Lantern Sam and the Blue Streak Bandits (20 page)

“Oh boy. I’ve never seen him this mad,”
said Sam.

“Now see here!” bellowed Judge Ambrose. “Who do you think—”

“Quiet!” said Clarence, grimacing as he rubbed the back of his head. “This is
my
train. Somebody tell me what is going on.”

“Look!” I said, using the handcuffs to pull Ellie into his line of vision. “I’ve got her!”

Clarence’s face brightened and broke into a huge smile. “Well, I’ll be! Ellie! I can’t tell you how good it is to see you! Are you okay? They didn’t hurt you? Where …?

How …? We’ve got to get you back to your … Why are you two hand—”

The train whistle sounded again as we rumbled through the darkness and rain, closer and closer to the station in Ripley.

I didn’t let him finish his question. “You have to hurry! Nobody believes me, but it was the Perfiddles! They’re not who you think they are,
honest
. They’re criminals! He’s not a preacher, and she’s definitely not going to have a baby. Their names are Connie and Ty, and they took Ellie, and then when I found her, they locked me up with her. They’re going to get off at the next stop. And
he
has the Blue Streak! It’s in his coat pocket. I saw him put it there.”

Uncertainty rippled through the crowd.

“Connie and Ty?”

“Bank robbers!”

“On the FBI’s most-wanted list, I’ve heard.”

“They killed a man in Pittsburgh.”

“Utterly preposterous,” said Judge Ambrose, silencing the crowd with a wave of his platter-sized hand. “Mr. Nockwood, maybe that knock on the head wiped away the memory, but perhaps I can clear it up: you
watched
me put the necklace in the mailbag. And so did a number of other witnesses. Now, I’m a big enough man to admit that
I’m, uh … well, it appears I have
misjudged
this boy. Perhaps we should be praising him for finding the girl. But he’s wrong about the Perfiddles and the necklace. Dead wrong. I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“Listen to me, Clarence,”
said Sam, risking injury by moving to a spot between Clarence and the judge.
“Captain Hindenburg here isn’t the only one to underestimate the kid. I was wrong, too. The fact is, the kid’s been right about everything, from the very beginning. And he’s right about who they are. Don’t feel bad; they had everybody fooled. And if the kid says Ty has the necklace, I believe him.”

Clarence’s eyes went from Sam to me, and then to Connie and Ty, before returning to the judge. “You’re right, Judge. I saw you put
something
in the mailbag. But now that I think about it, Mrs. Strasbourg first handed the necklace to Reverend Perfiddle, who gave it to you. And do you remember what happened in those few seconds it was in his possession? He had a sneezing fit, and his lap and face were covered for a long time with that huge handkerchief of his. He must have used that time to make a switch. He put a fake necklace in the bag—just in case somebody checked—and pocketed the real one.”

Ty stood, smiling broadly as he removed his coat and handed it to Clarence. “Please. Be my guest.”

Clarence turned all the pockets inside out and patted the jacket thoroughly. No necklace. It was the Poughkeepsie Pickpocket all over again.

Ty smiled slyly, and Judge Ambrose humphed.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Maybe he gave it to
her
.”

“I’ve heard enough,” said the judge. “It’s time we got the girl back to her mother.”

The words had barely left his mouth when Mrs. Strasbourg cried out Ellie’s name. She came running into the car from her suite at the back of the train.

“My baby! Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said to Judge Ambrose, as if
he
had anything to do with Ellie’s safe return.

My
mother, meanwhile, suddenly appeared from our humble section in the front of the train, carrying my baby sister and looking concerned. When she finally spotted me in the middle of all those strange, angry-looking people and handcuffed to Ellie, her look turned to one of absolute bewilderment.

“Henry?” She fought her way through the crowd. “You scared me to death. I woke up and you were gone. What is going on?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’ve been … busy, I guess.” I held up my handcuffed wrist, pulling Ellie’s arm up with it.

