Rufus M. (13 page)

He was very disappointed. He had waited impatiently for today. Now, he had thought, he would see the kind of house the settlers lived in, made of logs, where people who looked like Daniel Boone lived, and where there would be plenty of Indians about; friendly ones on the inside, and hostile ones on the outside. But these people were not Indians, or pioneers, either.

And the settlement house itself looked just like any other ordinary red brick house from the outside. Inside there were just rooms. There was one big room with a stage in it. That's where the play was given. Also there was a kitchen, where the people that ran the house cooked cocoa and piled cookies on paper plates. For a minute, when Rufus saw cocoa and cookies, he thought perhaps now the Indians or at least the pioneers would come. There was an upstairs to the house and maybe that was where they stayed. But everybody, all the ordinary people, drank their cocoa and no settlers joined in. Nor was there a trace of an Indian! Not so much as a feather or a tomahawk!

"Why didn't you tell me this was just a house?" he asked a little crossly. He and Mama, Jane, and Joey were picking their way up the street on the way to the trolley car. They were all walking gingerly on the ash-strewn pavements, trying not to get cinders in their rubbers or to slip on a smooth spot. Sylvie had stayed behind in the Settlement House because she was giving "The Lollipop Princess" again tonight.

"Once I thought it meant Indians, too," said Jane dreamily. "Stockades ... blockades. But it doesn't."

Joey was silent. An uncomfortable thought had just struck him. The late afternoon was icy cold and the temperature might easily have fallen down around zero. And he or Mama or somebody should have remembered to turn off the water in the cellar before they left. Otherwise the pipes might have frozen. And if they had frozen they might have burst! For a while he kept this possibility to himself.

"It's called a Settlement House," said Mama, "because the people who manage it try to settle newcomers to the country and tell them the ways of the land."

"Any newcomer is really a sort of a settler," added Jane.

"Not if there aren't any Indians," said Rufus, still cross, and having to run to keep up with the rest of the family.

Joey took Rufus by the hand. "Well, fella," he said, to take Rufus's mind off the dismal disappointment he had had of not seeing any Indians, "well, you better stop thinking about Indians and think instead of whether the pipes busted or not!"

"Gracious!" exclaimed Mama. "Did we forget to turn off the water? How could we have, on a day like this?"

"'Cause it's daytime," said Jane. This was true. At night, before they went to bed, Mama or Joey turned the water off in the cellar in this zero weather, so the pipes would not freeze. But in the daytime there was usually somebody at home, running the water now and then and keeping the fires going.

They heard a trolley coming and hurried to the corner. Joey accidentally stepped on the heel of Jane's rubber and it slid off her shoe, but she managed to slither along on it and they did just barely catch the car. On the trolley it was beautifully warm. In the back of the car some men were smoking and the tobacco smelled good.

"I can stand," said Rufus, for he considered it manly to hang on a strap in trolley cars. Of course, he couldn't reach the straps, but he could stand without hanging on. There were seats enough for everybody, though, and Mama finally persuaded him to sit down, too. Rufus soon became drowsy and he almost fell asleep. He heard Mama and Joey and Jane talking about the pipes.

They needn't worry,
he told himself.
If the pipes burst, I'll put my finger on the leak the way the boy did in "The Leak in the Dike. "And I'll hold it there till help comes.
He was too sleepy to tell them now. But he certainly was not going to fall asleep on this trolley the way babies do. Every time he felt his head wobble over sideways, he pulled himself up straight with a lurch, and stared at the Drink Moxie ad, or watched the men smoking at the back of the trolley.

Mama and Joey and Jane thought about the pipes. If only they had not burst! It was dreadful to have pipes burst. The Moffats would have to call a plumber perhaps, and that cost a great deal of money. "Gee," Joey chided himself. "How did I forget?"

"We were all so excited about goin' to the play, we all forgot," said Jane.

"Well, maybe they didn't burst," said Joe. "I stoked the stoves good. That should've kep' the house warm enough."

"Ordinarily it would have," said Mama. "But this is bitter weather. And you know that kind of coal that we get nowadays isn't very good for our stoves."

Soft coal! Bituminous coal! That's the kind of coal they had to burn this year, for the good, hard nut kind was scarce. When Mama started a fire with this coal what a time she had! "By-two-minutes coal," she called it. "By two minutes the house will be full of smoke," she always said, making a joke of it.

The Moffats hated to get off the trolley where it was so warm. "Why couldn't we live on a trolley?" asked Jane, laughing.

"Sure. We could stretch out on the long seats and sleep," said Joe. "Rufe's practically asleep now."

"I'm not!" denied Rufus, sitting up straight with a jerk. "Just thinkin'. Where are we?"

"Goin' over the Cumberland Avenue bridge," said Jane. They all looked out over the snowy marshes. The sun had set but there was still a wan wintry glow behind the heavy clouds in the west. "Those clouds look like mountains," said Jane. "You could think we were livin' in the mountains."

"That's night comin'," said Joe.

