Escape to the World's Fair by Wendy McClure

the open gate. “I don’t trust your kind. You weren’t trying to slip out, were you?”
    â€œNo, sir!” Eli replied, and he sat back down.
    The deckhand pulled the gate shut and locked it with a key he kept on a ring on his belt. Then he stomped off out of sight, the noise of his boots fading away.
    The mush—some kind of cornmeal, Frances guessed—was cold and tasteless, but it wasn’t hard to eat. The nine of them passed the pot around twice, and while they did, they continued to discuss their escape. From what Frances could tell, the only plans the older boys had come up with involved ways to subdue the deckhand.
    â€œI can trip him,” Dutch said. “And then Finn, you can jump on his back and start clobbering him!”
    â€œShouldn’t we start thinking about ways to actually get
off
the boat, too?” Alexander asked.
    Owney ignored him. “Frances, maybe you’ll have to be the one to clobber Miss DeHaven, since you’re a girl.”
    Frances almost choked. “What? Wait a minute—why do we have to clobber
anyone
?” She tried to imagine winding her arm up and punching Miss DeHaven in the nose. Fine—so it was fun to
imagine,
but it was another thing to
do
it.
    â€œWell, do
you
all have any other ideas?” Finn asked, looking at Frances and her friends.
    Everyone fell silent. Then Eli, who hadn’t said anything for quite a while, spoke up.
    â€œI’ve got a lot of ideas. But first, we’ve got to get out of this pen,” he said.
    Dutch laughed. “No kidding. But how?”
    Eli got up and went over to the gate. He knelt down and peered into the lock, then took a long piece of straw and threaded one end through the keyhole. He reached through the bars around to the other side of the lock and grabbed the straw end where it came out.
    â€œYou can’t pick a lock with straw,” Finn whispered. “Can you?”
    Eli motioned for everyone to come over for a closer look. “One of the sheds at the Carey farm had a lock like this and I learned how to keep it from sticking.” He pointed to the little slot along the edge of the gate where the latch was supposed to fit. It was packed with straw. “See that straw? I stuffed it in there when the deckhand fellow brought us breakfast. Now I can pull the latch back even more with a strong piece of straw.”
    Eli had both ends of the straw now, one in each hand, and he yanked it back and forth, hard, until it seemed to catch on something.
    â€œAlmost got it,” he said. “Now someone’s just got to try the handle.”
    Frances stepped forward. Holding her breath, she turned the handle just above the gate lock. To her surprise, it gave way with a soft
click
!
    â€œI think it’s unlocking!” she said with a gasp. And then, in one easy motion, she pulled open the gate.

14
    O PERATION HUCKLEBERRY
    L
isten for the whistle. Then count to a hundred.
    Jack kept repeating the directions in his head as he waited in the luggage hold with Eli. The escape plan Eli had come up with was a good one, but it involved an awful lot of waiting.
    Right now, on the upper deck, Frances and Harold were doing some waiting of their own. They too wouldn’t move until they heard the whistle. Once it sounded, Frances would distract the first-class passengers with her dancing—one of the Irish jigs she used to perform for coins down on the Bowery.
    Meanwhile, in the livestock pen, Alexander, Finn, and Chicks were waiting for the right moment to create a noisy diversion for the deckhands, and over by the bow, Dutch and Owney were getting ready to put out the gangplank.
    The patch of sky Jack could see from his hiding spot was getting hazier, the kind of haze that came from a city’s chimneys and smokestacks. They had to be close to docking. That was when the
Addie Dauphin
’s whistle would sound, just as the boat was about to arrive in St. Louis. Jack