Spot those signposts!

     My father hid in the hold for six days and nights. Twice he was nearly caught when the ship stopped to take on more cargo.

     But at last he heard a sailor say that the next port would be Cranberry and that they’d be unloading the wheat there. My father knew that the sailors would send him home if they caught him, so he looked in his knapsack and took out a rubber band and the empty grain bag with the label saying “Cranberry.”

     At the last moment my father got inside the bag, knapsack and all, folded the top of the bag inside, and put the rubber band around the top. He didn’t look just exactly like the other bags, but it was the best he could do.

     Soon the sailors came to unload. They lowered a big net into the hold and began moving the bags of wheat. Suddenly one sailor yelled, “Great Scott! This is the strangest bag of wheat I’ve ever seen! It’s all lumpy-like, but the label says it’s to go to Cranberry.”

     The other sailors looked at the bag too, and my father, who was in the bag, of course, tried even harder to look like a bag of wheat. Then another sailor felt the bag and he just happened to get hold of my father’s elbow. “I know what this is,” he said. “This is a bag of dried corn on the cob,” and he dumped my father into the big net along with the bags of wheat.

     This all happened in the late afternoon, so late that the merchant in Cranberry who had ordered the wheat didn’t count his bags until the next morning. (He was a very punctual man, and never late for dinner.) The sailors told the captain, and the captain wrote down on a piece of paper, that they had delivered one hundred and sixty bags of wheat and one bag of dried corn on the cob. They left the piece of paper for the merchant and sailed away that evening.

     My father heard later that the merchant spent the whole next day counting and recounting the bags and feeling each one trying to find the bag of dried corn on the cob. He never found it because as soon as it was dark my father climbed out of the bag, folded it up and put it back in his knapsack. He walked along the shore to a nice sandy place and lay down to sleep.