"Robert F. Young - Little Red Schoolhouse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

All Ronnie wanted was to return to his beautiful valley – but where on
Earth was it?

Little
Red
Schoolhouse

By ROBERT F. YOUNG
Illustrated by JOHNS

RONNIE avoided the towns. Whenever he came to one, he made a wide detour,
coming back to the tracks miles beyond it. He knew that none of the towns was
the village he was looking for. The towns were bright and new, with white
streets and brisk cars and big factories, while the village in the valley was
old and quiet, with rustic houses and shaded streets and a little red
schoolhouse.
Just before you came to the village, there was a grove of friendly maples
with a brook winding through them. Ronnie remembered the brook best of all. In
summer, he had waded in it many times, and he had skated on it in winter; in
autumn, he had watched the fallen leaves, like Lilliputian ships, sail down it
to the sea.
Ronnie had been sure that he could find the valley, but the tracks went on
and on, through fields and hills and forests, and no familiar valley appeared.
After a while, he began to wonder if he had chosen the right tracks, if the
shining rails he followed day after day were really the rails along which the
stork train had borne him to the city and to his parents.
He kept telling himself that he wasn’t truly running away from home, that
the aseptic three-room apartment in which he had lived for a month wasn’t his
home at all, any more than the pallid man and woman who had met him at the
bustling terminal were his mother and father.
His real home was in the valley, in the old rambling house at the outskirts
of the village; and his real parents were Nora and Jim, who had cared for him
throughout his boyhood. True, they had never claimed to be his parents, but
they were just the same, even if they put him on the stork train when he was
asleep and sent him to the city to live with the pallid people who pretended
to be his parents.
Nights, when the shadows came too close around his campfire, he thought of
Nora and Jim and the village. But most of all, he thought of Miss Smith, the
teacher in the little red schoolhouse. Thinking of Miss Smith made him brave,
and he lay back in the summer grass beneath the summer stars and he wasn’t
scared at all.

ON THE fourth morning, he ate the last of the condensed food tablets he had
stolen from his parents’ apartment. He knew that he had to find the valley
soon and he walked faster along the tracks, staring eagerly ahead for the
first familiar landmark—a remembered tree or a nostalgic hilltop, the silvery
twinkle of a winding brook. The trip on the stork train had been his first
trip into the outside world, so he was not certain how the valley would look,
coming into it from the surrounding countryside; nevertheless, he was sure he
would recognize it quickly.