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Title: Peck's Bad Boy in an airship
Author: Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
Language: English
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PECK’S BAD BOY IN AN AIRSHIP
[Illustration: “Take That from Your Little Hennery.”]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peck’s Bad Boy
in an Airship
By Hon. Geo. W. Peck
Author of Peck’s Bad Boy, Peck’s Bad Boy Abroad, Peck’s Bad Boy
With the Circus, Peck’s Bad Boy With the Cowboys, Etc.
-------
Humorous and Interesting
A story relating the adventures of Peck’s Bad Boy and His
Pa who are sent to Europe to investigate airships with an
idea of using them in the United States Navy. Tells of their
adventures in Europe also in South Africa where the airship
is used in hunting wild animals.
-------
Illustrated by Charles Lederer
The Celebrated Illustrator and Cartoonist
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CHICAGO
STANTON and VAN VLIET CO.
PUBLISHERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1908
By W. G. CHAPMAN
-------
Copyright, 1908
By THOMPSON & THOMAS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS.
----------
CHAPTER I.
The Bad Boy Wants to Be an Orphan—The Bad Boy Goes to an Orphan
Asylum—The Government Gives the Bad Boy’s Pa an Appointment to
Travel Over the World and Get Information About Airships,
Dirigible Balloons and Everything to Help Our Government Know
What Other Governments are Doing in Case of War 15
CHAPTER II.
No Encouragement for Inventive Genius in Orphan Home—The Boy
Uses His New Invention, a Patent Clothes Wringer, in Milking 28
CHAPTER III.
The Boy Escapes from Orphan Asylum—The Boy and His Chum Had Red
Letter Days—The Boy is Adopted by New Friends 42
CHAPTER IV.
A Bad Railroad Wreck—The Boy Contrasts Their Ride to One in a
Parlor Car—The Lawyer is the Greatest Man on Earth—The Boy
Settles His Claim for $20 55
CHAPTER V.
The Bad Boy Leaves St. Louis in a Balloon—The Boy Makes a Trip
to San Francisco and Joins Evans’ Fleet—The Police Arrest Boy
and Tie Up Balloon 67
CHAPTER VI.
The Balloon Lands in Delaware—The Boy Visits the
Battleships—They Scour the Boy With a Piece of Brick and Some
Laundry Soap—The Boy Investigates the Mechanism of the
Battleships—The Boy Goes With the Ships as a Mascot 78
CHAPTER VII.
A Storm Comes from the Coast of Cuba—Everyone Goes to Sleep on
the Ship Except the Watchman and Pilot—The Bad Boy is Put in
the Dungeon—The Captain Says to Throw the Boy Overboard to
Feed the Sharks 91
CHAPTER VIII.
The Boy Dresses Up in His Sunday Clothes and Tells the Captain
He is Ready to Die—The Crew Throw a Steer Overboard to Feed a
School of Sharks—The Boy Produces His New Electric Battery—The
Bad Boy Makes a Trip to France to Meet His Pa 104
CHAPTER IX.
The Bad Boy Arrives in France—The Boy’s Pa is Suspected of Being
an Anarchist—The Boy Finds Pa Seated at a Large Table Bragging
About America—He Told Them the Men in America Were All
Millionaires and Unmarried 131
CHAPTER X.
Pa Had the Hardest Time of His Life in Paris—Pa Drinks Some Goat
Milk Which Gives Him Ptomaine Poison in His Inside Works—Pa
Attends the Airship Club in the Country—Pa Draws on American
Government for $10,000 145
CHAPTER XI.
The Boy and His Pa Leave France and Go to Germany, Where They
Buy an Airship—They Get the Airship Safely Landed—Pa and the
Boy With the Airship Start for South Africa—Pa Shows the Men
What Power He Has Over the Animal Kingdom 157
CHAPTER XII.
All Kinds of Climates in South Africa—Pa Hires Men to Capture
Wild Animals—The Boy and His Pa Capture Some Tigers and a Big
Lion—They Have a Narrow Escape from a Rhinoceros 170
CHAPTER XIII.
Pa Was a Hero After Capturing Two Tigers and a Lion—Pa Had an
Old Negro With Sixty Wives Working for Him—Pa Makes His Escape
in Safety—Pa Goes to Catch Hippopotamusses 181
CHAPTER XIV.
Pa Was Blackmailed and Scared Out of Lots of Money—Pa Teaching
the Natives to Speak English—Pa Said the Natives Acted Like
Human Beings—Pa Buys Some Animals in the Jungle 194
CHAPTER XV.
The Idea of Airships is All Right in Theory, but They are Never
Going to Be a Reliable Success—Pa Drowns the Lions Out With
Gas—The Bad Boy and His Pa Capture a Couple of Lions—Pa Moves
Camp to Hunt Gorillas 207
CHAPTER XVI.
The Boy’s Pa Shows Bravery in the Jungles in Africa—Four
Gorillas Chase Pa—The Boy and His Pa Don’t Sleep Much at
Night—The Boy Discovers a Marsh Full of Wild Buffaloes 220
CHAPTER XVII.
The Boy’s Experience With an African Buffalo—The Boy’s Pa Shoots
Roman Candles to Scare the Buffaloes—The Boy’s Pa Tames the
Wild Animals 234
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Boy and His Pa Start for the Coast in an Airship—Pa Saluted
the Crowd as We Passed Over Them—The Airship Lands Amid a
Savage Tribe—The King of the Tribe Escorts Pa and the Boy to
the Palace 246
CHAPTER XIX.
The Boy’s Pa Becomes King over the Negroes—Pa Shows the Natives
How to Dig Wells—Pa Teaches the Natives to become Soldiers—The
Boy Uses a Dozen Nigger Chasers and Some Roman Candles—The
Boy, His Pa and the Natives Assist at the 4th of July
Celebration 258
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ILLUSTRATIONS.
----------
Gee, My Ideas of an Orphan Home Got a Shock.
The Way Freshmen Do in College When They’re Being Murdered.
Gosh, But I Never Had Such an Excursion.
Grabbed the Balloon Rope and Gave it a Hitch Around the Pole.
Any Man That Lays Hands on the Government Mail Can Be
Imprisoned for Life for Treason.
Hit the Chief of Police With a Bottle.
They Pulled Me Through the Forty-Foot Gun to Swab it Out.
When it Exploded the Jap Was the Scaredest Person I Ever Saw.
The Boss of the Boat Ordered Me Pulled Out With a Boat Hook.
I Am Thy Father’s Ghost—Come on in, the Water’s Fine.
The Captain Got Upon a Chair and Pulled a Revolver and Was
Going to Shoot.
I Gave Him a Squeeze That Sent a Shock Through Him That
Loosened His Teeth.
Pa’s Face Was Scratched So They Sent Him to the Pest House.
After Pa Had Been Ducked in the Fountain They Charged for Two
Ducks He Killed by Falling on Them.
The Fireworks Went Off. The Woman Threw a Fit and Pa Raised
Out of the Smoke.
Up She Went With the Inventor Steering and Pa Hanging on for
Dear Life.
Pa Gave a Honk Honk Like an Auto, But the Lion Wasn’t
Frightened So You Would Notice.
When Pa Found the Snake Coiled Up on His Blanket He Threw a
Fit.
Looking Him Square in the Face I began to Chant,
Ene-Mene-Miny-Mo.
Pa Astride of a Zebra, Has Frightened the Elephants Into a
Stampede by Playing “A Hot Time” on a Mouth Organ.
Pa Made a Lunge and Fell on Top of the Little Elephant, Which
Began to Make a Noise Like a Baby.
“There’s Your Lions, About a Dozen, Captured Down in That
Hole; Help Yourselves,” Said Pa.
“Get in There, You Measly Cur Dog,” Said Pa, Kicking the Big
Lion at Every Jump.
Pa Stopped the Music and Repeated an Old Democratic Speech of
His, and They Acted Just Like a Caucus.
All He Had to Do Was Play “Supper is Now Ready in the Dining
Car.”
Some of Those Negroes are Running Yet, and Will, No Doubt,
Come Out at Cairo, Egypt.
Pa Had to Put His Foot on Their Necks and Acknowledge Him
Their King and Protector.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peck’s Bad Boy in an Airship.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I.
The Bad Boy Wants to Be an Orphan—The Bad Boy Goes to an Orphan
Asylum—The Government Gives the Bad Boy’s Pa an Appointment to
Travel Over the World and Get Information About Airships,
Dirigible Balloons and Everything to Help Our Government Know
What Other Governments Are Doing in Case of War.
I have always wanted to be an orphan and I guess now I have got my wish.
I have watched orphans a whole lot and they have seemed to me to have
the easiest job outside of politics.
To see a good mess of orphans at an Orphan Asylum, with no parents to
butt in and interfere with your enjoyment has seemed to me to be an
ideal existence.
When a boy has a father that he has to watch constantly to keep him from
going wrong he has no time to have any fun, but to belong to a syndicate
of orphans, with an easy old maid matron to look after the whole bunch,
an individual orphan who has ginger in him can have the time of his
young life. At least that is the way it has always seemed to me.
They set on the food at an orphanage, and if you have a pretty good
reach, you can get enough corralled around your plate to keep the wolf
from the door, and when it comes to clothes, you don’t have to go to a
tailor, or a hand me down store, and take something you don’t want
because it is cheap, but you take any clothes that are sent in by
charitable people, which have been worn enough so there is no style
about them, and no newness to wear off by rolling in the grass, and you
put them on and let it go at that, if they do smell of moth balls.
Pa has skipped and I am left alone and I shall enter as a freshman in an
Orphan Asylum, and later go out into the world and travel on my shape.
Pa took me to Washington and for a week he was visiting the different
Departments, and nights he would talk in his sleep about air ships and
balloons, and forts and battleships, and about going abroad, until I
thought he was getting nutty.
One day he called me up to our room in the hotel and after locking the
door, and plugging up the keyhole with chewed paper he said: “Now,
Hennery, I want you to listen right out loud. The government has given
me an appointment to travel over the world and get information about air
ships, divagable balloons, and everything that will help our government
to know what other governments are doing in inventing things to be used
in case of war. I am to be the Billy Pinkerton of the War Department and
shall have to spy in other governments, and I am to be the traveling
diplomat of the government, and jolly all nations, and find out how
things are running everywhere.
“You will have to stay home this time because you would be a dead give
away, so I will send you to a nice orphan home where you will be taught
to work, and where guards will keep you on the inside of the fence, and
put you to bed in a straight jacket if you play any of your jokes, see?”
and Pa gave me a ticket to an orphans’ home, and a letter of
introduction to the matron and the next day I was an inmate, with all
the degrees coming to me. What do you think of that, and Pa on the
ocean, with a government commission in his pocket?
Gee, but my ideas of an orphans’ home got a shock when I arrived at the
station where the orphans’ home was located. I thought there would be a
carriage at the train to meet me, and a nice lady dressed in white with
a cap on her head, to take me in her arms and hug me, and say, “Poor
little boy, I will be a sister to you,” but there was no reception
committee, and I had to walk a mile with my telescope valise, and when I
found the place and went in the door, to present my letter to the
matron, a man with a scar on his face, and one eye gone, met me and
looked over my papers, and went, one eye on me, and called an assistant
private and told him to take me and give me the first or entered
apprentice degree.
[Illustration: Gee, My Ideas of an Orphan Home Got a Shock.]
The private took me by the wrist and gave me a jerk and landed me in the
laundry, and told me to strip off, and when I had removed my clothes and
folded them and laid them on a table, he took the clothes away from me,
and then told me to climb into a laundry tub, and he turned cold water
on me and gave me a bar of yellow laundry soap, and after I had lathered
myself he took a scrubbing brush, such as floors are scrubbed with, and
proceeded in one full swoop to peel the hide off of me with a rough
crash towel till you could see my veins and arteries, and inside works
as well as though you had used X-rays, and when I was ready to die and
wanted to, I yelled murder, and he put his hand over my mouth so hard
that he loosened my front teeth, and I guess I died right there or
fainted, for when I came to, and thought the resurrection morning, that
they used to tell me about in the Sunday School, had come. I found
myself dressed in a sort of combination shirt and drawers, like a bunny
nightie, made of old saddle blankets, and he told me that was the
uniform of the orphanage and that I could go out and play for fifteen
minutes, after which the bell would ring and I could go from play to
work. Gosh, but I was glad to get out doors, but when I began to breathe
the fresh air, and scratch myself where the saddle blanket clothes
pricked me, about fifty boys, who were evidently sophomores in the
orphanage, came along, and made a rush for me, to haze me as a freshman.
Well, they didn’t do a thing to me. They tied a rope around one ankle,
and threw the rope over a limb, and pulled me off the ground, and danced
a war dance around me and run thistles up my trouser’s legs, and spanked
me with a board with slivers in it, and let me down and walked over me
in a procession, singing “There’ll be a hot time in the old town
to-night.” I laughed all the time, because that is the way freshmen do
in college when they are being murdered, and I thought my new associates
would like me better if I died game. Just before I died game the bell
rang, and the one eyed pirate and his chief of staff came out and said
we would go to work, and the boys were divided into squads and put to
work, some husking corn, others sweeping up dead leaves, others milking
cows, and doing everything necessary around a farm.
Before I was set to work I had a few minutes of silent reflection, and I
thought of my changed condition from my porcelain lined bath tub with
warm water and soft towels, to that bath in the laundry, and the
skinning process of preparing a boy for a better life.
[Illustration: The Way Freshmen Do in College When They’re Being
Murdered.]
Then what do you suppose they set me to work at? Skinning bull heads and
taking out the insides. It seems the boys catch bull heads in a pond,
and the bull heads are used for human food, and the freshest boys were
to dress them. Well, I wasn’t going to kick on anything they gave me for
a stunt, so I put on an apron, and for four hours I skinned and cut open
bull heads in a crude sort of way, until I was so sick I couldn’t
protect myself from the assaults of the live bull heads, and the cook
said I done the job so well that she would ask to have me skin all the
bull heads after that. I said I would rather milk cows so the pirate
gave me a milk pail and told me to go and milk the freckled cow, and I
went up to the cow as I had seen farmers do, and sat down on a wooden
camp stool and put the pail under the cow, and began to squeeze the
Summer Sausages she wore under her stomach, four of ’em, and the more I
squeezed the more there didn’t any milk come, and the cow looked around
at me in a pitying sort of way, but the milk did not arrive on schedule
time, and then I thought of a farmer I once saw kick a cow in the slats,
and I thought maybe that was the best way to cause the milk to hurry and
flow, so I got up off the stool and hauled off my hind leg and gave that
cow a swift kick that sent her toes clear in to her liver and lights and
sausage covers.
Well I thought it was a car of dynamite running into an elevator and
exploding, but the boys that picked me up and poured milk on my face to
bring me to, said it was not an explosion, but that the cow had reared
up in front and kicked up behind, and struck me with all four feet, and
had hooked me with her horns, and switched me with her tail, and pawed
me with her forward feet, and licked my hair with her tongue, and laid
down and rolled on me. Well, I certainly looked it. Gee, but I don’t
want any more farmer’s life in mine.
I certainly thought that was the way to cause a cow to give milk. Maybe
I ought to have sworn at her the way the farmer did. I remember now,
that he used language not fit to print, but I have not taken the
swearing degree yet.
Well, they got me braced up so I could go to dinner, and it was surely a
sumptuous repast, fried bull heads and bread. I have eaten fish at home
and at hotels, where you had ketchup, and celery, and vegetables, and
gravy, and pie, and good things, but to sit down with fifty boys and eat
just bull heads, and stale bread, and try to look pleasant like you were
at a banquet, was one on your little Hennery that made him feel that the
pleasures of being an orphan had been over drawn.
Gosh, but the boys tell me we have bull heads here six times a week,
because they don’t cost anything, and that the bones stick through your
skin so they hold your clothes on.
I am organizing a union among the boys and we are going to call a
strike, and if the pirate with one eye does not grant all we ask, we are
going to walk out in a body, and jump a freight train, and go out in the
wide world to make our fortunes. I shall go look for pa. There can’t no
man give me such a dirty shake. I feel like I had been left on a door
step, with a note on the basket asking the finder to take good care of
me “’cause I was raised a pet.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II.
No Encouragement for Inventive Genius in Orphan Home—The Boy Uses
His New Invention, a Patent Clothes Wringer, in Milking.
There is no encouragement for inventive genius in this orphans’ home
that I am honoring with my patronage.
I always supposed that an orphanage was a place where they tried to make
an orphan feel that it wasn’t such a great loss not to have a regular
home, among your people as long as you could be lovingly cared for in
big bunches by charitable people, who would act like a High School to
you, and when you got a diploma from an orphans’ home you could go out
into the world and hold up your head like a college graduate, but I can
see from my experience at this alleged home that when we boys get out
the police will have a tab on us, and we will be pinched like tramps.
