Ghost Boy Read Online Free

his head at a slant. He could see a circus tent and rows and rows of wagons behind the elephant. In the distance were the mountains, just barely there, a bit of jagged blue.
    â€œI guess if I was younger, I’d go traveling with the circus,” said Hopalong. “If I didn’t have a bum leg, I’d be up there on the tightrope, see.” He pointed at the poster. Under the elephant’s trunk, so small that Harold couldn’t really see it at all, was a figure in a leotard balanced on a line as thin as a thread.
    â€œDamn the war,” said Hopalong. “Damn it all to hell.”
    â€œYou weren’t in the war,” said Harold.
    Hopalong squinted. “I was thinking of you. Look what it did to you. Took your daddy and killed him. Took your brother, David, and never gave him back.”
    â€œHe’s coming home,” said Harold.
    â€œDon’t I know it?” Hopalong gathered up his bundle, his cloth, the little bucket of paste he’d set below the window. “Why, he’s probably sitting in Tokyo now, figuring out how to get back.” He jabbed a paste-speckled finger at the poster. “But don’t you think that looks like him? That little guy there in the tights?”
    Harold stood so close to the picture that his nose almost touched it. The tightrope walker, he saw, did look like David, tall and slim and bulging with muscles. He gazed at the figure, remembering things he was afraid he’d forget: splashing through the Rattlesnake with David, swinging from the fence rails, just walking down the street and feeling big as Gary Cooper. No one dared to tease him then, with David right beside him.
    â€œWhat else have you got there?” he asked.
    â€œWell, I’ll show you.” They started back along the main street, and on every window was a poster. The pictures hung askew on doorways and wrapped around telephone poles. There were clowns. There were people on trapezes, a juggler and a bareback rider.
    â€œAnd look at this,” said Hopalong, coming to the credit union.
    It was an enormous poster, and across its top it said Freaks of Nature. And there was the tiny lady and the ugly giant of a man that she’d called Samuel. Princess Minikin, the poster said; She Lived Among the Crowned Heads of Europe. And beside that: The Fossil Man! Is He an Ape or a Man? He’s the Missing Link, a Living Fossil Direct from Darkest Africa!
    â€œI met them,” said Harold.
    â€œDid you, by gosh? You met a living fossil?”
    â€œI guess I did,” said Harold.
    â€œAnd did you meet the Cannibal King?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œThe King! The Cannibal King!” He hopped up on his one good leg. “Well, come and look, Harold.”
    Even limping, Hopalong John went faster than Harold. He scuttled ahead, waited, then scuttled along again, to the corner of the drugstore. “Well, here’s your dog,” he called. “Here she comes after you, sure as pigs follow the slop bucket.”
    She came around the corner, but Harold didn’t stop. He would ignore her, he thought; he didn’t care if she followed or not. And then he looked back, to show that he didn’t care, and Honey was lying flat on her stomach with her paws on her nose.
    â€œOh, come on, then,” he said, and she trotted up by his side. He bent down and ruffled the fur between her ears. He cuffed her ribs the way she liked.
    â€œWhat’s that she’s got in her collar?” asked Hopalong. “See there? She’s got something stuffed in her collar.”
    It was a piece of white paper folded in three, with a ticket inside for the circus. Harold held the ticket in one hand, the paper in the other, and read the writing that went in a crazy scrawl.

    To the boy from Libberty
    Deer boy,
    Jist to show theres no hard fealings heres a tikket to the circus. We are jist going to bee hear for only one nite so you better come to nite. Drop by and see us