack took out the medallion to show everyone, and Alexander told them all about meeting Zogby and how he’d given them instructions to find a person named Mr. McGee at the World’s Fair and deliver it to him for a reward.

  Owney grinned. “Sounds easy enough.”

  “I don’t know,” Dutch said. “It seems a little fishy. Why do you trust this Zogby fellow? You’d only just met him. What if he’s lying?”

  Even though Frances hoped the older boys were willing to help them escape, she had to admit she’d had similar worries about Zogby. She still did, in fact.

  “Look, if the fellow’s lying, we still have the medallion,” Jack pointed out. “Which we can sell.”

  The older boys appeared to think about this for a moment and exchanged looks with one another. Finally Finn said, “Okay, we’ll escape with you. But we’re still all going to Wanderville, too, right?”

  “Of course!” Alexander exclaimed.

  “Do you think we could go there first?” Owney asked.

  “We’re always there!” Harold said.

  Owney dismissed him with a wave of his hand and turned back to Alexander. “I know you’ve gone there a lot, but maybe you could take us there before we go to the Fair. If ain’t too much trouble, that is.”

  “Yeah, those hot buttered rolls sound good,” Chicks said.

  “Sure!” Alexander said, grinning. “It’s never too much trouble to go.”

  “Do you think I could work in that bakery?” Dutch asked. “You know, the one that sells those rolls. You suppose they pay good wages?”

  Alexander nodded and grinned. “You can do whatever you want,” he said.

  It was then that Frances realized that there was something strange about the conversation Alexander was having with the older boys. She looked over at Jack, who was also listening in, and she could tell by his expression that he knew it, too.

  These boys don’t know what Wanderville really is, she realized. They still thought it was like other towns—real-life towns. She and Jack could tell by the way the boys talked about it, and by the questions they asked Alexander.

  But Alexander couldn’t tell.

  13

  HOCUS-POCUS STUFF

  Jack guessed it was pretty late at night, judging from the way the ragtime piano music from the upper decks had given way to slower songs and the din of passenger voices had quieted down.

  By now Harold was curled up fast asleep in the straw, and Eli had dozed off as well. Frances had her Eclectic Third Reader out and was trying her best to use the meager lamplight outside the animal pen to make out the words. Meanwhile, Alexander and the older boys were still excitedly talking over in the far corner. As for Jack, he had been lying in his corner for a while trying unsuccessfully to sleep. Finally, he crept over to where Frances sat with her book. She seemed grateful to have someone to talk with, too.

  “It’s too dark to read.” Frances sighed. “I’ve just been listening to Alexander and the boys talking. They’re talking about the World’s Fair now, but before that, they were talking about Wanderville, and . . .” She took a deep breath. “And, well, you heard how that went. It’s clear those boys don’t know the truth.”

  Jack nodded in agreement. “The problem is that Alexander thinks they’re just playing along and thinking up new things to build.”

  “Should we tell them what Wanderville really is?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said.

  “I don’t either,” Frances whispered. “Maybe not yet. Or not here. It would change everything.”

  Over in the corner Alexander was smiling from ear to ear as Dutch dealt out playing cards to their group.

  “I was so mad at him for not telling us about that conversation between Miss DeHaven and Mr. Adolphius.” Jack rubbed his cramped legs and sighed. “But I guess it was just too hard for him to tell us. And now that I see how happy he is, I feel the same way about telling those boys Wanderville isn’t what they think it is. It would be too hard.”

  Frances agreed. “He is happier now. And I’m glad he’s getting along better with Finn and his gang.”

  “Also, he’s excited about going to the Fair,” Jack pointed out. “Remember when he didn’t think it was a good idea for us to go?”

  Frances’s expression suddenly shifted. “Yeah, well . . .”

  “What? You’re not still suspicious of Mr. Zogby, are you?”

  “I’m not the only one who is, Jack. Didn’t you hear Dutch say it all seemed kind of fishy?” She turned to the flyleaf of her book where she kept her notes. “All Zogby wrote was a name, ‘Mr. C. McGee.’ Then as he was driving off he said to look for ‘Moses McGee at the Temple of Promises.’ Come on, the Temple of Promises? None of it makes any sense! And then there’s that medallion thing you’ve got—”

  Jack interrupted. “Look, there’s something going on with that medallion, I tell you.” He pulled it out of his pocket and held it up in the light. “I didn’t have a chance to tell anyone yet, but when we were over by the orange crates I saw something carved into the wood on a trunk over there.”

  He found the symbols on the medallion—the one that looked like a loop with loose ends, and the one like a letter M with an arrow—and pointed them out to Frances. “See these? Somebody scratched those into the wood! I don’t know what it means but it can’t be coincidence, you know?”

