by Tony Abbott
“Staying alive?” asked Frankie.
“In a sense,” he said. “The engineer tells me that unless we stop this train at Fort Kearney in …” He glanced at his watch. “… in two minutes and forty-eight seconds, we will surely be captured. For there isn’t another station for miles.”
“But getting to the engine is impossible!” said Aouda, pointing through the cars to the bunches of Sioux leaping onto the train. “They have nearly taken over every car. They will trap us in here.”
Meanwhile, the train was thundering over the rails.
Passepartout stepped forward. “I will climb under the cars to the engine and stop the train,” he said.
Frankie shook her head. “That’s crazy talk, Passepartout. We’re way at the back of the train. It’s impossible to crawl under the train for that long … unless …”
“Unless what?” I asked.
She turned to me and grinned. “Unless … we go on the roof. We did it before. It’s more or less fairly safe.”
I looked at her. I blinked. Then I smiled, too. “Come on, Passepartout,” I said. “We’ll show you the way.”
In exactly a few seconds, Frankie and I climbed up to the roof of the car, with Passepartout right behind us. We took a running start and leaped onto the roof of the next car. And the next one, and the next one.
It was an awesome feeling, running up there. I had never felt so excited and nervous, and yet I liked it.
“Frankie,” I said, as we made another leap and landed two cars away from the engine. “Here we are, smack in the middle of a life-and-death adventure.”
“I know,” she said, grinning at me. “Could we be doing anything more cool?”
“I can’t believe this is only a book,” I said. “Wait a sec, only a book? I don’t think I’ll ever say that again.”
“If Mr. Wexler could hear you say that!”
While the train chugged along at top speed, Passepartout came up with his plan. “My friends, here it is. Since the warriors have taken over the engine room, the only way to get the train to stop at Fort Kearney is to unhook the engine from the rest of the cars.”
Frankie nodded sharply. “Let’s do it.”
When we got to the first car, we climbed down the ladder all the way to the bottom, near the wheels. From there, the three of us worked our way along under the car. There were bars and chains and other stuff to hold on to. It was scary.
But, hey, you do what you have to do.
Struggling to the front of the car, we managed to find the iron bar that kept the car attached to the engine. Frankie and Passepartout had to go on one side, and me on the other.
We tugged and pulled and yanked and tugged.
Finally, there was a loud popping sound and the bar twisted up suddenly, knocking all three of us clear of the train. We tumbled to the ground, but Frankie and Passepartout fell on the opposite side of the tracks.
I scrambled to my feet while the engine rumbled away into the distance at full speed, and our part of the train slowed to a stop right in front of Fort Kearney!
“Frankie!” I cheered. “We did it! Ya-hoo!”
Instantly, a huge bunch of noisy soldiers burst out of the fort, driving the Sioux away into the distant hills.
“Hooray, Frankie!” I shouted again.
But there was no answer.
That’s when Aouda rushed over, tears in her eyes.
“Frankie is gone!” she said. “So is Passepartout!”
“Gone?” I said.
Aouda pointed to a plume of dust rising in the distance. “Our friends … have been captured!”
Chapter 17
“Frankie … gone?”
I still couldn’t believe it was possible.
Aouda nodded. “I saw her tumble to the ground and several warriors take her away on a horse. Passepartout tried to help her, but he was taken, too! Frankie and Passepartout were heroes who saved the rest of us!”
Mr. Fogg strode over. “Do not fear. I will find them. But only if we do not lose a moment. Who is with me?”
In a matter of seconds, some thirty soldiers volunteered to go with Fogg.
“I’m coming, too, of course!” I exclaimed.
“I’ll stay behind,” said Detective Fix, his eyes darting everywhere but not meeting mine or Mr. Fogg’s. “To help the wounded passengers. And to keep Princess Aouda safe, of course.”
I didn’t trust Fix for a second.
“On second thought, I’ll stay, too,” I said. There was no way I was going to let Fix out of my sight.
Fogg nodded. “I shall return with our friends.”
