by Henry Clark
“Do that trick you did with the mouse!”
“With stampeding horses? Are you crazy?”
I decided it was up to me. And the only thing I could think of was completely nuts.
I took a faltering step toward the front, and a hay monster rose up in front of me. The mound shook itself, sent straw flying, and turned into a broad-shouldered young man in tattered clothing. He had to be a runner—an escaped slave—who had been hiding in the wagon even before we hopped on. He reached into the hay and pulled a woman into the daylight. She was pregnant and dressed as raggedly as he was. Blood streaked her arm along a gash that looked like it might have been made by a pitchfork.
Since I wanted to make our situation crystal clear, I shouted, “We’re all gonna die!” and gestured frantically at the flying landscape.
Hay Monster gave one calm glance to the fence posts whizzing by, handed the woman to me and Frankie, and turned to the wagon’s front.
“Seth drives Master Landry’s coach!” the woman informed us. “He’s good with horses!” She pulled a kerchief from her head and started tying it around her pitchfork wound.
I felt a glimmer of hope. As I watched Seth climb from the wagon bed up to the spring-mounted driver’s bench, I saw the muscles ripple across his back. If anybody could rein in two insane horses, it would be Seth. He eased himself over the seat, caught up the reins, and stood like a colossus with his legs braced well apart.
Seth might have been good with horses, but he was terrible with trees. A low-hanging branch caught him in the middle and swept him over our heads, and in moments he was disappearing down the road behind us, a surprised look on his face.
“Great,” I said under my breath, and returned to my original plan, which involved suicide.
I let go of the woman, who had become hysterical the moment Seth flew past us, and allowed Frankie to support her fully. I floundered through the hay to the driver’s seat.
I didn’t make Seth’s mistake and climb up into the seat. Instead, I braced my knees against the wagon wall and grabbed the reins that had been helpfully stretched within reach by Seth’s sudden departure. I hauled back on them with all my might and hollered “WHOA!” at the top of my lungs.
The horses went faster.
“Tree!” screamed Frankie, as if I couldn’t see it hurtling toward us.
I yanked the reins to the left and the horses veered, crashing through a picket fence surrounding the yard of a three-story house. Four clotheslines stretched across our path, heavy with dresses, and we broke through all four lines, snapping them like string, the clothing draping itself around the horses and wagon like bunting on a float in the Run for Your Life parade.
An apron plastered itself to my face, blinding me, and I clawed it away. I didn’t want anything blocking my view of the barn we were about to hit.
Tom came up beside me and added his strength to the reins. We pulled back on the right side as hard as we could, and the horses turned just enough to miss the barn, the wagon knocking shingles off the corner.
Ahead of us, through the trees, I could see the building that would one day be the Barrelhouse restaurant. It was low and long and made of brick, and there were towers of barrels in the yard around it. Beyond the cooperage, the ground sloped down to a pier that jutted into the river, with a flatboat docked at its end. Men were loading barrels onto the boat.
The horses made a beeline for the pier. If we reached it at the speed we were going, we’d sail right down its length, fly off the end, and crash into the boat. More likely, we’d hit the rocks that formed a breakwater on either side of the pier’s entrance. Either way, I was pretty sure we’d be dead.
I let go of the reins and scrambled into the driver’s seat. The horses crossed the edge of the cooperage’s yard. Ahead of us, Killbreath and Bert emerged from around a stack of barrels. Killbreath raised his hand like a policeman who wanted a car to stop. He might even have said “Halt!”
Then barrels were tumbling down on them as the horses nicked the edge of the stack, and Bert fell beneath a plummeting keg.
Killbreath lunged at us as we passed and caught the side of the wagon.
“No you don’t!” shouted Frankie, and raked her bracelet across his fingers.
He dropped off and was almost run over by one of the rear wheels. The wagon barely missed another pyramid of barrels, swerved around a woodpile, and bore down on the rapidly approaching pier.
I grabbed the brake.
I had forgotten that wagons had brakes, although I had known it when I was younger—since Zane Grey Park had a wagon ride as well as pony rides. Unfortunately, the brake isn’t used to stop a moving wagon; it’s used to keep a wagon from rolling when it’s already stopped. Only a lunatic would throw the brake while the horses were running.