  Frances
just squinted at him.

  Jack sighed—of course she wouldn’t understand. He didn’t understand what the symbols meant either. He simply had a feeling that the medallion had come their way for a reason, and the feeling had gotten stronger once he’d seen the symbols scratched into the trunk. But he couldn’t tell Frances any of this. She’d only laugh and say it was all “hocus-pocus stuff.”

  So instead he said, “Look. I don’t care what you think. Going after the reward for the medallion is the only choice we have! It’s the only way we can keep Wanderville going and get us money for California.”

  “Oh, what do you care?” Frances sputtered back. “You’re the one who’s planning on going back to New York!”

  “I’m not planning! That was just an idea!” Jack protested. That wasn’t quite true—he really had been thinking a lot lately about going back to New York—but he hadn’t decided anything. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to do. All I know is that we have to escape this place first!”

  “Yeah, that’s for sure,” Frances muttered. She closed her book and crawled over to sleep near Harold. “Maybe that magic medallion of yours will tell you how. Good-night, Jack.”

  • • •

  Frances woke to the sound of the Addie Dauphin’s bells clanging. She could glimpse a bit of blue sky and morning daylight over the stacks of cargo that surrounded the pen.

  Everyone else was awake by now—though Frances wondered if Alexander and the older boys had even slept, since they were still yammering on, only now Jack and Eli had joined them and they were talking about escape plans.

  “What if we jammed something in that big paddle wheel?” Chicks was saying. “Would that stop the boat?”

  Oh, brother, Frances thought. She was glad the older boys were going to escape with them, but she wondered if any of them were really smart enough to figure out how. She listened until Harold tugged her sleeve.

  “Frannie, my nose isn’t leaking anymore!”

  Frances smiled and began to pick bits of straw out of her little brother’s hair. “The oranges must have helped cure your cold.”

  “I wish we could have more,” Harold whispered. “I’m hungry.”

  But they hardly needed to wonder about food, because a few minutes later they heard the sound of boots in the corridor outside the pen, and one of the deckhands appeared with a big pot and two wooden spoons.

  “The cook saved some mush for you brats,” he muttered. He tried to shove the pot between the bars of the pen, but it was too wide. Grumbling complaints under his breath, he unlocked the tall gate, stepped inside, and set the pot down with a thunk.

  Everyone was silent for a moment.

  “Er . . . thank you,” Alexander said.

  “Two hours ’til we dock in St. Louis,” the deckhand told them. “Then we’ll come back down and take you to the factory.” He tossed out a rag from his pocket. “Make sure you clean that pot real good when you’re done with it.”

  Dutch nodded. “Got it.”

  “And you’re not getting out of this pen until we come get you, you hear? Especially you.” The deckhand turned to Eli, who was now standing right by the open gate. “I don’t trust your kind. You weren’t trying to slip out, were you?”

  “No, sir!” Eli replied, and he sat back down.

  The deckhand pulled the gate shut and locked it with a key he kept on a ring on his belt. Then he stomped off out of sight, the noise of his boots fading away.

  The mush—some kind of cornmeal, Frances guessed—was cold and tasteless, but it wasn’t hard to eat. The nine of them passed the pot around twice, and while they did, they continued to discuss their escape. From what Frances could tell, the only plans the older boys had come up with involved ways to subdue the deckhand.

  “I can trip him,” Dutch said. “And then Finn, you can jump on his back and start clobbering him!”

  “Shouldn’t we start thinking about ways to actually get off the boat, too?” Alexander asked.

  Owney ignored him. “Frances, maybe you’ll have to be the one to clobber Miss DeHaven, since you’re a girl.”

  Frances almost choked. “What? Wait a minute—why do we have to clobber anyone?” She tried to imagine winding her arm up and punching Miss DeHaven in the nose. Fine—so it was fun to imagine, but it was another thing to do it.

  “Well, do you all have any other ideas?” Finn asked, looking at Frances and her friends.

  Everyone fell silent. Then Eli, who hadn’t said anything for quite a while, spoke up.

  “I’ve got a lot of ideas. But first, we’ve got to get out of this pen,” he said.

  Dutch laughed. “No kidding. But how?”

  Eli got up and went over to the gate. He knelt down and peered into the lock, then took a long piece of straw and threaded one end through the keyhole. He reached through the bars around to the other side of the lock and grabbed the straw end where it came out.

  “You can’t pick a lock with straw,” Finn whispered. “Can you?”

  Eli motioned for everyone to come over for a closer look. “One of the sheds at the Carey farm had a lock like this and I learned how to keep it from sticking.” He pointed to the little slot along the edge of the gate where the latch was supposed to fit. It was packed with straw. “See that straw? I stuffed it in there when the deckhand fellow brought us breakfast. Now I can pull the latch back even more with a strong piece of straw.”

