The Whipping Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

a river sure enough, out of its banks and roaring, and the hotel was sitting in the edge of it. A chicken house floated by, crowned by one forlorn leghorn. The door to the room swung open and Mrs. Oke poked her head in.
    â€œMovin out!” she croaked. “Need help!”

2
    F OR TOM FRESHOUR the last twenty-four hours had been like a dream—the long walk from the orphanage at Bokchito to Durant, the train ride from there to Fort Smith, and the hanging, then going into a big old building and standing before a roomful of nervous, chewing men, and being given a job, and told that he would never return to the academy, just like that. And again a train into the territory, and staying the night in an atticlike room with a salesman named Mr. W. W. “Jake” Jaycox while it rained without end. The whole world outside the Armstrong Academy was like a dream, only more sudden, more amazing, more full of strangeness. And this morning Tom’s shivering and the gnawing hunger in his belly felt very real, but slogging up the cold, rain-swept hill carrying furniture seemed both real and dreaming—the real of the cold against his skin in the fantastic dreamy unendingness of the rain.
    Lanterns burned smoky and high around the common room of the OK Hotel. Water was over the floorboards and the old woman waded around, gathering up smaller things. A man carrying a huge wooden display grip with
El Dorado Chemical & Drugs
in sweeping red letters was helping move some of it. There were three others: a white prisoner with loosened leg manacles and two white men with badges. The deputies slouched in the common room, rolling cigarettes and passing a bottle back and forth. The old woman kept fussing at the ones who were helping, as they hauled food safe, tables, dressers, and even some beds out the door and up the hill.
    â€œ
Apela!
” She went down the little hall to the first-floor room and pounded on the door. “Wake up! Come out! Hurry.”
    Mr. Jaycox appeared, walking as stiffly as a table down the stairs, looking grizzled and grumpy, blinking at the water that covered the floor. “Good God almighty,” he muttered. Soon he was helping Tom muscle a chest of drawers and parts of beds up the slippery hill, dropping things, getting their feet stuck in the mud. The drug salesman and the prisoner—the deputies called him “cedar thief”—continued helping, too, while the two deputy marshals did not.
    They bucked the furniture to a building behind John Blessing’s General Merchandise. Back at the hotel, the water was more than ankle-deep. Mrs. Oke now was being followed around by the shorter of the deputies, who wanted to get back last night’s room fee in payment for the labor of their prisoner. He was a fast-talking, snaky man with two big hogleg guns strapped backwards to his waist.
    She had her cash box under her arm but wasn’t about to hand back any money. “
Ch sinti!
Go away, you penny pincher!” she said angrily.
    Mr. Jaycox picked up a lantern and walked between them. “This place is flooding out.”
    The door to the downstairs room opened and out came the woman they had met last night. She wore a high collar and a starched grey skirt, the hem of which floated in the water. It wasn’t as if her appearance was unexpected, but to Tom the sight of her was troubling. High-arched eyebrows, green eyes, and dark hair done up in a bun with stray curls down her temples—she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, though he hadn’t seen many. He wanted to look away from her but found it impossible to do so. It occurred to him that she was from the city, the big city—an odd thought since, as far as he knew, he had never known anyone from a big city, much less a woman. The one woman he had really known was seventy-some years old and did not speak the same language he did, so they had done little talking. Yet however ill equipped he was to