it on with great care and even, Omri thought, tenderness.
“Now,” said Omri, “take off your Chief’s cloak and cover him up warmly.”
This, too, Little Bull did uncomplainingly.
“We’ll take him upstairs and put him to bed,” said Omri. “Oh, God, I wish we had that key and I could get that doctor back!”
As they walked slowly upstairs, he told Patrick about the First World War soldier he had brought to life to tend Little Bull’s leg-wound.
“We’ve got to find that key!” said Patrick. “We’ve just got to!”
Little Bull, still at Boone’s side on Omri’s hand, said nothing.
In Omri’s room, Patrick made a bed for the cowboy from a folded handkerchief and another woollen square cut from Omri’s sweater. Omri slipped a bit of thin stiff card between Boone and his own hand and on this, he transferred the wounded man without too much disturbance which might have started the bleeding again. He was still unconscious.
Little Bull silently stood by. Suddenly he moved. Reaching up, he snatched off his Chief’s headdress and threw it violently on to the ground. Before Omri could stop him, he began jumping on it, and in a second or two all the beautiful tall turkey-feathers were bent and broken.
Leaving it lying there, Little Bull took off across the carpet, running as hard as he could over the deep woollen tufts, stumbling sometimes but running always in the direction of the seed-tray and his home. Patrick moved, but Omri said quietly, “Let him alone.”
Chapter Fifteen UNDERFLOOR ADVENTURE
OMRI AND PATRICK decided they must take it in turns to sit up all night with Boone. This was going to be tricky because of light showing under the door, but Omri unearthed the lumpy remains of a candle he had made himself from a candle-making kit.
“We can put it behind the dressing-up crate. Then the light won’t show.”
They got into their pyjamas. Patrick was supposed to be sleeping on a folding-bed, so they got it ready to avoid arousing suspicion.
When Omri’s mother came in to kiss them goodnight, they were both in bed, apparently reading. The fact that Omri was reading in semi-darkness was nothing unusual, she was always on at him about it.
“Oh Omri! Why won’t you switch your bedside light on? You’ll ruin your eyes.”
“It doesn’t work,” said Omri promptly.
“Yes it does. Daddy fixed it this morning. You know what was wrong with it?”
“What?” asked Omri impatiently, wishing, for once, that she would go.
“That wretched rat of Gillon’s had made a nest under the floorboards and lined it with bits of insulation it gnawed off the wires. It’s a wonder it didn’t electrocute itself.”
Omri sat up sharply.
“Do you mean it’s got loose?”
His mother gave a lopsided smile. “Where have you been keeping yourself? It’s been loose since last night – haven’t you noticed Gillon frantically looking for it? It seems to have taken up residence under your bed.”
“Under my bed!” Omri yelled, leaping out of it and dropping to his knees.
“It’s no use looking for it. I mean right under – the floor. Daddy caught a glimpse of it today when he had the boards up, but he couldn’t catch it, of course. It’s a matter of waiting till it comes out for food, and then—”
But Omri wasn’t listening. A rat! That was all they needed.
“Mum, we’ve got to get it! We’ve got to!”
“Why? You’re not scared of it, are you?”
“Me – scared of that stupid rat? Of course not! But we’ve got to catch it!” said Omri, feebly yet desperately. “It might run across my face—” He felt wild and furious. How could Gillon have let the thing go? The perils that a rat presented to his little men simply turned his blood cold. And why, of all rooms in the house, should it have chosen his?
He was tearing frantically at the edge of the carpet, trying to pull it back, when his mother hiked him to his feet.
“Omri, that carpet and those floorboards have been taken up once today, they’ve been put back once and everything tidied up. Rat or no rat, I’m not going through it all again tonight. Now get into bed and go to sleep.”
“But—”
“Into bed, I said. Now!”
When she used that tone, there was no arguing with her. Omri got into bed, was kissed, and watched the light go off and the door close. As soon as her footsteps had faded, he leapt up again and so did Patrick.
“Now we must definitely stay awake all night. We mustn’t close our eyes for a moment,” said Omri.
He was hunting through his ancient collection of book-matches for one out of which his father had not cut the matches. At last he found one, and lit the candle. They very gently moved Boone’s bed out of hiding on to the bedside table, set the candle beside it, and sat one on each side, watching Boone’s dreadfully ill-looking face. The pink square of sticking plaster moved fractionally up and down as he breathed – you could hardly see it. It was like watching the long hand of a clock moving – only the strongest concentration enabled them to detect the faint motion.
“Hadn’t we better move the seed-tray up here too?” whispered Patrick.
In the moment when Little Bull had shot Boone, Omri had almost been angry enough to have fed him to the rat; but now, his fury had cooled. He certainly didn’t want anything awful to happen to him.
“Yes, let’s.”
Between them they cleared a place on the table and lifted the seed-tray, with its longhouse, fireplace and hitching posts, up out of reach of prowling rodents.
“Careful. Don’t frighten the ponies.”
The ponies, however, were getting used to being carried about, and hardly looked up from munching the little piles of grass-cuttings. There was no sign of life from the longhouse.
There followed a timeless period of just sitting there silently, their eyes fixed on Boone’s still figure in the flickering candlelight. Omri began to feel light-headed after a bit: the candle flame went fuzzy and Boone’s body seemed to vibrate as he stared at it. At the very back of his mind, something else was nagging, nagging… He didn’t ask himself what this was, because he had a superstitious feeling that if he let his mind wander from Boone, even for a minute, Boone would slip away into death. It was as if only Omri’s will – and Patrick’s
