Free A String of Beads by Thomas Perry Page B

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     town to their right. Jane stopped running and walked through a stand of trees, keeping
     herself in the foliage.
    She followed the tracks with her eyes, moving her gaze from the spot where they emerged
     from the cluster of buildings at the edge of a grid of streets, stretched across a
     level field that looked like wheat, and then reached the hillside where they began
     to wind and go upward. She pointed. “Right over there—where the tracks turn and climb—I’ll
     bet a train would have to slow down to practically a walk.”
    “Are you planning to jump a train?”
    “I’m considering it,” she said, and watched Jimmy for a reaction. He said nothing.
    She said, “Thank you for not mentioning Skip Walker.” Skip was a harsh nickname for
     a boy they had both known when they were young. At some point in early childhood he
     had decided to hop a train. He had run along beside it, then either tripped or been
     unable to hang on to a handhold after he’d made his leap. The train wheel had rolled
     over his leg and amputated it. “Skip” was a reference to the way he walked on his
     prosthetic leg, with a limp and a little hop. He had been one of those boys that everyone’s
     mother cited to scare them out of taking risks.
    Jimmy shrugged. “Skip was seven or eight when he did that. We ought to be able to
     keep from being hurt that bad.”
    Jane was still tracing the tracks with her eyes, walking along the hillside to see
     where the tracks went after the first turn. “It looks to me as though the tracks go
     mostly north,” she said. “If we jumped the train, our trip home might be a whole lot
     quicker.”
    Jimmy said, “Let’s head for that place right over there, where it takes another turn
     and climbs at the same time. If they have people watching at the front and the back,
     they won’t see us if we pop out in the middle and climb aboard.”
    They trotted along the hillside, staying among the trees but heading for the spot
     where the tracks turned and disappeared into thick woods. It took them a few minutes
     to run from their hill to the one where the tracks were. When they arrived they could
     look down above the tracks to see a place where the rails bisected the town. On one
     side they could see four church steeples, a row of long, flat-topped buildings that
     were probably stores and offices, and farther out, dozens of small houses with pitched
     gray roofs. On the other side of the tracks were a number of old brick buildings with
     rows of dirty, barely translucent windows, smokestacks, and railroad sidings. Beyond
     them there were metal Quonset huts that were either warehouses or garages.
    A train snaked around the hill on the far side of the valley and sounded its horn
     as it came into town at the first intersection—two short, one long, one short blare,
     still somewhat faint. At each spot where the tracks crossed a road, they could see
     red lights begin to flash, and then a black-and-white barrier came down, and the train
     came through. Now they could see that the train had a big yellow engine in front and
     one right behind, and more and more freight cars appeared behind them from around
     the hill.
    “It’s a big train,” said Jimmy. “I’ll bet it’s a hundred cars.”
    “That’s got to be good for us,” Jane said. “Let’s get closer.”
    They came down through the trees just as the front of the train passed, moving along
     at a slow, steady rate. There were hoppers, tank cars, boxcars, flatbeds laden with
     big loads of pipes or thick packs of flat material like wallboard or plywood, all
     strapped down tightly. There were gondolas full of coal or slag. The names blazoned
     on the cars were familiar from their childhood—Canadian National, Georgia Central,
     Chicago and North Western, Erie Lackawanna.
    Jane stopped beside the tracks. The engines were at least twenty-five cars ahead of
     them now. Jane looked ahead toward the place where the tracks turned and