Lantern Sam and the Blue Streak Bandits (3 page)

“You might as well tell him,”
said the voice.
“He’ll figure it out eventually, even if he is just a dumb kid.”

“Figure
what
out?” I asked. Most of all, I wanted to know who was insulting me.

“You’re right,” said Clarence. “Here, you’d better sit down, kids.”

Ellie and I, both bewildered, sat on the edge of the bed, one on each side of Lantern Sam.

“That voice you heard, Henry—it’s, um, well, I know it seems hard to believe, but it’s Sam,” Clarence said matter-of-factly. “That’s right. Lantern Sam … talks. Wait, let me rephrase that. He doesn’t
talk
like you and I do, but I can hear what he’s thinking. And now it, uh, well, looks like you’re in the same boat.”

I may not have been the next Einstein, but I knew when somebody was pulling my leg, so I laughed out loud. “Sure, mister. A talking cat. That’s a doozy!” I looked Lantern Sam straight in the eyes. “Say something, Sam.”

Serves me right for being a smart aleck, because I almost
fell off the bed when I heard Sam’s voice, inside my head:
“What would you like to hear? How about a little Shakespeare? ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones; so let it be with Caesar.’ A little hammy, I know, but that’s what you get when you learn Shakespeare aboard a train. Perhaps you prefer poetry. I’ve always been partial to Byron: ‘She walks in beauty like the night—’ ”

I recovered from the initial shock and my eyes went from Sam to Clarence, back to Sam, and then back and forth several more times as the performance went on. “Ohhhh, I get it! You’re a ventriloquist! And your cat is the dummy.” I had seen one of those acts at the county fair in Jefferson the summer before.

“Hey! Who are you calling a dummy?”
Sam asked.

“Oh, sorry,” I said automatically. Even though I didn’t believe in talking cats, there was no need to forget my manners. “But wait. If he’s the dummy, shouldn’t his lips be moving?”

Ellie leaped to her feet. “What is going on? Why are you apologizing? Why did you say that Clarence is a ventriloquist?”

“You swear to me that you didn’t hear him?” I demanded. “He was talking about Shakespeare. And poetry.”

“What? I swear I didn’t hear anything about Shakespeare
or poetry. In fact, I didn’t hear anything at all. I’m starting to think you’re both crazy.”

I closed my eyes, trying as hard as I could to come up with a reasonable explanation for what was happening.

“It’s just not possible,” I said. “Cats can’t talk. They’re not even that smart. Everybody knows that dogs—”

“Don’t!” shouted Clarence. “Stop! Don’t say what you’re thinking.”

“What, that dogs are smarter than cats? It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Noooo,” Clarence moaned. “Never, ever say that to Sam. I said something like that to him right after I found him and he lectured me for an hour about the achievements of
Felis domesticus
all through the ages.”

“Wait—are you starting to
believe
this?” an astounded Ellie asked me.

“Um, yeah. Kind of. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but
somebody’s
talking inside my head.”

“Well, I’m going to need more proof. You’re both saying that you can hear what this cat is saying, right? Henry, you go through those doors at the end of the car and count to ten before coming back.”

I did as she said.

Ellie was standing there with her arms crossed when I returned, confident that she was about to prove I was
somehow involved in trying to trick her into believing that a cat could talk.

“Okay, Sam,” she said. “Tell him. When is Clarence’s birthday?”

“December twenty-fifth,”
said Sam.

“December twenty-fifth?” I answered.

“Ha! I knew it! I
knew
you were faking! When did you two plan this? Are you related or something?”

“What? That’s not right?” If possible, I was even more confused. I looked to Clarence for help.

Clarence, shaking his head, picked up Sam. “Sam, tell him the real answer.”

My head was filled with the strange sound of a cat sighing loudly.
“Humans. Absolutely no sense of humor. All right, all right. The real answer is February twenty-second, 1886.”

“February twenty-second, 1886?” I repeated.

“Wh-what?” cried Ellie. “How did you—”

“Is that right?”

Clarence nodded. “Sam was just having a little fun with you.”

“It’s really true,” said Ellie. “You can talk to a
cat
. Is there … can anybody else?”

“Not that I know of,” said Clarence.

“How does it work?” I asked. “I mean, why me? And why not her?”

“Don’t know. Neither does Sam. My own theory is that it’s kind of like the radio. Me and Sam, and now you, are all tuned to the same station, in a sense.” Clarence glanced at his watch and quickly tucked it back into his vest pocket. “Sorry, kids, but I have to get back to work, and I’m afraid we’re interrupting Sam’s afternoon ‘serious-thinking’ time. Maybe tonight, after things quiet down—after dinner, and past the Syracuse stop—the four of us can chat some more.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something, Clarence?”
Sam asked, lifting his head from the bed with one eye open.
“You know. The oath.”

“Oh, right,” said Clarence. “Sam wants me to remind you that what you learned here today, about his, er, abilities … it has to stay secret. You can’t tell a living soul. Not your parents, not your best friends. Heaven knows what would happen to Sam if somebody from the government learned the truth. He’d be on a ship to Europe to spy on the bad guys before you could say ‘Babe Ruth.’ There’d be experiments and who knows what else, especially when they discover that he’s probably the greatest detective since Sherlock Holmes.”

“He’s a
detective
?” Ellie asked. “I’m going to be a detective, too!”

“Who do you think solved the Case of the Poughkeepsie Pickpocket?” asked Clarence, obviously proud of his feline
companion. “And the Buffalo Bootleggers? Lantern Sam, that’s who. I’ll tell you all about that later. He has a good life here on the Shoreliner; he spends about eighteen hours a day
thinking
, solving the problems of the world. Promise to keep his secret?” He held up his hand as if he were in a courtroom, being sworn in.

