g to go to the hospital to be with his mother
and had asked him, "Don't you want to come too, Chris? For a little
while?" But a cold-edged wing of fear had brushed the boy like a bat
wing in the night. He had shaken his head, speechless, grabbed his
sweater, and slammed the front door.

Now he hesitated on a corner, suddenly dismayed, not knowing quite
where to go or what to do. The whole city with its white marble
buildings and templed memorials, its elm-lined avenues, seemed all at
once very empty.

He looked down to the Potomac, always, for Chris, just "the river,"
where it glinted distantly blue and silver at the end of the street.
Factories along the riverbank cut off all but the farthest stretches
of water as the river moved under bridge after bridge beside the banks
of Maryland and Virginia.

Chris made up his mind to see what might be in the Pep Boys' store,
far down the hill and along traffic-filled M Street. Somehow the
tawdry bustle of this street, with its many shops, appealed to the boy
who carried misery inside him like a cold, heavy stone. Running, he
started down the hill between the lines of old brick houses, left Rock
Creek Park behind him, and turning to the right up M Street, reached
the hardware glitter of The Pep Boys'.

And it was there, as he stood staring in at the chromium bicycle
lamps, red glass tail lights, and wire baskets, that Mike Dugan found
him.

CHAPTER 2

Mike was in his class at public school, the eighth grade. Mike was all
right. Chris liked him.

"Hya, Chris!"

"Hi, Mike!"

"Whatcha doin'?"

"Nothin' much. Just looking."

"Say--you know sumthin'?" Mike wiggled himself across part of the Pep
Boys' window to gain Chris's attention. "Old Wicker's got a sign in
his window--he needs a boy. For after school, I guess. Think he'd pay,
huh? Whyncha try?"

Chris looked from a nickel-plated flashlight to a car jack and spark
plug.

"Oh--I don't know."

Mike persisted. "Well, I'll tell you what. Know who needs a job bad?
That's Jakey Harris. His mother's sick, and he's got that bad foot.
Whyncha ask for him, huh? You sit next to him at school."

All Chris heard was "--needs a job bad--mother's sick."

"O.K.," he said. "Only why didn't you ask him yourself?"

Mike became uneasy and fished an elastic band out of his pocket, made
a flick of paper and sent it soaring out into M Street.

"Well--" he admitted, "I did. Wicker's such a queer old guy. That ol'
antiqu