Lantern Sam and the Blue Streak Bandits Read online

  “Just think of it. We could be famous,” said Ellie. “Like Dick Tracy. Or the Shadow.”

  Oh, that’s just swell—she must have seen my comics!

  “Maybe you should tell the conductor instead,” I said.

  “What should you tell me?” asked Clarence the Conductor, who had approached us from behind without our noticing. “Is something wrong?”

  Our gasps were followed by sighs of relief as we both spun around to see the conductor’s kindly face gazing down at us.

  “Oh—you scared me!” said Ellie. “I didn’t even hear you come into the car.”

  “Sorry, miss—didn’t mean to frighten you. Was there something you two wanted to tell me?”

  I looked at Ellie, who shook her head ever so slightly, and then up at Clarence. “No, sir. We were just … playing a little game, that’s all.”

  Clarence, who seemed to know that I wasn’t telling the whole truth, didn’t push the matter any further. “Is this your first time aboard the Shoreliner?” When I nodded, he checked his pocket watch. “How would you kids like to meet a good friend of mine? I’ll take you on a little tour of the train, too. My name is Clarence, by the way. Clarence Nockwood. I’m the head conductor.”

  Ellie jumped to her feet. “I’m Ellie, and this is Henry, and we would love to take a tour of the train. Can we see the kitchen? I always wanted to see inside a train kitchen.”

  “Don’t see why not,” said Clarence. “Follow me.”

  He gave us what he called the “nickel tour” (at the end, I was relieved to learn that it wasn’t literally a nickel tour, and the money Mother had given me remained safe in my pocket), leading us back up the long passageways and allowing us to poke our heads into an empty roomette. When we got to the dining car, he squeezed us through the cramped, steamy kitchen, where the chef—busy preparing for the dinner service—smiled at Ellie and me, handing us each a freshly baked dinner roll, still warm from the oven. Then Clarence led us to the car at the front of the train—the one that I had peeked into during my self-guided tour. In addition to the baggage and mail, that car also contained the dormitory compartment where all the conductors, porters, cooks, and other train workers took their breaks and slept when they were off duty. Clarence pulled the curtain of his private section back, and a long, lean calico cat slowly lifted his head from the bed and looked up at our surprised faces.

  “Mrrrraaaaaa,” he said.

  “Kids, meet my old friend Lantern Sam,” said Clarence. “Sorry to interrupt your deep-thinking session, big fella, but I want you to meet some new friends, Ellie and Henry. Sam’s been with me on the Shoreliner for going on five years now. Used to ride the freight trains, but decided that the food’s better and the beds are more comfortable on passenger trains.”

  “Lantern Sam—that’s a funny name,” Ellie said. “Can I pet her?”

  “Absolutely, but I should tell you, she’s a he.”

  “Are you sure?” Ellie asked, running her hand down Sam’s back. “I thought all calicoes were girls.”

  “Almost all calicoes,” said Clarence.

  “What’s a calico?” I asked, wondering if calico had something to do with the cat’s notched ears. He looked as if he’d been in a couple of good fights—on the losing side.

  “A black and white and orange cat,” said Ellie. “They’re always girls—at least that’s what I heard.”

  “He looks like he’s wearing an eye patch,” I said. “Like a pirate.”

  “Why’s he called Lantern Sam?” Ellie asked.

  “That’s a long story, maybe for another time. What I can tell you is that Sam is one in a million,” Clarence announced proudly.

  “Oh, brother. Here we go again,” said a voice from behind the curtain of the next bed over—or at least that’s where I thought it came from. “It’s not ‘one in a million,’ Clarence. Remember what that odd duck from Soseau University—the one with the bow tie and the elbow patches—told you? Professor Dinkelakker? Dunglepfeffer? Dimpledoofus? Well, whoever he was, he said I was one in three thousand. That I was a curiosity, nothing more. As if a man who goes out in public in a polka-dotted bow tie has room to talk. If anybody’s a curiosity, it’s him.”

  “One in three thousand is still pretty rare,” I said with a shrug.

  Clarence stiffened and looked at me so suspiciously that I wondered what I had done wrong. “What did you say … about Sam being one in three thousand?”

  I was very confused. Maybe Clarence is a little hard of hearing, I thought, and didn’t hear his neighbor. “I, um, just heard what that other man said.”

  “What other man?” Ellie asked. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Just now,” I said. “Somebody, right behind one of those curtains. Oh, come on. You must have heard him. He said something about a professor telling Clarence that Lantern Sam wasn’t one in a million, that it was only one in three thousand.”

  Ellie looked at me as if I had just told her that the Shoreliner was made of moldy cheese. “I didn’t hear anybody.” She looked at Clarence. “Did you?”

  “Uh-oh,” said the voice. “Looks like the little beggar can hear me.”

  “There it is again!” I said. “He said, ‘Uh-oh. Looks like the little beggar can hear me.’ Hey! I’m not a beggar!”

  “I still didn’t hear anything,” said Ellie. “Who called you a beggar?”

  Lantern Sam sat up on the bed and stared directly into my eyes for an uncomfortably long time. “Wh-what’s he doing?” I asked, too frightened to move. “It looks like he’s trying to hypnotize me.”

  “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 t
hink 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 cow
s, 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.”