With a toot on the bugle, the troop left the fort. Not long after they disappeared over a distant hill, the air shrieked with the sound of the train whistle.
“The train!” one of the passengers called out. “They’re bringing the engine back!”
Chugging in reverse over the tracks, the lost engine finally came to a stop. Immediately, the engineer and the conductor began hooking up the cars again.
“We have to wait for Mr. Fogg to come back with Frankie and Passepartout,” Aouda told them.
“Wait?” said the engineer. “I’m sorry, but the Sioux are still out there. They may attack again. I can’t take that risk. Besides, I need to keep to my schedule.”
And he did … without us. Five minutes later, Aouda, Fix, and I were staring at the train puffing its way across the plains toward Omaha. No sooner was it out of sight than darkness fell, the air turned frigid, and snow began to fall in thick, squashy flakes.
Together we waited on an old, busted covered wagon outside the fort.
“I should have gone with Mr. Fogg,” I told Aouda. “I mean, my best friend is out there.”
“Mine, too,” she said. Then she put her hand on my shoulder. “Mr. Fogg is a brave and wonderful man. If anyone can save Frankie and Passepartout, he can.”
I felt a little better. “Yeah. I can’t figure him out, but he does come through for people when they need him.”
Then I told Aouda about Fogg’s giving money to the poor woman in London just before we left.
Her eyes sparkled. “He will return soon.”
I heard a noise over my shoulder. It was Fix, growling in the shadows. I stood up. “Did you say something?”
“Fogg won’t be back,” he said in a low snarl. “He’s escaped, is what I think. I never should have let him go.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You just wait. Fogg’ll be back!”
And he was.
Out of the swirling snow, the troop of soldiers came thundering back to the fort, Mr. Fogg himself in the lead. As they approached, Passepartout and Frankie leaped off their horses and rushed to Aouda and me. We had a big, long, four-way group hug.
“But where is the train?” asked Mr. Fogg.
Aouda told him how it came back, but left again on its way to Omaha. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fogg. The engineer needed to keep to his schedule.”
Fogg scratched his chin for a moment. “Then we shall have to find another way.”
We all sat on the busted wagon and started thinking.
Not only was the snow coming down in sheets, but the wind was picking up something fierce, too.
“What we really need is a fast way to Omaha,” I said, as one blast of wind after another swept across the flat plains and tunneled through the wagon’s torn canvas.
“Right,” said Frankie, frowning deeply. “But how?”
The canvas filled with wind and flapped and fluttered like a sail, then fell back again. It kept doing that, filling up, then fluttering back, up and back, up and back. Every time it did, the wagon moved a few inches.
Frankie noticed it and made a small gasping sound. “Devin, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Yeah,” I said finally. “But why do they call them hamburgers when there’s no ham in them?”
“No, look.” Frankie pointed to the canvas filling up with wind and the wagon sliding across the snow.
T
hen I did the small, gasping thing.
“A sailboat!” I cried. “Only instead of a boat, it’s a wagon! Only instead of a wagon, it’s a sled! With a sail! A sail that fills with wind! A wind-sail sled!”
In a matter of minutes, Aouda, Passepartout, Fix, Fogg, Frankie, and I took the base of the wagon and put flat beams along each side as runners. Then we mounted a mast and ran the canvas up like a giant sail.
We dragged the thing out where the wind was strong; then we all piled on.
Whooooosh! The moment the wind filled the canvas sail, our crazy sled began to slide across the plain.
“It’s a sledge,” said Mr. Fogg, nearly cracking a smile. “I rather like it.”
“I love it!” cried Passepartout, his eyes all twinkly.
In a matter of minutes, our wind-sail sled was bouncing across the vast plains at more than fifty miles an hour!
Chapter 18
Wump! Boing! Sloosh!
With each strong breeze, our sledge seemed to lift off the ground, spilling high waves of snow up behind it.
“I smell theme-park ride!” I said, clutching the back end of the sledge where Frankie and I were taking turns steering straight toward Omaha.