Now the trolley was swaying and sailing up Elm Street. Soon they would have to get off. In the town the streets seemed darker, for the great elm trees and the houses shadowed the sky. Just two more blocks and then they'd be at Ashbellows Place. Rufus was wide awake now and he was the one who pushed the bell. The trolley stopped and the Moffats stepped out into the cold.

"Br-r-r," said Mama.

The three children raced ahead. They would soon see whether or not the pipes had frozen. They slid up the street on the smooth icy stretches in the gutters, and then they turned into the narrow walk of their own yard. Both sides of the pavement leading to their porch were piled high with great banks of hard snow. "The Grand Canyon!" yelled Jane, her mind on mountains.

Joey opened the door. The three children stood in the doorway and listened. They didn't hear one thing. This was encouraging, Rufus thought, for if the pipes had burst, surely they would hear water rushing in the cellar. But Joey said no, the pipes might have burst and the water frozen over the break. Or they might have frozen and not burst yet. That would not be quite so bad though, for he and Mama could thaw the pipes themselves with warm cloths and they need not call the plumber.

Joey led the way into the kitchen. Soon he had the lamps lit. The fire in the stove had gone out! A fire made of this soft coal just did not last and the house was very cold. Catherine-the-cat was sitting right on top of the stove to absorb the last bit of warmth there was in it. Nobody took off his coat or his mittens. And everybody held his breath as Joey went over to the sink. He turned the faucet on. The pipe shuddered but no water came. "Shucks!" said Joe. "It did freeze!" and he quickly turned the spigot off again.

Mama came in now. You could see everybody's breath even though they were in the house. Mama and Joey took the medium-sized lamp and went down to the cellar to investigate. Jane and Rufus stood at the top of the stairs and listened. They could hear Mama and Joey talking in low tones.

"Well," said Rufus, "did they bust?"

There was no answer. Mama and Joey were too busy, tapping the pipes here and feeling them there, to answer. Rufus and Jane stepped cautiously down one or two steps. These stairs did not have any backs to them and were really more like a ladder than a stairway. The unpaved cellar smelled of damp, cold, dirt.

"Did they bust?" Rufus demanded again.

"Yeah," came Joey's muffled voice.

"Bad?" asked Jane.

"No. A little break. Must have just happened," said Mama.

"Is there goin' to be a flood?" asked Rufus, taking his mitten off and limbering up his forefinger.

"Nope," said Joe. "There's just a little water around the break. Jane, get some things to tie around the pipe."

Jane climbed to the head of the stairs where the ragbag hung on a nail. But Rufus felt his way up the stairs and into the kitchen and all the way out of the house. Rufus had a plan in his head. It was cold in the Moffats' house. The fire had gone out and the pipes had frozen. It was not at all nice there, thought Rufus. The first thing to do, of course, was to get the pipes fixed. Mama and Joey were taking care of that. The next thing was to fix the stove, but there wasn't anything in the house to start a fire with. And this was where Rufus's plan entered in. He knew of a certain new house that was being built over on Second Avenue. He figured he could get some shavings there to start a fire.

He first snatched an empty burlap bag from the back entry. Then he picked up his red sled, one of the low flat kind with round steel runners. And with his red plaid mackinaw flapping open he took a good run and then belly flopped across the hard snow that covered the Moffats' lawn and all the way down the street and across the lot to Elm Street.

In front of the drugstore he couldn't resist taking one or two good slides back and forth on the thick green ice that had piled up there. Many colors were reflected in the ice, red and blue ones from the big globes in the drugstore window and purple ones from the street lamp. "Well, I better go now and get the wood," said Rufus, and he made ready to take one last good slide.

He ran a way to gain momentum and then he flopped down on his sled. As he was skimming along the ice, his eyes watching the glassy surface go slipping by, he thought he saw something shiny, something shiny frozen in the ice. He thought it looked like money. It looked like a lot of money—not just two cents.

"Probably some old bottle tops," he told himself in order to keep his hopes under control. Nevertheless, he dragged his feet behind him so that he would slow up and he edged his sled backward toward the spot where he thought he had seen something shiny in the ice. He dug his toes and his fingers into the ice, getting a grip to pull himself backward. It might have been a mirage such as people see in the desert. They think they see something they want to see, like water or a city, when it isn't really there at all. But he hadn't even been thinking about money. He had been thinking only about getting the wood. Where were the shiny things? Maybe he had imagined them. No! There they were! There they were!

Rufus stopped his sled. He stopped right over the shiny things so he could look at them from between the front runners of his sled. He stared at them for a long, long time. They were money. They were not bottle tops. There were two quarters, three dimes, and two nickels, spread out, frozen solid beneath the surface of the ice. Rufus felt as though he were glued to this spot. He gazed at them, fascinated, taking them in. The coins were there, and they couldn't get away. Nobody else could get them, either. He, Rufus, was on top of them on his own sled, nailing them down, laying claim to them like the miners in the Alaska goldfields.