On Track for Treasure

by Wendy McClure

  “Never mind that,” Jack whispered back. “Where’s Harold? Is Frances all right?”

  Sarah shrugged. “Harold’s upstairs in bed. And Frances just came through here with Eleanor and Olive. I’ve no idea why. They wouldn’t tell us.”

  Jack nodded. He was just as confused as they were.

  George pointed to the other end of the big kitchen. “You can’t see it from here, but there’s a pantry. They went in there to get something!”

  Jack went over to the pantry doorway. No one was in there, but Jack stood inside a moment to marvel at all the casks and bins and sacks of provisions, the jars of jelly and preserves all lined up on the shelves. . . .

  “Someone’s coming!” Nicky hissed. “You have to hide!”

  Jack spotted the open trapdoor in the corner of the pantry—he could see there were stairs leading down to a cellar. He tiptoed across the first few steps, then crouched and leaped down into the cellar like a cat to make the least amount of noise possible.

  He ducked out of sight of the trapdoor as he heard footsteps on the floor overhead. Hardly daring to breathe, he waited. Jack looked around—one small window let in scant daylight, and though his eyes had yet to adjust to the dimness, he could make out bins of apples and potatoes.

  Then, suddenly, the cellar darkened further as the trapdoor closed above him. Jack heard a key clink in a lock.

  It was at the very same moment that Jack realized he wasn’t alone. He could hear someone breathing.

  “Hello?” he whispered.

  Jack had barely spoken the words before something came at him in a pale flash and hit him in the head with a thunk!

  27

  DOWN IN THE CELLAR

  “An onion,” Jack said, rubbing the side of his head. “You threw an onion at me?”

  “Sorry!” Eli said. “I didn’t know it was you! I was sure someone was coming to thrash me for escaping.”

  “It’s all right. Glad it was a small onion,” Jack said as he looked down at the vegetable at his feet. “And it’s better than throwing a hot potato.”

  Eli gave him a funny look. “Who was throwing hot potatoes around?”

  Jack grinned. “Long story.”

  “Well, you might have time to tell me. We’re locked in down here!”

  Jack glanced around. “What about that window over there?” But as he looked, he could see it had only one tiny pane of glass that angled forward just enough to let air in.

  “It doesn’t open wide enough,” Eli said.

  “There’s got to be another way out. Another exit, right?”

  Eli sighed. “Yes, but . . . here, I’ll show you.” He led Jack to one end of the cellar where a few stone steps led up to a pair of tilted doors. Jack realized he’d seen these doors from the outside—they leaned against the side of the house below the kitchen window.

  Eli pushed against the doors, but they didn’t open. “See, they’ve got a board nailed across them to keep ’em shut. In fact, my old man had the job to hammer them down two summers ago.”

  “Maybe the nails are looser now,” Jack suggested. “We could push together.”

  “Good idea.” Eli leaned hard against the doors, and Jack joined him.

  The wood creaked and groaned as they struggled, and they could feel the doors straining against the board on the other side.

  “C’mon!” said Eli. They pushed again until the wood began to pop and splinter.

  But no matter how many times they heaved, they couldn’t get the doors to move any further. Jack wondered how many pushes it would take to work the nails loose. He turned around and leaned back against the doors so that he could brace his feet and shove with his own weight. Eli did the same.

  “Grrrr!” Jack grunted.

  But the doors didn’t open. Both boys stumbled down the stone steps and wiped their foreheads. It’s no use, Jack thought.

  But the noise of splintering wood continued. “What’s that?” Eli asked.

  Suddenly, Jack realized the sound was coming from the other side of the door. Someone outside was prying off the board! They could hear the squeak of nails being pulled out.

  Eli looked at Jack, bewildered. “Who . . . who’s out there?”

  “I think it’s—”

  The board popped loose with a loud snap, and then the doors flew open.

  “Alexander!”

  Jack couldn’t have been happier that he’d guessed right. The older boy waved his hatchet and grinned.

  “Are we ever glad to see you!” Eli said.

  “We sure are,” Jack said, and he meant it.

  “Figured you could use a little help with that door,” he said to Jack. “You can shove hard, but sometimes it takes a lot more than that to break something.”

  Jack smiled. He knew Alexander was talking about more than doors.

  Frances had gone upstairs “to visit Harold”—but of course there was only the empty room where the children slept. She’d sat on one of the beds for a few moments trying to calm down from all that had just happened down in the hallway.

  But she knew she couldn’t stay there long, so she’d crept back down the stairs. There were voices coming from the kitchen, so she headed toward the front door instead—if she could just find Jack and Alexander, maybe they could all work out a way to get Harold free. And then they could figure out where Eli was, too. . . .

  She turned to cut through the parlor and almost collided with Reverend Carey. Frances gasped as she stopped short.

  “I’m—I’m sorry,” she stammered, her chest pounding all over again. She hadn’t seen the Reverend since the incident behind the shed. She stared at the lapels of his black vest and remembered the blood on his shirt. A swell of helpless rage filled her head and she didn’t dare look him in the face.

