Читать онлайн «Jack Frost»
Автор Уильям Джойс
Contents
Chapter One
A Nose Is Nearly Nipped
Chapter Two
Less Than Early Frost
Chapter Three
Pitch Is No Longer at Bat . . . for Now
Chapter Four
An Unusual Pair of Tails
Chapter Five
The Guardians Begin to Guard
Chapter Six
Misgivings on Giving Gifts
Chapter Seven
A Yuletide Most Untidy
Chapter Eight
The Everlasting Lip Touch
Chapter Nine
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Whisper
Chapter Ten
What’s Good for the Goose Is Grand for the Ganderly
Chapter Eleven
How to Get the Goose
Chapter Twelve
The Greatest Library the World Has Never Known
Chapter Thirteen
In Which We Get to the Root of the Matter
Chapter Fourteen
Anger Management
Chapter Fifteen
The Pause that Thickens (the Plot, that Is)
Chapter Sixteen
The Worm Turns Inside Out
Chapter Seventeen
Jack Is Nimble; Pitch Now Trembles
Chapter Eighteen
One for All and All Against One
Chapter Nineteen
The Moon Is Full
Chapter Twenty
Between the Tick and the Tock
Chapter Twenty-One
Like an Elephant Stamps a Flea
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Greatest Strength
Chapter Twenty-Three
Once Upon a Time . . .
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mind Over What Matters
Chapter Twenty-Five
No Mercy
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sadness Into Snow
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Snag, Smush, and Whittle
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Time and Tide
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For my editor,
Caitlyn,
my most stalwart
Guardian and friend
C
HAPTER
O
NE
A Nose Is Nearly Nipped
CHRISTMAS EVE WAS JACK’S favorite day of the year. And for the last few decades or so, he had spent that day in his favorite place: his tree.
Jack’s tree was the oldest in Central Park. A thousand people, maybe more, walked past it daily and had done so for many years, but not one of them knew that Jackson Overland Frost was very often living inside it.
This tree was much older than the park it stood in and was even older than the city of New York itself. It was a sapling when the city was still called New Amsterdam and there were more Native Americans than settlers living in the swampy forests of Manhattan Island.
By this Christmas Eve 1933, millions of people lived within shouting distance of this noble oak, but its secrets were still more absolute than they had been when flintlocks or bows and arrows were the order of the day.
A heavy snow was falling over all of the East. It muffled the sounds of the city, though New York was already quieting down. People had finished shopping and were heading to their apartments and penthouses and homes. Jack, however, could feel the thrum of excitement from the children. Sleep would be difficult for them. It was, after all, Christmas Eve.
The inside of Jack’s tree contained more than a dozen rooms within its majestic hollow, and the furnishings were a mix of pieces from several centuries: spears, shields, stools, and pottery from the various tribes of the Iroquois, along with colonial tables and ornate chairs and couches brought over from Europe. There was a tomahawk from a chief of the Algonquians. The jacket that George Washington had worn the night he crossed the Delaware was hanging on a hat rack that had belonged to Teddy Roosevelt. This tree, like all the tree-houses Jack called home, was a handsome, comfortable clutter of the region’s history.
