The Haystack Read Online Free Page A

he does that. And he doesn’t look when he’s putting his knife into that box thing on his belt.”
    “Scabbard. He’s done it so often, he doesn’t need to.”
    “If I owned the butcher’s, I’d have sausages for tea every day. And for lunch, and breakfast.”
    “You might get sick of them.”
    “I’d never get sick of sausages.”
    “What if you finished up looking like a sausage yourself?”
    “I wouldn’t mind.”
    “Mrs Dainty would say I wasn’t feeding you properly; nobody would buy Mr Cleaver’s sausages, in case their children turned into sausages, too; he’d have no job and become a swagger, and we’d have no butcher to buy our meat from. All because you ate sausages every day.”
    While he was talking, Dad opened his pocket knife and finished the teeth around the other rim of the cotton reel, cutting away from himself. “There’s a length of inner tubing in the shed,” he said, “an old bike tube. It’ll be stronger than an ordinary rubber ring.”
    He held the red inner tube while I got the scissors and cut a slice off the end. “It won’t be any use if it’s too strong. Try it anyway.”
    “Dad! You came inside in your boots. Tramping dirt all over my polished lino!”
    “I wiped them first. And I tiptoed.”
    “All the same, you know very well you’re not supposed to. Is that why Mr Cleaver’s nose looks like a sausage?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Because he eats so many.”
    Dad grinned. “I think that nose comes out of a bottle.”
    Through the middle of the cotton reel, I poked the strong rubber ring till a loop stuck out the other end. A short splinter of kindling through the loop stopped it pulling back.
    The brass candlestick on the mantelpiece held a stub of candle. I bored a hole through it to take the other end of the ring. Just enough of the ring showed for me to poke a stump of pencil through. I wound the pencil and put my tractor on the table.
    It tipped over and scrabbled sideways, the pencil stump shot round, striking the table and shouting “Hullabaloo! Hullabaloo!”
    Dad had sneaked back inside, to see how I was getting on.
    “It sounded like my blind going up.”
    “That rubber band’s strong. What you need’s a full-length pencil, or a longer piece of wood.”
    “I used a splinter of kindling to hold the other end.”
    “Who wouldn’t light the copper because they’d haveto split the kindling, and now she’s using the kindling her poor old father had to go and split—to make her tractor?”
    “I’ll chop some more tonight. Anyway, you’re wearing your boots inside again.”
    “You make sure you do. Using all my good kindling…That’s all it needed; look at it climb.”
    I ran along the street, but Freddy was hiding. Last time I asked if he could come out and play, Mrs Jones chased me, so I didn’t go in his gate. I wound up my tractor, and it drove itself across the footpath. When it came to the bike tracks, it stumbled, dug in its teeth, stood thinking to itself, then the powerful rubber band worked. My tractor shrugged and climbed the ridges up and down, up and down, no trouble.
    “We’ll show Freddy Jones.” I smoothed the dirt, drew a morepork with big eyes, claws, and a savage beak, and ran home.
    “Dad, Freddy Jones is hiding.”
    “I don’t blame him.”
    “I can’t beat him if he hides.”
    “He’s sick of getting beaten. Change the ring on your tractor for one of those we keep for holding the cellophane on the jam jars. Freddy will come out and play then because his tractor has some show of winning.”
    But I didn’t see why Freddy Jones’s tractor should beat mine. He could cut a ring off an old inner tube if hewanted. I ran back, rubbed out the morepork, and drew one twice as savage, with a screaming boy in its beak.
    “This’ll give him something to think about,” I said and wrote “F. J.”, with an arrow pointing at the screaming boy. Wandering home, pretending not to look around, I glanced sideways as I went