  “What brings you here, my child?” he asked. “Oh—you must be visiting your sick young brother. But you look upset. Is the boy all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Frances managed. But her eyes felt hot with the angry tears that she was trying to blink back. She remembered how kind he’d been at the train depot, and how nice his voice was when he played the fiddle at the prayer sessions. But now she couldn’t see him like that. She never would again.

  “But I see something else is wrong, Frances,” Reverend Carey said gently. “What is it?”

  Frances didn’t want to answer—was that like lying? Yes, she knew, it was lying. And even though she hadn’t made the promise not to lie like the other kids did, she realized that this was one time where she had no choice but to tell the truth.

  “The other night we saw you,” Frances said. “We saw what you did to Moses Pike.”

  The Reverend’s face went pale. “My child,” he whispered. “You should not have witnessed that. You don’t understand. . . .”

  “Yes, I do!” she cried. “There are people you want to help, but there are people you don’t want to help, either. And you only want to help people when they live by your rules!”

  Reverend Carey stepped back, shaking his head, unable to speak. His face had gone from pale to red, and Frances couldn’t tell if it was from mortification or fury. She didn’t want to find out.

  She pushed past him and flew out the door.

  “I sure am grateful that you got me out of that house,” Eli told Jack and Alexander.

  Jack nodded. “It’s a good thing Alexander stayed outside.”

  “And that you went inside,” Alexander said with a grin.

  The boys had brought Eli to Wanderville while they tried to figure out what to do next. Eli had told them about how he’d slipped out of the schoolroom but that he didn’t know what had happened to Harold.

  “Let’s hope Frances figured out a way to get him out,” Alexander said. “We should go back over to the house.”

  “Not me,” Eli said. “I ain
’t going anywhere near that house and that lowdown preacher again. Not now, not ever. I’m staying right here in Wanderville.”

  “But what about your pa?” Jack said.

  “I’m not living with him, either. He doesn’t want me around anyway.”

  “Well . . .” Alexander exchanged a look with Jack. “Of course you’re welcome in Wanderville. The thing is, Wanderville isn’t just this spot here behind the fence. At least, not for us. It’s anywhere we go.”

  “And we’re planning on leaving the farm,” Jack continued. “Us and Harold and Frances and the kids in the house. As soon as possible.”

  Eli didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “So that means . . . ,” he said hesitantly.

  “You’re coming with us,” Jack finished.

  Eli’s face burst into a huge smile. “Right,” he said.

  Alexander reached over and shook his hand. “Congratulations. You’re our newest citizen!”

  Eli laughed and shook Jack’s hand, too. Then he looked around. “I just need to get a few things from my pop’s place while he’s still out in the fields.” He ran over and climbed the split-rail fence.

  “Eli, wait . . . ,” Jack called, remembering the last time he’d seen Mr. Pike. “What if he’s not out in . . .”

  But Eli was already gone.

  Jack turned toward the fence to run after him, but Alexander clapped him on the shoulder. “Just give Eli a minute, and then go and make sure he’s all right. And I’ll go by the house and see if I can find Frances.”

  “Here!” gasped a familiar voice from behind them. “I’m here!” called Frances. “I finally found you two!” She stopped by the fence to catch her breath. “I ran everywhere looking.”

  “Where’s Harold?” Jack asked. “Is he still locked up?”

  “That’s why I was trying to find you! So I could tell you—”

  “Wait,” Alexander interrupted. “There’s Harold right now.”

  He was pointing over to the back of the barn, and Jack turned to look. Sure enough, there was Harold, his eyes wide.

  Mrs. Carey stood behind him with a firm grasp on his shirt collar. Beside her was Reverend Carey, his face stern as he stared across at Jack and his friends.

  “Come here at once,” he ordered.

  28

  WORDS NOT SPOKEN

  If it hadn’t been for Harold, she would have just run off. It was all Frances could do to keep from dragging her feet as the three of them made their way over to where the Careys stood with Harold. The Reverend grasped something in his hand, a white stick of some kind. A ruler? She cringed to think of the punishment.

  Harold had his I’m sorry look on his face. Frances could only nod and try to hide her own fear and dread.

  But when she finally stood in front of Reverend Carey, she saw that the thing in his hand wasn’t a stick at all, but a rolled sheaf of paper. Some of the pages came loose as he held the sheaf out for the children to see.

  Frances recognized them. They were the pages that she had written and placed in the schoolroom.

  “Who wrote these?” the Reverend asked. “I’m well aware it wasn’t Eli.”

  “We were just trying to help him,” Jack said.

  “I know what you were doing,” Reverend Carey said. “But I want to know, who wrote them?”

  Frances stepped forward. “I did,” she whispered. She was getting that squeezed-too-tight feeling, and she couldn’t bring herself to look up.

  The Reverend held one of the scribbled pages right in front of her face. “And these words,” he asked, his voice a little less sharp. “They are your . . . thoughts?”

