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Transcriber's Note:
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
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MR.
WICKER'S WINDOW
by
Carley Dawson
Illustrated by
Lynd Ward
1952
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON
The Riverside Press Cambridge
Copyright, 1952, by
CARLEY DAWSON and LYND WARD
* * * * *
_For
those at
Second Family
House_
* * * * *
CHAPTER 1
[Illustration]
Christopher Mason felt numb. It seemed to him that he was as good as
an orphan already, for his father, a Commander in the Navy, was far
away at sea, and Chris's mother was in a hospital, not expected to
live.
Chris scuffed along the brick pavements of Georgetown, but he did not,
as he usually did, look about at its familiar houses. This friendly
core of the growing city of Washington, D.C., today seemed to him
almost hostile.
Georgetown, where Chris lived, is the oldest part of the capital city,
built by early English settlers long years before Washington itself
was even planned. Grouped at the head of the navigable part of the
Potomac River, above Georgetown's bluffs, the Potomac foams and dashes
over wild rocks and waterfalls, and across the river, the country
starts.
Chris had just left his mother's sister, his Aunt Rachel. Aunt Rachel,
white-faced, was preparing 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.