At that moment, Ellie was looking over her mother’s shoulders at Connie and Ty, who were starting to make their move toward the exit, one step behind Phyllis Finkleman and that little bit of Amazonian jungle living on top of her head.

Sam leaped up onto the table right in front of us and stood on his hind legs, with his front paws on Ellie’s shoulders. As he looked deeply into her eyes, something strange began to happen: Sam’s eyes began to glow—a soft, mossy green light at first, gradually turning brighter and brighter, until I could have sworn there were two enormous lightning bugs sticking out of his skull. At first, I was sure that it was pure coincidence: a trick of the light, a mere reflection. But Sam’s face was in shadow; the light, I realized, was coming from his eyes.

Ellie, meanwhile, looked as if she were in a trance. In a matter of seconds, the skin of her hand and wrist, where she was handcuffed to me, turned ice-cold, and her eyes stared unblinkingly into Sam’s.

“Listen to me, Ellie,”
said Sam in a voice that sounded different from the one I was used to—a little louder, a little clearer.
“If you can hear me, right now would be an
excellent
time to speak up. It’s up to you, but if you don’t say anything, those two crooks are going to get away with it.”

Ellie’s eyes grew to the size of dinner plates, and finally,
she blinked, breaking the spell. “I—I heard him!” she stammered. “Henry! I heard him! It’s like he was inside my head.”

“What is she talking about?” Judge Ambrose asked. “
Who
did she hear?”

I nudged Sam. “How did you do that? What happened to your eyes?”

“Shhh! Just watch and listen. It’s going to get interesting.”
He climbed onto Clarence’s shoulder to have a clear view.

Ellie stood up straight and pointed directly at Connie and Ty, who were still fighting their way through the crowd. “Stop them! Henry is telling the truth! They did it—Connie and Ty. They knocked me out, and kidnapped me, and then tied me up and gagged me in one of the compartments.”

Connie and Ty stopped dead in their tracks, the path to the exit blocked by the suddenly boisterous crowd.

“And stop the lady in the funny hat!” she shouted over the noise.

“What? Why?” I asked. “Is she in on this with them?”

Ellie didn’t answer, refusing to take her eyes off the silly stuffed goldfinches perched on Phyllis Finkleman’s head.

In a flash Ty reached out to grab the hat, sending a few feathers flying toward the floor, but Phyllis saw him coming and ducked out of the way just in time.

“You keep your filthy hands away from me, you cheap crook,” she said. “What did you do to my hat?” Her eyes never left Ty as she backed her way across the room to Ellie.

Then, as everyone in the car watched, Ellie reached up with her free hand and felt around in the bird’s nest in the center of Phyllis’s hat. Grinning triumphantly, she raised her hand from the nest and turned it over so that everyone could see what it held: her mother’s extravagant necklace, with the world-famous Blue Streak sapphire dangling gloriously and sparkling like there was no tomorrow.

“Now
that’s
what I call a nest egg,” said Phyllis, shaking her head in disbelief.

I turned to Sam. “The hat? How did you know?”

He winked at me.
“Lucky guess.”

The new name stuck. I wasn’t just plain old Sam anymore; in the blink of an eye, I had become Lantern Sam. Which was fine by me, even if the way I had acquired the name wasn’t anything to be proud of.

“Call me whatever you want,” I told Clarence. “Just don’t call me late for dinner, especially if there are sardines involved.”

Frankly, I was more concerned about the fur on my belly, or, to be more accurate, the
lack
of fur on my belly. The railroad lantern had burned it so badly that it all fell out, leaving me with a bald patch that took months to grow back.

In the meantime, my life aboard the Shoreliner grew more interesting over the next few years. I developed my talent
for sniffing out con men, crooks, and cads of every flavor, and managed to do it without risking any more of my precious lives. Two weeks to the day after Clarence and I had toasted my success in the Case of the Syracuse Swindler with a bottle of fresh Jersey milk, I noticed a familiar face pretending to guzzle gin in the lounge. Clarence called him Poughkeepsie Pete, and he was just about the slipperiest, sneakiest pickpocket this side of the Susquehanna. Once a month or so, he’d board in Poughkeepsie, and by the time we got to Schenectady, he had helped himself to the contents of any number of passengers’ pockets.

