Read Rufus M. for Free Online

He couldn't see the invisible man but the invisible man could probably see him and would not want him to get too close while he was playing. Rufus sat down on the edge of a chair and watched.
    Up and down, up and down, hopped the keys.
Clinkety-clinkety! Poompty-poomp!
    There came a little pause in the music.
    "Hey, mister," said Rufus, in case it were a man and not a boy after all.
    Nobody answered him. The music began again. This piano player was wonderful.
Poompty-poomp!
Rufus stared hard, watching the keys hop up and down all along the keyboard from one end to the other. At last Rufus stood up. He cautiously approached the piano. Now he was going to touch the invisible piano player's hand, if possible.
    Rufus reached out his chubby fist. The keys kept hopping up and down very fast and Rufus swooped his hand up and down the keyboard but he did not feel anybody's hand there. It was a very scary thing to do, feeling for an invisible piano player's hands.
    "I see you, fella," said Rufus, to reassure himself. Since there was no answer to this remark, only that same uncanny hopping up and down of the keys, Rufus began to feel bolder. He tapped where he supposed a shoulder would be if a man were sitting there. He felt nothing. He quickly touched the stool, ran his chubby hand all over it. He still felt nothing. Rufus's spine tingled with excitement. He retreated across the room and stood under a big rubber plant. He had put his hand right through an invisible man! That was proof all right. An invisible man cannot be felt! He cannot be seen and he cannot be felt! He is like thin air and you can walk right through him or hundreds like him and never even know it.

    Wait till he told Jane that! All the time she was going around thinking an invisible person can be felt.
That's not so. What would be the advantage anyway of being invisible if people bumped into you all the time?
Rufus thought in disgust.
    Poompety, poompety!
From beneath the rubber plant Rufus watched the invisible musician, thinking of the hands that were making the keys hop up and down so fast, never forgetting a note.
A Paderooski all right,
thought Rufus.
An invisible Paderooski,
and he imagined him tossing his hair off his forehead.
    All of a sudden in rushed Mrs. Saybolt. She dashed over to the piano and then she dashed out of the room again, fortunately without seeing Rufus. But when she left, the invisible man began to play faster. Goodness, how fast he went! Rufus got dizzy watching the keys pop up and down.
    Then Mrs. Saybolt raced back into the room. Rufus guessed she did not like the fast way the invisible man was playing. Rufus could not see what she did to him, perhaps she rapped his knuckles, but when she left this time, the man (Rufus decided it must be a man; no boy could play that fast) began to play very slowly.
Poo-oomp-ty, poo-mp.
Instead of pelting down like raindrops, the keys rose and sank so slowly you would almost think there was another invisible man inside the piano trying to hold the notes back.
    "Play slow, too, don't you?" said Rufus, ruminating on this.
    Once he had gone to the moving pictures. He had seen pictures of athletes racing and of a ballgame. Then they did tricks with the movie. They made it go lickety-cut. The racers looked as though they were running right out of the screen at you and you couldn't help ducking so they wouldn't step on you. Then they made the movie run very slowly. The runners looked as though they could scarcely pick up their feet, as though they were made of lead. And then they made the movie go backward. The runners were whisked back to their starting point, and in the baseball game the ball was sucked right back into the pitcher's mitt. It was quite miraculous.
    Now this invisible piano player was going so slowly that maybe the next thing he would do would be to play backward. He had played fast and he had played slow; also just right. But would he play backward, Rufus wondered. Could he?

    "Hey, fella," he