The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald Read online

  “I’m glad,” she said. “But you must let them go, you know. You must let them go after they’ve promised not to bother me anymore.”

  Alvin was stunned. “But Mrs. Huntley! We can’t let them go! They might lock us all up here. And — and — well, who’d feed the birds then?” he finished lamely.

  At that instant a door slammed downstairs. Then they heard the sound of running feet.

  “Yeeow!” shouted the Pest. “They’re loose! They’re coming after us!”

  Alvin was so scared he dropped his candle. It went out before it struck the floor. They stood there motionless in the flickering light of the single candle on the table by the window.

  Now they could hear feet pounding up the steps and running along the balcony. Doors slammed. Then the footsteps came slowly up the narrow stairs to the tower. The Pest stood by Mrs. Huntley, eyes wide, her hand over her mouth.

  Alvin went into action. He hurled himself across the room and swung the door. He had just a glimpse of a beam of light on the steps below before he slammed the door. The knob turned slowly, and someone pushed against the door. Alvin was shoved into the room. Then the light was shining in his face.

  “Alvin! Alvin, what are you doing here? And you, Daphne — and Shoie? What’s all this about?” It was Dad’s voice. Never had it sounded so good.

  The Pest, who had been huddled in the corner, raced across the room and threw herself into Dad’s arms. She was crying.

  Alvin heard other voices downstairs. “Dad, there are two bad men down there. Don’t let them get away.”

  “Don’t worry about those two men,” said Dad. “They’ll never get away. They were mighty helpless when we found them. There are four other officers down there taking care of them. Come on, let’s go downstairs. I want to find out what’s going on in this house.”

  “But Mrs. Huntley,” said Alvin. “She’s too weak to get down the steps.”

  Dad went over and looked straight into the old lady’s eyes. “It’s good to see you again, Mrs. Huntley. Don’t you worry about a thing. I’m going to take these children downstairs. Just as soon as I get down there, I’ll send up two strong men to carry you down. Don’t you worry.”

  A powerful light had been brought from a squad car and was shining on the front porch. One of the officers had recovered the man from the tree. The man was sitting on the steps, his eyes bulging, still gasping for breath.

  Another officer was working over the other man. “Say,” he called, tugging at the man’s clothing, trying to rip it loose, “this isn’t a bad invention. Maybe we should use it instead of handcuffs. Looks like it will take me fifteen minutes, just to pry this fellow loose from the floor.”

  Two officers came through the front door carrying Mrs. Huntley between them.

  “We’re taking her to the hospital,” said one of them. “She’s badly in need of medical care.”

  Mrs. Huntley looked Alvin squarely in the face. A single tear — a tear of gratitude — rolled from one of her eyes, down her face, then disappeared in a deep wrinkle.

  “Don’t forget,” she said. “Please don’t forget to take care of my birds.”

  Chapter 11

  THE REWARD

  Alvin woke with a start, sensing that something was different. Suddenly he knew what it was. The Silent Waker Upper had failed to jerk his toe and the sun was slanting through the window from high in the morning sky. He looked at the clock. Wow! He was already an hour late in delivering the morning papers.

  He leaped out of bed and climbed into his clothes. He was in such a hurry that he didn’t even wash his face before he dashed downstairs. Dad was sitting at the breakfast table.

  “Hello, Alvin,” he said. “Sit down and have some breakfast. I want to talk to you.”

  “Can’t.” Alvin headed for the door. “Already late for my paper route. See you later, Dad.”

  “Come back here, Alvin.” Something in Dad’s voice stopped him. “Don’t worry about your paper route. We figured you needed some sleep. I turned off your alarm last night after you were in bed, and your mother insisted on delivering your papers this morning. She should be back any minute now.”

  Alvin looked out the front door. His mother was riding his bicycle down the street. And just as he watched, she pulled the special release trigger. The last paper sailed through the air and landed smack on the top step of Mrs. Perkins’ house.

  When Mom walked into the house she was out of breath. “Say, Alvin,” she said, a surprised tone in her voice, “that invention of yours works fine. Sort of fun, too. May I try it again sometime?”

  “Sure, Mom.” Alvin grinned.

  The Pest walked into the room, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. “Can I try it too, Alvin?”

  “No!” he snapped. Suddenly he remembered how brave she’d been last night. “Well, maybe. We’ll see whether you can reach the pedals on my bike.”

  “Sit down, children,” said Dad. “I want to talk to you about last night. It was too late to get the whole story from you then. Now, Alvin, I want you to start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

  Half an hour later, Alvin was still talking. He described the whole adventure, from the time the paper sailed through the air and crashed through the window of the old Huntley place. At one point he said, “Gosh, and a mirror from your purse is in that Electric Periscope, Mom.” Later he suddenly remembered something else. “And our hose — I mean my Supersecret Eavesdropper — is still lying on the ground.” Finally he finished the story. “... and then you and the squad car came, and took the two men off to the police station. How did you know we were there, Dad?”

  “Someone was walking past, heard some yelling and thrashing around in a tree, and called the station.”

  “Oh. We sure were glad to see you.”