What encouragement is there to learn anything but being chambermaid to
cows? Gee, but I never want to look a cow in the face again. When I
failed to milk that cow and she galloped all over the place, and kicked
my liver around where my spleen ought to be, the one-eyed warden of the
place told me I must practice on that cow till I got so that I could
milk her with my eyes shut, and that I wouldn’t get much to eat until I
could show him that I was a he-milkmaid of the thirty-third degree.
I told him I saw a machine last year at the State Fair that had a
suction pump that was put on to the cow’s works, and by touching a
button the milk and honey flowed into a pail, and if he would get such a
machine I could touch the button all right. He said the orphanage
couldn’t afford to buy such a machine, but if I wanted to invent any
device to milk cows I could go ahead, but it was up to me to produce
milk, one way or another.
Well, an idea struck me just like being hit with a base ball bat, and in
a short time I was ready.
I got a clothes wringer out of the laundry, and went to corral the cow.
I thought if a clothes wringer could squeeze the blue water out of a
wash tub of clothes, it would squeeze a pail of milk out of a cow, so I
took my clothes wringer and the milk pail and got under the cow and
gathered all her four weiners together in my hands and put the ends of
them between the rubber rollers, just easy, and the boys gathered round
to see where my inventive genius was going to get off at. Then when my
audience was all ready to cheer me, if the machine worked, I took hold
of the handle of the machine, which was across my lap, and turned the
crank with a yuck motion, until all the cow’s weiners went through
between the rollers, and I noticed the cow flinched, and just there one
of the sophomore boys threw a giant firecracker under the cow’s basement
near the milk pail, and when the explosion came, just when I was
cranking her up a second time and turning on the high speed clutch, the
cow bleated as though she had lost her calf, and she went up into the
air like the cow that jumped over the moon, and she went across the
country on a cavalry charge, with me hanging on the handle of the
wringer with one hand, on her tail with the other, and the boys giving
the orphan school yell, and the cow bellowing like a whole drove of
cattle that have smelled blood around a slaughter house.
Gosh, but I never had such an excursion. The cow went around the house
and on to the porch where the manager and some women were, and finally
rushed into the kitchen, and everybody came and tied me loose from the
cow, and got the clothes wringer off her vital parts, and shooed her
back to the barn, and then they took me to the manager’s office, and I
fainted away.
[Illustration: Gosh, But I Never Had Such an Excursion!]
When I came to the one-eyed manager had a bandage over his nose where
the handle of the clothes wringer hit him when he tried to turn the
handle back to release the pressure on the cow’s bananas, and he was so
mad you could hear him “sis,” like when you drop water on a hot griddle.
He got up and took me by the neck and wrung it just like I was a hen
having its neck wrung when there is company coming and he dropped me
“kerplunk” and said I had ruined the best cow on the place by flattening
out her private affairs so that nothing but skim milk could ever get
through the teats, and he asked me what in thunder I was doing, milking
a cow with a clothes wringer, when I ought to have known that a clothes
wringer would squeeze the milk up into the second story of the cow.
I told him I had never been a dairy farmer, anyway, and a cow was a new
proposition to me, and he said I could go and live on bread and water
till doomsday, and that I was the worst orphan he ever saw, and he
pushed me out of the room.
The boys met me when I came out of the presence of the one-eyed manager,
and we went off into the woods and held an indignation meeting, and
passed resolutions condemning the management of the orphanage, and I
suggested that we form a union and strike for shorter hours and more
food, and if we did not get it, we could walk out, and make the orphan
school business close up.
We discussed what we would do and say to the boss, and just before
supper time we lined up in a body before the house and called out the
manager and made our demands, and gave him fifteen minutes to accept, or
out we would go, and I tell you we looked saucy.
I never saw anything act as quick as that strike did. In five minutes
the manager came out and said he wouldn’t grant a thing, and besides we
were locked out, and couldn’t ever get back into the place unless we
crawled on our hands and knees and stood on our hind feet like dogs, and
barked and begged for food, and he shut the door and the dining room was
closed in our faces, and we were told to get off the place or they would
set the dogs on us.
For a few minutes not a word was said, then the boys pitched on to me
and another boy that had brought on the strike, and gave us a good
licking, and made us run to the woods, and when we got nearly out of
sight we turned and all the brave dubs that were going to break up the
orphanage were down on their seats on the grass, begging like dogs to be
taken back, because supper was ready, and my chum and me were pulling
for tall timber, wondering where the next meal was coming from, and
where we are going to sleep.
We were the only boys in that bunch of strikers that had sand enough to
stand up for union principles, and as is usually the case the fellows
who had the most gravel in their crops had little else, and I was never
so hungry in my life.
A diet of fried bull heads and skim milk, and sour bread for a few days
in the orphanage had left me with an appetite that ought to have had a
ten course banquet at once, but we walked on for hours, and finally
struck a railroad track and followed it to a town.
My chum stopped at a freight car on a side track and began to poke
around one of the oil boxes on a wheel, and when I asked him what he was
going to do, he said that to a hungry man the cotton waste and the
grease in a hot box of a freight car was just as good as a shrimp salad,
and he began to poke the stuff out of the hot box to eat it. He said the
lives of tramps were often saved by eating out of hot boxes. I swore
that I would never eat no hot box banquet, and I pulled him away from
the box car just as a brakeman came along with a hook and a can of oil
and a bucket of water to cool it off, and we escaped.
I told him we would have a good supper all right, if he would stick by
me.
We went into the little town and it was getting dark, and all the people
were out doors looking up into the sky, and saying, “there it is, I see
it,” and I asked a man in front of a saloon what the excitement was
about, and he said that they were watching the balloons from St. Louis,
about two hundred miles away, which were sailing to the east.
Did you ever have an idea strike you so sudden that it made you dizzy?
Well, I was struck with one so quick that it made me snicker, and I
pulled my new chum away and told him how we would get supper and a place
to sleep, and that was to go into the woods near where the people were
looking up into the air, and when a balloon went over, after it got good
and dark, we could set up a yell, as though murder was being done, and
when the crowd came to see what was the matter, he could say we fell out
of a balloon, and landed in a tree and squirmed down to the ground.
Well, I didn’t want to lie, but my chum, who had once been in a Reform
School, did not care so much about lying, so he was to do the talking
and I was to be deaf and dumb, as though the fall from the balloon had
knocked me silly.
Well, when we saw a light in the sky over us and the people were going
wild over thinking they saw a balloon, we began to scream like wild
cats, and groan like lost souls, and yell for “help, help.” When the
people came on the run, and when they found us with our clothes torn,
and our hair standing on end, and our eyes bulging out, and my chum, the
old liar, said when we were leaning over the basket of the balloon to
see what town we were passing over, we fell out in a tree, and we were
so hungry.
[Illustration: “Tossed him over the fence.”]
Well, the way those good people swallowed that yarn was too comical, and
they picked us up and took us into a house. A pussy woman got me under
her arm and said “Poor dear, every bone in his body is busted, but I saw
him first, and I am going to have him mended and keep him for a
souvenir,” and I hung my legs and arms down so I would be heavy, and she
dragged me to the house. All I said was, “pie, pie, pie,” and she said I
was starving for pie, and when they got us in bed, with nice night
shirts on, they crowded around us and began to feed us, and we took
everything from soup to mints, and went to sleep, and the last thing I
heard was balloon talk, and the woman who drew me in the shuffle said,
“The ways of Providence are past finding out,” and as I rolled over in
bed I heard my chum in another bed say “You can bet your sweet life,”
and then the people began to go away, talking about the narrow escape of
those dear boys, and my pussy fat lady held my hand and stroked my
aching stomach until long after midnight, and then she tip-toed off to
bed.
I spoke to my chum and said, “Did it work out all right?” and he groaned
and said, “Gee, but I et too much, I otter have saved some of it for
breakfast,” and then we went to sleep in nice feather beds instead of
those beds at the orphanage made of breakfast food.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III.
The Boy Escapes from Orphan Asylum—The Boy and His Chum Had Red
Letter Days—The Boy Is Adopted by New Friends.
There is not much fun in being an orphan until you escape from the
orphan asylum, and I want to say that my chum and myself have had two
red letter days in the town where we seemed to drop out of a balloon
into the hearts of the country people.
They took up a subscription to buy clothes for us, and dressed us up,
and we looked as though we had been clothing dummies in front of a
clothing store, and then the people got into a quarrel as to who should
adopt us.
A farmer drew my chum and wanted him to get acquainted with some mules
and drive six mules to haul fertilizer on the farm. My chum had to set
on a saddle on one mule, and drive the other five mules by using one
line, which he pulled and hauled to make them gee round grand right and
left.
The fat woman adopted me because I was such a dear little thing. She was
one of those hay widows, whose husband got plenty of her sauce, and took
to the tall timber, and all she wanted to do was to hug me, and tell me
that if I had not dropped into her life, out of that balloon, she would
have kicked the bucket, and I thought of how any bucket I ever saw would
have collapsed, for she had a foot like a fiddle box.
She made me tell her the story of my past life, and when she found I was
Peck’s Bad Boy, and I thought I had made my story so sanguinary that she
would want me to go away, so she could have a quiet life, she just froze
to me and said she could see that she had been selected by Providence to
take the badness out of me, and she went to work hypnotizing me, and
giving me absent treatment on my meals, to take my strength for
wickedness away, and then she got me so weak I could not hug back when
she squeezed me, and you can imagine the condition a growing boy would
be in who could not do his share of the hugging.
The second day of my sentence to be her adopted son, with all my crimes
on my head, she let me go out on the farm to visit my chum, and there is
where my whole new life changed.
My chum was driving his mules around the farm, and I was riding behind
him on the wheel mule, when a balloon from St. Louis came over, and the
men in the balloon yelled to us to grab hold of the rope as they wanted
to land in the field. The mules began to act up and my chum couldn’t
control them, and I jumped off the mule and grabbed the rope and gave it
a hitch around the pole of the wagon, and that settled it with the
mules. They rolled their fawn like eyes around at the great gas bag that
was swaying over the wagon, with the two men yelling, and the mules
started to run, with the wagon and the balloon, around that field, the
balloon striking the fence occasionally, and a tree once in a while, the
men yelling for us to cut the rope, and the mules braying and saying
mule prayers, and me chasing along to try and cut the rope, and my chum
hanging on to the ears of the wheel mule, and the farmers rushing into
the field from every direction to stop the mules, and the men in the
balloons using the worst language.
[Illustration: Grabbed the Balloon Rope and Gave It a Hitch Around the
Pole.]
The mules had run around the field several times, and the balloon was
doing its best to keep up, when I yelled to the men in the balloon, “Why
don’t you throw out your anchor?” and they then seemed to recollect
about the anchor, and they threw it out, and when it caught fast in the
ground the mules pulled loose from the wagon and went through a fence,
and started for Texas, and I guess they are going yet. My chum got off
all right, except he was so scared he could not stand up. Well, we had a
time straightening things out, the farmers wanted to lynch the balloon
men, and make them pay for the mules, but in rolling up the balloon to
take to the station, to ship to St. Louis, I found a mail bag, and I
told the farmers these balloonists were carrying the U. S. mail, and any
man that laid hands on the government mail could be imprisoned for life
for treason, and I scared the farmers so they gave the balloonists their
dinner, and hauled the balloon to the station with the whole bunch of
us, and when the balloonists went away on the train they told my chum
and me that if we would come to St. Louis they would give us jobs
carrying off balloons, and they would teach us how to fly. Gee, but that
was nuts for us. To rise, at once, from being mule drivers and adopted
boys, to a place in balloon society, was what we wanted, and my chum and
I deserted our more or less happy homes and began to plan to jump a
freight train bound for St. Louis.
[Illustration: “Any Man That Lays Hands on the Government Mail Can Be
Imprisoned for Life for Treason.”]
We laid down on the platform of the station that night and went to sleep
and I dreamed that I sailed across the ocean in a balloon, and landed in
a park in Paris, and when the populace came to welcome us to dear old
France, Pa was one of the first to see me, and he fell upon my neck, and
when the people were going to give me a reception, and a cross of the
Legion of Honor, for being the first to cross the ocean in a balloon, Pa
told them I was his boy, and Pa wanted to take all the credit for my
grand achievement, and when I woke up a watchman at the station kicked
us off the platform like we were tramps, and we walked down the tracks
and were so mad we wanted to throw stones at the switch lights, and my
chum wanted to put a tie on the track to wreck a train, but I persuaded
him that it was that kind of revenge that caused the enmity between
tramps and the richer class. Then he wanted to set fire to a tank car of
kerosene, because Rockafeller owned the railroad, and the watchman who
kicked us was an agent of the Standard Oil Company. If I hadn’t been a
pretty good citizen there would have been a bon-fire sure, but I showed
my chum that we were only temporary tramps, and that in a few days we
would achieve success, and own railroads, and that we should show an
example of patience, and strive to become members of the four hundred.
So we refrained from getting even, and Rockafeller was not kept awake by
hearing that another tank car of oil had gone skyward.
We were pretty hungry, but tightened up our belts and pretty soon a
freight car stopped on a side track and a brakeman came along with a
lantern and I gave him the last half dollar I had and told him we wanted
to land in St. Louis, and he looked us over and pointed to a car, and we
hustled in and he locked the side door of the car, and we were alone in
the dark, hungry and thirsty.
We found a part of a bale of hay, and scattered some on the floor and
went to sleep, and I never slept better on a spring mattress, but I
dreamed of home, and all the fun I had ever had, making it hot for other
people, playing tricks on them, but now all was changed, and I felt that
I was on my own resources, making my own way in the world, handicapped
by always having an easy life.
Along towards daylight in the morning some horses began to paw and
whinner and a colly dog began to bark in the car, and some sheep bleated
in the car, and as morning came, and a little light came in the car,
which was hitting the high places, running at high speed, so it shook us
out of our hay bed, we looked around starved and stiff, and sick at
heart.
When the train stopped I walked through the car, over bags of oats, and
looked at the horses, and wished I was a horse. The dog was a watch dog,
and when I got near him he snarled and grabbed a mouthful of my new
pants and held on and shook me, and I yelled and got away.
As it grew lighter I saw a box near the dog, and in it were some square
things that my practiced eye, as the son of an old hunter, told me were
dog biscuit, a sort of petrified dough and meat scraps made for high
class dogs that are not allowed to eat scraps from the table, and I told
my chum we would have breakfast. It took me half an hour to steal a few
dog biscuit away from that dog, and all the time he was trying to make
his breakfast off of me, but I finally poked out enough for breakfast,
and I called my chum to partake of the repast. He said he always had to
have some kind of breakfast food before he ate meat, so I cut into a bag
of oats, and gave him a handful, and there we sat and chewed away,
trying to imagine that we were happy, and thinking of coffee and
pancakes and sausage, and waffles, and biscuit and honey.
It was probably the worst breakfast ever eaten by anybody. The dog
biscuits were so hard we had to pound them on the floor with a
currycomb, and that did not help the flavor much.
After breakfast we laid down on the hay with a horse blanket over us,
and slept till noon, when we heard water being poured into the tin
trough for the horses, and we quenched our thirst, and ate more dog
biscuit, and I hoped that other boys would hear of our distress, and
that no boys would ever run away from a happy home again.
My chum and I talked over the depression in the money market, and the
panic in Wall street, and tried to think we were better off than
millionaires who did not know where the next meal was coming from, and
with our stomachs full, and no care on our minds, we wished we could
give some of our dog biscuit to the hungry rich.
While we were thinking of the good one can do with a few dog biscuit,
there was a terrible crash, the car jumped on the ties and reared up,
and finally rolled over and down a bank and all was still as death,
except that the boiler of the engine was blowing off steam, and the
horses were groaning, and the confounded dog that chewed me was dead.
Men run over the cars, and chopped with axes, and finally a fire engine
began to throw water on the burning cars, my chum and I were wedged
under bales of hay, one of my legs was asleep, and we both yelled
murder, and finally the fire was out, the side was chopped out of the
car, and they took us out and put us in an ambulance and the brakeman
who had let us into the car said, “Tickets, please,” and the ambulance
was driven to a hospital at East St. Louis, and they wanted to amputate
us, just for practice. One of the hospital attendants asked me who I
was, and when I told him I was “Peck’s Bad Boy,” traveling for my
health, he said, “Well, you are certainly getting what is coming to
you,” and I guess that is no lie.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV.
A Bad Railroad Wreck—The Boy Contrasts Their Ride to One in a
Parlor Car—The Lawyer Is the Greatest Man on Earth—The Boy
Settles His Claim for $20.
The accident by the wrecking of the freight train on which my chum and
myself were touring the country, viewing the scenery through an auger
hole in the side of a box car, was a darn sight worse than I thought it
was. What a come down it was for me, who have always traveled with pa,
in a parlor car, to have to ride in a box car, with live stock, and
feast on dog biscuit, instead of ordering from the menu in a dining car.
