Escape to the World's Fair Read online

  “We’ll do it,” Jack said. “We’ll go to the Fair!”

  5

  A TICKET TO ST. LOUIS

  And just like that, they were back on the road in the motorcar. The noise and jostle of the engine seemed to match Frances’s anxious, pounding heartbeat. What are we doing? she thought. And why did Alexander leave it up to me?

  “Excellent!” Zogby had exclaimed when Jack had told him that they’d travel to the Fair in his place. Then he’d reached into his jacket and pulled out a wad of bills. The sight of all that money had made Frances catch her breath. For a moment, all five of them had been too stunned to move as Zogby held out the cash. Finally Alexander had reached out and taken it.

  “This is for your fare to St. Louis,” Zogby had explained. Then he’d counted out several half-dollar coins. “And these,” he had said, dropping the coins into Alexander’s hand, “are to get into the Fair. I believe admission is fifty cents a person.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Alexander had managed to say.

  At that, Zogby had cranked the engine again for the drive to Hannibal. It was just a couple of miles away, and from there the five of them would journey on to St. Louis.

  Now the car was slowing down; they’d passed a sign that said HANNIBAL TOWN LIMITS.

  Zogby pulled over and stopped the car on a quiet street at what appeared to be the edge of town. He pointed to an old clapboard hotel on the corner. “Take a right at the Sawyer Inn and then head down the hill until the street ends. You’ll see the ticket office right there.”

  This is all happening so fast, Frances thought as she and her friends climbed out of the car. “Wait, Mr. Zogby,” she said, trying to keep her voice from sounding too anxious. “Aren’t we supposed to meet someone at the Fair? To give them that gold medal for you?” She pulled out her Third Eclectic Reader from her jacket pocket and fished her pencil out of her stocking. “Can you write down their name in here?” she asked, handing him her book.

  Zogby nodded and took the pencil. It took a moment for him to find a blank spot—Frances used all the empty spots inside her old schoolbook to make notes of anything she wanted to remember—but then he scrawled something in the corner of the back flyleaf. He gave the book and pencil back to Frances. She was just about to look inside when he snapped his fingers.

  “Why, I almost forgot the most important thing!” he said. “Of course I must give you this!”

  Zogby drew the medallion from his pocket and unwrapped it. He rubbed the edge with his thumb and gathered up the chain. Just before he handed it over, he hesitated briefly; in those few moments Frances thought he looked a little sad, or even sorry about something. But then he wrapped the handkerchief around the medallion and pressed it into Jack’s hand.

  “Be careful with it,” he said.

  Jack nodded and tucked the medallion into his hip pocket. Eli, standing right next to him, looked a little relieved when the medallion was put away.

  Zogby checked his watch and looked around. “I should really be going. They won’t begin boarding for St. Louis for another hour, so you needn’t hurry.”

  But hurrying seemed to be exactly what Zogby himself was doing. He rushed around the side of the motorcar to work the engine crank. “You kids be careful, too,” he called.

  What does that mean? Frances thought. By then the car’s motor had started up and Zogby was climbing back into the car.

  Frances suddenly remembered the book in her hand. She opened it to see what Zogby had written. There it was, in the corner—a name: Mr. C. McGee.

  “Wait!” Frances called, but she had to raise her voice over the noise of the engine. “WAIT!”

  “WHAT?” Zogby called back.

  “WHERE CAN WE FIND MR. McGEE AT THE FAIR?”

  Zogby shook his head. “IT’S MOSES McGEE,” he shouted. Or at least that’s what it sounded like to Frances. “MOSES McGEE AT THE TEMPLE OF PROMISES!”

  “The Temple of . . . THE TEMPLE OF PROMISES?” What kind of place is that?

  The young man nodded. “YEP!”

  Frances had no idea what that meant either. “Moses McGee at the Temple of Promises.” It sounded odd, but it was easy enough to remember.

