Soon Be Free (26 page)
Authors: Lois Ruby
From the blaring speakers we heard, “Folks, let's welcome the junior senator from the great State of Kansas, Senator Rhain Buth!” The crowd went berserk, and I craned my neck to get a peek at the handsome young senator.
Mike yanked me down from the truck, saying, “Let's go. I hate crowds.”
“Where to?” I shouted.
He patted the Council Grove brochure flapping out of his back pocket. “Worlds to conquer,” he said.
Mike bought a Pepsi from a street vendor and asked for two straws. Some kid's cotton candy glopped into my hair as we ripped a hole in the crowd to explore quieter comers of Council Grove. I kept glancing back at the Farmers and Drovers Bank, wondering, wondering, while I peeled pink
sticky stuff out of my hair and wiped it down the back of Mike's T-shirt.
The crowd was just a quiet roar in the distance when we came to the Monument to the Unknown Indian. Mike walked right past it, but I tugged at the back of his shirt and made him stop.
For some reason, the statue sent chills through me, despite the 98-degree day. What kind of Indian was this? Kaw? Kiowa? Pawnee? Osage? Probably one of those tribes. Delaware? Probably not; there'd been so few of them.
I moved away from Mike, needing space. The sun beat down on my back. I could already feel my neck and shoulders turning lobster red, and new freckles popping out on my nose. Then a cloud slid past the sun, turning the ground under the monument a cool gray. It was all the time I needed, just long enough to convince myself that I knew who this Indian was.
Mike rattled ice in our empty Pepsi cup. “He looks like the guy on those red Big Chief tablets we had in second grade.” Mike looked up into the bronze face of the statue, whose gaze was fixed across the huge prairie. “What do you see out there, Big Chief Anonymous?” He leaned against the base of the statue with his arms folded across his chest, grinning. The sun glinted off his braces. Two more years, and he'd have teeth just like Miss Kansas. “Cute guy, whoever he is. Not that I like guys.”
“I know who he is,” I said quietly.
“Yeah? Who?”
I shook my head. He'd think I was a lunatic if I told him the Indian's name was Samuel Straightfeather.
Mike circled the monument. “It doesn't say the guy's name anywhere, just like it didn't say the architect's name over at that ugly bank. You're hallucinating again, Dana. Too much sun.”
But it all fit togetherâJames Weaver and his astonishing building, which looked like nothing else in town, and Council Grove, where lots of Indian treaties were signed, and now this haunting statue.
The building was James's, but maybe not.
The statue was of Samuel Straightfeather, but maybe not.
It didn't matter anymore.
The sun shimmered on the dry ground beneath the statue, almost like a rippling patch of water. Mike was impatient to get moving. He said, “Forget it. Nobody knows who this guy is supposed to be. He's
unknown,
right? That's the whole point. Use your noggin, Dana.”
He's Samuel Straightfeather.
“Hey, take my picture,” Mike said.
Great-great-too-many-greats-grandfather of Faith Cloud.
Just as I had at high noon, on the day of Bo Prairie Fire's funeral, I silently asked,
What year is it,
Mr. Prairie Fire?
And I heard the old Indian's raspy voice sputtering between coughing fits, “Why, it's
this
year, girlie, eighteen and fifty-seven.”
Mike was saying, “Heads up, Dana. Hit the red button. I can't stand here looking cute much longer.”
Click.
“When the picture comes back, we'll call it Photo of the Unknown White Kid with the Unknown Indian.”
Unknown to everyone, but me.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Aladdin Paperbacks edition January 2002
Copyright © 2000 by Lois Ruby
Aladdin Paperbacks
An imprint of Simon & Schuster
Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.
Designed by Steve Scott
The text of this book was set in Stempel Schneidler.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Ruby, Lois.
Soon be free / Lois Ruby.â1st ed.
p. cm.
Sequel to: Steal away home.
Summary: Thirteen-year-old Dana investigates a mystery involving the old Kansas house that her parents have turned into a bed-and-breakfast business; in a parallel story, a Quaker boy living in the house in 1857 sets out to help some fugitive slaves to freedom.
ISBN 0-689-83266-4 (hc.)
[1. Fugitive slavesâFiction. 2. SlaveryâFiction. 3. Underground railroadâFiction. 4. QuakersâFiction. 5. KansasâHistoryâ1854-1861âFiction. 6. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.R8314 So 2000 [Fic]âdc21 99-47319
ISBN 0-689-83579-5 (Aladdin pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4814-2552-0 (eBook)