No one likes the luxuries of foreign travel any better than I do, but
that freight car experience showed me that we do not know when we are
well off, but when a boy goes out into the world to make his fortune,
and cuts loose from home ties, and pie, and bath tubs, and a warm bed,
and victuals such as mother makes, and winds up in a wreck, under a
horse that he does not know the name of, he is going some.
When we got to the hospital a lawyer, who had chased the ambulance on a
motorcycle, retained me as his client and offered to sue the railway
company for a million dollars damage, and he would furnish all the
evidence, and take half of what he got for his fee. I thought it was a
good proposition, and probably I can own a railroad if I take stock for
my damages, but I shall take nothing but money, and let my lawyer have
the railroad stock. Gee, but a lawyer is the greatest man on earth. This
one has been riding alongside the railroad track on a motorcycle for
years, waiting for an accident, and when he selected me for a client he
just cried for joy, and he has drawn a complaint against the Railroad
Company that is a work of art.
[Illustration: Started on a stampede.]
When he read it to me, and I saw how I had been broken up and damaged by
the soulless corporation, and how my promising career had been ruined, I
never was so overcome in my life. While I was not hurt any, except where
the horse laid on me and squeezed my dog biscuits in my stomach so my
backbone was poulticed by the chewed biscuit, the lawyer had the doctors
at the hospital put my legs and arms in plaster of paris casts, and had
my body done up in splints and bandages, and my face covered with strips
of court plaster, until nothing but my mouth was in working order, and I
wore out a nurse bringing me things to eat, and I never enjoyed myself
more in my life than I did in that hospital, just eating and being
petted by good looking nurses.
My lawyer told me to groan all the time when anybody was present, and
when a railroad lawyer called at the hospital to take an invoice of my
wounds, and my lawyer was present to see that I groaned plenty, it was
all I could do to keep from laughing, but my lawyer would run a paper
knife into my slats every time I quit groaning, so we were working the
railroad all right, and the hospital doctors, who were going to have a
share in the money, made a list of my broken bones, and the railroad
lawyer wanted to be shown every break in my anatomy.
Well things went on this way for several days, and I was getting nervous
from the plaster casts on me.
I didn’t like it very much when the railway lawyer offered to settle for
five dollars, claiming I was a tramp stealing a ride, but he brought my
chum to see me, and my chum who had his neck twisted around by a bale of
hay falling on him, settled for twenty dollars, and so I did the same,
and when the nurses were asleep in the afternoon, my chum and me left
the hospital with forty good dollars, and started across the bridge for
St. Louis, to find the air ships.
We were sitting down on a railroad track, at the east entrance to the
bridge, and I had taken off my clothes, and was breaking the plaster of
paris off my limbs, when my lawyer came along on his motorcycle, on the
way to the hospital to make me groan some more, and when he saw us he
had a fainting spell, and when I told him we had been discharged cured,
he said it was hard for a deserving lawyer to be knocked out of a half
million dollar fee by a dumb fool client who didn’t know enough to look
out for his own interests, and he was going to have us arrested for
highway robbery, but I told him I wouldn’t have known what to do with so
much money if we had kanoodled the railroad out of a million dollars, in
addition to a free ride on its palatial freight car, and besides it
would be cheating, and the lawyer drew a long sigh and told us to get
out of the country and he would continue the suit on the ground that we
had been injured so bad that we became insane and jumped into the river,
and he offered to throw us in the river, but we jumped on a street car
and went across to St. Louis in search of the park where the balloon man
was that had offered us a job riding in balloons.
We found the man and he said they were all going to start for somewhere
the next morning and we could go along, my chum in one balloon and I in
another, and all we would have to do was to throw out ballast when told
to do so, and open cans of stuff to eat, and for us to buy thick
sweaters, and show up at nine o’clock in the morning, and write the
address where we wanted our remains sent to in case we were killed, and
pin the address on our sweaters.
It wasn’t cheerful and my chum and I talked it over until late that
night, and I am sorry to say my chum showed a streak of yellow, and he
confessed to me that he was a coward, and came from a family of cowards,
and that he didn’t have sand enough to go up in a balloon, and he would
let me go up, but he would rather stay on the ground, where he could
feel the earth with his feet, and watch the balloons.
He said that people who go up in balloons were either crazy, or had met
with some disappointment in life, and took the balloon method of
committing suicide, and he would side step balloons, and if the time
ever came when he was tired of life, he would take a job firing on an
engine, or go into burglary, or get in love with some old man’s wife, or
marry a chorus girl, or something that would be fatal, but on land.
Gee, but I was disappointed in my chum. He had been in a reform school,
and I thought he had gravel in his crop, but he proved to have the
chilblains, and so I went to the balloon man in the morning alone, and
told him I had made my will, and was ready to go up to heaven or down to
Helena, Arkansas, any minute he was ready, but my chum had weakened and
gone glimmering.
I got in the basket and looked things over, and jumped out and in
several times, and asked questions of the two men who were to go up in
it, and they seemed pleased that I was not afraid, and they asked me if
I thought my father would make a kick if I was killed or lost at sea, or
anything, and I told them from my last conversation with Pa I thought he
would take it as a kindness if they should find it convenient to spill
me out somewhere or lose me, and when they landed, if they could make
affidavit that I had been permanently disposed of, like a mess of
kittens under water in a bag, with a stone in it, that Pa would be
willing to cough up quite a premium.
That held them for a little while, and then they asked me who I was,
anyway, and when I told them that I was the only original “Peck’s Bad
Boy,” they said that from their recollection of my tricks on my father
they could readily see how a fatality might be a blessing, and they
seemed relieved of any responsibility, and we went to work to get things
in the basket, and they instructed me what I was to do.
The basket was about nine feet square, and it had more things in it than
a delicatessen store.
At about ten o’clock in the morning, with thousands of people watching
the balloons, they began to cut loose and go shooting into the air, and
it was a race.
The man told me that the balloon that went the farthest from St. Louis
before being compelled to land would get the prize, and I began to feel
anxious to have our balloon win.
I watched those that started first, and they went up so far I could only
see little specks in the sky, and I thought of balloons I had seen go up
on fair grounds, where a girl sat on a trapeze bar, and jumped off, and
a parachute opened and took her safely to the ground, and I looked
around our balloon for a parachute, but there was none, and I wondered
what would happen if the balloon came down, with its gas all escaped,
like the fair ground balloon, and there is where I came the nearest to
weakening and climbing out, but I thought if I did I would be a coward
like my chum, and then I thought if those two grown men, with families
depending on them for support, were going up, they were not doing it for
any suicidal purpose, and I could go if they could, and when the boss
man said, “Now, Bub, if you want to stay ashore, this is your last
chance,” I said, “Your little Hennery is ready to go where you go, and
you can’t tie her loose any too soon to suit me,” and he patted me on
the head and said, “Hennery, you sure are game,” and then all was ready
and he said to them to let go. My heart went up and rubbed against my
palate, and the balloon made a jump like a horse going over a five foot
fence, advertising a brand of whiskey, and we shot up into the air, the
people yelling, and I saw my chum sitting on a dray, driving a mule, and
I thought of the difference between a brave boy and a mucker like my
chum, the houses began to look smaller, until St. Louis looked like play
houses, with a ribbon of gray on the side of it, which was the river.
The boss looked at a machine and said we were five miles high, and I
thought how I had always enjoyed high life, and I was trying to get my
heart swallowed down where it belonged.
The balloon basket was as steady as a house, and I got up and looked
over the side of the basket, and it seemed awful, cause I had never been
higher than the top of a twenty story building before, and I began to
weep tears, and the air seemed queer, and I was just going to faint when
the boss told me to open a can of lobsters, and I woke up.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V.
The Bad Boy Leaves St. Louis in a Balloon—The Boy Makes a Trip to
San Francisco and Joins Evans’ Fleet—The Police Arrest Boy and
Tie Up Balloon.
When our balloon left St. Louis, and got up in the air so far that the
earth looked like a piece of rag carpet, with pop corn scattered over
it, which were villages, and I realized that if anything busted, we
would be dropping for hours before we struck a church steeple, and would
be so dead when we hit the ground, and stiff and cold that we would be
driven down in the mud so far no one would ever find us, and I looked at
the two fool men in the basket with me, who didn’t seem to care what
became of them, as though they were unhappily married or had money in a
shaky bank, I began to choke up, and the tears came to my eyes, and I
took a long breath of thin air, and fainted dead away.
When I fainted we were being driven south, and when I came to, with a
smell of ammonia on my hair, we were going east, and the balloon had
gone down within a mile of the earth, and the men gave me some hot tea
out of a patent bottle, and pretty soon I began to enjoy myself and
wonder if I could hit a mess of negroes picking cotton in a field, with
a sand bag.
When you are up in the air so far that a policeman cannot reach you, you
feel loose enough to insult men that would knock your block off if you
should give them any lip when you were on the ground.
We came down a half a mile more, and I asked the boss man if I might
throw a sand bag at the negroes, and he said I might throw a bundle of
advertisements for liver pills at them, so I yelled, “Hello, you black
rabbits,” and when the negroes looked up and saw the balloon, they
turned pale, and dropped on their knees, and I guess they began to pray,
and I didn’t mean to interfere with their devotions, so I threw a bottle
of ginger ale at a mule hitched to a wagon near them, and when the
bottle struck the mule on the head and exploded and the ginger ale began
to squirt all over the colored population, the mule run one way with the
wagon, and the negroes ran for the cane brakes. The boss man in the
balloon complimented me on being a good shot, and said I had many
characteristics of a true balloonist, and probably before we got to the
end of the trip I would get so I could hit a church steeple with a bag
of ballast, and break up a Sunday School in the basement. He said that
being up in the rarefied air made a man feel as though he would like to
commit murder, and I found out that was so, for the next town we passed
over, when all the people were out in the main street, and the balloon
man told me to throw over a bag of sand, so we could go up higher,
instead of trying to throw the bag into a field, where there was nobody
to be hurt or frightened, do you know, I shied that bag at a fountain in
the public square and laughed like a crazy person when the water
splashed all over the crowd, and the fountain was smashed to pieces, and
the pirates in the balloon complimented me, and yet, when those men are
at home, on the ground, they are christian gentlemen, they told me, so I
made up my mind that if ballooning became a fashionable pastime, those
who participated in it would become murderers, and the people on the
ground would shoot at a balloonist on sight.
We went up so high that we were out of range of people on the ground, so
you couldn’t pick out any particular person to hit with a bundle of
pickle advertisements, so you had to shoot into a flock, and run chances
of winging somebody, so I did not enjoy it, but along towards evening we
passed over a town in Tennessee or Kentucky, where there was a race
track, and races going on, and just as we got over it I said to the boss
balloon man, “Just watch me break up that show,” and I pitched overboard
a whole mass of advertisements of different things we carried, and two
bundles hit the grand stand, and exploded, and about a million circulars
advertising pills and breakfast food struck the track, just as the
horses were in the home stretch, and of all the stampedes you ever saw
that was the worst, horses running away, riders fell off, carriages
tipped over, and the people in the grand stand falling over themselves,
and as we sailed along none of us seemed to care two whoops whether
anybody was killed or not. It was the craziness of being up in the air,
and not caring for responsibility, like a drunken chauffeur running a
crazy automobile through a crowd of children, and acting mad because
they were in the way of progress.
We laughed and chuckled at the sensation we had caused, but cared no
more for the results than a hired girl who starts a fire with kerosene.
It came on dark after a while, and all we had to do was to look at the
stars and the moon, and it seemed to me that the stars were as big as
locomotive headlights, and that you could see into them, and on several
of the largest stars I was sure I could see people moving, and the moon
seemed so near that you could catch the smile of the man in the moon,
and see him wink at you.
The two men had to remain awake all night, but after awhile I said I
guessed I would have my berth made up, and the boss man handed me a
shredded wheat biscuit for a pillow, and laid me down by the sand bags
and the canned food, and threw a blanket over me, and I slept all night,
sailing over states, the balloon moving so still there was no sound at
all.
I woke up once or twice and listened for a street car, or some noise to
put me to sleep again, and found myself wishing there was a fire, so a
fire department would go clanging by, making a noise that would be
welcome in the terrible stillness.
I dreamed the awfulest dreams, and thought I saw Pa, in another balloon,
with a rawhide in his hand, chasing me, and the great bear in the
heavens seemed to be getting up on his hind legs, with his mouth open,
ready to hug me to his hairy chest.
It was a terrible night, and at daylight the boss man woke me up and I
looked over the side of the basket and we were going across a piece of
water where there were battle ships lined up like they were at San
Diego, when Cevera’s fleet was smashed, and the men said now was the
time to demonstrate whether balloons would be serviceable in case of
war, and told me to take a bundle of malted milk advertisements, and
imagine it was a dynamite bomb, and see if I could land it on the deck
of a big white battleship. I took a good aim and let the bundle go and
it struck on deck just in front of a cross looking man in a white
uniform, and scattered all over the deck and the sailors and marines
came up on deck in a wild stampede, and threw the malted milk
advertisements overboard, and as we sailed on there was an explosion of
red hot language from the cross looking man in the white uniform, and
the boss balloon man said, “That is a good shot, Bub, for you landed
that bundle of alleged dynamite square on the deck of Admiral Bob Evans’
flagship. Didn’t you hear him swear?” and then we went on, and the man
in the white uniform was shaking his fists and his mouth was working
overtime, but we couldn’t hear the brand of profanity he was emitting,
but we knew he was going some, for before we got out of hearing the
bugles were sounding on more than a dozen battleships, the men came up
from below and took positions in the rigging and everywhere, and all was
live with action, and the boss balloon man said the fleet was preparing
for its trip around the horn, to San Francisco, and then I told the
balloon man that he couldn’t land me a minute too quick, because I was
going to join that fleet and go with Bob Evans, if I never did another
thing in my life.
[Illustration: Hit the Chief of Police with a Bottle.]
The inspiration came to me up there in the rarefied air, and I was as
sure I was going around the Horn as though I was already on one of the
ships.
We sailed along part of the day and the gas began to give out, and I had
to throw over ballast, and open cans of food, and bottles of stuff to
drink, and I made some good shots with the sand bags and the bottles.
Once I hit right in front of a brakeman on a freight train with a bottle
of soda water, and again I hit an oyster schooner with a sand bag and
must have chuckled at least a barrel of oysters. The gas kept escaping,
and presently we came down in a field in Delaware, after I had hit a
chief of police in Wilmington with a bottle of beer, which is a crime in
a prohibition country, and after we landed the police arrested the two
balloon men, and tied up the balloon. They paid me thirty dollars for my
services, and I took a train for Fortress Monroe to join the fleet, and
left the two balloon men on the way to a whipping post.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI.
The Balloon Lands in Delaware—The Boy Visits the Battleships—They
Scour the Boy With a Piece of Brick and Some Laundry Soap—The
Boy Investigates the Mechanism of the Battleships—The Boy Goes
With the Ships as a Mascot.
When our balloon that sailed from St. Louis came down in Delaware, and I
had bid good bye to the two men whom I sailed with, and they had paid me
good money for my services and keeping them awake, I thought of that
fleet we had passed over at Fortress Monroe, the beautiful white battle
ships, and I was afraid I could not get there before it sailed, and
secure my berth, as I had made up my mind to go with it around the horn,
and help fight Japan or mosquitoes, or any old thing that came in the
way, so I took the first train to Fortress Monroe, and found that the
whole population of several near by states were going too, as the
President was going to review the fleet before it sailed.
The next day I was at the hotel at Old Point and with hundreds of other
people took a launch and went out among the battle ships. Everybody was
welcome to go aboard the ships, and we visited several of them and were
shown all over the vessels by the uniformed jacks.
Gee, but a battleship is like a sky scraper on land, and you can go from
the roof clear down half a mile below the water line, and it is like a
combination of an engine manufactory, a boiler plant, a coal yard, a
wholesale grocery, a packing house, a blacksmith shop, a department
store, a hotel, a powder mill, a suburban trolley line, and a bargain
sale of blankets, a state fair and a military encampment, and a parade
ground, a county jail and an apartment house, with rooms to let on the
European plan and all of it in an iron coffin, liable to go to the
bottom any minute, if the air tanks are punctured.
Gee, but I was almost afraid to be down cellar in a battleship without
any life preserver, and when I went up on deck, where I could jump
overboard if she began to sink, there, away on top of the whole old cook
stove, were guns so big that it seemed if one got to moving around on
deck it would tip the ship over. It seemed to me like boring a hole in a
flat iron and crawling in, and being put in a bath tub, or like rigging
up a coal stove with paddles and outriggers, and paddling out in a marsh
duck shooting.
