On the Blue Comet by Rosemary Wells Read Free Book Online Page A

cuff, his attention on his father as a mouse might eye an owl.
    “Learn it, son,” Mr. Pettishanks ordered, his words boring holes into Cyril, “or you’ll find yourself at military prep school for next term. You can bet your bottom dollar they’ll drill some discipline into you starting at five o’clock in the morning!”
    “Please, Father, no!” whimpered Cyril.
    Mr. Pettishanks grabbed his son by the front of his sweaty shirt. He undid and retied Cyril’s necktie and drew the knot up tight to Cyril’s neck. In a spitting whisper that everyone in the room could hear, he said, “I was cum laude at Harvard. Your grandfather the same, and his father before him. My son is not going to be the first failure in this family. Do you hear me, Cyril?”
    “Yes, sir,” said Cyril, his eyes flicking on me.
    “It’s two weeks before Christmas. You get it by the first week of the new year, or you’ll find yourself in a cadet’s uniform, drilling on the parade ground at the military prep. Think about it, son. Ice-water showers morning and night. The parade ground has flint chips on the track. They call it The Grinder. They make you do push-ups on it.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Cyril. His eyes were dull.
    His father released Cyril’s shirt and gave his tie a small yank. “We can’t have the public-school boys creeping up on ya and grabbing your slot at Harvard.” Mr. Pettishanks eyed me and smiled without humor at his own joke.
    Cyril tried his best to laugh. But when his father turned again to go, he snarled at me out of the side of his mouth, “You’re a little worm, Ogilvie. I’ll get you!”
    “Do as Mr. Pettishanks asks, Oscar,” said Aunt Carmen as if nothing had happened. “Do not linger. Take the number seventeen bus home when your errand is complete.”
    Out the front door I went, almost skipping with my sudden freedom. Free. Free as a sparrow in the sky for at least an hour. Unwatched and unremarked upon, I climbed aboard the streetcar and dropped my nickel fare into the slot just like all the free grown-up people. I might as well have joined life in Brazil. I turned my face upward to wherever God might be hiding. A tiny prayer of thanks blossomed in my heart, and I sent it skyward. Somehow I had pulled the lucky lever and got my dad instead of Mr. Pettishanks. Cyril would never learn that poem. With all his money and privilege, he was going to wind up in Missouri Military Prep, just over the river from Cairo. Everybody knew what went on there. Sometimes we could see them drill and hear them shouting on the wind. My dad said, “The Prep is supposed to be a school for troublesome boys, but it’s really a school for the boys of troublesome dads. The Prep spits those boys out four years later as nasty little cadets.”
    The bus took twenty minutes to reach downtown Cairo and the intersection of Center Street and Washington Avenue. I alighted at the corner and went to the bronze filigreed doors of the bank. The First National was a heroic granite building. Ten fluted Greek columns held up the capital out in front. The bank’s name was chiseled in the marble for all Cairo and the surrounding world to read.
    Bankers’ hours ended at three, but there was a bell on the side of the double doors, and I rang it. Waiting in the cold afternoon for the night watchman, I turned to the right to one of the darkened display windows. Suddenly spotlights flared on. All that was in the Christmas display window came to life. There was a layout of twenty different trains in a Christmas landscape. The Blue Comet whizzed by. It was my Blue Comet. Mr. Pettishanks had it running lakeside on the South Shore Line.
    Before I could even take it in, the night watchman opened the bank door and saluted me with a smile.
    “Mr. Applegate!” I shouted.

“Oscar,” said Aunt Carmen after grace and before supper that evening, “you are excused from writing any further copies of Mr. Kipling’s poem.” She gave me a frosty