"Michael Thomas - The Time Thief" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thomas Michael)

MICHAEL THOMAS

THE TIME THIEF

THE STRANGER APPEARED at the crest of the knoll.

Mark and his friends, playing tag through the carcass of the abandoned Model T,
did not see or hear him approach, but Mark gradually sensed the man's presence
the way a disturbing thought lingers at the edge of consciousness before
bursting full blown into the mind.

The steering wheel was safe and Mark rested his hands on the wheel while the
Mellon twins, their scrawny red-headed bodies looking like waltzing carrots,
scampered away from pudgy and flat- footed Joey Hanson. Soot from the blast
furnaces coated the rusting car, turning Mark's fingertips black where they
touched the wheel. He wiped his hands on his knickers, then with a spidery kind
of feeling knew that he was being watched, caught at playing hookey from the
eighth grade even before he looked up and saw the man. At first the stranger was
just a silhouette on the hill framed by the saw-toothed battlements of the Ford
Rouge Plant. Black smoke from the coke ovens momentarily blotted out the sun,
transforming the man from silhouette to hawk-faced stranger. As Joey and the
Mellon twins climbed through the car to Mark's side, he pointed at the man and
they watched as the stranger slowly descended the hill toward them.

"Service Department?" Joey whispered.

"Must be," Pete Mellon said.

"Hobo," Mark guessed.

"Must be," Paul Mellon said.

The man reached the foot of the hill, stuck his hands on his hips and grinned at
the boys. He wore a brown leather aviator's jacket, threadbare and ripped, and a
hat with the brim shadowing his forehead. He was thin with deep-set eyes and
sunken cheeks, convincing Mark that he was indeed a hobo, probably having just
ridden the rails from out west to find work at the Ford Plant.

"Excuse me, boys, but is that the Ford Rouge Plant?" the stranger asked.

"That's Ford's," Mark said.

The Mellon twins stifled laughter over anyone being so dumb as to not know
Ford's.

"They hirin?" the man asked.

"Maybe," Joey said. "But they'll only start you at $6 a day."