NYS Grade 8 Practice Test 2

The Towpath at Night

¹The fever took Gideon on the third day out of Rochester, and by the fourth he could not stand. Captain Bell laid him on a blanket in the cabin of the Kestrel, where the heat from the little stove made the air shimmer, and then he climbed up to the deck and looked down at Hiram the way a man looks at a tool he has never used before.

²"Your brother says you know the mules," the captain said.

³"Yes, sir." Hiram was thirteen. He had walked the towpath beside Gideon for two seasons, carrying the lantern, fetching water, sometimes holding the lead rope while Gideon ate. He had never driven the team alone, and he had certainly never driven it at night.

⁴Captain Bell chewed the stem of his pipe. "We've got sixty barrels of flour bound for Albany and a buyer waiting who doesn't care whose brother is sick." He paused. "Two hours on. Then we'll see."

⁵Then we'll see. Hiram heard the doubt in those words as clearly as if the captain had shouted them. He climbed down to the towpath, where Jubilee and Duke stood waiting in their harness, their long ears turning toward him. Jubilee was the older of the two, a gray mule with a scarred shoulder and opinions about everything. Duke followed wherever Jubilee went.

⁶The first hour passed without trouble. The towline stretched from the mules' harness back to the bow of the boat, rising and dipping with each step, and the Kestrel slid along behind them as smooth as a thought. Frogs called from the ditches. Now and then a farmhouse window glowed across a field and slipped away again. Hiram walked at Jubilee's head with the lantern swinging from his hand and began, just slightly, to breathe.

⁷Then he heard the horn.

⁸It came from ahead, around a long bend: three bright notes, the signal of a packet boat. Packets carried passengers, not freight, and they moved fast, with fresh horses and drivers who liked to show off. By custom, the slower freight boat gave way. Gideon had explained the procedure a dozen times, usually while Hiram was only half listening. The freight team was to stop on the outside of the path. The steersman was to swing the boat toward the far bank. And the driver was to let the towline go slack, so slack that it sank to the bottom of the canal, and the packet could glide right over it.

⁹It sounded simple when Gideon said it. It did not feel simple now, with the packet's lanterns swinging into view, much larger and closer than Hiram had expected, and its horses coming on at a trot.

¹⁰"Whoa," Hiram said. "Whoa, Jubilee."

¹¹Jubilee did not whoa. She tossed her head and sidestepped toward the water, and Duke, as always, followed her. The towline jerked tight. Behind him Hiram heard Captain Bell shout something from the stern, but the words were lost in the jingle of the packet horses' harness and the voice of their driver, a tall boy in a straw hat, yelling, "Drop your line! Drop it, you're in the way!"

¹²Hiram's heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth. For one wild moment he thought of grabbing the towline with both hands and hauling on it, as if he could hold the whole boat by himself. Then he remembered something else Gideon used to say, usually with a laugh: A mule can't hear you if you're louder than she is.

¹³Hiram lowered his voice almost to a whisper. He set the lantern on the ground, put his hand flat on Jubilee's scarred shoulder, and leaned his weight against her, gently, the way he would lean on a door that stuck. "Easy, old girl," he murmured, "nobody's going anywhere." He felt the muscles under her hide twitch, then loosen. A moment later she stopped, and Duke stopped beside her.

¹⁴Hiram unhooked the towline from the harness bar and let it run through his fingers. Out on the water, he heard it slap and then go quiet as it sank. The Kestrel drifted toward the far bank, and the packet boat swept past, its cabin windows bright, its passengers' faces turned toward the dark fields without the faintest idea that anything had nearly gone wrong. The boy in the straw hat did not look at Hiram at all.

¹⁵When the packet's lantern had shrunk to a spark around the next bend, Hiram hauled the dripping line back up, hooked it to the bar, and clucked to the mules. They leaned into their collars, and the Kestrel began to move again.

¹⁶He walked the rest of those two hours and then two more, and nobody came to relieve him. At dawn, when they tied up at a lock to wait their turn, Captain Bell climbed down onto the towpath. He looked at the mules, which were calmly cropping grass along the bank. He looked at the wet towline coiled neatly beside them. Then he looked at Hiram.

¹⁷"Packet came through last night," the captain said.

¹⁸"Yes, sir."

¹⁹"Line's not tangled."

²⁰"No, sir."

²¹Captain Bell was quiet for a while. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at the cabin, where Gideon lay sleeping. "When your brother wakes," he said, "you tell him he taught you right." He started to turn away, then stopped. "And tell him there's no hurry getting up."