After sailing full speed through the night, it was around noon the next day that Passepartout leaped up and pointed directly ahead. Before us was a collection of roofs all white with snow.
“Omaha!” cried the Frenchman. “We have arrived! And today is December tenth. If we reach Chicago tomorrow, we shall be in New York by the twelfth! Perfectly on schedule! Then a steamer. And then England!”
“And then England,” said Fogg calmly.
Aouda glanced up at him but said nothing.
Fix did help Passepartout hastily pull down the sail, but we were going so fast it took us about a mile and a half to slow down to a stop! And guess what? We stopped right in front of the Omaha train station.
“Awesome driving, Frankie!” I said, slapping her five.
We rolled off the sledge and into the station just in time—chug-chug!—to take the next train to Chicago.
The train whizzed really quickly across Iowa. During the next night it crossed the great Mississippi River. By dawn, we were in Chicago.
They call Chicago the Windy City, but after sailing the plains on a homemade sled, it seemed pretty calm to us. Besides, we didn’t see much local weather, anyway, because—zip-zip-zip!—we were off one train and onto the next in, like, sixteen-point-seven seconds.
“All aboard the New York train!” shouted a man in a blue uniform. And we were on it.
I kept reading, trading off little bits with Frankie, who was keeping an eye on Fix. During that time, we took a lightning-fast tour of all the states—Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, even New Jersey—between Chicago and New York. When we finally rolled into the Big Apple, it was nearly midnight the next day.
But before we could even gawk at the Empire State Building, which Frankie told me hadn’t been built yet, or meet and greet the Mets, who weren’t a team yet, we went rushing off to the pier where all the ships were.
Well, almost all the ships.
The one we needed was missing.
“Where is the transatlantic steamer called the China?” Mr. Fogg asked the man at the dock’s ticket booth. “It is to leave for Liverpool, England, this morning.”
The man in the booth blinked. “I’m sorry, sir. It left forty-five minutes ago!”
The next sound we heard was a loud wailing. It was coming from Passepartout, who was stomping up and down on the sidewalk as if he were trying to go straight back to China itself.
“It is all my fault!” he cried. “If not for me, we would not have been captured by the Sioux. If not for me … If not for me …”
Mr. Fogg let him speak, then said, “Delays such as those you mention have been accounted for. As this good gentleman has reported to us, we are merely forty-five minutes late. It shall not defeat us.”
We all looked out across the dock to the vast Atlantic Ocean beyond. It was huge. It was wide. We had only nine days to cross it. It seemed completely impossible.
But, as usual, Fogg didn’t seem too concerned. “It’s all very logical,” he said. “We shall simply find a captain speedy enough to take us to Liverpool, England.”
“Did somebody mention my name?” said a gruff-looking man from a ship nearby.
Mr. Fogg shook his head. “I merely said we need to go to Liverpool, and we are looking for a captain who is speedy—”
“That’s me,” growled the man. “My ship is the Henrietta, and my name is Captain Andrew Speedy!”
I looked at Frankie.
She looked at me.
“Cut! Time out!” I said. “This seems a little silly. Here we are, in maybe the worst spot we’ve been in. We need a fast captain to get us across a gigantic ocean, so all of a sudden a guy named Captain Speedy shows up?”
Frankie laughed. “Why not check the book to see if he’s really supposed to be in this story.”
“Good call.” I flipped open the book. I read as far as I could before the pages got blurry. Then I blinked, looked up, then blinked again.
“Dudes, his name really is Captain Speedy!”
Chapter 19
“Yahoo!” whooped Frankie, jumping up and down with Passepartout. “Captain Speedy! We found Captain Speedy! Our problems are solved! Holy crow, are we lucky or not—”
“Not,” said the captain.
“Please explain that remark,” said Mr. Fogg.
The captain made a sort of growly noise in his throat and tugged his long scraggly beard and said, “I’m only going to Bordeaux, France. I can take you to France, and it will cost you plenty, but I don’t sail anywhere else. Especially not England!”
