The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester Read Online Free PDF

and pressed her lips together in a thin, hard line.
    Owen waited.
    Earlene went back in the house, letting the screen door slam shut behind her.
    Owen and Travis and Stumpy and Pete and Leroy raced to the pond with Tooley.

CHAPTER NINE
    Owen lay on his stomach on the dock and peered into the murky water. Tooley sat on the bottom of the pond inside the perfect cage.
    Owen nudged him gently with a stick. Tooley swam to the other side of the cage and nestled back down into the squishy mud.
    “He likes it!” Owen grinned up at Travis and Stumpy.
    But inside Owen, something was niggling at him.
    A teeny tiny niggle.
    Barely noticeable.
    But a niggle, nonetheless.
    The niggle was caused by a thought.
    The thought was this: Maybe, just
maybe
, Tooley should not be in that perfect cage.
    Maybe he should be swimming freely around Graham Pond. Gliding gracefully through the water. Floating among the rotting oak leaves that had settled on the surface. Sunning lazily on the moss-covered logs along the edges.
    Instead of in a cage. (Even if the cage was perfect.)
    Owen pushed the niggle away.
    Then he tossed the stick into the pond and said, “Now we can go look for the thing that fell off the train.”
    Travis and Stumpy let out a whoop.
    The three boys raced around the pond toward the train tracks.
    “What’s that?” Travis said, pointing to a clump of weeds beside the tracks.
    Something shiny and round was nestled in among the prickery vines.
    Owen ran over and examined it. “A hubcap. Shoot!” he said, kicking at the weeds.
    The boys walked glumly along the side of the tracks. Every now and then, one of them spotted something and would point and holler and they’d all race over to examine it. But it was never anything that seemed likeit might have fallen off the train and made the noise that Owen had heard.
    The thud.
    The crack of wood.
    The tumble, tumble, tumble sound.
    “Let’s go to my house and get lunch,” Stumpy said.
    So the boys headed back up the path through the woods. But they hadn’t gotten far when Owen stopped.
    He snapped his fingers.
    “Wait a minute!” he said.
    Travis and Stumpy waited.
    “Tumble, tumble, tumble,” Owen said.
    Travis and Stumpy waited some more.
    “If something’s tumbling, that means it’s, like, rolling,” Owen said.
    Travis and Stumpy waited some more.
    “So that means that whatever was tumbling was probably going downhill, right?”
    Travis and Stumpy looked at each other.
    “Yeah,” they both said.
    “So?” Travis said.
    “So maybe whatever fell off the train isn’t up by the tracks where we’ve been looking, but more downhill from the tracks, like in the bushes and stuff,” Owen said.
    Travis and Stumpy nodded and grinned and high-fived Owen and they all raced back to the tracks to search the bottom of the rocky, red-dirt slopes that ran along the sides.
    They found a bicycle wheel with broken spokes.
    They found a bullet-riddled stop sign.
    They found the bent-up frame of an aluminum lawn chair.
    They found a mildewed, mud-covered sofa cushion.
    They found a grocery cart with two missing wheels.
    They found cinder blocks and broken bottles and rusty cans.
    “I’m sick of this,” Travis said.
    “Yeah,” Stumpy said. “Me, too.”
    Owen’s disappointment swirled around inside him and then settled with a heavy thunk in the pit of his stomach.
    “Not me,” he lied.
    “I’m going home,” Travis said.
    “Me, too,” Stumpy said.
    “Not me.” Owen jammed his hands into his pockets and strolled off, studying the ground, peering into the weeds and bushes, kicking at clods of dirt, pretending like he didn’t care that Travis and Stumpy were quitters.
    He glanced over his shoulder to see the two boys trotting up the tracks toward the path in the woods.
    “Quitters,” he muttered under his breath.
    Owen climbed back up the slope and scanned the bottom of the ravine on the other side of the tracks.
    It wasn’t nearly as much fun searching without Travis