  Dad looked at him sternly. Then he turned and looked at the Pest. It was the sort of a look Dad always got just before he punished them.

  Finally he said, “Both of you should be spanked within an inch of your lives. In the first place, you’ve been told many times to stay away from the Huntley house. In the second place, Alvin, you sawed off your mother’s broom handle, took one of her mirrors, and used the garden hose without permission. In the third place, both of you sneaked out at night. We want no sneaks in this family. In the fourth place, you know better than to take the chances you did with two dangerous men.”

  He paused a minute. Alvin wondered what the punishment would be.

  “And in the fifth place,” continue Dad, his voice much lower and softer, “in the fifth place, your mother and I are the proudest parents in the whole wide world. We’re proud that we have children who are so brave. And we’re proud that we have children with imagination, who can use their heads to solve problems. Children, you’ll never know how proud we are.”

  Dad cleared his throat and reached for his handkerchief. Mom was hugging the Pest.

  In all his life, Alvin had never heard any words that made him feel so good. He felt as though he could lick the world. But there was something that still puzzled him, something he had to know before he could feel that the adventure was over.

  “Dad, I still don’t understand what was going on in that old house. After you brought us home and put us to bed last night, did you find out what those two men were trying to do? Who are they, anyway?”

  “One of them is Mrs. Huntley’s nephew, her only living relative. He’s a lazy sort who tries to live on the work of other people. He brought one of his city friends with him, another shiftless character. They were going to split the money.”

  “What money?”

  “Old Mrs. Huntley’s money. Remember the stories about all of her money? For years everyone believed she had it hidden in a paper sack somewhere in that old house. Her nephew had heard those stories. He and his pal figured they’d force her to tell where the money was, then split it up and disappear.”

  “But why didn’t Mrs. Huntley want us to tell the police?”

  “Becaus
e her nephew was her only relative. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that he should be arrested, that he’s completely bad. And in one way, she’s right. You kids should always remember that no one is completely bad. We’re all a mixture. In each of us there’s a little of the ‘good guy’ and a little of the ‘bad guy.’ In his case, most of the bad shows through instead of the good. He should be locked up, of course, for trying what he did. But by the time we started talking to him at the station last night, he already was beginning to feel some shame. Perhaps, after he’s punished, he’ll turn out all right. Perhaps sooner or later the ‘good guy’ will start showing through instead of the bad.”

  Just then there was a knock at the door. Dad crossed the room and opened it. A little man with a moustache was standing there. Behind him was a big man with a camera.

  “I’m from the Daily Bugle,” said the man with the moustache. “I just heard about the story down at the police station. We’re mighty proud of our delivery boy. I wonder if I could talk to him and his sister.”

  Dad looked at Alvin and Daphne. He lifted his eyebrows.

  “I think Shoie ought to be here,” said Alvin. “Let’s go find him.”

  Just as they walked through the front door, the Mighty Athlete came bounding down the street, did a back flip and landed at the bottom of the steps.

  It was an exciting morning. The man with the camera lined up the children and started taking pictures.

  Standing there in front of the camera, Shoie whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “I didn’t even get bawled out.”

  “Neither did we,” answered Alvin. “Well, hardly.”

  Then the man asked them all sorts of questions. All three of them had to tell the story again. At last the man turned to Daphne and said, “And what were you thinking about, little lady, while you were standing by that door with the bag of popcorn in your hand?”

  “I was thinking,” said the Pest, “I was thinking that I had the smartest brother in the whole world, and if he said his Automatic Man Trap would work, then it would work.”

  That touched off a whole batch of new questions about Alvin’s inventions. The man with the moustache even sent the man with the camera upstairs to photograph Alvin’s inventing bench.

  A few minutes later, Mom suddenly shrieked in dismay. She had just noticed that Alvin was wearing a filthy pair of pants. She insisted he change them.

  “But the Pest has on her nightgown,” complained Alvin.

  The man with the moustache was making notes on a pad of paper. He looked up. “Is that what you call her? The Pest?”

  Alvin paused for just a moment, looking down at his sister’s upturned face. Her golden curls were shining in the sunlight. “No,” he said. “No, this is my sister Daphne.”

  The Pest threw her arms around him and buried her face in his shirt.

  By now the neighbors were gathering on the front lawn, trying to find out what had happened. A squad car pulled up at the curb, followed by Mr. McReynolds and three other firemen in the Chief’s red car. Only once could Alvin ever remember seeing more people on the front lawn. That was the time he blew out the basement window with his chemistry set. But this time all the people were looking at him in admiration.

  Finally the man with the moustache said, “Alvin, I talked to Mrs. Huntley at the hospital just before I came here. She’s very grateful to you kids for what you did. She claims she has a lot of money hidden somewhere around that old house, but she’s forgotten where it is. She says that if anyone finds it, she wants to give you kids five hundred dollars as a reward. If you get a reward, Alvin, our readers will want to know what you plan to do with it.”

  The magnificent brain suddenly stripped gears. Money! The money! He’d forgotten all about the package of money hidden under the stone.

