Free The Hope Chest by Karen Schwabach

crossed out
I am
and wrote
I'm.
She tried to think of something else to say—How are you? But that was the sort of thing you wrote in a letter, when you weren't paying for every single word.
    “Well, that won't break the bank,” Mr. Martin said, looking over her shoulder. “But you can't use any punctuation marks, so contractions like ‘I'm’ are out. And up to the first ten words it's all the same price, forty cents.”
    Violet dipped the pen in ink again, crossed out what she'd written, and started over.
Mother and Father I am fine.
That was six words. She didn't want to tell them she was going to Tennessee—what if they notified the policeto arrest her there? For the same reason, she couldn't mention woman suffrage. She had four words left.
Hope you are too.
    “You'd better sign it,” Mr. Martin suggested. “The signature is free.”
    Violet wrote her first name.
    “You're a woman of few words,” said Mr. Martin. He took the form up to the counter, dropped a fifty-cent piece on it, and slid it under the brass bars to the clerk.
    “I can pay for it,” Violet said. She still had forty-two cents left.
    “Allow me. It was my idea, after all.” Mr. Martin smiled. “There's nothing wrong with going off to have adventures, you know, as long as you let your folks know you're all right.”
    This was not something Violet had ever heard a grownup suggest before. “You must have had a lot of adventures,” she said, and then winced at her forwardness.
    He touched his scar and smiled again. “Yes, a great many. When I was your age, I walked from Pennsylvania to Long Island with Mother Jones, on her Children's Crusade. But my parents knew I was going.”
    “What was the Children's Crusade?” Myrtle asked as they went out to the broad, busy street.
    “A march Mother Jones—she's a labor organizer, remarkable old lady—put together to draw attention to child labor. She took a bunch of us kids from the mines and mills, especially those of us with something to showfor our work.” He held up his hand with the missing fingers. “She got all our parents' permission, and we were all outfitted with a tin plate and a spoon. We walked up through Pennsylvania to New York City and then out to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to call on President Roosevelt.”
    “What did President Roosevelt say?” Violet asked as they stopped to let a large open-sided sightseeing bus, shaped like an overgrown rowboat, pass.
    “He wouldn't see us,” said Mr. Martin. “So we walked back again.”
    “Then it didn't do any good?” said Myrtle.
    “Sure it did,” Mr. Martin said. “We kids got out of the mills for weeks. We had a lot of fun on that walk, playing and running around like other kids, sleeping in barns and eating what folks along the road gave us. Mother Jones and her helpers taught us to read too.”
    “But President Roosevelt wouldn't see you,” Violet reminded him.
    “No, but thousands of people did see us. You can never know what seeds your words and actions might plant. We may get children out of the mines and mills in this country yet—it's only been seventeen years since our march.” He smiled wryly. “Even when you don't win, you don't always lose. Remember that.”
    “Yes, Mr. Martin,” said Violet politely. “It's a shame a woman like Mother Jones can't vote to change the child labor laws.”
    “Mother Jones doesn't want to vote. She's an Anti.”
    Violet looked at him to see if he was joking. “Doesn't want to vote? Why not?”
    “That,” said Mr. Martin, “is a mystery.”
    Everyone was very busy at the National Woman's Party headquarters in Cameron House over the next two days. They were much too busy to worry about where Violet and Myrtle had come from; everybody took it for granted that in some way they belonged to Mr. Martin, who was going to Nashville either to support the suffrage cause or to seek out his lost love—there wasn't really time to discuss which. Violet and Myrtle helped in the