Lantern Sam and the Blue Streak Bandits (5 page)

“Here he is, ma’am,” said Clarence. “This is the young man who was with your daughter.”

“Have you seen her? Have you seen my Ellie?” the woman asked, her voice trembling.

I sat up straight in my seat and closed my sketchpad. “No, ma’am. Not for a while, that is. I was with her in the club car a while ago. I went to the observation car to get
this
, and when I came back she was gone.”

My mother, who had been napping with Jessica and
Gone with the Wind
on her lap, opened her eyes. Blinded momentarily by the sun, she reached over and pulled down the window shade. “What’s going on?”

“I’m Doris Strasbourg,” said the woman. “My little girl, my Ellie—I can’t find her.”

“Your son was with her earlier,” Clarence explained. “We were hoping he knew where she might have gone.”

“We were going back to the dormitory car to see Lantern Sam. I went up there, but he told me—” I stopped, realizing that what I was about to say sounded loony enough to land me in a straightjacket and a room at the Hotel Silly.

“Who is … Lantern Sam?” Mother asked. “Is he one of the porters?”

“Sam is my cat,” said Clarence. “The kids met him a little earlier in the afternoon. He rides with me up in the dormitory car.”

“Like I was saying,” I continued, “I went up there, but Ellie wasn’t around. I waited for a while, but she never showed up. I just thought …”

“Yes?” Ellie’s mother leaned closer, waiting for me to finish my thought.

“Just that, well, maybe she didn’t want to hang out with me anymore. I figured she went back to her compartment.”

Clarence started to gently guide Mrs. Strasbourg toward the rear of the train. “Let’s get you back to your suite, ma’am. I have all the porters looking for her. She’ll turn up. There’re lots of hiding places aboard the old Shoreliner. Henry, you’ll let us know if you see her? The Strasbourgs are in the Commodore Perry suite, all the way back in the observation car—you remember, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” said my mother. “Henry is always disappearing on me and then magically reappearing at the moment I’m beginning to panic. He’ll be the death of me one day. Children! It’s as if their only job is to make their parents worry.”

I survived the incident with Derby the cow with two side effects. First, I was longer and thinner than I had been, a change that has stayed with me. From the side, I look perfectly normal, but if you were to see me from the front, you’d be surprised at how narrow I am, a bit like a piecrust that’s been rolled out. If anything, that has worked to my advantage, as you’ll see. I can slip under doors, through windows opened “just a crack,” or into about anyplace else that foolish people
think
they can keep me out of. Second, and this is the strange one, I lost the ability to purr. Ever since the night I spent under Derby, I just can’t do it anymore. People think I don’t purr because I’m unhappy, but that’s not it. I’m
plenty happy, as cats go. My purrer just got switched off, or squashed, or something. Period. I don’t especially care to discuss it any further.

A few weeks after the Derby incident, I dodged another bullet, or in this case, an arrow. Although, to be honest, I didn’t quite dodge it, as you’ll see. That experience left me with my first scar. It also explains my basic distrust of all boys under the age of thirty (at least).

The two middle Dilly sons, Danny and Davey, had received most unwise Christmas presents from their well-meaning parents: archery sets with wooden bows, several metal-tipped arrows, and a dozen paper targets. The boys set up a bale of straw at one end of the barn (far away from the cows), hung a target from it, and proceeded to spray arrows in all directions. It was only rarely that they hit the bale of straw, let alone the target, but my siblings and I all knew to stay out of that area when they were shooting, because … well, because they were boys.

One day, Simon, Sylvester, and I were on the prowl, looking for a mouse to chase, when one ran practically between my legs.

“Mrrr!” I shouted, and took off after him.

Rule Number One when hunting mice, Mom told us time and time again, is simple: don’t forget all the
other
rules of
cat life. You know, rules like don’t play in the street, and don’t sleep on warm car engines (Simon learned that one the hard way—his nickname became Stubby), or, in this particular case, stay away from two boys armed with bows and arrows.

As I ran across the barn after the mouse, I completely forgot Rule Number One, and I found myself on a path that would take me between the boys and their target.

“Look out!” shouted Sylvester, covering his eyes.

Danny and Davey, to their credit, tried to hold their fire, but by the time they saw me it was too late. The first arrow struck the concrete a foot in front of me, throwing up a shower of sparks before skidding harmlessly into the straw bale.

The sight of that arrow hitting the ground just inches away scared me so much that I bounded straight up in the air—like I was on a pogo stick, according to Simon, who watched the whole thing. My jump, unfortunately, was perfectly timed, and the second arrow intercepted me midflight, neatly piercing the skin at the back of my neck and pinning me to the paper target. A perfect bull’s-eye.

For a few seconds, as I hung from the arrow, there was complete silence in the barn. Danny and Davey stood frozen in place, too frightened to move, or even to speak. As for me, I tried to convince myself that I really wasn’t dead. It wasn’t until the holes in my neck started to hurt that I believed it.

“Is it dead?” Davey asked. “I didn’t mean to do it!”

“Debbie is going to kill you,” said Danny. “Swell shot, though. Bull’s-eye.”

“Shut up. We’ve got to get rid of the cat. And you have to promise you’ll never tell.”

“Okay, but you owe me.”

They crept toward the target, where I dangled most uncomfortably from their arrow, a feline shish kebab.

“Mrrrrraaaaa,” I said.

“It’s alive!” cried Davey. “Look, it’s just through the skin.”

“What should we do?” Danny asked.