  Eli had both ends of the straw now, one in each hand, and he yanked it back and forth, hard, until it seemed to catch on something.

  “Almost got it,” he said. “Now someone’s just got to try the handle.”

  Frances stepped forward. Holding her breath, she turned the handle just above the gate lock. To her surprise, it gave way with a soft click!

  “I think it’s unlocking!” she said with a gasp. And then, in one easy motion, she pulled open the gate.

  14

  OPERATION HUCKLEBERRY

  Listen for the whistle. Then count to a hundred.

  Jack kept repeating the directions in his head as he waited in the luggage hold with Eli. The escape plan Eli had come up with was a good one, but it involved an awful lot of waiting.

  Right now, on the upper deck, Frances and Harold were doing some waiting of their own. They too wouldn’t move until they heard the whistle. Once it sounded, Frances would distract the first-class passengers with her dancing—one of the Irish jigs she used to perform for coins down on the Bowery.

  Meanwhile, in the livestock pen, Alexander, Finn, and Chicks were waiting for the right moment to create a noisy diversion for the deckhands, and over by the bow, Dutch and Owney were getting ready to put out the gangplank.

  The patch of sky Jack could see from his hiding spot was getting hazier, the kind of haze that came from a city’s chimneys and smokestacks. They had to be close to docking. That was when the Addie Dauphin’s whistle would sound, just as the boat was about to arrive in St. Louis. Jack tried not to think about the fact that Edwin Adolphius’s canning factory was nearby.

  “Do you think we missed the whistle?” he whispered to Eli.

  Eli shook his head. “Not a chance. That thing is right over our heads. And if the plan wasn’t going right, we’d know.” They had all agreed that if something went wrong, the code word to shout was huckleberry, and so far nobody had shouted it. “Just calm down.”

  Jack breathed out. “Aren’t you nervous?”

  Eli grinned. “Well, I keep thinking there’s someone looking over our shoulder, and that feels funny.”

  Jack turned and looked back at the straw-stuffed figure wearing a red flannel shirt, brown trousers, and a black derby hat. “Well, at least he’s on our side.”

  They’d discovered the shirt and trousers and hat in one of the heavier trunks. The figure’s head was a lady’s stocking stuffed with cotton from the cargo
bales, and its feet were socks packed with straw. They’d even found a pair of shoes, but everyone realized that Owney could use them more. In the end they had something that was a lot like a scarecrow, only better, because it was going to do much more than stand on a post in a cornfield.

  “We should call him O’Reilly,” Eli said. O’Reilly was the mean farmhand who’d bossed him around back at the Careys’ place. “What do you think?”

  Jack laughed and was just about to answer when the whistle began to sound. It gave off a long, low call that everyone on the boat could hear.

  “Finally!” Eli said under his breath. “Start counting!”

  Jack nodded. Four five six seven eight nine ten eleven . . . He was trying not to count too fast.

  He and Eli each took an arm of the dummy. “Come on, O’Reilly, let’s get a move on,” Jack muttered as they began to drag it toward the railing. Thirty-two thirty-three thirty-four thirty-five . . . Now they had only a minute.

  “Wait a second!” Jack cried as soon as they got to the railing. “His arm came loose!” He reached up inside the dummy’s shirtsleeve and tried to pack the straw more tightly.

  Just then Dutch and Owney came running back from the bow.

  “We got the gangplank ready!” Dutch cried. “But . . . uh . . .” He gasped and shook his head.

  “What is it?” Jack asked.

  “Huckleberry!” Owney shouted. “You’ve got to hurry! Finn found something real strange under the cotton bales and we might be in even bigger trouble if we don’t hustle.”

  Jack could hear boots pounding the deck in the direction Owney and Dutch had come from. Someone was after them—getting closer—but still out of sight for the moment. He and Eli exchanged a panicked look. They couldn’t let anyone see them doing what they were about to do.

  With only seconds to spare, they lifted O’Reilly as high as they could over the railing, swung back, and let go.

  • • •

  On the upper deck, Harold was counting. “Sixty-five sixty-six sixty-seven sixty-eight . . .”

  “Shh! Quit counting out loud!” Frances hissed. She was trying to focus on her dance steps and match her rhythm to the jaunty piano music coming from the nearby parlor. She felt self-conscious enough in the dress she’d borrowed from one of the trunks in the luggage hold. The dress was lacy and yellow, and she had pulled it on over her breeches and shirt in the little hidden stairwell between decks. She hoped to be rid of it by the time they were all off the boat, because if Dutch or Finn saw her in this getup they’d laugh their heads off, and Alexander would give her a funny look, too. Good thing they were all elsewhere at the moment.