The first hour I was investigating the mechanism of a battleship and was
scared silly for fear she would get ready to sink, and as I looked at
the iron everywhere, which I had been taught in school would sink so
quick it would make your head swim, I wondered what my nation could be
thinking of to build ships of iron and depend on wind to keep them on
top of the water, and I thought it would be just as safe to cover an
iron railroad bridge with building paper, and launch it for a trip
across the ocean; and yet all the officers and men seemed to enjoy it,
and forget about the danger, for they laughed and played jokes, and put
on airs, and mashed the girls who came on board as though they had made
up their minds that it was only a matter of time when the ships would
sink, and they seemed to congratulate themselves that when they went
down with the ships a time lock would close them up hermetically so
sharks and devil fish couldn’t eat the crew, and they could float around
for all time and eternity safe from the resurrection as they would be
buried in a safety deposit box in the vault of a trust company.
Some of the jacks played it on me. They took me and wrapped an angora
goat skin around me, with the hair outside, and tied a string to my
feet, and run it out of the breach of the big sixteen inch gun, and
another string on my legs, and they pulled me back and forth through
that forty foot gun to swab it out, and when I came out alive they
laughed and were going to tie a bag of shot to my feet and let me off a
plank over the side to practice on a burial at sea, but I yelled for
help and a cross looking man came along and pardoned me, and told the
fellows to take me to his cabin and wash the powder off my face, and
hold me until he could have a talk with me. When they had scoured me
with a piece of brick and some yellow laundry soap, the man came into
the cabin, and the boys who had hazed me said he was Admiral Evans, and
I remembered him cause once when he was in the light house service he
entertained Pa and me on his light house tender, and held me on his lap
at the New Orleans Mardi Gras, and I said, “Hello, Mr. Evans, don’t you
remember little Hennery? I am Peck’s Bad Boy,” and he remembered me, and
said, “What n’ell you doing here?” and I told him I knew what he was up
against, going around the horn, and to San Francisco and Japan and the
Philippines, and that I wanted to go along on his ship as a mascot, or a
waiter or anything, and he said he didn’t know, but I would be a good
mascot, as last trip they had a goat and a monkey for mascots, and I had
a combination of both, and if he was going to make a trip to hades, or
any climate hotter than the straits of Magellan, he thought I would be
all right.
[Illustration: They Pulled Me Through That Forty-Foot Gun to Swab It
Out.]
He asked me what I could do and I told him there was nothing that I
couldn’t do if properly encouraged, anything, from flying a flag of
truce from the fighting top, to riding up in the ammunition elevator
with five hundred pounds of dynamite, to acting as the propeller to a
Whitehead torpedo.
We talked it over for an hour and he asked about Pa, and then he said he
would think it over, and he gave me a ticket with a number on, and told
me to be on the front porch of the Hotel Chamberlaine at nine o’clock
the second morning after, and if a steam launch from the Connecticut
landed there and gave two whistles, for me to get on board with my
baggage, and report to him before the fleet sailed.
Well, say, this was quick work, and I called a launch and visited the
other vessels, promising to be Johnny on the spot at the appointed hour.
It was a great sight to see the review, when the President came along on
the yacht Mayflower and I forgot all about the battleships being of iron
liable to sink if the wind got out of the tanks, and was never so proud
in my life as I was when I saw the jacks climb up on the rigging and
hang on like monkeys, lined up like they were drilling on deck, and when
the Connecticut began to fire a salute to the President, out of those
great iron sewer pipes, and all the rest of the fleet began to shoot at
the air, the noise was so loud that it made your head feel like you do
when you take seidletz powders, and it gullups up your nose, and the
smokeless powder made the smoke so thick you couldn’t see anything but
the President’s teeth, as he sailed along on his yacht, and I got so
patriotic that the chills went up my back like when you have the grip
coming on, and then the smoke cleared away and when a million American
flags were flung to the breeze, I began to choke up like you do when you
are sick and the callers say, “Well, brace up boy, you may pull through,
but there are a hundred chances against your living till morning,” and
the tears rolled down my cheeks, and my throat got full like I had the
tonsilitis, and everybody else on our launch except two Japanese were
crying, and then the President’s yacht took a position, and all the
battleships swinging into line and marched past, and the bands played,
and we all just bellered for patriotic joy, and I was so mad to see
those Japanese standing there like bottles of castor oil, not even
smiling, that I blew up a toy balloon which I have been playing air ship
with, and I whacked it on the head of the meanest looking Jap, and when
it exploded he was the scardest-looking person I ever saw, because he
thought one of those sixteen-inch shells had gone off in his hat, and
everybody said, “served him right,” and then he laughed, the first time
since the review started, and he wanted the skim of my toy balloon as a
souvenir of the first gun fired in the war with Japan.
[Illustration: When it Exploded the Jap Was the Scaredest Person I Ever
Saw.]
From that day, when I had examined critically our fleet and seen it
salute, and monkey around the President, I felt so patriotic that I
wanted to fight for my country, and I could hardly wait two days for Mr.
Evans to send his launch ashore after me, and I didn’t care if the whole
thing was iron, that couldn’t float under natural conditions and if Bob
Evans should put oarlocks on a bar of railroad iron, and put me on it,
with orders to go sink a Japanese sampon, or whatever they call their
war ships, I would step aboard that bar of railroad iron with a light
heart, wave my hat and tell them all to go plumb.
So we went ashore, and that evening there was a ball at the hotel, and
all the officers of the navy were there, and the army, and millions of
ladies with clothes on the lower half of them, and talcum powder and
black court plaster on the upper half, and the way they danced and
waltzed and flirted and et lobsters would make you dizzy, and when Bob
Evans walked limping by me, with a two-hundred-pound lady on one arm,
and a ninety-pound girl on the rheumatiz side of him, I was so full of
patriotic fire I couldn’t help saying, “Hello, Bob, I will be on deck
all right,” and he looked at me with an expression on his face that
looked as though he had drawn a lobster that had been dead too long, and
he marched along with his female procession, and the orchestra struck up
a good-night waltz, and everybody waltzed, and took some drinks, and
went home to wait the sailing of the fleet the next day, and I went to
bed with an order to be called at sunrise, so I could be on the porch
with my ticket in my hand, ready to jump into the launch when she
whistled and sail away “for a frolic or a fight,” and I didn’t care
which.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII.
A Storm Comes from the Coast of Cuba—Everyone Goes to Sleep on the
Ship Except the Watchman and Pilot—The Bad Boy Is Put in the
Dungeon—The Captain Says to Throw the Boy Overboard to Feed the
Sharks.
I feel like a bridegroom that has been left waiting at the church, with
no bride appearing, and the crowd scoffing at him, and commenting on his
clothes.
I waited on the porch of the hotel at Fortress Monroe all the forenoon
for Mr. Evans’ launch to come and get me and take me aboard his
gladship, holding my ticket in one hand and my bundle of clothes in the
other.
Launches came by the dozen, bringing people ashore, but no one was
allowed to go out to the ships. Finally the last launch came, and it was
manned by “Connecticut” men, and when I showed my ticket and was going
to get on, the boss said “skiddoo,” the boat moved away with one of my
feet on board and the other on the dock, and I promptly fell in the
water, the boss of the boat yelled to some one on the dock to “get a
boat hook and pull it out,” and soon I came up strangling, a hook caught
me in the pants and I was hauled out on the dock, they rolled me on a
barrel and stood me on my head to empty the water out of me, and a
soldier took me into the kitchen of the hotel to have me dried out by
the gas boiler, and I felt deserted and demoralized. The guns boomed,
the bands played, and I looked out of the kitchen window and saw the
fleet sail away south without me, and I realized that Bob Evans had been
“stringing” me, and that he never intended I should go around the horn
with the fleet, and I thought that may be, if he was a liar, and used
profane language, and was subject to rheumatism, it was better that I
did not go, as I might be spoiled. But they can go plumb with their old
fleet, and if the Japs get Bob Evans and roast him over the coals, all I
hope is that he will be sorry for treating me as he did.
[Illustration: The Boss of the Boat Ordered Me Pulled Out with a Boat
Hook.]
But I always light on my feet. After I got dried out, I met a man who
was picking up a crew to go to Europe from Baltimore on a cattle ship,
and he pictured to me the easy life on the ocean wave with a load of
steers, and hired me to go along, and I thought it was the chance of my
life to meet up with Pa, who is over there hunting airships for his
government, so we went to Baltimore, and that night we were in the
cattle ship and I slept in a hammock and ate my bread and beef out of a
tin basin.
Gee, what a change it was over my former trip to Europe with Pa, on a
regular liner, with a bed and meals in the cabin. But when a boy goes
out in the world to gain his own living, and travel on his face, he has
got to take what comes to him.
The next morning my work began. Our vessel went up to the stock yards,
and began to load steers for shipment, and all I had to do was to act as
a “twister.” When the cattle came through the shute, and landed on the
deck, and refused to go into the dark places, we had to take hold of the
tails of the cattle and twist them so they would move on, and of all the
bellowing you ever heard, that was the worst.
Whether the bellowing was caused by the tail twisting, or because the
cattle were home sick, and did not want to be kidnapped or “shonghaid”
on board a foreign-bound vessel, I don’t know, but it was more exciting
than the sea fight at Santiago and about as dangerous, for the cattle
hooked with their horns and kicked, and I was kicked more than forty
times, and would have quit, only the man that hired me said if any of us
were injured we would be put on the government pension list, and be
supported in luxury the balance of our lives, so I worked for two days,
and finally we got a thousand or more steers down in the hold, sliding
them down on skids, and they were lined up in stalls, with a hay rack in
front of them, and a bar across behind them, and we sailed for the
ocean, after feeding the cattle bailed hay and giving them water and
bedding.
It seemed to me those cattle were almost as comfortable as steerage
passengers on a liner, but they kicked and bellowed, and pawed the
planks off the deck, and mourned like lost souls.
The first day out I found that I was not a passenger, but a crew.
Instead of the easy life I had expected, loafing along across the ocean,
I had to get up before daylight and skin potatoes, and help stir soup,
and pulverize hard tack, and carry the food up into the cabin for the
officers, and be sea sick, and wash dishes and wait on table, and feed
cattle, and do everything anybody told me to do. After a few days I
mutinied, and went to the captain and complained. He was an English
nobleman, and after hearing my tale of woe, he told me if I didn’t like
it I could go to ’ell, and I went down cellar to the cook room, which
was the nearest to ’ell I could go on that vessel. I found the man that
hired me, and told him I seemed to be doing the most of the work on the
excursion, and that I wanted an assistant. He said if I thought I was
working much now, I better wait until we run into a storm, when I would
not only have to be cook and waiter and chamber maid to the steers, but
I would have to be trained nurse down in the cattle regions, for when
the steers began to be sea sick that was a time when any man who had a
heart could use it to the best advantage, for there was nothing more
pitiful than a steer with a pain under his belt. He said steers were not
at all like the Irishman who was on the bow of the boat on the last
trip, feeding the fish, when the captain came along and said, “Pat, your
stomach seems to be weak,” and Pat said, “O, I dunno, I am throwing it
as far as any of them.” He said when there was a storm at sea the
animals acted perfectly human. They would get down on their knees and
roll their eyes heavenward, and moan, and cry, and tears would be in
their eyes, but they never lost their cud, only they swelled up and
bellowed.
Well, it wasn’t an hour before a storm came from towards Cuba, and the
boat was rocking and pitching, and the captain blew three whistles,
which was a signal for all hands to go below and nurse the steers, and
we all made a rush down to the very bowels of the ship, where the cattle
were, and such a sight I never saw.
Every steer was standing on one leg and then another, pitching forward
into the manger, and then back against the bar that held them in the
stall, and all bellowing as though their hearts would break, and the
duty of the crew was to go in the stalls and throw the cattle down on
their sides, and tie their legs so they couldn’t get up, when they could
lie there and ride easy.
They sent me into a stall where a steer was slowly dying by inches, with
instructions to hold up his left foreleg, so they could throw him, and
just as I had raised the leg they threw him onto me, and went on to the
next stall, leaving me with the wind all jammed out of me, and the
haunch of the steer holding me down.
They went all through the lower deck, got the steers down, and went off
and left me there to die, never seeming to miss me. I have slept with a
good many different kinds of people and things in my time. I have had a
porcupine crawl into bed with me when camping in the North woods, and he
was rough enough, for sure. I once had a skunk come into a tent where
some of us boys were camping, and when the skunk found out who we were
he didn’t do a thing and all the boys said it was me, and they kicked me
out, and made me sleep with the dogs, until the dogs struck, when I was
lonely enough.
Once I had a snake get under my blanket and shake his rattles, and I got
out of the tent so quick the snake never knew I was there, but in my
wildest moments of seeking for new experiences, I never thought I should
be a pillow for the stomach of a sea sick thousand-pound steer.
When I got my breath so I could yell it was night, and I had probably
been under that steer for several hours. I tried to kick the steer in a
vital part, where ox drivers kick oxen to make them “haw” and “gee,” but
the steer had gone to sleep and never paid any attention to me.
I guess everybody had gone to sleep on the ship, except the watchman and
the pilot, but I could lay there all night, so I began to make a noise
like a ghost, and I wailed so the watchman heard me, and he peered down
the hatch, and I mumbled, “I am thy father’s ghost,” and I rubbed some
phosphorus I had in my pocket on the hair of the steer that was acting
as my bed clothes. The man skipped, and pretty soon he came back with
the English captain, who had told me if I didn’t like my job I could go
to ’ell, and when he saw the shining steer with the phosphorus on its
hair, I wailed and said, “This is ’ell, come in, the water is fine, and
I smell the blood of an Englishman.”
[Illustration: “I Am Thy Father’s Ghost!—Come on in, the Water’s Fine!—I
Smell the Blood of an Englishman!”]
Well, the captain weakened, and wouldn’t come down, but I heard bells
ringing all over the boat, like a fire alarm, and pretty soon the whole
crew came down cellar with hose and began to squirt water on the steer
and me, and the steer was so scared it broke the rope on its legs and
got up off me, and then the animal stampeded out of the stall and
charged the firemen, and rubbed its phosphorus side against the English
captain, and he thought he was in hell, for sure, and he made them turn
the hose on him, and then a man hit the steer in the head with an ax,
and the trouble was over, except that the captain laid it all to me, and
told the crew I was a “’oodoo,” and they searched me and found my
phosphorus, and that settled it with me.
They were ordered to put me in the dungeon, and when they were going up
stairs I heard the captain say, “At daylight ’oist it h’out of the ’old,
and chuck it h’over board to feed the sharks,” so I guess I can see my
finish all right.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII.
The Boy Dresses Up in His Sunday Clothes and Tells the Captain He
Is Ready to Die—The Crew Throw a Steer Overboard to Feed a
School of Sharks—The Boy Produces His New Electric Battery—The
Bad Boy Makes a Trip to France to Meet His Pa.
I never slept a wink that night after the phosphorus episode, which I
painted the wild steer so it looked like a four-legged ghost, and scared
the crew so they nearly deserted the ship, because the captain ordered,
as I supposed, that I be cast overboard the next morning, to give the
sharks a meat sandwich, and all night I tried to prepare myself for
death, though I could not help thinking that in some way I would escape.
The next morning I got up and collected all the shoes of the officers
and got a blacking brush and began blacking them. Soon there was
trouble, because every man missed his shoes, and they began to hunt for
them, and they found me working at the shoes and singing, “Pull for the
shore, brother,” and such pious hymns.
I was dressed up in my Sunday clothes, and when the captain got his
shoes he wanted to know what was the meaning of my sudden industry, and
the funeral aspect all around, and I told him I had heard him tell the
crew to chuck me overboard, and I was preparing myself for death, and I
gave him a letter to mail to Pa, after I was gone, and told the captain
I was ready. “Why, you dumb fool,” said the captain, “it was not you I
meant to throw overboard, but that phosphorus steer that we killed last
night. They are hauling it up out of the hold now with the tackle. We
will save you for a worse fate.”
Well, I never felt so happy in my life as I did when that dead steer
came up through the hatchway, and was launched over the side, and when I
saw the flock of sharks jump on the steer and begin to hunt for the
tenderloin, I let out a yell for joy that sounded like the cry of a
timber wolf.
Then I got what was coming to me. The captain gave me a swat across the
jaw for making noise enough to scare the crew into mutiny, the mate gave
me a kick when I started for the cook’s galley, and several of the under
officers hit me, and by the time I got my apron on to help cook dinner I
was bruised and mad, and decided to get even with the captain. I am a
peaceful citizen until somebody walks on my frame, then I become a
terror to the foe.
When we began to fry the beef for dinner I told one of the crew that it
was a shame to feed men on steer meat, when the steer had died in its
stall of Texas fever or rhinderpest, and before we got the meat cooked,
ready for the dinner of the officers and crew, every man but the
officers had talked over the dead steer, and resolved that they would
not eat it, and when they sat down to the table, and I began to bring in
the meat, they all looked like a mob of anarchists ready to murder
somebody, and I helped all I could by saying in a whisper, “This is
perfectly good meat, but this is a good day to fast, and you will live
longer.” The officers at the other end of the cabin were eating the
steer all right, but the crew never touched it, confining themselves to
the bread and coffee, and pretty soon one of the crew proposed that they
show their displeasure by taking the meat and throwing it at the
officers.