“Promise,” Ellie and I said, solemnly raising our hands.

“Thanks, kids. And now, Sam, you can go back to your important work,” Clarence said with a wink at us.

“Mrrraaa,”
said Sam, who then closed his eyes and resumed his “serious thinking.”

It’s not that I don’t trust Henry to tell you the truth, but let’s face facts: He came late to the dance, as they say. He was only around for a small part of the story—for one, maybe two, of my lives. And we all know that humans have terrible memories, and that cats have nine lives, right? So I’m here to tell you the
rest
of the story—the interesting parts. Believe me, there’s a lot of story left to tell, and I can’t think of a better cat to tell it.

For starters, my name wasn’t always Lantern Sam. I was born in a dairy barn outside of Linesville, Pennsylvania, on November 1, 1929, three days after the stock market crashed
on Wall Street. Not that I, or any of the people around me, noticed. Daniel and Delilah Dilly were simple farmers who kept a herd of twenty-five Jersey cows. It is doubtful that they even knew where Wall Street was, and they certainly didn’t own any stocks or bonds. Mom was a calico like me and had lived on the Dilly farm her entire life. My father, who came from a farm up the road, was all black, which made him unpopular with the superstitious Dillys. There were seven of us in the litter: five calicoes and two brothers who were the spitting image of dear old Dad, who went by the name of Ajax. The Dillys gave their youngest daughter, Debbie, the job of naming us. Naturally, she assumed that all the calicoes were females (which, as you know, is wrong), so she named us Sally, Selma, Sarah, Susie, and Samantha. You can probably guess which one was me. My two brothers were named Simon and Sylvester.

Other than being stuck with a girl’s name, though, I can’t really complain about my kittenhood. I had a loving mother, six siblings to play king of the hayloft with, and best of all, we had all the fresh Jersey milk we could drink. And when I say fresh, I mean straight from the udder to my tongue in under a minute. It was warm, and rich, and sweet as sugar, and I’ve spent the rest of my lives looking for milk half as good. Sometimes life is like that, I guess. You don’t realize
how great you have it until it’s gone, and you’re stuck on a twenty-hour train ride with nothing to drink but ice-cold Holstein milk that’s had the cream removed.

Right about now, you’re probably asking yourself, if it was so great at the Dillys’ farm, why did Lantern Sam ever leave?

A good question. A great question, even.

It may not be the answer you’re looking for, but here it is: I don’t know. Not really, anyway. I suppose I felt what lots of young cats (and young people, too) feel at some point in their lives—that they have to see the world for themselves. I needed some adventure, some danger. I had read the books and heard the stories about faraway places like Meadville and Grove City, and I wanted to see them for myself.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was telling you about my kittenhood, and my first brush with “the nine lives question.”

It was mid-January, and I was about ten weeks old and maybe two or three pounds. The temperature outside the barn had dropped to fifteen below zero, so cold that all those warm cow bodies raised the inside temperature to only slightly above zero. My siblings and I had burrowed into a crevice between bales of straw in the hayloft, but I was still shivering.

“You know where I bet it’s really warm,” I said to my brothers and sisters. “Snuggled into the straw right up against one of the cows, especially the big, old ones.”

“Don’t do it,” said Susie. “It’s too dangerous.”

I puffed myself up as big as I could. “I don’t care. I need a little danger. Besides, I’m going to freeze to death if I stay here, so what’s the difference?”

“Suit yourself,” she said. Years later, when Susie became a mother, she was
much
more protective of her kittens than she was of her siblings, as is often the case.

I jumped down into the hay in the manger between two of the biggest cows, Dell and Derby (all the Dilly cows had names that started with
D
, and the Dillys had long ago used up all the usual ones).

Derby turned her head to look at me. She was lying on a bed of fresh, deep straw, and I could feel the warmth radiating from her thousand-pound body.

“Mrrraaaa,” I said, rubbing against her. I continued “testing the water” to see if she had a problem with my plan, but she went on chewing her cud, not at all concerned with me. So far, so good. I zeroed in on a spot near her belly, which seemed like the warmest place, and buried myself in the straw, pressing my tiny body against hers until I felt the heat start to flow. For about an hour, it was a little slice of heaven, if heaven is a warm place that smells like a barn (and I think it is).

And then.

And then, while I lay there in a state of perfect contentment,
Derby shifted positions. Before I knew what was happening, I was completely
under
her, trapped in the cranny between her udder, her back leg, and the straw-covered floor of the stall. As she settled into position, her tremendous mass began to squeeze the breath right out of me. I tried to wriggle in order to get her attention, hoping and praying that she wouldn’t shift the
wrong
way and crush me completely, but it was no use. There was just too much Derby.

I don’t know how long I lay there like that. Susie seemed to think it was at least a couple of hours, maybe a bit more. At four-fifteen, the Dillys entered the barn and flipped on the lights. Cows started to stir for the morning milking, and Derby pulled herself to her feet.

According to Susie, it was Debbie Dilly who spotted me first. She was certain I was dead.

“Oh no! Poor Samantha.” She knelt in the straw next to my flattened body and gently lifted me in her hands.

“Dead?” her father asked.

Debbie nodded. “Flat as a pancake. She’s still warm.”

“That’s because Derby was on top of her,” said Mr. Dilly.

And then I sneezed, scaring poor Debbie so much that she dropped me! Luckily, I landed in a pile of straw, and not manure.

“Daddy!” she cried, recovering enough to pick me up again. “She’s alive. She just sneezed.”

“Mrrr,” I said as the feeling started to return to my legs and paws.

“It’s a miracle,” announced Debbie.

“Let’s not get carried away,” said her father, a practical man. “It’s just a cat. A darned lucky cat, if you ask me. I think it’s safe to say that she just used up one of her lives.”