  Frances stared at her own cursive handwriting and remembered. Write whatever comes to mind, Jack had said. And there, on the page, was just that, in crazed half sentences:

  One day soon we’ll be gone and we’ll go to California—we’ll be free—California—find gold! Hope we can escape—Not Eli’s fault he missed so much school. His pa’s a drunkard! Not fair, not fair at all—have to escape what if Miss DeHaven comes back—makes us work in a factory—or go back to the orphanages don’t want to—wish there was a train, an anywhere train—in the big rock candy mountains all the chores are fun as pie and all of us in Wanderville are free forever nigh—

  Frances’s face burned as she read the words she’d scribbled. She’d written pages like this—about her old life on the streets, the orphan train ride, all the things she’d seen. She’d written about how she wished they could go back to Kansas and save all the kids at the Pratcherds’, then find treasure and live someplace where nobody would force them to work or send them away from their brothers and sisters. . . .

  She took a quavering breath. She hadn’t thought anyone was going to read what she’d written.

  Mrs. Carey spoke up. “These words are how you feel, Frances?”

  Frances wiped a tear from her face. Funny how she’d never made that promise to the Careys about not lying. Now she couldn’t lie to them even when she wanted to.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said. “And it’s how the rest of us feel, too. We want to be on our own.”

  From behind her she could sense the boys nodding, and she heard Alexander say, “That’s right, ma’am.”

  The Reverend and Mrs. Carey exchanged a solemn look that Frances couldn’t decipher. Then Mrs. Carey let go of Harold’s collar to draw out another piece of paper from the sheaf her husband held. “There is this page as well,” she said.

  Right away Frances recognized her little brother’s handiwork. Harold must have drawn the picture while he was locked in the schoolroom—taking advantage of the paper and pencils that were available there. He’d drawn the wild apple trees and the split-rail fence and the old stone chimney; he’d also put in the creek and the pine trees and the courthouse log from the ravine in Kansas. He’d drawn himself swinging on a rope swing, with legs like stovepipes and a blocky body. And all around were smiling figures that Frances knew to be Alexander and Jack and George and Nicky and Anka and Sarah and another figure that she guessed was Eli.

  Harold had come over and now he was pointing proudly. “That’s you,” he told Frances. And there she was in the drawing—she knew it was her because she was holding her book, the Third Eclectic Reader, with the broken spine.

  At the top Harold had written: WANDRVILLE.

  “What is this place?” Mrs. Carey asked the children. “You wrote this name, too, Frances—is it the place where you go play in the evenings?”

  Jack spoke up. “It’s the place that goes wherever we go. So we can call it home.”

  “And we might as well tell you,” Alexander said, his voice shaky. “We think it’s time we go somewhere else. We’ve caused so much trouble, after all. . . .”

  Frances dared to look up at the Reverend. There was a stormy look on his face. He straightened up as if he were about to deliver a sermon. But then he bowed his head. “My children,” he said, “it was our hope that this would be your home. But . . . I understand that there are different paths one can take in life.”

  Mrs. Carey was nodding at that.

  “I have tried to cultivate all the trees in this orchard,” he continued. “But even I have to admit there are some that grow best when they grow wild, and perhaps it’s the same way with you children.”

  He looked straight at Frances suddenly. “And I’ve been wrong, too. I always thought I was helping everyone I could. But there have been those whose troubles I’ve ignored. Many years ago, the people who toiled on this farm were given their freedom, but I’ve been blind to the other things that have kept some of them from being truly free. I see now, and I will do my best to change that.”

  Frances knew he was talking about Eli’s father. Thank you, she mouthed.

  Jack spoke up. “If Miss DeHaven ever comes back, will you promise not to tell her where we went
?”

  “Yes,” said the Reverend. “We can promise that.”

  Mrs. Carey was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. “This is not easy, letting you children go,” she said. “But I know the sadness a house can have when a child is not happy there.”

  Reverend Carey gave a weary sigh. “Our oldest, Matthew.”

  Frances remembered hearing that he had become a missionary. She knew the Careys were proud of him, but it must have been hard for them knowing that he wanted to go so far away from home.

  “Now perhaps you understand why we wanted to take you in,” Mrs. Carey said. “And why we’re letting you go. We just want all children to be happy.”

  Harold pointed to his drawing. “You can keep this,” he told Mrs. Carey. “It shows us happy.”

  29

  GOODBYE AND GOOD NIGHT

  Jack was in the barn rolling up the few clothes he wasn’t wearing—his coat, extra socks, and a hand-me-down shirt the Careys had given him—into his sleeping blanket. He stuffed the roll into a feed sack, his mind buzzing with excitement. He couldn’t believe they were free to leave!

  “Packing already?” Alexander laughed. “We still have to round everyone up to meet our newest citizen. Speaking of which, is Eli back?”

  “Eli!” Jack said suddenly. “We forgot to check on him!” It must have been an hour since Eli had gone back to his father’s shanty to get his things. Was he all right?

  Jack tossed down the feed sack and ran out of the barn. He was relieved to see Eli coming up the path carrying a bundle much like the one Jack had just packed.

  “I’m ready,” Eli said, swinging the bag over his shoulder.

  “What about your pa? Did you see him?” Jack asked.

  Eli scowled. “He just sat there in his rocker while I got my things. Said he figured I was going to run off and it was good riddance. Well, good riddance to him, too.”