Well, if I live a million years I will never have so much fun again.
About thirty men got up and grabbed the meat I had put on their plates,
and began to throw it at the captain and mate, and all the officers, and
of all the greasy mess I ever saw, that was the worst. The captain got
up on a chair and pulled a revolver, and asked what was the cause of the
assault, and was going to shoot, when the crew drew revolvers and told
him that if he pulled a trigger they would annihilate every officer on
the boat, and take charge of it themselves, and run it into the first
port. He said the crew could stand anything except eating diseased
cattle, and that they drew the line at steers that had died of
rhinderpest.
[Illustration: The Captain Got Up on a Chair and Pulled a Revolver and
Was Going to Shoot.]
The captain was stunned, and said the beef flying through the air was
good, and he got it from cold storage in Baltimore, and asked that a
committee go with him down in the hold and see the evidence, and a
committee was appointed to go down and see about it.
When they came back they were satisfied, and the captain asked them how
they got the idea the meat was bad, and when it came to that I felt as
though some one would squeal on me, and as I started to make a get away,
and hide somewhere until the storm blew over, one of the crew took me by
the neck and said to the captain, “This young man told us about the
meat.”
The captain told the fellow that had me collared to take me to his
cabin, and he came in pretty mad, and called in a few officers, and they
were getting ready to kill me, when I thought of the little electric
battery in my pistol pocket.
It is one I got in St. Louis to scare people with. I can turn a button,
and the battery will send electricity into my arm and through my body,
and I turned the dingus, and felt the electricity going through me like
ginger ale up your nose, and when they had got ready to maul me I began
to weep, and told the captain I was no saint, but I wanted a quiet life,
and all the fun I could have, and I asked him as a special favor to
allow me to shake his hand before I died, as I knew my earthly career
was about done for, and by that time the battery was buzzing, and I
reached out my hand to shake his. He gave me his hand, and when I began
to squeeze his hand the electricity went up his arm so he turned pale,
and I hung on and he yelled to the officers to take me off, as I was
killing him, and the sweat stood out on his face.
[Illustration: I Gave Him a Squeeze That Sent a Shock Through Him That
Loosened His Teeth.]
The mate grabbed hold of me and I gave him my other hand and he began to
dance, and the three of us were as full of electricity as a trolley
wire. I hung on and made them get down on their knees and swear they
would not lick me, and then I let go of them and began to weep again,
and they were sorry for me.
Then they made me tell them who I was, and that I was going to France to
meet Pa, and monkey with air ships, and when they were sure I was Peck’s
Bad Boy they said I could have the free run of the ship and that I had
the right to play all the tricks on anybody that I wanted to.
They made me show them how I worked my little pocket battery and then
they wanted me to shake hands with all the crew so they got the whole
bunch in the cabin and the captain said they had been entertaining an
angel unawares, and that I was the original Bad Boy, who had traveled
all over Europe and met the crowned heads, and he wanted to introduce me
to each member of the crew personally, as a distinguished guest who
honored the ship by being on board. Then he began to pass them up to be
shook by the great and only.
The first fellow to put out his hand was a Greek, who drew a knife on me
once because the coffee was weak, and I gave him a squeeze that sent a
shock through his system that loosened his teeth, and when the captain
alluded to me as the angel child who was loaded for fear, and who had a
charmed life that could not be destroyed by knives or guns, the Greek
looked at me in a respectful way as though he didn’t want to have any
more truck with me.
Then a big Welshman came up and shook my hand, and when I gave him the
third degree he let go and jumped out of the window of the cabin, on
deck, and began to use language that was equal to Russian, and then a
Swede came bowing to me, thinking I must be at least a crown prince, and
when I squeezed his hand he looked at his fingers and his arm, and
trembled and squirmed and said, “Ah tank a got yim yams,” and he lit out
in a hurry.
A small Irishman came next, and as he was the one who promised to cut my
ears off to serve on toast, I gave him the limit, and he curled up like
a German dockshound and laid down to the mat, making motions with his
mouth as though he was repeating poetry, and he said, “Kape away from
me, ye hoodoo,” and he crawled out so quick it almost broke the door.
The captain and mate laughed every time I shook hands with any of the
crew, and when I had paralyzed them all, and got them so scared they
would come to me if I whistled, and eat out of my hand, the captain said
I was worth more towards maintaining discipline on the boat than a whole
police force, and he wanted me to do something every day to keep the
crew from being lonely, so that night at supper time I charged all of
the steel knives and forks with electricity and got two nigger chasers
ready for business.
It was to be the last night before we landed in France, and I was
prepared to make it a meal long to be remembered. I sat next to the
captain, and that brought me right close to the crew’s table, and when
the crew filed in and took their places, they all looked at me as though
I was the devil instead of an “angel child.”
I had a match all ready and when the supper was put on and the crew
grabbed their knives and forks they were shocked real hard, and they
dropped them and yelled something like the swear words of each
nationality, and then I put my nigger chasers down on the floor, headed
for the crew’s table, and lit the fuse.
Well, you know how nigger chasers will chase. Gee, but they went under
the crew’s table, smoking and hissing, the sparks flew, and the brave
crew got up and run out on deck yelling “fire,” and “murder,” and “dam
that boy,” and the man in charge of the fire hose turned it into the
cabin and drowned everything out, and the crew run away and hid, and
when things cleared off the captain said, “Boy, I like a joke as well as
anybody, but you have overdone this thing, and I am mighty glad we land
tomorrow, and you can go to your Pa and his confounded airships, and may
the Lord have mercy on him.”
Then we went to bed, and I expected some of the crew would stab me
before morning, but I guess they were too much rattled.
Gee, but I am dying to see Pa, and help him spend government money for
eatings, seems as though I haven’t had a square meal since my chum and I
struck that community near St. Louis, as escaped balloonaticks.
Pa has had the hardest time of his life in Paris, and if I ever pitied a
man it was Pa.
You see, that last fly in the airship pretty near caused him to cash in
his chips, and go over the long road to the hereafter, cause he got
blood poison from the thorns that run into him where he landed in the
top limbs of the thornapple tree, and he sprained his arm and one hind
leg while being taken down with a derrick, and then before we left the
country town for Paris he drank some goat’s milk, which gave him
ptomaine poison in his inside works, and a peasant woman who sewed up
his pants where they were torn on the tree pricked him with a needle,
and he swelled up so he was unable to sit in a car seat, and his face
was scratched by the thorns of the tree and there were blotches all over
him, so when we got to Paris the health officers thought he had smallpox
and sent him to a pest house, and they wouldn’t let me in, but
vaccinated me and turned me loose, and I went to the hotel and told
about where Pa was, and all about it, and they put our baggage in a sort
of oven filled with sulphur and disinfected it, and stole some of it,
and they made me sleep in a dog kennel, and for weeks I had to keep out
of sight, until Pa was discharged from the hospital, and the friends of
Pa out at the airship club in the country got Pa’s airship that he
bought for a government out of the tree and took it to the club and
presented a bill for two hundred dollars, and I only had seven dollars,
so they held it for ransom.
[Illustration: Pa’s Face Was Scratched So They Sent Him to the Pest
House.]
Gee, but I worried about Pa!
Well, one day Pa showed up at the hotel looking like he had been in a
railroad wreck, and he was so thin his clothes had to be pinned up with
safety pins, and he had spent all his money, and was bursted.
The man who hired Pa in Washington to go abroad and buy airships for the
government told Pa to use his own money for a month or two and then draw
on the secretary of the treasury for all he needed, so before Pa went to
the hospital he drew on his government for ten thousand dollars, and
when he came back there was a letter for him from the American Consul in
Paris telling him to call at the office, so Pa went there and they
arrested him on the charge of skull dugging. They said he had no right
to draw for any money on the government at Washington. Pa showed his
papers with the big seal on, and the consul laughed in Pa’s face, and Pa
was hot under the collar and wanted to fight, but they showed him that
the papers he had were no good, and that he had been buncoed by some
fakir in Washington who got five hundred dollars from Pa for securing
him a job as government agent, and all his papers authorized him to do
was to travel at his own expense, and to buy all the airships he wanted
to with his own money, and Pa had a fit. All the money he had spent was
a dead loss, and all he had to show for it was a punctured airship,
which he was afraid to ride in.
Pa swore at the government, at the consul, and at the man who buncoed
him, and they released him from arrest, when he promised that he would
not pose any more as a government agent, and we went back to the hotel.
“Well, this is a fine scrape you have got me in,” says Pa, as we went to
our room.
“What in thunder did I have to do about it?” says I, just like that. “I
wasn’t with you when you framed up this job and let a man in Washington
skin you out of your money by giving you a soft snap which has exploded
in your hands. Gee, Pa, what you need is a maid or a valet, or something
that will hold on to your wad.” Pa said he didn’t need anybody to act as
a guardian to him, cause he had all the money he needed in his letter of
credit to the American Express Company in Paris, and he knew how to
spend his money freely, but he did hate to be buncoed and made the
laughing stock of two continents.
So Pa and I went down to the Express Office, and Pa gave the man in
charge a paper and the grand hailing sign of distress, and he handed out
bags of gold and bales of bills, and Pa hid a lot in his leather belt,
and put some in his pockets, and said, “Come on, Henry, and we will see
this town, and buy it if we like it.”
Well, we went out after dark and took in the concert halls and things,
and Pa drank wine and I drank nothing but ginger ale, and women who
waited on us sat in Pa’s lap and patted his bald head, and tried to feel
in his pockets, but Pa held on to their wrists and told them to keep
away, and he took one across his knees and slapped her across the
pajamas with a silver tray, and I thought Pa was real saucy.
A head waiter whispered to me and wanted to know what ailed the old
sport, and I told him Pa was bitten with a wolf in our circus last year,
and we feared he was going to have hydrophobia, and always when these
spells come on the only thing to do was to throw him into a tank of
water, and I should be obliged to them if they would take Pa and duck
him in the fountain in the center of the café, and save his life.
Pa was making up with the girl he had paddled with the silver tray,
buying champagne for her and drinking some of it himself out of her
slipper, when the head waiter called half a dozen Frenchmen who were
doing police duty, and told them to duck Pa in the fountain, and they
grabbed him by the collar and the pants and made him walk turkey towards
the fountain, and he held on to the girl, and the Frenchmen threw Pa and
the girl into the brink with a flock of ducks, and they went under
water, and Pa came up first yelling murder, and then the girl came up
hanging to Pa’s neck, and she gave a French yell of agony, and Pa gave
the grand hailing sign of distress, and yelled to know if there was not
an American present that would protect an American citizen from the
hands of a Paris mob. The crowd gathered around the circular fountain
basin and one drunken fellow jumped in the water and was going to hold
Pa’s head under water while the girl found his money, when Pa yelled
“Hey, Rube,” the way they do in a circus when there is a fight, and by
ginger it wasn’t a second before half a dozen old circus men that used
to belong to the circus when Pa was manager in the States made a rush
for the fountain, knocked the Frenchmen galley west, and pulled Pa out
of the water and let him drain off, and they said, “Hello, old man, how
did you happen to let them drown you?” and Pa saw who the boys were and
he hugged them, and invited them to all take something and then go to
his hotel.
[Illustration: After Pa Had Been Ducked in the Fountain They Charged for
Two Ducks He Killed by Falling on Them.]
When Pa paid the check for the drinks they charged in two ducks they
said Pa killed in the tank by falling on them. But Pa paid it and was so
tickled to meet the old circus boys that he gave the girl he went in
swimming with a twenty-franc note, and after staying until along towards
morning we all got into and on top of a hack and went to the hotel and
sat up till daylight talking things over.
We found the circus boys were on the way to Germany to go with the
Hagenbach outfit to South Africa to capture wild animals for circuses,
and when Pa told the boss, who was one of Hagenbach’s managers, about
his airship and what a dandy thing it would be to sail around where the
lions and tigers live in the jungle, and lasso them, from up in the air,
out of danger, he engaged Pa and me to go along, and I guess we will
know all about Africa pretty soon.
The next day we went out to the club where Pa keeps his airship, with
the boss of Hagenbach’s outfit and a cowboy that used to be with Pa’s
circus, to practice lassoing things. They got out the machine and Pa
steered it, and the boss and I were passengers, and the cowboy was on
the railing in front with his lariat rope, and we sailed along about
fifty feet high over the farms, until we saw a big goat. The cowboy
motioned for Pa to steer towards the goat, and when we got near enough
the cowboy threw the rope over the goat’s horns and tightened it up, and
Mr. Goat came right along with us, bleating and fighting. We led the
goat about half a mile over some fences, and finally came down to the
ground to examine our catch, and we landed all right, and Hagenbach’s
boss said it was the greatest scheme that ever was for catching wild
animals, and he doubled Pa’s salary, and said we would pack up the next
day and go to the Hagenbach farm in Germany and take a steamer for South
Africa in a week.
They were talking it over, and the cowboy had released the goat, when
that animal made a charge with his head on our party. He struck Pa below
the belt, butted the boss in the trousers until he laid down and begged
for mercy, stabbed the cowboy with his horns, and then made a hop, skip
and jump for the gas bag, burst a hole in it, and when the gas began to
escape the goat’s horns got caught in the gas bag and the goat died from
the effects of the gas, and we were all glad until about fifty peasant
women came across the fields with agricultural implements, and were
going to kill us all.
Pa said, “Well, what do you know about that?” but the women were fierce
and wanted our blood. The boss could talk French and he offered to give
them the goat to settle it, but they said it was their goat anyway, and
they wanted blood or damages.
Pa said it was easier to give damages than blood, and just as they were
going to cut up the gas bag the boss settled with them for about twenty
dollars, and hired them to haul the airship to the nearest station, and
we shipped it to Berlin, and got ready to follow the next day.
Pa says we will have a high old time in Africa. He says he wants to ride
up to a lion’s den in his airship and dare the fiercest lion to come out
and fight, and that he wouldn’t like any better fun than to ride over a
royal Bengal tiger in the jungle, and reach down and grab his tail, and
make him snarl like a tom cat on a fence in the alley.
He talks about riding down a herd of elephants, and picking out the
biggest ones, and roping them; and the way Pa is going to scare
rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses and make them bleat like calves is a
wonder.
I think Pa is the bravest man I ever saw, when he tells it, but I
noticed when we had that goat by the horns and he was caught in a barbed
wire fence, so the airship had to slow down until he came loose, Pa
turned as pale as a sheet, and when the goat bucked him in the stomach
Pa’s lips moved as though he was praying. Well, anyway, this trip to
Africa to catch wild animals is going to show what kind of sand there is
in all of us.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX.
The Bad Boy Arrives in France—The Boy’s Pa Is Suspected of Being
an Anarchist—The Boy Finds Pa Seated at a Large Table Bragging
About America—He Told Them the Men in America Were All
Millionaires and Unmarried.
The greatest relief I ever experienced was getting off of that cattle
ship, which I did somewhere in France, because the ship had become so
foul smelling that one had to stay on deck to breathe, and there was no
more fun to have, cause the officers and crew got on to me, and everyone
expected to be blown up or electrocuted if they got near to me, and the
last three days they wouldn’t let me eat in the cabin or sleep in my
hammock, so I had to go down with the cattle and eat hot bran mash, and
sleep in the hay. Gee, but when you eat hot bran mash for a few days you
never want to look at breakfast food again as long as you live.
I traded my electric battery to a deck hand for a suit case, and so I
looked like a tourist, because I went to a hotel and got a square meal,
and had a porter paste some hotel ads. on my suit case, and I took a
train for Paris, looking for Pa, cause I knew he wouldn’t be far away
from the bullyvards.
I left my baggage at a hotel where we stopped when we were in Paris
before, and the man who spoke shattered English told me Pa was rooming
there, but he was not around much, because he was being entertained by
the American residents, and had some great scheme that took him away on
secret expeditions often, and they thought he was either an anarchist or
grafter, and since the assassination of the king and crown prince of
Portugal the police had overhauled his baggage in his room several
times, but couldn’t find anything incriminating, so I had my baggage
sent to Pa’s room, and went out to find Pa, and pick up something that
would throw suspicion on him if he showed any inclination to go back on
me when I found him.
It was getting along towards dark when I walked down a bullyvard where
Pa used to go when we were in Paris before, and as I came to a café
where there was a sign, English spoken, I saw a crowd out on the
sidewalk surrounding tables, eating and drinking, and there was one big
table with about a dozen men and women, Americans, Frenchmen and other
foreigners, listening to an elderly man bragging about America, and I
saw it was Pa, but he was so changed that but for his bald head and chin
whiskers I would not have known him.
He had on French clothes, one of those French silk hats that had a flat
brim and a bell crown, and he had a moustache that was pointed at the
ends and was waxed so it would put your eyes out.
