Samantha Smart Read Online Free PDF Page A

relocating. This went into great detail about the melting ice caps, confirming The Professor’s theory and dating the beginning of the extreme water level rise to sometime in the mid nineteen-eighties.
    “Egad!” The Professor exclaimed. “That’s extremely fast. Twenty-five years and the sea level rises by twelve feet worldwide? Something acutely disastrous must have occurred.”
    In fact, at that very moment, something acutely disastrous
was
occurring. Polly had wandered a little ways out onto an adjacent dock where a boat was moored with its motor running at an idle. In one of her bolder yet least intelligent moves, she had decided to jump into the boat, landing squarely on its throttle and lurching the boat forward at an alarming speed, so much so that it broke its slender tether like a string of spaghetti and roared off into the busy river-traffic of Columbus Avenue. Samantha’s jaw dropped and she and The Professor stared helplessly for a moment before springing into action.
    They ran as fast as they could, dropping all but one of their newspapers, straight to a taxi-boat that was parked nearby.
    “Please,” Samantha cried, pointing ahead of her, “We have to follow that boat!”
    “What?” the startled cabbie looked up from a magazine of questionable taste that he had been reading.
    “My Dog! Quickly, my dog jumped into that boat and must’ve hit the gas!
Please!
” Samantha pleaded in as hurried a voice as she could manage. The Professor nodded vigorously in agreement and they climbed into the boat.
    “Right,” the driver replied, dropping his magazine and kicking in the motor. “You guys got money, right?”
    “Yes,” The Professor nodded again, and they sped off in hot pursuit of the boat that Polly had inadvertently stolen.
    The cabbie opened up the throttle and they roared into high gear, the Polly-driven boat just on the edge of sight ahead. Amazingly, it appeared to be somehow maintaining a mostly straight course, though was not stopping for any of the traffic signals and had almost caused several accidents already. The cabbie dodged crosstown traffic as he wove through the same intersections, gradually gaining.
    “Great galoshes!” The Professor exclaimed, hanging onto his hat as they barely swerved around another crossing taxi-boat, inspiring honking horns and a flurry of non-English curses. They were now only a block behind Polly but had already traversed eight or nine blocks, veered left onto Broadway and were heading straight toward the huge, busy intersection of Columbus Circle.
    With an extra burst of speed, the cabbie zoomed within a hundred or so feet of the terrified dog in her runaway boat, and Samantha could see her little head poking up over the side. It looked like she was going to jump.
    Despite Polly’s general disdain of water and her overall fear of this new water-world and everything in it, jump is exactly what she did. The boat was moving so fast that she actually skipped across the water, was almost hit by another boat and then came to a floating halt, totally dazed. She began to paddle, just trying to stay afloat, and the cabbie downshifted, slowing down to pull alongside of her.
    “Polly!” Samantha shouted, waving her arms as they approached her slowly, “Polly, over here!”
    The dazed terrier seemed to hear her and changed the direction of her paddle towards their boat. When she was within arm’s reach Samantha grabbed her by the collar and began to pull her aboard, The Professor aiding in the process.
    “Keep the seats dry!” the cabbie yelled, letting them know that he was less than excited about having a wet dog in his taxi-boat, especially after a harrowing chase. Trying to ignore him, Samantha hugged her soaked canine companion, very happy to have her back in one piece.
    “Are you okay?” she asked, almost in tears, inspecting Polly for any wounds or missing parts. Amazingly, she seemed to be intact.
    The ‘stolen’ boat, however, had not been so