The Dragon Lantern by Alan Gratz Page A

a little thin, with long, curly blond hair and a bushy blond mustache and goatee. His eyes were beady and sky blue, and his nose was long and sharp. He wore the dark blue jacket of the United Nations Steam Cavalry, with a red neckerchief tied tight around his collar and gold buttons down his front in two curving lines. A yellow stripe ran down the outside seam of his light blue steam-cavalry pants, and the shiny black boots he wore went all the way up to his knees.
    Custer ran a hand down his mustache to smooth it. “Gonna have to tell me how you managed that one, son.”
    â€œLater,” Mrs. Moffett said. Her eyes were dark and cold. “There’ll be plenty of time for that on the road.”
    â€œWe’re going home?” Archie asked.
    â€œNo. You’re going after the Dragon Lantern,” Mrs. Moffett told him.
    â€œBut how do we know where she’s going? The fox girl, I mean?”
    â€œWe checked all the outgoing airships,” Hachi said. “She wasn’t on any of them.”
    â€œSo we got the idea to check the trains,” Fergus said.
    â€œShe took a train?” Archie asked. “From Cahokia on the Plains?”
    â€œShe bought her ticket with this,” Hachi said. She put a stack of dollar-sized slips of newspaper in Archie’s hand.
    â€œTicket seller swore up and down she’d given him United Nations money with Hiawatha’s picture on it,” Fergus said. “Must have made him think that’s what he was seeing. He couldn’t believe it when he opened his till and pulled out scrap paper.”
    â€œWhy not take an airship wherever she was going?”
    â€œWell, for one thing, we were checking them all,” Hachi said. “And she had to know that.”
    â€œAnd if you’re going to go west this time of year,” Fergus said, “you most definitely do not want to be taking an airship.”
    Custer nodded. “Tornado season.” He picked an invisible piece of lint off his sleeve and gave it a brush. “Rip an airship right outta the sky. Want to get as far as the coast, you take a train to Cheyenne and catch it moving south. From there you gotta take an airship again. Leastways until they finish that Transcontinental Railroad.”
    â€œThe three of you will leave right away on Captain Custer’s steam man,” Mrs. Moffett told them. “I will follow by train. Captain Custer assures me you can catch her train before it reaches Kansa City.”
    â€œI’m not going,” said Hachi.
    â€œWhat?” Archie said.
    â€œI’m not going,” said Hachi again. “The Pinkertons found Blavatsky in Louisiana. Her name is Helena Blavatsky, and she’s set herself up as some kind of magician at the court of Queen Theodosia. I bought us three tickets to New Orleans on the next steamboat down the Mississippi.”
    â€œThree tickets?” Archie asked. He pulled Hachi aside, and Fergus and Mr. Rivets came with them. “Hachi, we can’t go to New Orleans now! We have to go after the fox girl and get the Dragon Lantern back.”
    â€œI went after it once, and I brought it back,” Hachi said.
    Archie reddened. “Oh. So it’s my fault it got stolen, is that it?”
    Hachi softened. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean that I was willing to do this when I didn’t know where Blavatsky was. Now I do.”
    â€œBut we have a job to do. We have a responsibility to the Septemberist Society. We’re the League of Seven. ”
    â€œYou and Mrs. Moffett keep saying that,” Hachi told him. “But where are the other four?”
    Archie glanced imploringly at Fergus, but he looked away.
    â€œLook, Archie, we may be a League of Seven, or we might not be,” Hachi said. “But I’ve waited my whole life for a lead like this, and I’m not going to put it off for a second. Not for the League of Seven, and not for any Septemberist