Pa was telling them that all the men in America were millionaires and
unmarried, and that all of them came abroad to spend money and marry
foreign ladies, to take them back to America and make queens of them,
and he looked at a French woman across the table with goo-goo eyes, and
she said to the man next to her, “Isn’t he a dear, and what a wonder he
is not married before,” and Pa smiled at her and put his hand on his
watch chain, on which there hung gold nuggets as big as walnuts, and he
fixed a big diamond in his scarf, so the electric light would hit it
plenty.
They ate and drank and the party began to break up, when Pa and the
beautiful woman were alone at the table, and they hunched up closer
together, and Pa was talking sweet to her, and telling her that all
wives in America had special trains on railroads, and palaces in New
York, and at Newport and in Florida, and yachts and gold mines, and she
could be the queen of them all if she would only say the word, and she
was just going to say the word, or something, and had his fat, pudgy
hand in both of hers, and was looking into his eyes with her own liquid
eyes, and seemed ready to fall into his arms, when I got up behind him
and lighted a giant fire cracker and put it under his chair and just as
the fuse was sputtering, I said, “Pa, ma wants you at the hotel,” and
the fireworks went off, the woman threw a fit and Pa raised up out of
the smoke and looked at me and said, “Now, where in hell did you come
from just at this time?” and the head waiter took the woman into a
private room to bring her out of her fit, the waiters opened the windows
to let the smoke out, and the crowd stampeded, and the police came in to
pull the place and find the anarchist who threw the bomb, and Pa took me
by the hand and we walked up the sidewalk to a corner, and when we got
out of sight of the crowd Pa said, “Hennery, your ma ain’t here, is
she?” in a pitiful tone, and I said no she wasn’t along with me this
trip, and Pa said, “Hennery, you make me weary,” and we walked along to
the hotel, Pa asking me so many questions about home that it was a like
a catekism.
[Illustration: The Fireworks Went Off—the Woman Threw a Fit, and Pa
Raised Out of the Smoke.]
When we got to the hotel and went to Pa’s room and I told him what I had
been doing since he abandoned me, he said he was proud of me, and now he
had plenty of work and adventure for me to keep him in.
He said he had tried several airships, by having someone else go up in
them, and that he was afraid to go up in one himself, and he seemed glad
that I had been ballooning around home, and he said he could use me to
good advantage.
I asked him about the woman he was talking to about marriage, and he
said that was all guff, that she had a husband who had invented a new
airship, and he was trying to get title to it for use in America, for
war purposes, and that the only way to get on the right side of these
French women was to talk about marriage and money, because for money any
of them would leave their husbands on fifteen minutes’ notice. He said
he had arranged for a trial of the airship the next day, from a place
out in the country, and that I could go up with the inventor of the ship
and see how it worked and report, so we went to bed and I slept better
than I had since I shipped on the cattle ship.
In the morning while we were taking baths and preparing for breakfast, I
found that Pa had been flying pretty high on government money, and he
had all kinds of gold and paper money and bonds, and he made people
think he owned most of America.
Pa asked me how the people at home looked upon his absence, and if they
advanced any theories as to the cause of his being abroad, and I told
him that everybody from the President down to Rockefeller knew about
what he was out looking after, and that when I left Bob Evans at
Fortress Monroe he told me to tell Pa to send a mess of airships to him
so he would meet them when he got to San Francisco, as he wanted to
paralyze the Japs if they got busy around the fleet, which pleased Pa,
and he said, “Just tell the people to wait, and I will produce airships
that can fight battles in the clouds, but it will take time.”
Then we went out in the country about a dozen miles, and met the
inventor and his wife, and the inventor filled a big balloon that looked
like a weiner sausage with gas that he made over a fire out in a field,
and the inventor and I got on a bamboo frame under the balloon, and he
turned on the gasoline that runs the wheel for steering, and they cut
her loose and we went up about fifty feet and sailed around the country
a half mile either way and watched Pa and the wife of the inventor as
they sat under a tree and talked politics.
We came back after a while and Pa was proud of me for having so much
nerve, and I told him the government at home was complaining because Pa
didn’t go up in the airships, cause they said he couldn’t buy airships
intelligently unless he tried them out, and that if he didn’t look out
they would send some expert out to take his place and spend the money,
and as we were landed on the ground I dared Pa to get on the frame and
go up with us for a little spin, and he was afraid the woman would think
he was a coward if he didn’t, so he got up and straddled the ridge pole
of the bamboo frame, and said he would take a whirl at it if it killed
him. The balloon thing couldn’t quite lift all of us, so I got off and
give her a lift, and up she went with the inventor steering, and Pa
hanging on for dear life and saying, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”
[Illustration: Up She Went with the Inventor Steering, and Pa Hanging On
for Dear Life.]
I have seen some scared men in my life, but when the machine got up
about as high as a house, so Pa couldn’t get off, and the woman waved a
handkerchief at Pa, he swallowed his Adam’s apple and said, “Let her go
Gallagher,” and Gallagher, the Frenchman, let her go.
Well, you’d a died to see the thing wobble and see Pa cling on with his
feet and hands. For about a quarter of a mile she went queer, like a
duck that has been wing-tipped, and then she began to descend.
First she passed over a lot of cows that women were milking, and the
cows stampeded one way and the women the other way, and the women were
scared more than the cows, cause when they got out from under the ship
they prayed, but the cows didn’t.
Then the ship struck a field where about forty women were piling onions
on the ground, and it just scattered women and onions all over the
field, and of all the yelling you ever heard that was the worst.
Pa yelled to them that if he ever got off that hay rack alive he would
pay the damages, and he thought he was swearing at them. Then the worst
thing possible happened. The airship went up over a tree, and Pa was
scared and he grabbed a limb and let go of the bamboo, and there he was
in the top of a thornapple tree. The balloon went over all right, and
the inventor steered it away to where it started from, and the woman and
I watched Pa. The thorns were about two inches long and more than a
hundred of them got into Pa and he yelled all kinds of murder, and then
the women who owned the cows and onions the ship had wrecked surrounded
the tree with hoes and rakes and pitchforks, and they made such a
frantic noise that Pa did not dare to come down out of the tree. So Pa
told us to take the train back to Paris and send the American Consul and
the police and a hook and ladder company to get him down and protect
him.
I told Pa I didn’t want to go off and leave him to be killed by strange
women, and maybe eaten by wolves before morning, but he said, “Don’t
talk back to me, you go and send that patrol wagon and the hook and
ladder truck, and be quick about it or I won’t do a thing to you when I
catch you.”
So we went and put the airship in a barn and went back to town and
turned in a police and fire alarm to rescue Pa. The chief said there was
no use in going out there in the country before morning, because the
women couldn’t get up the thornapple tree and Pa couldn’t get down. So I
went to bed and dreamed about Pa all night, and had a perfectly lovely
time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X.
Pa Had the Hardest Time of His Life in Paris—Pa Drinks Some Goat
Milk Which Gives Him Ptomaine Poison in His Inside Works—Pa
Attends the Airship Club in the Country—Pa Draws on American
Government for $10,000.
Pa has had the hardest time of his life in Paris, and if I ever pitied a
man it was Pa.
You see that last fly in the airship pretty near caused him to cash in
his chips and go over the long road to the hereafter, cause he got blood
poison from the thorns that run into him where he landed in the top
limbs of the thorn apple tree, and he sprained his arm and one hind leg
while being taken down with a derrick, and then before we left the
country town for Paris he drank some goat’s milk, which gave him
ptomaine poison in his inside works, and a peasant woman who sewed up
his pants where they were torn on the tree pricked him with a needle,
and he swelled up so he was unable to sit in a car seat, and his face
was scratched by the thorns of the tree, and there were blotches all
over him, so when we got to Paris the health officers thought he had
smallpox and sent him to a pest house, and they wouldn’t let me in, but
vaccinated me and turned me loose, and I went to the hotel and told
about where Pa was and all about it, and they put our baggage in a sort
of oven filled with sulphur and disinfected it and stole some of it, and
they made me sleep in a dog kennel, and for weeks I had to keep out of
sight, until Pa was discharged from the hospital, and the friends of Pa
out at the airship club in the country got Pa’s airship that he bought
for a government out of the tree and took it to the club and presented a
bill for two hundred dollars, and I only had seven dollars, so they held
it for ransom.
Gee, but I worried about Pa!
Well, one day Pa showed up at the hotel looking like he had been in a
railroad wreck, and he was so thin his clothes had to be pinned up with
safety pins, and he had spent all his money and was bursted.
The man who hired Pa in Washington to go abroad and buy airships for the
government told Pa to use his own money for a month or two and then draw
on the secretary of the treasury for all he needed, so before Pa went to
the hospital he drew on his government for ten thousand dollars, and
when he came back there was a letter for him from the American consul in
Paris telling him to call at the office, so Pa went there and they
arrested him on the charge of skull dugging. They said he had no right
to draw for any money on the government at Washington. Pa showed his
papers with the big seal on, and the consul laughed in Pa’s face, and Pa
was hot under the collar and wanted to fight, but they showed him that
the papers he had were no good, and that he had been buncoed by some
fakir in Washington, who got five hundred dollars from Pa for securing
him a job as government agent, and all his papers authorized him to do
was to travel at his own expense and to buy all the airships he wanted
to with his own money, and Pa had a fit. All the money he had spent was
a dead loss, and all he had to show for it was a punctured airship,
which he was afraid to ride in.
Pa swore at the government, at the consul and at the man who buncoed
him, and they released him from arrest when he promised that he would
not pose any more as a government agent, and we went back to the hotel.
“Well, this is a fine scrape you have got me in,” says Pa, as we went to
our room. “What in thunder did I have to do about it?” says I, just like
that. “I wasn’t with you when you framed up this job and let a man in
Washington skin you out of your money by giving you a soft snap which
has exploded in your hands. Gee, Pa, what you need is a maid or a valet
or something that will hold on to your wad.” Pa said he didn’t need
anybody to act as a guardian to him, cause he had all the money he
needed in his letter of credit to the American Express Company in Paris,
and he knew how to spend his money freely, but he did hate to be buncoed
and made the laughing stock of two continents.
So Pa and I went down to the express office, and Pa gave the man in
charge a paper, and the grand hailing sign of distress, and he handed
out bags of gold and bales of bills, and Pa hid a lot in his leather
belt and put some in his pockets, and said: “Come on, Henry, and we will
see this town and buy it if we like it.”
Well, we went out after dark and took in the concert halls and things,
and Pa drank wine and I drank nothing but ginger ale, and women who
waited on us sat in Pa’s lap and patted his bald head and tried to feel
in his pockets, but Pa held on to their wrists and told them to keep
away, and he took one across his knee and slapped her across the pajamas
with a silver tray, and I thought Pa was real saucy.
A head waiter whispered to me and wanted to know what ailed the old
sport, and I told him Pa was bitten by a wolf in our circus last year
and we feared he was going to have hydrophobia, and always when these
spells come on the only thing to do was to throw him into a tank of
water, and I should be obliged to them if they would take Pa and duck
him in the fountain in the center of the cafe and save his life.
Pa was making up with the girl he had paddled with the silver tray,
buying champagne for her and drinking some of it himself out of her
slipper, when the head waiter called half a dozen Frenchmen who were
doing police duty and told them to duck Pa in the fountain, and they
grabbed him by the collar and the pants and made him walk turkey towards
the fountain, and he held on to the girl, and the Frenchmen threw Pa and
the girl into the brink with a flock of ducks, and they went under
water, and Pa came up first yelling murder, and then the girl came up
hanging to Pa’s neck, and she gave a French yell of agony, and Pa gave
the grand hailing sign of distress and yelled to know if there was not
an American present that would protect an American citizen from the
hands of a Paris mob. The crowd gathered around the circular fountain
basin, and one drunken fellow jumped in the water and was going to hold
Pa’s head under water while the girl found his money, when Pa yelled
“Hey, Rube,” the way they do in a circus when there is a fight, and by
ginger it wasn’t a second before half a dozen old circus men that used
to belong to the circus when Pa was manager in the States made a rush
for the fountain, knocked the Frenchmen gally west and pulled Pa out of
the water and let him drain off, and they said, “Hello, old man, how did
you happen to let them drown you?” and Pa saw who the boys were and he
hugged them and invited them to all take something and then go to his
hotel.
When Pa paid the check for the drinks they charged in two ducks they
said Pa killed in the tank by falling on them. But Pa paid it and was so
tickled to meet the old circus boys that he gave the girl he went in
swimming with a twenty franc note, and after staying until along towards
morning we all got into and on top of a hack and went to the hotel and
sat up till daylight talking things over.
We found the Circus boys were on the way to Germany to go with the
Hagenbach outfit to South Africa to capture Wild Animals for circuses,
and when Pa told the boss, who was one of Hagenbach’s managers, about
his airship and what a dandy thing it would be to sail around where the
lions and tigers live in the Jungle, and lasso them from up in the air,
out of danger, he engaged Pa and me to go along, and I guess we will
know all about Africa pretty soon.
The next day we went out to the club where Pa keeps his airship, with
the boss of Hagenbach’s outfit and a cowboy that used to be with Pa’s
circus, to practice lassoing things. They got out the machine and Pa
steered it, and the boss and I were passengers, and the cowboy was on
the railing in front with his lariat rope, and we sailed along about
fifty feet high over the farms, until we saw a big goat. The cowboy
motioned for Pa to steer towards the goat, and when we got near enough
the cowboy threw the rope over the goat’s horns and tightened it up, and
Mr. Goat came right along with us, bleating and fighting. We led the
goat about half a mile over some fences, and finally came down to the
ground to examine our catch, and we landed all right, and Hagenbach’s
boss said it was the greatest scheme that ever was for catching wild
animals, and he doubled Pa’s salary and said we would pack up the next
day and go to the Hagenbach farm in Germany and take a steamer for South
Africa in a week.
They were talking it over and the cowboy had released the goat, when
that animal made a charge with his head on our party. He struck Pa below
the belt, butted the boss in the trousers until he laid down and begged
for mercy, stabbed the cowboy with his horns and then made a hop, skip
and jump for the gas bag, burst a hole in it, and when the gas began to
escape the goat’s horns got caught in the gas bag and the goat died from
the effects of the gas, and we were all glad until about fifty peasant
women came across the fields with agricultural implements and were going
to kill us all.
Pa said, “Well, what do you know about that,” but the women were fierce
and wanted our blood. The boss could talk French, and he offered to give
them the goat to settle it, but they said it was their goat any way, and
they wanted blood or damages.
Pa said it was easier to give damages than blood, and just as they were
going to cut up the gas bag the boss settled with them for about twenty
dollars, and hired them to haul the airship to the nearest station, and
we shipped it to Berlin and got ready to follow the next day.
Pa says we will have a high old time in Africa. He says he wants to ride
up to a lion’s den in his airship and dare the fiercest lion to come out
and fight, and that he wouldn’t like any better fun than to ride over a
royal bengal tiger in the jungle and reach down and grab his tail and
make him synawl like a tom cat on a fence in the alley.
He talks about riding down a herd of elephants and picking out the
biggest ones and roping them; and the way Pa is going to scare
rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses and make them bleat like calves is a
wonder.
I think Pa is the bravest man I ever saw, when he tells it, but I
noticed when we had that goat by the horns and he was caught in a barbed
wire fence, so the airship had to slow down until he came loose, Pa
turned as pale as a sheet, and when the goat bucked him in the stomach
Pa’s lips moved as though in praying. Well, anyway, this trip to Africa
to catch wild animals is going to show what kind of sand there is in all
of us.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI.
The Boy and His Pa Leave France and Go to Germany, Where They Buy
an Airship—They Get the Airship Safely Landed—Pa and the Boy
With the Airship Start for South Africa—Pa Shows the Men What
Power He Has Over the Animal Kingdom.
I was awful glad to get out of France and into Germany, and when we had
got the airship safely landed at the Hagenbach stock farm and boxed and
baled ready to load on a boat for South Africa, and all hands had drank
a few schooners of beer, and felt brave enough to tackle any wild animal
that walks the earth, I listened to the big talk and the gestures,
though I couldn’t understand a word they said, except when they held up
their fingers for more beer.
I felt that we had got among Americans again, because all a German needs
to be an American is to be able to talk a little broken English. The
French are all right in their way, but they are too polite. If a
Frenchman wants to order you out of his place he is so polite about it
that you think he wants you to stay there always and be at home.
If a German wants you to get out he says “Rouse” in a hoarse voice, and
if you don’t rouse he gives you a swift kick in the pants and you
instinctively catch on to the fact that you are due some other place.
The Germans that are with us on the animal hunt in South Africa all
speak English, and while at the Hagenbach farm Pa convinced everybody
that he was the bravest animal man in the world, “cause he would go up
to any cage where the animals had been tamed and act as free with them
as though he did not know fear,” and he went around in his shirt sleeves
the way he used to in the circus, and would pat a lion on the head, and
if the animal growled Pa would scowl at him and make the lion believe Pa
was king of beasts.