  Zogby put the motorcar in gear. “SO LONG,” he called. “THANK YOU AND GOOD LUCK!” A cloud of fine dust rose as the young man steered the car into a quick half circle and then drove off in the same direction he’d come in. He turned a corner and was gone.

  Jack turned to Frances. “I could’ve sworn he said the fellow’s name was Mice McGee,” he said. “Not Moses.”

  Eli shrugged. “Nah, it sounded like ‘Moses’ to me,” he said. “Just like my pop’s name.”

  Frances hadn’t been certain about the name either, but Eli sounded sure enough. Yet something still didn’t seem right about all this. “What about the ‘Temple of Promises’?” she asked. “If you ask me, that sounded even weirder.”

  Alexander spoke up. “But didn’t you hear him talking about all the bizarre things at the Fair? Ostrich farms, golden chariots . . .”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Frances said. Nonetheless, she couldn’t stop thinking that everything was bizarre right now, not just the Fair. After all, one moment they’d been walking alongside some railroad tracks, and now here they were on their way to St. Louis with at least twenty dollars in their pockets.

  Jack and Eli and Alexander started to head down the street Zogby had pointed out, but it wasn’t until Harold tugged on her sleeve that Frances realized she hadn’t moved.

  “Aren’t you coming, Frances?” he asked.

  “Yes, but . . .” She started walking. “Doesn’t anyone else think that everything that just happened was . . . was really strange?”

  Jack looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this fellow was simply sitting there in his fancy motorcar in the middle of nowhere! Not even on the road! What was he doing, anyway? And what was he planning on doing before we showed up?”

  “Are you saying you think he was up to no good or something?” Eli asked.

  “I don’t know!” Frances sighed. “It seems a little fishy, that’s all. And we’re expected to take him at his word and get on a train to—”

  “A train!” Harold interrupted, his face crumpling up with worry. “I thought we weren’t going to get on another train, Frannie!”

  Frances turned to Jack and Eli. “Well, we weren’t, until we met this Zogby character and all agreed to this half-baked plan. And Harold’s right. When we left the Careys’ we decided it was too risky to take a train. Who knows—Miss DeHaven might have folks on all the trains looking for us by now.”

  She got a sick feeling whenever she thought about the cruel woman from the Society for Children’s Aid and Relief. Miss Lillian DeHaven had been the chaperone on the orphan train she and Harold and Jack had taken. But she was also the sister of Mrs. Pratcherd, and she’d seen to it that the orphan train children were sent to the Pratcherd Ranch to work long days in the fields.

  “Isn’t that Miss DeHaven the one who came out to Reverend Carey’s farm to check on you?” Eli asked.

  “That was her, all right,” Jack said. “She said she was making sure we were all right. But she had other plans for us. . . .”

  “We’d caught her talking about them,” Frances continued. She remembered the sound of Miss DeHaven’s beautiful but cold voice that day in the Kansas City depot. Frances herself had overheard her talking to the station matron. “She said she was going to send us to a man named Edwin Adolphius, who runs an industrial school. But . . . it didn’t sound like a school at all. It sounded like a factory.”

  “Edwin Adolphius,” Eli repeated the name slowly. “He sounds important. But sometimes, important folks are the worst kind of folks.”

  “That’s for sure,” Alexander muttered. “Well, we’ll just have to stay on the lookout when w
e’re on the train.”

  “Speaking of the train, do you suppose it runs along the river?” Jack asked, pointing down the street ahead of them.

  They were walking the slope of a gentle hill that Frances now realized was the bank of a very big river. It was in fact the biggest river she’d seen since the Hudson River in New York. It was a great swath of bright silver that glinted under the midday sun.

  “The Mississippi,” she whispered.

  They had come to the bottom of the hill now, where they crossed one more street. Frances studied the row of brick buildings lined up along the riverbank. “I don’t see the depot, do you?” she asked the others.

  “Zogby mentioned something about a ticket office,” Jack said.

