Humbug Mountain by Sid Fleischman Read Free Book Online Page A

owl-eyed behind her glasses. She stared at him as if he were the devil with his clothes still smoldering from down below.
    â€œCome along,” Pa said, and the three men headed toward the river. We stood where we were like fence posts. How Pa had got the best of those outlaws was a wonder. It fogged the brain.
    Then Ma gave her head a toss. “I don’t know what your Pa is up to, but I do hope he keeps those two men downwind of us. They smell stronger than skunk cabbage. Now then, what’s Grandpa’s boat doing over in those trees?”
    Ma’s green eyes wandered sadly from one end of the boat to the other. “The poor old Phoenix. She was pretty as a duck on the water. But look at her now. Dirty as a pigsty. Grandpa wouldn’t allow it. Something dreadful must have happened. He’d never abandon the Phoenix.”
    He might be dead, I thought. Maybe we all thought it, but no one ventured to say it.
    We trooped across the gangplank to the cabin deck. “Pa said the logbook might tell us a thing or two,” I muttered.
    Ma nodded. “In Grandpa’s stateroom. Or up in the pilothouse.”
    We opened the cabin doors, one after another, and looked in. It felt as if we were opening tombs. Each stateroom sat in heavy silence, with a red plush chair pulled up to a marble-topped table and rosy light pressing through stained glass at the top of the windows.
    Grandpa’s cabin was far forward and easy to spot. There was a speaking tube hung on the wall, a brass bed, Grandpa’s pilot’s license framed near the door, and baby pictures of Glorietta and me. There was also one of Ma as a young girl and another of Ma and Pa together.
    Still, the room looked ransacked and the bed looked freshly slept in. We didn’t find the logbook, but Glorietta discovered a club under the bed. A bur-oak club.
    She gave me an anxious glance. No doubt about it, the Fool Killer had been sleeping in Grandpa’s brass bed.
    Ma opened the window to air out the cabin.
    We climbed the stairs to the top deck. The pilothouse sat like a box of windows to the rear of the black smokestacks. But there wasn’t a scrap of paper to be found inside. Not even Grandpa’s river charts.
    Ma shook her head. “What had he been doing, steaming off out of the main river!”
    â€œFool Killer!”
    â€œHang’m! Bash’m!”
    Both Ma and Glorietta looked up in surprise. I’d forgot to tell them about those spooky ol’ crows. They’d flocked onto the crown of the smokestack again.
    â€œRavens!” Glorietta exclaimed.
    â€œJust common crows,” I said.
    â€œSame kin,” Ma remarked. “I wonder who taught them to speak.”
    â€œMaybe it was Grandpa,” I said. “Those birds keep worryin’ Shagnasty John. The Fool Killer, too. They keep chunking rocks at them.”
    We kept searching for papers. The ship’s log must be somewhere. And there might even be a letter or two Grandpa had meant to send off to us.
    I ended up poking around on my own. The freight deck was piled to the guardrails with stacks and stacks of milled lumber and windows and barrels of nails. I explored around and ended up at the door of the engine room. I turned the brass knob and looked in. I could make out the huge furnace and the white-faced steam gauges and the brass tubing gleaming in the shadows. I edged inside and gazed all around. Almighty clean, the engine room, I thought. There wasn’t even the feel of grit under my shoes.
    I was starting back outside when I whirled about. A faint rustling sound had caught my ear.
    â€œWho’s there?” I said quickly.
    I peered into the gloom and waited, but no one answered. Something had moved, but I couldn’t make out a thing. Maybe a rat, I thought. Ma would have a perishing fit if she thought there were rats underfoot, and I didn’t much like the idea myself. I scrambled out of there and shut the door.
    Pa and