Lantern Sam and the Blue Streak Bandits Read Online Free

asked Clarence, obviously proud of his felinecompanion. “And the Buffalo Bootleggers? Lantern Sam, that’s who. I’ll tell you all about that later. He has a good life here on the Shoreliner; he spends about eighteen hours a day
thinking
, solving the problems of the world. Promise to keep his secret?” He held up his hand as if he were in a courtroom, being sworn in.
    “Promise,” Ellie and I said, solemnly raising our hands.
    “Thanks, kids. And now, Sam, you can go back to your important work,” Clarence said with a wink at us.
    “Mrrraaa,”
said Sam, who then closed his eyes and resumed his “serious thinking.”

It’s not that I don’t trust Henry to tell you the truth, but let’s face facts: He came late to the dance, as they say. He was only around for a small part of the story—for one, maybe two, of my lives. And we all know that humans have terrible memories, and that cats have nine lives, right? So I’m here to tell you the
rest
of the story—the interesting parts. Believe me, there’s a lot of story left to tell, and I can’t think of a better cat to tell it.
    For starters, my name wasn’t always Lantern Sam. I was born in a dairy barn outside of Linesville, Pennsylvania, on November 1, 1929, three days after the stock market crashedon Wall Street. Not that I, or any of the people around me, noticed. Daniel and Delilah Dilly were simple farmers who kept a herd of twenty-five Jersey cows. It is doubtful that they even knew where Wall Street was, and they certainly didn’t own any stocks or bonds. Mom was a calico like me and had lived on the Dilly farm her entire life. My father, who came from a farm up the road, was all black, which made him unpopular with the superstitious Dillys. There were seven of us in the litter: five calicoes and two brothers who were the spitting image of dear old Dad, who went by the name of Ajax. The Dillys gave their youngest daughter, Debbie, the job of naming us. Naturally, she assumed that all the calicoes were females (which, as you know, is wrong), so she named us Sally, Selma, Sarah, Susie, and Samantha. You can probably guess which one was me. My two brothers were named Simon and Sylvester.
    Other than being stuck with a girl’s name, though, I can’t really complain about my kittenhood. I had a loving mother, six siblings to play king of the hayloft with, and best of all, we had all the fresh Jersey milk we could drink. And when I say fresh, I mean straight from the udder to my tongue in under a minute. It was warm, and rich, and sweet as sugar, and I’ve spent the rest of my lives looking for milk half as good. Sometimes life is like that, I guess. You don’t realizehow great you have it until it’s gone, and you’re stuck on a twenty-hour train ride with nothing to drink but ice-cold Holstein milk that’s had the cream removed.
    Right about now, you’re probably asking yourself, if it was so great at the Dillys’ farm, why did Lantern Sam ever leave?
    A good question. A great question, even.
    It may not be the answer you’re looking for, but here it is: I don’t know. Not really, anyway. I suppose I felt what lots of young cats (and young people, too) feel at some point in their lives—that they have to see the world for themselves. I needed some adventure, some danger. I had read the books and heard the stories about faraway places like Meadville and Grove City, and I wanted to see them for myself.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was telling you about my kittenhood, and my first brush with “the nine lives question.”
    It was mid-January, and I was about ten weeks old and maybe two or three pounds. The temperature outside the barn had dropped to fifteen below zero, so cold that all those warm cow bodies raised the inside temperature to only slightly above zero. My siblings and I had burrowed into a crevice between bales of straw in the hayloft, but I was still shivering.
    “You know where I bet it’s really warm,” I said to my