Pa has found that putting on a pair of automobile goggles and getting
down on his hands and knees and crawling towards the animal in captivity
frightens the animal into a fit, but I guess when he tries that stunt on
wild animals on the veldt of Africa he will find it does not work so
well.
I expect to have to bring Pa back the way they transport canned sausage,
after a few wild lions and tigers and hippopotamuses have used him for a
cud to chew on.
Before we took the steamer for South Africa I had the first serious talk
with Pa that I have had since I joined him in Paris. I said, “Pa, don’t
you think this idea of chasing wild animals in Africa with an airship is
going to be a sort of a dangerous proposition?” and Pa began to look
brave, and he said, “Hennery, this is an age of progress, and we have to
get out of the rut, and catch up with the procession and lead it. The
old way of capturing wild animals by enticing them into baited traps and
letting them touch a spring and imprison themselves is about as
dangerous as catching mice in a wire trap with a piece of cheese for
bait.
“Of course, we shall take along all of the traps and things usually used
for that purpose, because roping animals from an airship is only an
experiment, and we want to be on the safe side, but if the airship
proves a success I will be considered the pioneer in airship wild animal
capturing, and all animal men will bow down to your Pa, see, and my
fortune will be made. We will get into the animal country and locate a
few lions and tigers, first, and sail over their lairs in the jungle,
and while I hold the steering apparatus our cowboys will sit on the
bamboo rails of the ship and throw the rope over their necks, and when
they find we have got them where the hair is short they will lie down
and bleat like a calf, and when we dismount and go up to them to tie
their legs they will be so tame they will eat out of your hand.
“I have got it all figured out in my mind and I don’t want you or
anybody else to butt in with any discouraging talk, for I won’t have
it.”
“But suppose the airship gets caught in a tree?” I said to Pa. “Well,
then, we will tie up and catch baboons,” said Pa. “Everything goes with
your Pa, Hennery.”
Well, it was like moving a circus to get the stuff loaded for South
Africa, as we had more than fifty cages to put animals in to bring home,
and tents and food enough for an arctic expedition, and over two hundred
men, and several tame lionesses and female tigers to use for decoys, and
some elephants for Judases to rope in the wild animals, and when we got
started it was more than a week before we struck the coast of Africa,
and all there was to do on the trip was to play poker and practice on
the tame animals.
We almost lost a tame lioness. Pa wanted to show the men what power he
had over the animal kingdom and he induced the manager to turn Carrie
Nation, the big lioness, loose on deck, while Pa put on his auto goggles
and scared her. Gee, but I thought I was an orphan for sure. The boys
had trained that lioness to be a retriever, like a water spaniel, and on
every trip some of the boys would jump overboard when there was no sea
on and let Carrie jump over the rail and rescue them, so when they let
her out she thought there was going to be a chance for her to get her
regular salt water bath, and that it was expected that she would do her
stunt at rescuing a human being.
When she was let out of her cage and the crowd was lined up all around
the rail, and she saw Pa in the middle of the deck, on all fours, with
the black goggles on, she looked around at the crowd of her friends as
much as to say, “What is the joke?” but she sidled up to Pa and lashed
her tail around and began to play with Pa as a kitten would play with a
ball of yarn.
She put her paw on Pa and rolled him over, and when Pa got right side up
and crawled towards her looking fierce, she side stepped and cuffed him
on the jaw and everybody laughed except Pa.
Then Pa thought he would make a grandstand play and drive her back in
her cage, and he started towards her real fast on his hands and knees,
and gave a “honk-honk” like an auto, and we thought she was scared, but
I guess she wasn’t frightened so you would notice it, for she jumped
sideways and got around behind Pa, and I said, “Sick him, Carrie,” and
by gosh she grabbed Pa by the slack of his pants and made a rush for the
railing, and before I could grab her by the tail she jumped right
overboard with Pa in her mouth, and landed kersplash in the deep blue
sea, with Pa yelling to the men to take her off.
[Illustration: Pa Gave a “Honk, Honk” Like an Auto, But the Lion Wasn’t
Frightened So You Would Notice.]
We all rushed to the rail, and I began to cry, but the boys told me not
to be scared, as Carrie would bring Pa to the yawl all right.
The men launched a life boat and the lioness was swimming around with Pa
in her teeth, as though she was a dog with a rag doll in its mouth.
Pa was swallowing salt water and saying something that sounded like “Now
I lay me,” and Carrie was trying to keep his head out of the water by
lifting hard on his pants, and finally the life boat got near them and
they grabbed Pa by the legs and pulled him in and he laid down in the
bottom of the boat, and the lioness climbed over the side and began to
shake herself, and then she licked the salt water off, and when the boat
came alongside she jumped up on the deck and rolled over and turned
somersaults, and then they pulled Pa on deck and when he got his sea
legs on he said to the manager of the expedition and the captain of the
boat, “Gentlemen, I have rescued your lion, and I claim salvage, and you
can give me credit for whatever she is worth as a show animal,” and then
Carrie went to her cage, and everybody patted Pa on the back and made
him think he had saved a thousand-dollar lion from drowning.
Pa asked me to accompany him to our stateroom, and when the door was
closed and he saw my tear-stained face, he said, “You think you are dam
smart, don’t you? I heard you say sick him to that old moth-eaten lion,
and now don’t you ever interfere with my plans again. I got that lion so
frightened by my fierce look, and the noise I made, that she jumped
overboard, and I went along to save her. Now, help me off with my
clothes and rub me down, and I will go out and chase a tiger round the
deck, and make it climb up into the rigging and beg to be taken down.
That is the kind of a man your Pa is,” and Pa began to shuck himself,
and I rubbed him down as if he was a race horse. I can see that when we
come to the wild animal fields Pa is going to astonish the natives.
We landed at a port in South Africa in the night, and before morning we
had all our stuff on a special train and about daylight we pulled out
for a place about three hundred miles from the coast, and the next day
we were in camp with the tents all up and the cages in place, and had
engaged two hundred negroes with no clothes on to help us.
When they saw the airship spread out ready to be filled with gas when we
got ready to use it, some of them deserted, but we got others to take
their places.
I suppose when we fill that gas bag with chemical gas and it begins to
flop around, there won’t be a negro left in Africa.
We were in wild animal country all right. The first night the lions in
the jungle kept us awake, and Carrie Nation answered every time the wild
lions bellowed, until Pa had to go and maul her with a bamboo club.
The next morning there were lion tracks all around camp, and Pa says the
trouble is going to be that the lions will hunt us instead of our having
to go after them.
A drove of zebras stampeded by our camp the first morning, a couple of
giraffes were looking us over from a hill top, and a rhinoceros went
through the camp and stole a smoked ham.
Pa is so scared he stays in his tent most of the time and shivers. He
says he has got chills and fever, but I can tell when a man’s heart
comes up in his mouth, and chokes him.
I told him this morning that if he showed the white feather now it was
all off with him, and the Hagenbach’s would leave him in Africa to be
adopted by a tribe. Pa said, “You watch me when we get to catching
animals. I will make any animal that crosses my path think he has run
into a live wire.”
Well, I hope Pa will not be a coward.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XII.
All Kinds of Climates in South Africa—Pa Hires Men to Capture Wild
Animals—The Boy and His Pa Capture Some Tigers and a Big
Lion—They Have a Narrow Escape from a Rhinoceros.
I don’t know whether I like the climate of South Africa or not, but you
can have any kind of climate you are looking for, from the Alaska kind
to the tropical kind, the same day.
I think it is the climate that makes all the animals so mad. One minute
a lion or a tiger may be lolling with his tongue out, fighting flies and
scratching fleas, and the next minute there are icicles on his
moustache, and he has to crawl into a hole in the ground to keep from
freezing.
These natives beat me. They do not wear any clothes except a doily, made
of bark or grass, over their loins, and from the doily, above and below,
their skin is bare, and they ought to be arrested for disorderly conduct
and exposure, but their skin is thick and warty like a rhinoceros, and
when it freezes it looks like pickled pigs’ feet.
One man we have hired to help capture animals is a native chief with
sixty wives, and he has brought them all to camp with him, and we have
to feed them, and it is rumored the women all have their caps set for
Pa, if the husband dies, and Pa is afraid they will kill their old man
and select Pa to fill the vacancy, that being the unwritten law that a
man’s wives can select a husband.
Gee, if I had to be a stepson to all those sixty senegambians that look
like monkeys in the face and when on dress parade like oxen, I should
die, or they would, if I could find chloroform enough to go around.
Well, Pa is trying his best to save the life of that husband of the
sixty wives, and every time one of the wives pats Pa on the back or
chucks him under the chin he has a chill, and I know he will do
something desperate if they get after him in flocks.
I suppose I ought not to have done it, but I told one of the wives who
understands a little English that Pa liked to be hugged and squeezed,
and held on the girls’ laps, so when we get through work at night and
sit around the camp fire they take turns holding Pa on their laps, and
he thinks one of the women broke one of his ribs hugging him, cause they
are strong as giants, and have a terrible squeeze.
I told one of them she could make herself solid with Pa if she could get
him a nice long snake, so she went off into the jungle alone and came
back dragging a snake more than twenty feet long, and put it in Pa’s
tent when he was asleep. When Pa woke up in the morning and found the
snake coiled upon his blanket he threw a fit and went to the doctor and
got some medicine for chills and fever, and we put the snake into a cage
to sell to a menagerie.
[Illustration: When Pa Found the Snake Coiled Up on His Blanket He Threw
a Fit.]
The old airship got in its work the first time we tried it, though we
didn’t make gas enough to more than half fill it, and it wouldn’t fly,
but we got some tigers and a big lion, all right.
We took the airship out on an open prairie and built a fire to make the
gas for the balloon, and Pa made everybody stay away from it except me,
and when we got it inflated we were to blow a horn, and the people we
wanted to go along could come, but the crowd of workers and negroes must
stay back, so as not to scare the animals, and be ready to bring cages
up when we blew the horn three consecutive times.
We were not looking around much, but just paying attention to our gas,
and steering it into the gas bag, and we had got the bag about half
full, and it was lying on the grass like a big whale that has died at
sea and floated ashore, and we were busy thinking of how we would sail
over the veldt and have our cowboy rope a few lions and choke them into
submission, when I happened to look around towards the jungle, and there
were two tigers crawling through the grass towards the gas bag, and a
lion walking right towards it as though he was saying to the tigers,
“Ah, g’wan, I saw it first,” and a rhinoceros was rooting along like a
big hog, right towards us. I told Pa to look out, and when he saw the
animals he seemed to lose all appetite for lions and tigers in their
wild state, for he started for a tree and told me to climb up, too.
Well, it took Pa quite a while to get up on a limb, but he finally got
all his person up there, and I was right with him, and Pa looked at the
animals creeping up to the gas bag, and he said, “Bub, the success of
this expedition will be settled right here if that lion drinks any of
the gasoline.”
Well, I have seen cats crawling along the floor towards a mouse hole,
and stopping and looking innocent when the mouse stuck his head out of
the hole, and then moving on again when the mouse disappeared, and these
tigers acted that way, stopping every time the wind caused the gas bag
to flap on the ground. The lion acted like a big St. Bernard dog that
smells something ahead that he don’t exactly know what to make of, but
is going to find out, and the rhinoceros just rooted along as though he
was getting what he wanted out of the ground, and would be along after a
while to investigate that thing that was rising like a big ant hill on
the prairie and smelling like a natural gas well. Finally the tigers got
near enough to the gas bag with their claws, running their noses down
into the holes where the gas was escaping, and fairly drinking in the
gas. Their weight sent the bag down to the ground, and they were in the
middle, inhaling gas, and pretty soon the lion came up and clawed a hole
in the gas bag and acted as though he was not going to let the tigers
have all the good stuff and pretty soon we could see from up the tree
that they were being overcome by the fumes, and Pa said in about four
minutes we would have a mess of animals chloroformed good and plenty,
and we would go down and hobble them and hog-tie them like they do
cattle on the ranches. What bothered us about going down the tree was
the rhinoceros that was coming rooting along, but after a while he came
up and smelled of the gasoline can, tipped it over, and as the gasoline
trickled out on the ground he laid down and rolled in it like a big pig,
and after he had got well soaked in gasoline he rolled near the fire,
and in a minute he was all ablaze and about the scaredest rhinoceros
that ever roamed the prairie.
When the fire began to scorch his hide he let out a bellow that could be
heard a mile and started towards the camp on a gallop, looking like a
barn afire, and Pa said now was the time to capture our sleeping
animals, so we shinned down the tree and found the lion dead to the
world, and we tied his feet together and put a bag over his head, and
then climbed over the gas bag and found the two tigers sleeping as
sweetly as babes, and I held their legs together while Pa tied all four
legs so tight they couldn’t move a muscle, and then Pa told me to blow
the horn for the cages to be sent out.
Gee, but I was proud of that morning’s work, two tigers and a lion with
no more danger than shooting cats on a back fence with a bean snapper,
and Pa and I shook hands and patted each other on the back. I told Pa he
was a wonder, and that Mr. Hagenbach would probably make him a general
in the Prussian army, but Pa looked modest and said, “All it needs is
brain and sand to overcome the terrors of the jungle,” and just then we
saw the cages coming across the veldt, and Pa said, “Now, when the boys
come up with the cages you put one foot on the lion and strike an
attitude like a lion tamer, and I will play with the tigers.”
When the cages came up I was on to my job all right, and the boys gave
me three cheers, and they asked where Pa was, and I pointed to the
center of the gas bag and said Pa was in there having a little fun with
a mess of tigers, and when they walked over the billowy gas bag they
found Pa with one of the tigers that had partly come to playing with him
and chewing his pants, but they rescued Pa and in a few minutes they had
our three animals in the cages, and we started for camp, Pa walking
behind the cages with his coat over his arm, telling young Hagenbach the
confoundedest story about how he subdued the animals by just hypnotizing
them, and I never said a word. A boy that will not stand up for his
father is an idgit.
When we got to camp the natives had all scattered to the four winds. It
seemed that when the fiery rhinoceros came towards them they thought the
Great Spirit had sent fire to destroy them, and they took to the jungle,
the rhino after them, bellowing all kinds of cheering messages from the
Great Spirit.
Along towards night they came to camp dragging a cooked rhinoceros, and
they turned in to eat it, and all those sixty females brought nice
pieces of rhino, cooked by gasoline, to Pa, and wanted Pa to eat it, but
Pa said he was dieting, and it was Friday, anyway, and he never ate meat
on Friday.
Then we all sat up all night, and everybody made speeches glorifying Pa
as the greatest hero that ever came to Africa, and that he had Stanley
beaten a mile, and Pa blushed, and the women held him in their laps and
said he was the dearest thing ever.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIII.
Pa Was a Hero After Capturing Two Tigers and a Lion—Pa Had an Old
Negro With Sixty Wives Working for Him—Pa Makes His Escape in
Safety—Pa Goes to Catch Hippopotamusses.
Pa was a hero after capturing the two tigers and the lion after they had
inhaled gas from the gas bag of the air ship, because the crowd didn’t
know how it was done. Everybody thought Pa had scared the wild animals
with the airship until they were silly, and then hypnotized them, and
got them into cages, but when the animals came out from under the
influence of the gas and began to raise the roof, and bite and snarl,
the whole camp was half scared to death, and they all insisted on Pa
going to the cages and quieting them by his hypnotic eye, but Pa was too
wise to try it on wild animals, and he had to confess that it was the
gas bag that did the work, and they made Pa fix up a gas bag under the
cages and quiet the animals, and when the employees of the expedition
found that Pa was not so much of a hero as he pretended, Pa was not so
much of a king as he had been, except in the minds of the African
negroes who were at work for us. That old negro who had sixty wives
fairly doted on Pa, and the wives thought Pa was the greatest man that
ever was, and the wives fairly got struck on Pa, and wanted to take
turns holding Pa in their laps, until the giant husband of the sixty big
black females got jealous of Pa, and wanted to hit him on the head with
a war club, but Pa showed him a thing or two that made him stand without
hitching.
The black husband had a tooth ache, and asked Pa to cure him of the
pain, and Pa had him lie down on the ground, and he put some chloroform
on a handkerchief and held it to the man’s nose, and pretty soon the
negro was dead to the world, and the wives thought Pa had killed their
husband with his mighty power, and they insisted that Pa marry the whole
sixty wives. Pa kicked on it, but Mr. Hagenbach told Pa that was the law
in that part of Africa, and that he would have to marry them.
I never saw Pa so discouraged as he was when the oldest wife took his
hand and said some words in the negro dialect, and pronounced Pa married
to the whole bunch, and when they led Pa to the man’s tent, followed by
all the wives, half of them singing a dirge for the dead husband, and
the other half singing a wedding hymn, and Pa looking around scared, and
trying to get away from his new family, it was pathetic, but all the
hands connected with the Hagenbach expedition laughed, and Pa
disappeared in the tent of his wives, and they hustled around to prepare
a banquet of roasted zebra, and boiled rhinoceros.