I hurled my weight against the lever next to the driver’s seat, and hard wood blocks jammed themselves against the metal rims of the wagon’s wildly spinning front wheels. The wheels kept spinning. A screeching drowned out all the rest of the world’s noises, and the front of the wagon shimmied as the smell of scorched wood filled the air.
The horses thundered onto the pier, narrowly missing the rocks on the right, and the wagon’s front wheels locked. I saw the rear of the wagon rise up and I was certain we were about to go end over end. I said a short, end-over-end prayer.
“Not good!” screamed Frankie.
Tom jumped up and planted his feet squarely on the back of the driver’s seat, leaned back until he was straight out, and pulled on the reins with his full body weight. The wagon’s rear end dropped back, and we skidded behind the horses like a sled. The ringing in my ears turned briefly to “Jingle Bells.”
The brake handle trembled in my hands like it was about to explode, and I wrapped myself completely around it until I was trembling like I was about to explode. If the brake handle broke, we were done for.
We were slowing. But we were also running out of pier.
The men down the end, loading barrels on the flatboat, looked up, shouted, and dived into the water. The horses dropped from a gallop to a canter to a trot, and then there was no more pier. They dug in their hooves and reared, once, twice, and the third time pushed the wagon back just enough to give them room to stand without tumbling forward into the boat.
The horses did a little side step against each other and finally calmed. Then, like two enormous, revolting Pez dispensers, both tails lifted and a load of road apples tumbled out.
“Is everybody all right?” I asked, and Frankie shook her head and pointed. I turned to see Killbreath and Bert running down the hill, waving guns, heading for the pier.
“Oooh, that was a kick,” said Seth’s friend, and I thought she was telling us how much she had enjoyed the ride until I saw she was holding her swollen tummy and gazing lovingly down at it. I had seen pregnant ladies do that before. I always found it a little creepy.
“Okay,” I said, jumping to the pier and going to my knees when my legs refused to hold me. I staggered to the rear of the wagon and pulled out the pins that held up the tailgate.
The gate dropped, and Frankie and Tom slid out in a cascade of hay. All three of us reached up and, as gently as we could, helped our new friend get down.
“Thank you very much,” she said, dusting herself off. “We have to go back for Seth.”
I turned and looked at the riverbank. There was no way we were going to get to it before our pursuers reached the end of the pier and cut us off. I glanced farther up the hill and my heart sank.
“They’ve got him,” I said.
Seth was trudging down the slope, his hands held over his head. Zack was walking behind him with the shotgun. I wondered what had happened to Mr. Collins. It couldn’t have been anything good.
“We’re going to have to swim for it,” said Frankie.
“Can’t swim,” said our new friend, and she reached up and twisted a piece of her hair around one finger. I felt my heart do a little flip-flop: My mom did the exa
ct same thing with her hair whenever she was upset. Suddenly, I wanted to reassure this woman that everything was going to be fine. I wished I could do it without lying to her.
“My name is Ambrose,” I said, looking up into her eyes. “My friends call me Bro. Is it that you can’t swim, or you don’t want to leave Seth?”
“Both. I’m Dwina. Seth is my man, and I’m staying with him!” She nodded at the shore. “You three should go. Now!” She turned me by the shoulders and gently pushed me toward the water. I could feel her hands trembling. She was terrified but putting on a brave face.
“She’s right,” agreed Frankie. “The longer we stay here, the bigger the chance is that we’ll do something that will change the future. We have to get going!”
“What if we untie the boat and take that?” suggested Tom. “You’d join us in a boat, right?” he asked Dwina.
“No,” she said. “Not without my Seth.”
A strangely familiar voice over my phone, in a place where reception should have been impossible, had warned me not to let Dwina drown. Trying to teach her to swim, or even taking her on a boat ride, didn’t sound like smart choices.
“We’re not leaving you!” I assured her, and shot Frankie a glance.
