The Curious Adventures of Jimmy McGee Read Online Free

figure it out, what Amy meant. He figured there were three kinds of heroes, the long-ago kind, the present-day kind, and the future kind, the hero-to-be kind.
    He mused. "Ah!" he pondered. "Maybe, just maybe, mind you, maybe in some long ago past time, long, long ago, I once
was
a hero, and I have forgotten about it ... if I ever knew it then when it was happening. Or, hey! Maybe there is,
maybe
I'm saying, another Jimmy McGee that I never heard of but Amy has? Some hero of long ago. Maybe I was named after him, a sort of fellow who always gets himself put into books by other people, say a book with a name like
Stories of Famous People.
Or the little boy who held his finger in a hole in the dike so the town would not get flooded if the dam burst. He probably didn't know he was being a hero and soon would be in books practically all over the world."
    Or take a hero of more recent times, who gets to have streets and boulevards named after him and a statue of him on a horse in Central Park or some park somewhere, maybe, or in a museum, or in a little garden outside the museum with a fountain splashing water all over him all the time. Like himself, for instance, behind his waterfall in Mount Rose Park?
    Or maybe a hero so recent he has ticker-tape parades down Fifth Avenue or Constitution Avenue, people clapping, shouting, roaring, "Hail! Hail!"
    Or maybe Amy meant that he, Jimmy McGee, would be a hero in the near future. He had better keep his eyes out for that chance happening to bring Amy's book up to date. But not to let all this hero business interfere with his real work. "No! Never!"
    The sun was not yet high enough for him to risk putting Amy's valuable book back where she had left it. The bench was still damp. Perhaps some seagull—they are curious birds, think everything they see is possibly good to eat, something novel, and squawk and scream over it—might fly off with it in its sharp beak to Gull Island or even Provincetown, scattering shredded pages of Amy's
Who
's
Who Book,
including the important L and M page, all over the ocean.
    He couldn't risk that. Amy wouldn't be out of bed yet anyway. He had taken good care of her book and wanted to see her delight at finding it safe and sound; all he had done that was extra was to have added a little something for fun!
    So he popped it in his bombazine bag. Then he zoomie-zoomied off to make his morning rounds, waking people up ... the ones who had to get to work early. Check the milk train. Was it on time? Slow? Check the switches.
The Boston Globe,
was it on the train? Well, all the usual morning chores. He went faster than ever, making the telephone wires hum, gathering extra electric speed, because he wanted to return Amy's book, which was bumping about in his bombazine bag along with a very special little box, about two inches long and one inch high and wide, an oblong very strong little box. This he always carried with him. It was what he was going to put two special bolts in some day. He called it the magic bolt box.
    He had a good collection of bolts all right, but something was lacking. Then one day an idea, like a bolt out of the blue, had struck him. For a long time he had had a longing to have a thunderbolt and a lightning bolt represented in his collection. Perhaps he could capture in his box the tiny, very, very small tip end of a lightning bolt and the last rumble of a thunderbolt.
    To try to capture these rare items for his bolt collection would help him forget the hero business. As far as his chores went, all was fine. All trains on time. No dogs hurt, no cats either, no little slowpoke hedgehog run over. Pipes everywhere, all O.K. All were banged on louder than ever, shuddering the cottages and shaking the people out of their beds.
    The sun was up. He zoomie-zoomied back to his summer headquarters in six-sixty time. He went so fast he might have passed himself coming back! That was how curious he was about Amy's book. It was hard for him to part with it,