Roy Blakeley: Lost, Strayed or Stolen

by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

That first night he crawled through a place where one of the boards was broken under Tony’s Lunch Wagon. He said he was pretty hungry. That’s just like great inventors. He said there were all toadstools under the wagon. Maybe if he had been a scout he would have known that the kind under there were good to eat. Even raw they’re better than nothing. But anyway he didn’t eat any. And he was good and hungry. He could hear people above him in the wagon, and he knew they were eating. I guess he saw it was a hard life starting out to be an inventor.

The next morning he didn’t dare to go out because he was afraid some one would see him and send him back to the Home. So he stayed there all day. In the night he heard some good news. He heard that he was worth three hundred dollars. He heard them talking up in the lunch wagon about a kid running away from the Home up in Willisville and he heard them say how three hundred dollars’ reward was offered to any one who brought him back. I guess the poor kid never knew he was worth so much money. I guess up to then he thought he wasn’t worth more than about nineteen cents, wholesale.

He was pretty hungry, but he decided that he’d stay there till he thought of a good submarine, for then he’d get a thousand dollars, on account of the government always paying that much to Skyhigh Sam for inventions. He told us that if he could get the thousand dollars before anybody found him around there, then he could give that to anybody that found him and they’d keep still because a thousand dollars is better than three hundred. Poor little kid, you can laugh, but honest, that’s just what he told us.

Pretty soon came the terrible moment in his career. I got that out of the movies—terrible moment in his career. Tony moved the lunch wagon away and the first thing our brave young hero knew there he was right out in the light of day. By that you can see he was up against the housing problem, too.

Anyway he showed more sense than Skyhigh Sam ever had. He took off his funny looking orphan asylum jacket, so nobody would notice him, and while everybody was laughing and shouting over in the field, on account of Tony moving over, he picked up a part of a sandwich that somebody had thrown away, and I guess it tasted pretty good to him.

After that he went over to the station and hid under the platform of the freight house. He was a greater inventor than Edison because Edison never even did that. Gee whiz, it’s a wonder he didn’t set the freight house on fire. All the while he kept watching our car being moved and I bet he wished he could come out and be with us, poor little kid. Believe me, we could have used his appetite that afternoon if we had only known.

After the circus was all over and we fellows left the car to go home, he sneaked over and went into it. He picked up some odds and ends of sandwiches and things that were left around after the terrible battle. I hope he got the cheese sandwich that I dropped by accident, because it was a dandy one—good and thick.

I asked him how he liked the car when he first went inside it and he said it was like a castle. Believe me, it’s more like an insane asylum half the time. He said he played it was a submarine and when it began to get dark he made believe it was going down, down, under the ocean. Gee, he’s an awful funny kid. Even now he talks that way.

Anyway, then he started smoking cigarettes. I guess he ate them alive. After a while the submarine came up and there was a big British ship right near. That was Slausen’s Auto Repair Shop. If he only could have torpedoed the shop it would have saved a lot of trouble, but he decided that he’d set fire to it instead. He didn’t exactly decide that he would, but he did just the same. Actions speak louder than thoughts.

He went over and climbed into the shop through the window, Skyhigh Sam, cigarettes, matches and all. Underneath the work bench was some nice cotton waste and he lay down on that and went to sleep. He must have been there when we were there, but he was dead to the world. I guess maybe he was dreaming about submarines and things.