Frankie looked from the shore to the water and grimaced. I could see she was torn. But after a moment she muttered, “All right; have it your way. We stay. But this is exactly the sort of situation the Shagbolt was made for, and I can’t believe we don’t have it!”
Killbreath and Bert could see they had us trapped. They slowed, stopped, and waited for Zack and Seth to join them. Killbreath watched us keenly across the distance, as if he expected us to do something foolish. We were good at that. He was right to keep an eye out.
Tom sat down on the pier and started flipping his quarter. He laid out a broken piece of hay for every tail and an unbroken piece for every head. I studied the pier and asked myself what it would take to turn the horses and wagon around so that they faced the other way. The answer was—a much wider pier.
Frankie sniffed. “Do you smell something?”
“That’s my sweat,” I said apologetically.
“No, besides that.” Frankie’s brow furrowed, and she looked back to a spot on the pier where our flying wagon had dislodged half a dozen planks. “I wonder…”
“Hexagram five,” said Tom, waving at his strands of hay.
“The hexagram is called Waiting,” he continued, and turned the book so we could see.
HEXAGRAM 5
WAITING.
CALCULATED INACTION. BIDE ONE’S TIME. BE THE BUMP ON THE LOG.
WAIT FOR THE TICK, WAIT FOR THE TOCK, AND THE NEXT TICK YOU SEE MAY BE THE OTHER GUY BLINKING.
“Is there a… Morse code message?” I couldn’t believe I heard myself ask.
Tom gave a quick nod, like he was a little bit frightened. But then, we were about to be captured by slave catchers, so he had every reason to be. “Yes. It’s two dots, followed by a dash and two dots, followed by three final dashes. It’s Morse code for I do.” He swallowed hard. “Don’t ask me how I figured that out so quickly. I just did. And I think it’s a personal message for me. It’s telling me that in this particular situation, I wait. That’s what I DO.”
“You can wait if you want,” I growled. “I say we rush them. We can use the wagon’s tailgate as a shield—”
Frankie grabbed me by the wrist, as if she expected me to run down the pier that instant.
“They’ve got guns!” she hissed. “We’re going to wait! We’re going to do what the I-Ching says. We have to make those creeps come to us.”
Zack and Seth had met up with Killbreath and Bert. Killbreath holstered his pistol and used the butt of Zack’s gun to deliver a blow to the back of Seth’s neck, causing him to fall to his knees.
The nineteenth century had way too many guns in it, as far as I was concerned. Or, at least, the people I didn’t like had way too many of them. It occurred to me that this was probably true of the twenty-first century, too. I just hadn’t noticed.
Killbreath handed the shotgun back to Zack, then yanked Seth to his feet and shoved him down the slope in front of him. The four of them marched down the hill until they stood at the entrance to the pier.
“That there was a merry chase,” hollered Killbreath, twirling his pistol at the end of his finger. “Fun’s over. Time we all got goin’. You so much as look like you’re gonna jump”—he fired the pistol in the air and we all shuddered—“and I’ll use this! Now, get yer tails over here!”
Dwina took a step forward. I snatched her by the elbow and pulled her back.
“You’re not going to shoot another man’s property, are you?” Frankie called out. “We’re all worth more to you alive than dead! And if we’re maimed, I’m sure we’d have to be discounted!”
“Well now, don’t you jus’ talk all ed-you-cated!” Killbreath waggled his head from side to side. “That’s enough to get you strung up, and whosomever it was ed-you-cated you as well. You wanna live, where I’m takin’ you, you jus’ better watch your smart-talkin’ mouth!”
Killbreath pushed Seth into Zack’s hands, stepped onto the pier, and gestured for Bert to follow. The two men strode purposefully toward us.
“I’m not going back to Tara,” muttered Dwina. “Too many flighty womenfolk there.”
Behind us, the horses stirred uneasily. The pier creaked ominously. I became aware of the aroma Frankie had mentioned, and was pleased to find it wasn’t me.
Killbreath and his sidekick stopped about a hundred feet away from us. They were on the far side of the loose planking.