“Get me down, you simpletons!” I thought.

Lucky for me, the door at the side of the barn opened and Debbie stepped inside. She saw me and screamed.

“Samantha! You poor baby! What did you two do to her?” She put her hands under me, taking the weight off the skin of my neck, and I felt a hundred times better almost immediately.

“It was an accident! I swear!” said Davey, who started crying.

“Well, let’s get her down first, then we’ll worry about that. I’ll hold Samantha, and Danny, you pull the arrow.”

“Wh-what? Whoa, Nelly!” I thought. “Isn’t this a job for a professional? Shouldn’t we wait for a veterinarian? Or Mr.

Dilly, at least?”

Danny nodded at her as I squirmed.

“Go!” she said.

Danny pulled quickly, and in one exquisitely painful movement, the arrow and I were separated.

“Mrrrr​rrooo​oooww​wwww,” I moaned in Debbie’s arms.

“That’s two, Samantha,” she said with a sad shake of her head.

By the time the Shoreliner zoomed past Schenectady, twenty-five minutes later, all of Clarence’s known “hiding places” had been checked, and there was still no sign of Ellie. I was with Clarence and Sam in the dormitory car when one of the porters, a tall, handsome young man of eighteen or nineteen, returned from the baggage compartment.

“What is it, James?” Clarence asked.

“You’d better see this, Mr. Nockwood, sir,” he said. “I was checking everyplace, like you said, and, well, see for yourself.”

Sam and I followed them through the mail room and into the baggage compartment, separated by a heavy cloth
divider that functioned as a door and that closed by means of metal snaps.

“Right over here, sir,” said James, leading Clarence to the far corner of the car. Behind a number of trunks and suitcases were dozens of marble floor tiles—six- and twelve-inch samples in every color imaginable—dumped into a pile.

“Looks like somebody overturned a salesman’s trunk,” Clarence observed. “But where’s the trunk?”

“That’s just it, sir. There’s no empty cases in here. I checked the whole car—twice. I was just thinking—”

As Clarence held up his hand to interrupt James, a million crazy ideas raced through my brain. Was it possible? Had Ellie been kidnapped—knocked out and stuffed into a traveling salesman’s trunk, and then taken off the train?

“Now let’s not jump to any conclusions and start scaring that poor woman—and the rest of the passengers—to death,” said Clarence. “James, I want you to do me a favor. There must be fifty or sixty pounds of marble tiles here. I want to know who they belong to. Donnie was loading baggage in New York; he must have helped a traveling salesman put a heavy trunk aboard. Find him and bring him here.”

“Yes, sir,” said James, hurrying out of the car.

Sam hopped up on one of the trunks that had been moved to hide the mess, then leaped down onto the pile of tiles. He sniffed around them for a while before jumping back up onto a trunk.

“Something’s not right,”
he said.
“If you’re going to hide them, why not do a better job of it? It’s almost like they wanted us to find them, and quickly.”

I noticed a balled-up white handkerchief on the floor and bent down to pick it up. When I brought it close to my face for a better look, the smell of it almost knocked me off my feet. Fighting off dizziness, I dropped the handkerchief and waved my hands around, trying to clear the air.

“Whoa! What is that smell?” I asked, breathing rapidly through my mouth.

Sam lifted his nose into the air and sniffed.
“I’m not positive, but if I had to guess, it would be chloroform. That’s what you use when you want to knock somebody out in a hurry. Are you all right? You look a little light-headed.”

Clarence picked up the handkerchief, wrapped it up in his own, and shoved it into his coat pocket. “I don’t like the looks of this—not one bit,” he said as James returned to the baggage area.

“I found him,” said James, coming back with a young man whose muscles bulged through his porter’s uniform.

Donnie scratched the back of his neck for a few seconds
when Clarence asked him about the trunk. Suddenly his eyes lighted up. “Oh, right! I remember him. Big fella. Red face. Asked me if I was interested in a new marble floor for me house. I told him I didn’t have a house, sir, but that didn’t slow him down one bit.”

“Do you remember his name, or what car he was in?” Clarence asked.

“Never got his name, but he was in compartment D in the second sleeper car back, I think. Don’t know why he didn’t just buy a coach ticket—since he was only going s’far as Albany.”

“Thank you, Donnie. You’ve been very helpful. You too, James. One more question, then you can return to your duties: did any other passengers with large cases get
off
the train at the Albany station?”

Donnie shook his head. “No, sir. Just small suitcases.”

“That’s right, Mr. Nockwood. I was on the platform, too. I would have seen,” said James.

“I see,” said Clarence. “You’re sure?”

Both men nodded at Clarence and then left the car.

“We need to see his compartment right away,”
said Sam, jumping off his trunk.

Clarence hesitated when he realized that I was still tagging along. “Uh, Henry, I think you’d better let us take it from here,” he said.

I dropped my shoulders and stared at my shoes, putting on the most dejected and disappointed face I could muster. It worked like a charm.

“Oh, let the kid come along,”
said Sam.
“He’s already involved, and he knows the girl better than we do. That could come in handy.”

“Okay, but I go into the compartment first,” said Clarence, leading the way with his passkey in hand.

I smiled at my mother as we walked past, pausing just long enough to say, “I’m helping the conductor look for Ellie. I’ll be back in a while.”

Clarence stopped outside the door to compartment D and pressed his ear against it. “It’s quiet.”

He knocked twice, and when there was no response, he turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. Sam slipped silently past his feet, and I followed, holding my breath and feeling my heart pound.