On Kingdom Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page A

on her bed. There would be no cats on Miss
Jane Hubbell Kinneson’s bed, thank you kindly. She pocketed the double eagle, picked up her ox goad, and prepared to head over the ice toward home.

5
    M ISS JANE’S LEGS were stiff and cold from her long day on the ice. She had intended to ride at least partway home on the sledge, but the monstrous lake trout took up most of the space. An antic notion occurred to her. From the shanty she fetched a short length of rope, which she ran through the trout’s mouth and gills. Taking up the free ends like a pair of reins, she sat down astride the fish on the sledge as if it were a horse or pony. “Giddap,” she said, laughing at herself. “Giddap, Ethan and Ira.”
    Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, riding a great silver fish across the ice behind two oxen. What a splendid carving it would make for On Kingdom Mountain. This was more like the adventure she had expected a month ago while reading Dickens.
    She had not been under way for long when she heard the storm hissing toward her over the ice. It struck so hard and suddenly that she nearly lost her seat on the fish. The oxen staggered in the blast of wind, regained their momentum, stumbled again. Snow pellets flew through the air around them, sizzling off the ice, bouncing off the steers and the sledge and Jane’s clothing.
    â€œTrot,” she called out to her team. “Trot, boys.”
    They moved over the ice. The rime-covered fire tower on the mountain summit disappeared in the oncoming snowstorm. The balancing boulder vanished. And then Miss Jane
glimpsed a speck in the sky, headed her way above the frozen lake, and heard, over the wind, a faint buzzing. At first it sounded like the humming of bees in the hollyhocks by her woodshed door on an afternoon in haying time. The buzzing grew louder as the flying object approached, now resembling one of the great winged reptiles that she knew had once terrorized the land. But this creature had a double set of wings and, unlike a bird’s wings, or even a flying lizard’s, they were fixed in place. It was a bright yellow biplane, racing directly up through the notch between the mountains, attempting to outrun the oncoming blizzard.
    Miss Jane could see the aviator plainly now, hands dancing over several levers, desperate to keep his craft aloft. The plane’s wings, just a few feet above the ice, tilted wildly back and forth. The oxen looked up wonderingly as the yellow biplane roared by just over their heads. On the underside of the bottom wing, in large black letters, were the words HENRY SATTERFIELD’S FLYING CIRCUS RAINMAKING AND PYROTECHNIC SERVICES BEAUMONT TEXAS . Near the end of each wing was the word DARE followed by an illustration of a dapper red devil piloting a biplane. The aviator, meanwhile, was jabbing downward with the forefinger of one gloved hand, indicating that he wished to land. Instantly, Miss Jane pointed back in the direction from which the plane had come, away from the treacherous open water north of the island. The pilot lifted his left hand and gave her a short salute, his hand snapping straight out from his forehead an inch or two and remaining there for a moment, like an upraised hatchet, then dropping back to the controls. The plane banked hard to the east, toward Kingdom Mountain, nearly clipping the soaring blue and emerald ice wall above the lake. Somehow the pilot managed to turn his craft away from the dark water just beyond the island. Barely missing Miss Jane and the oxen, wings wobbling and motor coughing, the plane labored back into the teeth of the storm.
    It hit the ice so hard that both wheels broke off. It took a high, crazy bounce, struck the ice again, and skidded sideways. To Miss Jane’s horror, the wind got under it and flipped it up on the bottom left wing at a forty-five-degree angle. It whirled around like a giant top, then turned upside down and, still spinning, vanished in the