“Hmm,” said Fogg, gazing off into the distance.
So there we were, with nine minutes left on our watch and no chance of getting to England on time. The zapper gates were going to be fixed any moment. It looked bad.
“Nevertheless,” said Fogg brightly. “We will accept Captain Speedy’s offer.” He pulled a wad of money from his giant carpetbag, and it was all settled.
We boarded the paddleboat steamer, and within the hour we were on our way. Two hours later, there was a loud banging on the door of Captain Speedy’s cabin.
It was Speedy himself banging on the cabin door.
From the inside. He was locked in.
“Let me out of here!” he cried. “I demand to be free!”
Frankie and I were guarding the door.
“Sorry, dude,” I said. “Captain Fogg says you—”
“Captain Fogg!” the guy screamed.
“Yes, Captain Fogg!” I said.
It was so neat. As soon as we were out of New York harbor, Fogg opened his carpetbag again and gave all the guys in Captain Speedy’s crew a chunk of money. They happily agreed to sail to Liverpool and lock Speedy in his cabin.
Like a pirate—but the best-dressed and most polite pirate ever—Phileas Fogg had taken over the ship!
More banging came from inside the door, but after a while the guy’s fists gave out, so Frankie and I went up on deck to look for Passepartout. We found him under the chugging smokestacks.
“We are in the North Atlantic Ocean,” he said.
I gazed out at the cold black water. “Isn’t this where the Titanic hits an iceberg and goes down?”
“It looks like the Love Boat’s taking a dive, too,” said Frankie. “Mr. Fogg is about as cold as an iceberg. Look.”
Aouda stood against the railing, shivering. She was as close to Fogg as she could be without actually touching him, but there he was, nose deep in his notebook.
“He’s calculating how to hurry back to England the quickest way possible,” said Passepartout.
I frowned. “It’s like he’s counting the days until our incredible, ultimate field trip will be over.”
“I know,” said Frankie. “It makes me sort of sad.”
“Right,” I said. “So
what happens when the trip is over? Aouda goes to find her cousin somewhere? And Mr. Fogg goes back to playing cards?”
Frankie nodded. “That’s the sad part.”
“I think perhaps Mr. Fogg is a robot after all,” Passepartout said with a sigh.
But I looked at Fogg, remembering when he made the decision to save Aouda. And when he went off to rescue Frankie and Passepartout without a thought. He wasn’t quite a robot then. There was something more there. I was sure of it.
During the first days of our voyage across the ocean, things went smoothly enough. The sails were hoisted high and the Henrietta plowed across the waves like a real transatlantic steamer. But on December 19, the seventy-eighth day of our trip, there was a problem.
A big problem.
The wind died to nothing and we ran out of fuel.
All of us were on deck when the first mate ran up to Captain Fogg. “We have no more coal,” he said. “We have been going full speed since New York. This has used up our entire fuel supply. Sorry, sir, but we are dead in the water. We cannot move.”
Fogg was silent for a moment, then nodded at Frankie and me. “Bring Captain Speedy to me, if you please.”
A few moments later, we unleashed the angry captain on deck. He was like his own personal typhoon. He stormed up to Fogg and shouted, “Where are we?”
“Seven hundred and seven miles from Liverpool, England,” replied Fogg calmly.
“Pirate!” boomed Captain Speedy.
“I have sent for you, sir,” said Fogg, “to buy the Henrietta. For I shall be forced to burn her.”
“Burn the Henrietta!. Are you insane?”
“Merely practical,” said Fogg. “I must burn all the wood on the ship in order to provide fuel for steam.”
“But my ship is worth five thousand pounds!”
“Here is six thousand pounds.” Fogg handed him two large wads of money.
This had an instant effect on Speedy. As his quivering hands took the money, a grin covered his face. “For me?”
“For the use of your ship. You may keep what is left of her,” said Fogg. “The iron hull and engine are yours. If we do not reach London by eight forty-five, on the evening of December twenty-first, exactly two days from now, I shall lose my entire fortune. So you see—”