  Sure enough, there was a sign that said TICKETS on a tiny little structure that was set back behind the other buildings, with a wooden sidewalk and a flight of steps leading up to it.

  Alexander was the first to reach the top of the stairs, and as he did, Frances heard him say, “Whoa! Look at this!” She ran up the last few steps to see for herself.

  They were at the very edge of the river now. And there, along the stretch of bank that had been hidden from view by the buildings, was a huge, white boat. It was bigger than the Staten Island Ferry and grander, too, with three upper decks trimmed with lacy woodwork. It looked to Frances like the fancy layer cakes she’d seen in bakery windows. The two tall chimney pipes trailed smoke as the boat drew nearer to the bank. Frances realized it was heading for the dock near them.

  “Are we going on a ship?” Harold asked.

  “It’s a steamboat!” Eli said. “A good old Mississippi steamboat!”

  Jack let out a low whistle. “Three decks! That’s really something!”

  Painted along the side of the boat were the words Addie Dauphin. Frances supposed it was the name of the steamboat—it sounded like it was named after someone fun and adventurous, and for a moment she wished she knew this girl, whoever she was. As Frances stared out across the glittering water at the boat, she felt a thrill unlike any she had felt in days. She was finally glad again to be on the road. Well, not exactly the road, she thought. This time it’s the river.

  “Guess what, Harold?” she told her little brother. “Looks like we won’t be going on a train after all.”

  6

  THE RIVER RATS

  As soon as the Addie Dauphin came in, the dock seemed to spring to life. Crews of men strode single file down the gangplanks, carrying crates and bales of straw and cotton. Another team rolled big wooden casks up a ramp to the boat’s deck; still more men used ropes and pulleys to haul a load of trunks on board. Jack had been thinking back to New York a lot over the past day, and the dock made him think of the crowded sidewalks of that city—so much hustle back and forth. There was even a group of older boys who loitered by one of the gangplanks, shoving one another jovially the way some of the street-gang kids did back on the Lower East Side.

  Jack watched everything, mesmerized, until he felt someone nudge his shoulder.

  “Come on, Jack. We’ve got to get our tickets.” Alexander pointed toward the ticket window, where a line had begun to form.

  The boys by the gangplank paused their shoving to stare at Jack and the others as they passed. Jack just nodded, the way Daniel had taught him. As he could see that the boys—there were four of them—were only a year or two older than he was. One of them, who seemed to be about Alexander’s age, had an unlit cigar stub clamped between his teeth. His eyes had narrowed suddenly, and Jack realized the boy was squinting at Eli.

  Some people aren’t going to look too kindly on a black boy traveling with you, Eli had said when Jack had invited him to leave the Careys’ farm with them. Now Jack understood what Eli meant by “some people”—he could see by the look on this strange boy’s face that he was one of those.

  Jack met the boy’s look with a cold and defiant glare, one that he hoped said, We don’t care what you think.

  Harold, though, was friendlier. “Ahoy!” he called happily to the boys.

  The tallest boy in the group grinned. “Whatever you say, kid.”

  The line at the ticket window had gotten longer. Alexander lined up first since he was holding the money for their fare. Frances and Harold stood behind him, followed by Eli and Jack.

  They had been waiting only a few minutes when the man at the ticket window caught sight of them. He scowled, then stood up from his seat and leaned out his window.

  “Blasted kids!” he barked at them. “What are you doing?”

  Jack froze. He glanced over at the others. They hadn’t been doing anything—just standing in line.

  “This line is for first-class transport!” the man shouted. “Not the likes of you urchins.”

  The grown-ups ahead of them in line had turned to glare at them. Jack could see that they were certainly dressed first-class—the men in suits and straw boaters, the women in fresh white dresses. Jack looked down at his grubby shirt and dirty fingernails. He and his friends all wore the same things they’d worn for the orphan-train journey, along with a few secondhand items from the Careys, and everything had become dull with dust.