“I ain’t so sure we’d get anythin’ for the Chinese kid,” Killbreath announced, and aimed his pistol at Tom. “So I’m thinkin’ losin’ him would be no loss whatsumever.” He cocked the gun. “You others got ’til the count of three to get yerselves over here.”
“Waiting,” said Tom.
“What was that?” Killbreath scowled.
“Waiting,” Tom repeated, a little louder, and I could see he was trembling.
“Waitin’ fer what?”
Frankie stepped in front of Tom and answered for him.
“Waiting for you to act like a man and not some lily-livered… bickwidus and come over here and get us yourself!”
Killbreath stalked toward us, glowering as though he planned to whip us all when he arrived, and Bert trailed in his wake. As they cleared the loose planking, Frankie announced, “I smell a skunk!”
“I been called worse!” Killbreath sneered.
“I’m sure you have, but I wasn’t talking about you!”
The pier exploded behind them as the planks erupted into the air and a soaking-wet, nine-foot-tall hairy giant wearing Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt shot up from the depths below and slapped the guns from Killbreath and Bert as they turned to see what the commotion was.
Both men screamed as Mr. Ganto clutched them by the arms and dragged them down the hole he had punched in the pier. All three dropped from sight, Killbreath and Bert flailing their arms and legs, their screams abruptly ending in a loud splash!
The horses went berserk.
CHAPTER 11
Pier Pressure
The horses reared. Their front legs waved in the air as if they were trying to climb an invisible mountain, and their hind legs rippled with muscle as they pushed backward on the wagon. The axle twisted sideways and the wagon jolted back, cockeyed, hitting one of the pier posts and splitting it away from the plank floor. The horses’ front hooves came crashing back down, and the whole pier shook.
They reared again, and I felt the pier sway beneath us. Frankie got into her surfboard-riding stance, Tom went down on one knee, and Dwina threw her hands across her belly. I danced two steps to the left, closer to Dwina.
The pier’s posts had probably been rotten to begin with. The passage of the runaway wagon had weakened them, and the hole Mr. Ganto had made hadn’t helped. When the horses’ hooves came down a second
time, the pier collapsed.
Everything forward of the hole broke away, twisted to one side, and tumbled into the water, moving slowly at first and then picking up speed like the climax of a log-flume ride. The pier came apart beneath me, and a plank hit me on the side of the head. A horrendous screeching filled the air, and then I couldn’t hear because I was underwater.
I spun sideways, thrashing, and the air I had gulped before going under burst from my mouth. I started to drown. I followed my bubbles—they knew where “up” was—and four strong strokes got me to the surface.
I spat out water, sputtered, and looked around for my friends. The only people I could see were Seth and Zack on the riverbank, wrestling the shotgun back and forth. The horses were submerged up to their necks, the water white and churning all around them. I couldn’t see Frankie or Tom or Dwina.
I knew Tom could swim. I had no idea whether Frankie could. Dwina had stated flat out that she couldn’t, and all I could think of was that finger-in-her-hair thing she had done that reminded me so much of my mom. I tried to remember exactly where she had been standing before the world fell out from under us. I picked a likely spot and dived.
The collapse of the pier had raised clouds of silt from the river bottom, making everything shadowy and misshapen. I wondered if Mr. Ganto and his captives had been pinned beneath the rubble. I didn’t think anyone could save them if they had been.
Suddenly I swam into something soft. I backstroked in a panic, at first not realizing what I had hit, but then the silt cleared and Dwina’s face appeared in front of me, the way my mother’s sometimes does when she’s trying to wake me up, all hazy around the edges. Dwina was upright, as though her feet were tethered to the riverbed, her hair floating above her head like her soul trying to leave her body. Her eyes were closed. It looked like her soul might already have left.
My lungs were giving me hints they weren’t enjoying themselves. I dropped down to Dwina’s ankles near the bottom of the river and discovered her left foot was pinned between two of the pier’s planks. I grabbed one of the planks and freed the foot. I expected her to rise, but she didn’t—grown-ups almost never do what you want them to—so I dropped into a squatting position, thrust my legs down with all my might, and pushed myself upward, catching Dwina under the arms and taking her with me.