  Alvin went racing down the street. The crowd, caught up in the excitement, ran after him. Inside the fence, Alvin looked back. It was a funny sight. Men and women were struggling across the fence, and while he watched, Mr. Peskin, who was inclined to be fat, got snagged on top of the fence, and it took three other men to get him down.

  By the time Alvin had found the right stone and pulled out the box, the crowd had gathered in front of the old house. He reached in the box and pulled out the sack. He dumped it upside down on the porch steps.

  A gasp went up from the crowd.

  “There’s the money,” announced Alvin. “There’s the money those two men were trying to steal. Mrs. Huntley probably figured it would be safer outside the house, where her birds could watch it, than inside, where everyone thought it was.”

  Now there were a good many more questions. Finally the man with the moustache pushed his way up until he was standing in front of Alvin once more.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Alvin,” he said. “What do you plan to do with the five-hundred-dollar reward?”

  Alvin thought for a moment. Enough money to patent his Paper Slinger!

  He looked up at the sky and saw a bird soaring overhead. The thought came into his mind that perhaps that bird up there was Mr. Huntley looking over his old house. It was at that instant that the magnificent brain went soaring into action, soaring like the bird.

  Someone tugged at his sleeve, and he heard the words, “reward money” again.

  Alvin Fernald, Great Inventor, answered the question quite simply. “I’ve been doing some thinking about gravity,” he said. “If we could get rid of gravity we could fly like a bird. I have an idea for a Super Magnetic Gravity Overcomer. I don’t think Shoie and I and the — and Daphne — would take any money from old Mrs. Huntley. But if she wants to contribute something to science, she might want to buy some magnets and a few other things I’ll need for my new Gravity Overcomer.”

  Shoie and the Pest looked at him. There was surprise in their eyes. There was admiration, too.

  Alvin didn’t notice it. His own eyes were getting glassy. “You see,” he went on, analyzing the problem without even realizing he was giving words to his thoughts, “there are at least three ways to overcome gravity. One is with wings. Another is with balloons filled with gas. I prefer the third way. I plan to fasten those magnets...”

  Author’s Note

  From their own lives, authors often borrow characters, incidents and even names for their fiction. That certainly is true of The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald.

  My wife was born in a small Iowa town named Fernald. Shoie was named for a close friend, a fellow Marine who died in my arms during World War II. Riverton, Indiana, was patterned after Marshalltown, Iowa, where I grew up.

  Mrs. Huntley was a real person who lived alone in a house just down the street from where I lived. The house was haunted — at least that’s what we kids thought. And yes, the real Mrs. Huntley believed her dead husband had returned as a bird. That’s why she fed the birds in her weed-grown yard so regularly.

  Alvin’s personality is a blend of my own three sons, with the characteristics of a couple of my childhood friends mixed in. My sons had an ‘inventing bench’ in our basement which produced a series of wild new products, some useful and others somewhat lethal. Indeed, as I as writing Marvelous Inventions, one son was developing a new howitzer to shoot dried peas, using a mousetrap as a propellant. Another son was working on a fireplace lighter; you pulled a lever, which turned a wheel, which moved a special part from an Erector set, which rubbed a match against a piece of sandpaper and then stuck the lighted match into the fireplace. Obviously a big step up from an ordinary match.

  And yes, when my friends and I were about Alvin’s age we invented some of the marvelous inventions you’ll find in this book.

  At one time during my writing career I became Editor-in-Chief of Popular Mechanics magazine. This also helped me to see into the corners of an inventor’s mind.

  During my career as a writer I have become grateful, most of all, to you, my readers. I have enjoyed your criticisms as well as you compliments. I still receive and exult in correspondence from
readers, now adults, who read Marvelous Inventions when it was first published 45 years ago. I hope you enjoy this special edition as much as they seemed to enjoy the first edition.

  I have written 15 juvenile books, nine in the Alvin Fernald series, three about a rascally kid named Peter Potts, and two nonrelated books. Disney Studios bought the film rights to four of the Alvin Fernald books, and produced two movies based on the characters. I also have written a stageplay about Alvin that is currently being produced in children’s theaters around the country.

  My wife and I live in the forested mountains of western North Carolina, where I enjoy hiking, fine woodworking, reading — and yes, a bit of writing.

  Clifford B. Hicks

  July, 2005

  Published by

  Purple House Press

  PO Box 787, Cynthiana, KY 41031

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1960 by Clifford B. Hicks

  Copyright renewed © 1988 by Clifford B. Hicks

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2006 by Purple House Press

  Afterword copyright © 2005 by Clifford B. Hicks and Purple House Press

  The publisher sincerely thanks Charles Geer for the new cover artwork.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hicks, Clifford B.

  The marvelous inventions of Alvin Fernald / by Clifford B. Hicks;

  illustrated by Charles Geer. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Despite the help of the Pest, some amazing inventions, and his best friend, Shoie, Alvin still wonders whether even he can solve the Huntley mystery.

  [1. Inventions—Fiction. 2. Mystery and detective stories.]

  I. Geer, Charles, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.H5316Mar 2006

  [Fic]—dc22 2006000735

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