  A burly man from the steamboat crew came up next to them. “You heard him,” he said, nodding toward the ticket window. “These folks in line are the paying passengers.”

  Alexander was indignant. “Is that so?” he snapped. He began to reach for his pocket. “Well it just so happens that we’ve got mo—”

  Frances grabbed Alexander’s hand, stopping him mid-sentence. Jack realized she was trying to keep him from pulling out the money Zogby had given them. She shot Alexander an insistent look that to anyone else might have seemed flirtatious, but, Jack knew, really meant be quiet.

  “Uh . . .” Alexander said, turning red as Frances kept his hand clasped with hers.

  “It just so happens that we’ve got no idea where to board!” Jack said to the burly man. “Is there another line?”

  The man pointed toward the end of the dock. “You’ll board there, with the rest of the river rats.”

  He was pointing toward the gangplank where the four older boys waited. Jack realized just then that the rough boys’ clothes were at least as worn and dirty as his own—if not more so. To the man, Jack and his friends probably looked just like those boys.

  “‘River rats’?” Alexander repeated.

  “That’s what we call you charity cases,” the man replied.

  Jack’s mind raced. Charity cases—that must mean those boys were riding for no charge.

  “Thank you, sir,” Jack told the man. He stepped out of the line and motioned for the others to follow him as he walked down the dock.

  “What’s going on?” Eli whispered.

  “He thinks we’re with those other boys and says we should get on the boat with them.”

  “But Zogby gave us money for first-class tickets,” Alexander said.

  “Which we can keep now!” Frances pointed out. “Who knows when we’ll need it?”

  “Exactly,” Alexander said, even though Jack was pretty sure it was Frances’s idea to hold on to the money in the first place.

  “Right,” Frances muttered, letting go of Alexander’s hand. “Exactly.”

  “Can we use the money to buy ice cream at the Fair?” Harold asked.

  “Shh!” Frances scolded. “We have to stop talking about the money!”

  They were close to the gangplank now, where the four rough boys stood and watched them warily.

  One of the boys smirked. “Glad you ’cided to join us,” he drawled. He had an accent a little like Eli’s, only with more twang in the way he said his a’s. Next to him was the tallest boy, who grinned, showing two missing teeth in front. The second tallest boy shrugged and spat, and the fourth one—the boy with the unlit cigar—wouldn’t even look at Jack, choosing to stare off into
the distance.

  Whatever the boy was looking at must have gotten his attention because suddenly his eyes widened. He spat out his cigar and tucked it in his pocket. The other three boys began to appear anxious as well, shuffling their feet and fidgeting. It seemed to Jack that there was someone nearby who was making them uncomfortable.

  He turned and saw a man strolling along the dock. A wealthy man, Jack guessed, from the way his suit looked as freshly pressed and crisp as a new handkerchief. His black hair was parted so precisely down the center of his head it was almost painted on, and he had a trim black and silver beard that tapered to a point below his chin. He walked much more slowly than anyone else on the dock, but all the deckhands and crew made a point to stay out of his way.

  He smiled at the boys by the gangplank as he passed. A satisfied smile, it seemed to Jack—the kind of smile that he’d seen on folks like the Pratcherds whenever a kid got in trouble at the ranch in Kansas.

  “Who’s that fellow?” Alexander whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Jack replied. “But I don’t like the looks of him.”

  “Neither do I,” said Frances, as she pulled Harold closer to her.

  The five of them stood and watched the bearded man walk all the way to the ticket office. Then a long, low whistle sounded, and Jack turned back to see the older boys making their way across the gangplank ramp to board the boat.

  “We’d better go,” Frances said. She took Harold’s hand and led him onto the ramp. Eli followed, and Alexander stepped onto the gangplank after him. Jack meant to as well, but he found himself hesitating, one foot still on the dock.

  He looked up at Alexander. “It’s funny—it was my idea that we should all go to St. Louis, but now that we’re getting on a boat it seems . . . so . . .”

  “So final?” Alexander finished.