The Hope Chest by Karen Schwabach Read Free Book Online

since Flossie's death that she'd become a worrier and fraidy-cat that Flossie wouldn't even like anymore. It was a horrible thought.
    She listened to what Hobie was telling them.
    To be blind baggage meant riding in the blind spot between the engine and the baggage car of a passenger train. The trick was to duck in just after the highball—the two short blasts on the whistle that meant that the train was about to leave—and after the conductors had all stepped onto the train.
    When the blast came, Hobie grabbed them each by a hand and darted onto the steel platform behind the engine so quickly that Violet caught her foot on the edge, stumbled, and almost fell onto the tracks. Hobie grabbed the collar of her middy blouse and pulled her back.
    “Steady, Angelina!” he said.
    They sat facing backward on account of the cinders, which flew back from the smokestack as the train gained speed and filled the air with the smell of coal smoke.
    Violet and Myrtle sat huddled together, trying not to look at the ground whizzing by beneath them. The train jolted about as it picked up speed, and there was nothing to hold on to. The platform had no walls. One good jolt, Violet thought, and all three of them would fly off into the landscape that was zipping past.
    Hobie was unperturbed. He leaned back and told them about his adventures. He was twelve years old, he admitted, and had been riding the rails on and off for two years.
    “Where do you come from?” Myrtle asked.
    “Tennessee. Copperhill, Tennessee. Up in the Blue Ridge. But there ain't hardly nowhere I ain't been,” Hobie bragged. “Been all over Hobohemia.” He swept his arm to indicate the scenery they were passing, which they couldn't see very well because they were squinting to keep the cinders out of their eyes.
    It seemed to go on forever. What if she'd just stayed home, Violet thought—what would she be doing right now? It was night. She would have already read toStephen. Dinner would be over, including the nightly endurance of table manners and impossible rules (like eating everything on your plate, even horrible gristly fat pieces of meat, or you'd have to eat it for breakfast tomorrow). She'd be alone in her room, in her bed, under the green chenille bedspread, rereading one of her Oz books by the bedside lamp.
    Instead, she was hunched over on the vibrating iron platform, breathing smoke and nearly deafened by the clatter of wheels on rails, so she could hardly hear Hobie. He seemed to be saying that he didn't need to go to school because he was going to be educated at some Hobo College that some rich man was starting.
    It must've been nearly midnight, Violet guessed, when they reached Philadelphia. They walked across numerous tracks to a freight yard.
    “We can catch a fast freight from here to Baltimore,” Hobie said. “But it ain't here yet. I'm going over to the jungle to get some hobo stew.” He indicated a clump of trees from which a thin column of smoke was rising. Violet and Myrtle started to follow him, but he held up a hand to stop them. “No, you Angelinas stay here. This is a bad jungle. Too many of the Johnson family, you know what I mean? Too many profesh.”
    “I guess he means criminals.” Violet stopped and looked at Myrtle. “Oh no, do I look as bad as you do?”
    “Probably,” said Myrtle. “If I look that bad.”
    “You do,” Violet assured her. Myrtle looked asthough she had taken a bath in charcoal. Her dress was no longer blue-and-white-striped but coal-smoke black, and her formerly white mobcap and apron matched.
    They sat down on the gravel of the roadbed. It was very uncomfortable. Violet wondered if there was anywhere nearby where they could buy something to eat, anywhere that wouldn't mind serving people who looked like they had been swept out of the bottom of a fireplace. And if anyplace was even open at this hour.
    “What time do you think it is?” Violet asked.
    Myrtle shrugged. “Really late. I think it was around