Pumpkin Jack and the Fountain

The Island

It's an almost empty train car with only three passengers. First of all, there's Mayor Jack. He has light blue eyes and a clean-shaven face with a crooked nose due to a pelican accident when he was younger and crab-fishing for a living. He's fairly spry four his stoutness of body and looks and acts younger than the five decades or so he has spent upon the Island. He had to head to the mainland to get something for his wife for her birthday, which as any good husband knows (and Mayor Jack is indeed a good one) must be something bought from away.

It cannot be just something he bought when he wandered down to, say, the local hardware store. Nor even the odds-and-ends shop that old Aunt Corrinne runs in her place at the tail end of Scarecrow Corners, even though the sort of Stuff that you find in Aunt Corrinne's shop usually can't be found anywhere else. He must go to the mainland to get it.

The next passenger on the train today is Mr. Arthur P Gonfrey, the Third. Now, Arthur P., as he likes to be called, looks the part of someone with "the Third" after their name. He wears those biggish, round wire-rimmed glasses, a serious (as if there ever was another sort of variety for him) mustache of inciting-envy-in-walruses proportions, a very ample waistcoat to allow for his very ample waist and a newspaper kept tucked so carefully at Just The Right Angle and appears as if "harrumph!" were his standard greeting for everyone he meets.

This might lead a person who has been brought up around similar Arthur P's to think of him as some sort of straight-laced, stuffy person who grumbles a lot and is Not So Good with children.

However, Arthur P is the history teacher in the school at Scarecrow Corners. He is well known in the Land for his love of a good story or joke, even if he is the one it's being played upon. He has a habit of starting a story and winding into it most eloquently in his classroom with every child rapt in their listening when the sudden chime of the class bell tell them that, sadly, they must put off finding out the end of the Big Mouthed Frog or the Raisin Pie story for another day. The twinkle in his eye should let any alert person know that here is someone who knows how to play jacks or climb a tree or comfort a stuffed animal injured in The Desk Wars or make a fort where he will make a Last Stand Against The Ravening Hordes.

The third and final passenger today is Turner Jake, Mr. Boot's assistant. His name is actually Jake Turner, but he is not only the assistant at Mr. Boot's book store in Turkeytown, he's also the fastest reader on the Island. The kids say he can read as fast as you can flip the pages, which is why they flipped his name around. He's skinny, has a skinny long ponytail and a skinny long beard and a skinny long face, usually half-hidden by a baseball cap. Turner Jake is by far the oldest inhabitant of the Island and seems to have been around since the beginning of it when the villages were just forming.

Mayor Jack is the most important person in our story today. He is, after all, Mayor Jack of Scarecrow Corners. Scarecrow Corners is the largest village in the Land of Fall, not to be confused with other Corner villages which have only one or two corners, and not very Corner-ish ones at that.

It has electric street lamps and even a large white marble round fountain in the town square, usually used by horses as a sort of drinking fountain. It is also used by children on a warm day to look for pennies and wonder whether their goldfish would like the pond (most don't).

Yes, horses. There are no cars allowed on the Land of Fall, mostly because it's a small place and you can usually walk from one part to another within a goodly amount of time. It is also because cars tend to be rather smelly and cause people to rush about fastly here and fastly there and no one is interested in doing anything fastly on the Island, thank you very much.