Flat Stanley - Jeff Brown [2]
Mr. Lambchop rolled Stanley up again and they set out for home. It rained quite hard while they were on the way. Stanley, of course, hardly got wet at all, just around the edges, but Arthur got soaked.
Late that night Mr. and Mrs. Lambchop heard a noise out in the living room. They found Arthur lying on the floor near the bookcase. He had piled a great many volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on top of himself.
“Put some more on me,” Arthur said when he saw them. “Don’t just stand there. Help me.”
Mr. and Mrs. Lambchop sent him back to bed, but the next morning they spoke to Stanley. “Arthur can’t help being jealous,” they said. “Be nice to him. You’re his big brother, after all.”
The next Sunday, Stanley and Arthur went to the park by themselves. The day was sunny, but windy too, and many older boys were flying beautiful, enormous kites with long tails, made in all the colors of the rainbow.
Arthur sighed. “Someday,” he said, “I will have a big kite, and I will win a kite-flying contest and be famous like everyone else. Nobody knows who I am these days.”
Stanley remembered what his parents had said. He went to a boy whose kite was broken and borrowed a large spool of string.
“You can fly me, Arthur,” he said. “Come on.”
He attached the string to himself and gave Arthur the spool to hold. He ran lightly across the grass, sideways to get up speed, and then he turned to meet the breeze.
Up, up, up … UP! went Stanley, being a kite.
He knew just how to manage on the gusts of wind. He faced full into the wind if he wanted to rise, and let it take him from behind when he wanted speed. He had only to turn his thin edge to the wind, carefully, a little at a time, so that it did not hold him, and then he would slip gracefully down toward the earth again.
Arthur let out all the string, and Stanley soared high above the trees, a beautiful sight in his red shirt and blue trousers against the pale blue sky.
Everyone in the park stood still to watch.
Stanley swooped right and then left in long, matched swoops. He held his arms by his sides and zoomed at the ground like a rocket and curved up again toward the sun. He side-slipped and circled, and made figure eights and crosses and a star.
Nobody has ever flown the way Stanley Lambchop flew that day. Probably no one ever will again.
After a while, of course, people grew tired of watching, and Arthur got tired of running about with the empty spool. Stanley went right on, though, showing off.
Three boys came up to Arthur and invited him to join them for a hot dog and some soda pop. Arthur left the spool wedged in the fork of a tree. He did not notice, while he was eating the hot dog, that the wind was blowing the string and tangling it about the tree.
The string got shorter and shorter, but Stanley did not realize how low he was until leaves brushed his feet, and then it was too late. He got stuck in the branches. Fifteen minutes passed before Arthur and the other boys heard his cries and climbed up to set him free.
Stanley would not speak to his brother that evening, and at bedtime, even though Arthur had apologized, he was still cross.
Alone with Mr. Lambchop in the living room, Mrs. Lambchop sighed and shook her head. “You’re at the office all day, having fun,” she said. “You don’t realize what I go through with the boys. They’re very difficult.”
“Kids are like that,” Mr. Lambchop said. “Phases. Be patient, dear.”
4
The Museum Thieves
Mr. and Mrs. O. Jay Dart lived in the apartment above the Lambchops. Mr. Dart was an important man, the director of the Famous Museum of Art downtown in the city.
Stanley Lambchop had noticed in the elevator that Mr. Dart, who was ordinarily a cheerful man, had become quite gloomy, but he had no idea what the reason was. And then at breakfast one morning he heard Mr. and Mrs. Lambchop talking about Mr. Dart.
“I see,” said Mr. Lambchop, reading the paper over his coffee cup, “that still another painting has been stolen from the Famous Museum. It says here that Mr. O. Jay Dart, the director,