Into the Firestorm Read Online Free PDF Page A

look down at my daddy’s boat and help him find his way.”
    Despite himself, Nick couldn’t help grinning. Something about her persistence seemed familiar. “So, Annie of the North Star, does that work?”
    “I won’t know, will I? Not until Daddy comes back,” she said a little crossly. “But I’m sure he will. He promised. He says it’s important not to give up believing in people. Sometimes believing is what makes things happen.”
    People disappear all the time and don’t come back,
Nick wanted to tell her. But he didn’t. She seemed so certain.
    Of course, considered Nick, she might be making it all up. It might just be a story she told herself at night. The girl’s father might not be at sea at all. It was more likely that he’d taken off, like Pa had, leaving Annie and her mother to fend for themselves in the city.
    Annie frowned and looked at him. She pointed at the hole in his pant leg. “You talk funny. You look poor and dirty. I bet you don’t have many friends. I suppose I could be your friend, even if you don’t live in my rooming house. What’s your name?”
    Nick was getting anxious. He wanted to be standing alone in front of the beautiful stationery store when the owner arrived. He had to get free of this persistent girl.
    “I don’t need any friends. I just need a job,” he said quickly. It wasn’t hard to be mean; he’d gotten good at it at Lincoln. He hadn’t let anyone be friends with him then. He’d never admitted to being an orphan like the rest of them.
    Nick took a breath. “Go home now, will you? You’re bothering me.”
    Annie flashed him a look, her large, strange eyes wide with hurt. Then, shoulders slumping, she walked slowly down the street in the direction of the rooming house.
    Looking after her, Nick was suddenly reminded of little Rebecca, picking cotton in the fields with her small shoulders bent against the pain.
    He sighed and called out, “Hey, Annie. My name’s Nick. Good luck being a big sister.”
    Annie turned sharply. She waved, her face lit with a big smile. Then she skipped toward home, hopping from one cobblestone to another.
    This little girl really
was
like Rebecca. Nick reached into his pocket to touch one of his coins. He wondered where Rebecca was now. Probably still on Mr. Hank’s place as a migrant field hand or some other farm like it. After all, it was April again, planting season. Nick swallowed. Spring. His first spring without Gran.
    “Well, I may be a road kid, but I’m not in the fields anymore, Gran,” Nick whispered. It was the first time since before he could remember when he wasn’t planting cotton seed. Planting first. Then came thinning the young seedlings and chopping to keep weeds away. And then in the fall came the harvest, the picking.
    It was funny. Up to now, everything—what he ate, how much food they had, even whether he went to school or not—was tied to cotton. But here in the city, most folks probably didn’t even know what a cotton plant looked like or what it felt like in your hands. Why, most likely they bought their clothes ready-made from a store without even thinking where the cloth came from.
    I could go back,
Nick thought.
If I can’t find a job here after all, if Bushy Brows or some other policeman catches me, I could go to an orphanage or some poor farm. Or I could go back to the fields on my own.
    He was good at picking cotton. He could earn his own living. Living in tents with other migrant workers, maybe working his way back up to a sharecrop…
    Nick looked down at his hands, callused from field work. Hours and hours, days and days. Hot, flat fields.
    No. Nick shook his head. No matter what, he didn’t want to look up into the same empty wide sky again.
    Here the sky wasn’t empty. It was broken by tall buildings that rose high into the air. The newspaper building—the Call Building, people called it—must be two or three hundred feet high, Nick thought. You glimpsed the sky and the sun between