Читать книгу Hands Up! онлайн

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"Run!" I cried.

He simply caught tight hold of the car and hung on. Suddenly he slipped. But I was ready for that, to grasp him if he showed signs of falling between the ties. No! He was too fond of life. He clung to the car, and to life, so tenaciously that he made a drag on the car as, with his body stretched out, his toes caught, caught, caught on the edges of the ties. He had almost stopped the car by the time we gained the opposite bank. There he scrambled to his feet. And now I had my eye on him.

"What you do?" he said.

"What you tried to do to me," I said, "and don't try again."

We trudged on thoughtfully to the cord-wood pile. He was silent; but, as you can surmise, the air was full of trouble. It broke at the cord-wood pile.

"You block that wheel to keep car from running down," he ordered.

At first I resented the order—you see by now what kind of kid I was and will understand me doing so. I thought to tell him to do the blocking himself, but quickly argued: "What's the sense? I don't want to dominate him. I only want fair play;" so I blocked the wheel, with a billet of wood from the side of the track, and as I rose from doing so, I saw a shadow leapin' along the ground—gave a jump sidewise to keep whatever caused it from falling on me, and smack came a billet down on the car-end just where I had stood.