Free It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC by Dean Ing

coins had lain in state long enough that they were hard to identify. Still, Indian heads were big, and Lincoln’s was small. Charlie would spit on a penny and rub it until its disguise wore thin, then start with another.
    He had hardly begun when Aaron returned with a discarded Dallas Morning News and a question. “We still going to the movie?”
    “I guess,” Charlie shrugged, though he had forgotten such trivia in the excitement of sudden wealth.
    “Then we can count this later.” As he spoke, Aaron was lining up sheets of newsprint, transferring the heavy coins to the center of the papers with cupped hands. Charlie watched, fascinated at this show of ingenuity, then noticed that Aaron was wrapping only half of the treasure as a wrinkled metal-filled tube. Without a word he chose several sheets of the remaining paper and copied Aaron’s work, twisting the ends like the wrapper of a colossal hard candy nugget.
    With a fresh goal and mindful of the fact that The Lone Ranger waits for no boy, they sprinted from the capitol grounds, trotted the next few blocks down Congress Avenue carrying their assets like footballs, and finally trudged exhausted into the last-minute line of boys at the Queen Theater. Not until they were at the ticket booth did they realize that every cent, including their original coins, was now wrapped in Dallas newsprint. Aaron loosened one twisted end and paid for both tickets. The ticket lady, experienced in the ways boys carried cash, touched the damp coins only with a fingertip sheathed in red rubber and nodded them past without comment.
    Inside, when Aaron turned toward the men’s room and Charlie asked him why, Aaron shamed him with a look, displaying palms that were a portrait of grime. “I’m gonna get popcorn and a Three Musketeers. Maybe go back again. But I’m not gonna touch any of it with these hands,” he promised.
    So Charlie, too, washed his hands, and later wolfed down two bags of popcorn and three Baby Ruth bars, and that night at supper, wondered why he had no appetite.

CHAPTER 6:
    SECRETS OF THE STORM DRAIN
    On Sunday, the boys held a council of three—though Lint was not a voting member—in a favored refuge under the workbench in the Hardin garage. Counting the loot disabled their brains in different ways. “Half of forty-four dollars and sixty-three cents,” Aaron enthused, his eyes like brown moons as he gloated over coin stacks, “makes, uh—.”
    “Plus the movie and the stuff we ate and the zoom plane,” Charlie itemized. “You remember what that came to?”
    “Nope. Don’t ask me, Charlie, it makes my head hurt. Besides, you found it. If I kept more than twenty bucks of this it’d be like cheating you. I don’t even know how to explain this to my folks.”
    “Me neither,” said Charlie. “So I’m not gonna. I found it fair and square.”
    “Stole it, you mean.”
    Charlie recoiled as if bitten. “I never! Who from?” Alerted by his master’s tone, Lint ceased sniffing at the coins. He knew that barking in such close quarters was rude so he contributed the faint growl this occasion seemed to call for.
    “I don’t know who from,” said Aaron, mostly to the growler. “Whoever owns the pond.”
    “For Pete’s sake, nobody owns it! No, wait a minute; everybody owns it, and some of it was right in plain sight for anybody, only nobody but us went and got it. So we earned it. I mean, it’s our durn state capitol, Aaron.”
    Nervous with doubt, Aaron said, “Wonder what the governor would say.”
    “You can find out. His house is right next to where we were flying the zoom plane.” This was true; the governor’s mansion faced the capitol building near Twelfth Street.
    “Aw, he’d say it was his.”
    “Then you go ask him, and we’ll do what he says.” The boys swapped stares. Charlie could see that his pal was giving the idea serious consideration, so, “We’d have to pay him back for all that stuff we ate,” he added quickly.
    This