But like I said, he was slippery. We were never able to catch him in the act, and on the three occasions that Clarence accused him of pocket picking, Pete calmly turned all of his own pockets inside out and invited Clarence, or anyone else, to search him. He was clean.

“There’s only one possible answer,” I said after it had happened the third time. “Pete has a partner in crime. I’ll bet the stuff never even makes it to the bottom of his own pockets. He’s handing it off before the dumb pigeons even know they’ve been robbed.”

“But he boards alone,” said Clarence. “And he’s alone when he steps off. I’ve seen him, lots of times.”

“Perhaps, but my thought is that he knows you’re watching. He and his partner could get on at different ends of the
platform, or even at different stations. If I had to guess, I’d bet it’s a woman.”

“Why a woman?”

“Because we’re less likely to suspect a woman, silly.”

“So, what do we do?”

“We don’t do anything. You’re going to go on doing whatever it is that you do, and I’m going to keep an eye on our old friend Poughkeepsie Pete.”

“Getting a bit full of yourself, aren’t you?” said Clarence. “What a cat! Solves a couple of crimes and now instead of Lantern Sam, he thinks he’s Sam Spade himself.”

He was right. Success was definitely going to my head. But it’s not like I was living in the lap of luxury. I was sharing a cot in the dormitory car with Clarence, and I sometimes went
days
without a decent bowl of cream and
weeks
without a few measly sardines. So as far as I was concerned, I had earned the right to be a little arrogant.

That evening, as the Shoreliner rumbled west, I settled into my perch above the seats in the lounge for a little observing. Clarence had followed my directions perfectly, placing a folded blanket on top of the divider between the barbershop and the lounge, Pete’s favorite hunting ground. From that vantage point, directly behind the bar and above the crowd, I had an unobstructed view of all the action.

I didn’t have to wait for long. At eight-fifteen, Pete strolled
in looking as if he owned the joint. He stood at one end of the bar and immediately struck up a conversation with a red-faced salesman. While he talked, though, his eyes were in constant motion, checking out every person in the room.

“Tell you what, Pete. You seem like a nice fella. Let me buy you a drink,” said the salesman.

“No, no, I couldn’t,” said Pete. “This round is on me.”

And then I watched something truly amazing. First, Pete motioned to the salesman to look at a pretty girl who had just come into the room. When the poor guy turned his head, Pete reached over and lifted the wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket. He got the bartender’s attention, bought two drinks, and then dropped the wallet back in the salesman’s pocket!

“Cheers!” said Pete, clinking glasses with his new “friend.”

“Thanks, pal. Next one’s on me, though.”

Pete smiled as he moved on to his next victim. “If you insist.”

He slid to the other end of the bar, where I watched him “borrow” someone’s fountain pen to write something on the back of a business card. When he finished, he took a close look at the pen, chuckled, and said, “Junk,” under his breath, and then returned it to its owner. I have to be honest: I was starting to respect Pete. Unlike most crooks, the guy had some standards.

After that he sat at the bar for a while, yawning and looking so bored that I thought he was about to give up for the night. That would have been fine by me; I was ready for a nap. Suddenly, though, he sat up straight on his stool. In the mirror, he had spotted the Grayfields, an elegantly dressed couple in their late sixties who, according to the newspapers, had recently donated a million dollars to a hospital in New York. He sprang to his feet, offering his seat to Mrs. Grayfield, who graciously accepted, and then he
really
turned on the charm. He bought them drinks (using his own money, even!) and before long, they were all roaring with laughter at a story he told them about the time he went swimming in May in the icy waters off Nantucket—where the Grayfields, as everyone also knew, just
happened
to own a summer home.