The Elfin Ship Read Online Free Page B

south to complete the trading and return before Christmas or else the holidays would be a rather sorry lot. Without honeycakes the traditional Christmas feasts would suffer, and without elfin gifts, the children would be sad. If the feasting were poor and the children were sad, Jonathan said in a stout voice, then the Christmas holidays might as well be Willowood Station all smashed and gone down the river.
    Jonathan’s speech was inspired. The people of Twombly Town were, up until then, uncertain as to whether Jonathan would undertake the voyage or not. What with Gilroy Bastable’s pessimistic account of his conversation with Jonathan the previous night, the outlook had been grim. Their response, therefore, was to shout hurrah and stomp about and lift Jonathan onto their shoulders and carry him up and down Main Street. Ahab looked on the scene in wonder. Even Wurzle and Beezle seemed content in their way. Beezle was happy that he’d had an opportunity to lay out his diagrams and explain them, and Professor Wurzle was happy for other reasons.
    Jonathan spent the rest of the day at market, trading cheeses for cabbages and hams and mushrooms and nets of onions and garlic. His wagon, when he finally towed it home, was as full as when he’d set out. For the return trip Ahab wasn’t allowed to ride on top of the load for fear that he’d squish the produce. Besides, the way home was uphill and Jonathan had a hard enough time of it without having to contend with the dog’s additional weight. The wheels of the wagon got mired in the mud twice so that by the time he lurched up before his porch, Jonathan was as splashed and muddied as Gilroy Bastable had been after his tussle with the storm. But all in all it had been a very good day. His decision to make the journey seemed almost as wise as it had when he made his speech at the Guildhall.
    Supper that night wasn’t as good as it should have been, as Jonathan was preoccupied and his mind wasn’t on what he was doing. His cornmeal muffins burned and tasted like sour charcoal, and the lima beans in his ham-and-bean soup refused to cook, and cracked rather than mushed when he bit into them. About halfway through the evening, Ahab began to walk in his sleep and strode stiff-legged around the room three times, one eye open and one shut, moaning fearfully. Coming on top of the ruined muffins and hardened beans, Ahab’s behavior was a bad omen indeed.
    Jonathan didn’t pretend not to know what was the matter. It was, of course, the journey he’d proposed in such a strutting manner at the Guildhall. As the night became blacker and the wind picked up and whistled through the redwoods in the forest beyond his house, Jonathan developed an even greater liking for his home and fire than usual. The spirit of adventure in him was being wrestled down by the spirit of stay-at-home, and by eight o’clock in the evening he was pacing up and down the room, first planning the trip, then unplanning it. He could already feel the cold night wind off the river and the wet socks that were the curse of raftsmen everywhere. He could imagine his disappointment when his eggs gave out and the fresh meat wasn’t fresh any longer. Unless he stopped to hunt – a sport he wasn’t inclined to – he would exist for the better part of the voyage on oatmeal porridge, jerked beef and hard biscuits. With luck, he would be able to pick wild blackberries on into the first of December, especially in the rainy hemlock forests closer to the sea. But as good as wild blackberries are, it doesn’t take too many days before they aren’t so good anymore. Jonathan’s thoughts were bleak indeed, and the more he paced and thought, the less he wanted to go.
    At one point he had the wild idea of piling all his valuables onto his cart, breaking a lot of windows in his house, and hanging a sign on the door that indicated he’d been robbed and carried away by pirates. The notion sounded very good at first, pirates being