We went to the tent and looked in, and Pa was the picture of despair,
seated in the middle of the tent, all the female negroes petting him,
and hugging him, and dressing him in the African costume.
They brought out loin clothes that belonged to the chloroformed husband
and made Pa put them on; they blacked his arms and legs and body with
some poke berry juice, so he looked like a negro, and greased his body
and tied some negro hair on his head over his bald spot, and by gosh,
when I saw Pa transformed into a negro I looked at myself in a mirror to
see if I had turned to a negro. I held the mirror up to Pa so he could
see himself, and when he got a good look at the features that had always
been his pride, he shed a few tears and said, “Booker Washington, by
Gosh,” and when the wives were preparing to bring in the banquet Pa said
to me, “Hennery, let this be a lesson to you. Don’t ever try to be
smart, and don’t be a masher under any circumstances, cause you see what
it has brought me to. When you get back to America tell Roosevelt that I
died for my country.” Well, they brought in the wedding feast, and all
the wives helped me and Pa and Mr. Hagenbach, and the cow boy that
throws the lasso, and the foreman, and we ate hearty, and all was going
smooth when there was a commotion at the door of the tent, and in came
the former husband, who had come out from under the influence of the
chloroform, and he was crazy and had a club.
He had been told of his death, and the marriage of his wives to the old
man who owned the gas bag, and he wouldn’t have it that way.
He knocked some of his wives down, and some fainted away, and then he
started for the man who had usurped him in the affections of his sixty
wives.
Pa was scared and started to crawl under the tent and escape into the
jungle, when I saw that something had to be done, so I got right in
front of the crazy husband and, looking him square in the face, I began
to chant, “Ene-mene-miny-mo, catch a nigger by the toe,” and before I
got to the end of the first verse, the great giant said, “May be you are
right,” and he fell to the earth in a fit probably from the effects of
the chloroform, but everybody thought I had overcome him by my remarks,
and then they jumped on the husband and held him down while Pa escaped,
and for Pa’s safety they put him in a cage next to the newly acquired
tigers and lions, who were cross and ugly, but Pa said he had rather
chance it with them than with that crazy husband who had accused him of
alienating the affections of his sixty wives.
[Illustration: Looking Him Square in the Face, I Began to Chant,
“Ene-Mene-Miny-Mo.”]
The next day everything was fixed up with the husband of the sixty
wives, his tooth ache was cured, and he quit being mad at Pa, and we all
went to a river about a mile from camp to catch a mess of
hippopotamuses.
The usual way to catch the hippos is to let negroes go out in boats and
give the hippos a chance to swim under the boats and tip them over, and
after they had eaten a few negroes they would come ashore and lie down
in the mud for a nap, and they could be tied to a wagon and hauled to
the cages.
Pa was to superintend the boat excursion, because the hippos would not
eat a white man. Pa forgot that he was made up like a negro, and so he
went in the first boat, with six negroes who had been purchased at five
dollars apiece for hippo bait.
When the boat got out in the middle of stream, and the hippo heads began
to pop up out of the water, with a “look who’s here” expression on their
open faces, Pa turned pale, which probably saved him, for when the boat
was upset, and the hippos took their pick of the negroes, and the water
washed the poke berry juice off Pa he was as white as a drioenenoro, and
when the nearest hippo got his negro in his mouth and started for the
shore Pa climbed on his back and rode ashore in triumph, grabbing the
husband of the sixty wives by the arm and pulling him on board the
hippo, and saving his life, and right there in the mud, while the hippos
were eating their breakfasts of cheap negroes, that husband told Pa he
felt so under obligation to him that he could have his sixty wives in
welcome, and he would go out in the jungle and corral another family.
Pa said he was much obliged but he must decline, as in his own country
no man was allowed to have more than fifteen or twenty wives. But the
terrible scandal Pa had brought upon the expedition was settled out of
court, and Pa was reinstated in good standing in our expedition.
It takes a hippo quite a while to go to sleep after eating a negro, as
you can imagine, they are so indigestible, and it was annoying to stand
around in the mud and wait, but we finally got two specimens of the
hippo into the cages, and we killed two more for food for the negroes,
who like the flavor of hippo meat, after the hippos have been battered
on negroes.
On the way back to camp we sighted a herd of elephants, and Pa said he
would go out and surround a couple of them and drive them into camp. Mr.
Hagenbach tried to reason with Pa against the suicidal act, in going
alone into a herd of wild elephants, but Pa said since his experience
with old Bolivar, the circus elephant, he felt that he had a mysterious
power over elephants that was marvelous, and so poor Pa went out alone,
promising to bring some elephants into camp.
Well, he made good, all right. We went on to camp and got our hippos put
to bed, and fed the lions and tigers, and were just sitting down to our
evening meal, when there was a roaring sound off where Pa had surrounded
the elephants; the air was full of dust, and the ground trembled, and we
could see the whole herd of about forty wild elephants charging on our
camp, bellowing and making a regular bedlam.
When the herd got pretty near us, we all climbed trees, except the negro
husband and his wives, and they took to the jungle.
Say, those animals did not do a thing to our camp. They rushed over the
tents, laid down and rolled over on our supper, which was spread out on
the ground, tipped over the cages containing the animals we had
captured, found the gasoline barrel and filled their trunks with
gasoline and squirted it all over the place, and rolled the gasoline on
the fire, and away the elephants went with gasoline fire pouring out of
their trunks, into the woods, bellowing, and when the dust and smoke
cleared away, and we climbed down out of the trees and righted up the
cages, here came Pa astride a zebra, playing on a mouth organ, “There’ll
Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” which had frightened the
elephants into a stampede.
[Illustration: Pa, Astride of a Zebra, Had Frightened the Elephants Into
a Stampede by Playing “A Hot Time” on a Mouth Organ.]
Mr. Hagenbach stopped Pa’s zebra, and Pa said, “Didn’t you catch any of
’em? I steered ’em right to camp, and thought you fellows would head ’em
off, and catch a few.”
I never saw Mr. Hagenbach mad before. He looked at Pa as though he could
eat him alive, and said, “Well, old man, you have raised hell on your
watch, sure enough.” And then Pa complained because supper was not
ready. Gee, but Pa is getting more gall all the time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIV.
Pa Was Blackmailed and Scared Out of Lots of Money—Pa Teaching the
Natives to Speak English—Pa Said the Natives Acted Like Human
Beings—Pa Buys Some Animals in the Jungle.
We thought when we came to Africa we would be near to nature, where the
natives were simple and honest, but Pa has found that the almost naked
negroes can give white men cards and spades and little casino and then
beat them at the game.
Pa has been blackmailed and scared out of his boots and a lot of money,
by an injured husband, as natural as he could have been flimflammed in
New York.
We noticed that Pa was quite interested in a likely negro woman, one of
twenty wives of a heathen, to the extent of having her wash his shirts,
and he would linger at the tent of the husband and teach the woman some
words of English, such as, “You bet your life” and “Not on your life,”
and a few cuss words, which she seemed to enjoy repeating.
She was a real nice looking nigger, and smiled on Pa to beat the band,
but that was all; of course she enjoyed having Pa call on her, and
evidently showed her interest in him, but that seemed only natural, as
Pa is a nice, clean white man with clothes on and she looked upon him as
a sort of king, until the other wives became jealous, and they filled
the husband up with stories about Pa and the young negress, but Pa was
as innocent as could be. Where Pa made the mistake was in taking hold of
her hand and looking at the lines in her palm, to read her future by the
lines in her hand, and as Pa is some near sighted he had to bend over
her hand, and then she stroked Pa’s bald head with the other hand, and
the other wives went off and left Pa and the young wife alone, and they
called the husband to put a stop to it.
Well I never saw a giant negro so mad as that husband was when he came
into the tent and saw Pa, and Pa was scared and turned pale, and the
woman had a fit when she saw her husband with a base ball club with
spikes on it. He took his wife by the neck and threw her out of the
tent, and then closed the tent and he and Pa were alone, and for an hour
no one knew what happened, but when Pa came back to our camp, wobbly in
the legs, and with no clothes on except a pair of drawers, we knew the
worst had happened.
Pa told Mr. Hagenbach that the negro acted like a human being. He cried
and told Pa he had broken into his family circle and picked the fairest
flower, broken his heart and left him an irresponsible and broken man,
the laughing stock of his friends, and nothing but his life or his money
could settle it.
[Illustration: “Dad started to run for the fence.”]
Pa offered to give up his life, but the injured husband had rather have
the money, and after an hour Pa compromised by giving him sixteen
dollars and his coat, pants and shirt, and Pa is to have the wife in the
bargain. Pa didn’t want to take the wife, but the husband insisted on
it, and Mr. Hagenbach says we can take her to America and put her into
the show as an untamed Zulu, or a missing link, but he insists that Pa
shall be careful hereafter, with his fatal beauty and winning ways, or
we shall have more negro women to bring back than animals in cages.
Talk about your innocent negroes, they will cheat you out of your boots.
Pa went off in the jungle to buy some animals of a negro king or some
kind of a nine spot, and he found the king had in a corral half a dozen
green zebras, the usual yellow stripes being the most beautiful green
you ever saw. The king told Pa it was a rare species, only procured in a
mountain fastness hundreds of miles away, and Pa bought the whole bunch
at a fabulous price, and brought them to camp. Mr. Hagenbach was tickled
to death at the rare animals, and praised Pa, and said there was a
fortune in the green and black striped zebras. I thought there was
something wrong when I heard one of those zebras bray like a mule when
he was eating hay, but it wasn’t my put in, and I didn’t say anything.
That night there was the greatest rain we have had since we came here,
and in the morning the green and black striped zebras hadn’t a stripe on
them, and they proved to be nothing but wild asses and assessess, white
and dirty, and all around the corral the water standing on the ground
was colored green and black.
Mr. Hagenbach took Pa out to the corral and pointed to the wild white
mules and said, “What do you think of your green zebras now?” Pa looked
them over and said, “Say, that negro king is nothing but a Pullman
porter, and he painted those mules and sawed them onto me,” so we had to
kill Pa’s green zebras and feed them to the negroes and the animals. Mr.
Hagenbach told Pa plainly that he couldn’t stand for such conduct. He
said he was willing to give Pa carte blanche, whatever that is, in his
love affairs in South Africa, but he drew the line at being bunkoed on
painted animals. He believed in encouraging art, and all that, but
animals that wouldn’t wash were not up to the Hagenbach standard.
Pa went off and sulked all day, but he made good the next day.
Our intention was to let elephants alone until we were about to return
home, as they are so plenty we can find them any day, and after you have
once captured your elephants you have got to cut hay to feed them, but
Pa gets some particular animal bug in his head, and the managements has
to let him have his way, so the other day was his elephant day, and he
started off through the jungle with only a few men, and the negro wife
that he hornswoggled the husband out of. Pa said he was going to use her
for a pointer to point elephants, the same as they use dogs to point
chickens, and when we got about a mile into the jungle he told her to
“Hie on,” and find an elephant. Well, sir, she has got the best elephant
nose I ever saw on a woman. She ranged ahead and beat the ground
thoroughly, and pretty soon she began to sniff and sneak up on the game,
and all of a sudden she came to a point and held up one foot, and her
eyes stuck out, and Pa said the game was near, and he told her to
“charge down,” and we went on to surround the elephant. Pa was ahead and
he saw a baby elephant not bigger than a Shetland pony, looking scared,
and Pa made a lunge and fell on top of the little elephant, which began
to make a noise like a baby that wants a bottle of milk, and we captured
the little thing and started for camp with it, but before we got in
sight of camp all the elephants in Africa were after us, crashing
through the timber and trumpeting like a menagerie.
[Illustration: Pa Made a Lunge and Fell on Top of the Little Elephant
Which Began to Make a Noise Like a Baby.]
Pa and a cowboy and some negroes lifted the little elephant up into a
tree, and the whole herd surrounded us, and were going to tear down the
tree, when the camp was alarmed and Hagenbach came out with all the men
and the negroes on horseback, and they drove the herd into a canyon, and
built a fence across the entrance, and there we had about fifty
elephants in the strongest kind of a corral, and we climbed down from
the tree with the baby elephant and took it to camp, and put it in a big
bag that Pa’s airship was shipped in, and we are feeding the little
animal on condensed milk and dried apples.
We have got a tame elephant that was bought to use on the wild
elephants, to teach them to be good, and the next day, after we cut hay
for the elephants, Pa was ordered to ride the tame elephant into the
corral, to get the wild animals used to society.
Pa didn’t want to go, but he had bragged so much about the way he
handled elephants with the circus in the States that he couldn’t back
out, and so they opened the bars and let Pa and his tame elephant in,
and closed the bars.
I think the manager thought that would be the end of Pa, and the men all
went back to camp figuring on whether there would be enough left of Pa
to bury or send home by express, or whether the elephants would walk on
Pa until he was a part of the soil. In about an hour we saw a white spot
on a rock above the canyon, waving a piece of shirt, and we watched it
with glasses, and soon we saw a fat man climbing down on the outside,
and after a while Pa came sauntering into camp, across the veldt, with
his coat on his arm, and his sleeves rolled up like a canvasman in a
show, singing, “A Charge to Keep I Have.” Pa came up to the mess tent
and asked if lunch was not ready, and he was surrounded by the men, and
asked how he got out alive. Pa said, “Well, there is not much to tell,
only when I got into the corral the whole bunch made a rush for me and
my tame elephant. I stood on my elephant and told them to lie down, and
they got down on their knees, and then I made them walk turkey for a
while, and march around, and then they struck on doing tricks and began
to shove my elephant and get saucy, so I stood up on my elephant’s head
and looked the wild elephants in the eyes, and made them form a pyramid
until I could reach a tree that grew over the bank of the canyon, and I
climbed out and slid down, as you saw me. There was nothing to it but
nerve,” and Pa began to eat corned zebra and bread as though he was at a
restaurant.
“Well, I think that old man is a wonder,” said the cowboy, as he threw
his lariat over one of the wives of the chief negro and drew her across
the cactus. “I think he is the condemdest liar I ever run up against in
all my show experience,” said Mr. Hagenbach.
“Now,” says Pa, as he picked his teeth with a thorn off a tree,
“tomorrow we got to capture a mess of wild African lions, right in their
dens, ’cause the gasoline has come by freight, and the airship is
mended, and you can look out for a strenuous session, for I found a
canyon where the lions are thicker than prairie dogs in Arizona,” and Pa
laid down for a little sleeping sickness, so I guess we will have the
time of our lives tomorrow, and Pa has promised me a baby lion for a
pet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XV.
The Idea of Airships Is all Right in Theory, but They Are Never
Going to Be a Reliable Success—Pa Drowns the Lions Out With
Gas—The Bad Boy and His Pa Capture a Couple of Lions—Pa Moves
Camp to Hunt Gorillas.
The idea of air ships is all right in theory, but they are never going
to be a reliable success. The trouble is you never know what they are
going to do next. They are like a mule about doing things that are not
on the mnu. If you want to go due South, the air ship may decide to go
North, and you may pull on all the levers, and turn the steering gear
every way, and she goes North as though there was no other place to go.
We waited for weeks to get a new supply of powder that makes the gas,
and finally it came. We got the bag full and Pa and the cowboy with the
lasso and two others, a German and a negro, got on the rigging, and
about fifty of us held on to the drag rope, and Pa turned the nose of
the machine south towards where he had located a mess of lions in a
rocky gorge, and he was going to ride over the opening to their den, and
let the cowboy lasso the old dog lion, and choke the wind out of him,
and drag him to camp by the neck, but the airship just insisted on going
North, and it took the whole crowd to hold her, and Pa was up there on
the bamboo frame talking profane, and giving orders.
She was up in the air about fifty feet, and Pa pointed out the place
where the lion’s den was to the South about a mile, and told us to drag
the air ship tail first across the veldt, to the other side of the den,
and cut her loose; so we dragged the ship away around South of the den,
taking us all the forenoon, and we could see the lions on the rocks
sunning themselves and probably talking over in lion language what they
would do to us if we got fresh, and every little while they would cough
like a case of pneumonia, and it made my hair raise, but Pa was so cool
he had to turn his collar up.
After a few hours we got the ship in the right place, about a quarter of
a mile south of the den, and Pa got the cowboy ready with his lasso, and
the German ready to yell murder in his language, and the negro ready to
throw overboard for the lions to eat, and Pa said, “Turn her loose,” and
we let go of the rope, and the ship sailed right straight for the den,
and we all climbed upon a big rock to watch the proceedings. It was the
most exciting moment of my life, except the time the fat woman in the
circus sat down in Pa’s lap, and crushed him beyond recognition and they
had to scrape him up with case knives.
There was Pa at the wheel, his eyes staring ahead at the lions, all of
the lion family having come out of the den to see the air ship, and the
dog lion, the head of the household waving his tail and making the air
fairly tremble with his roaring.
Pretty soon the airship was right over the den, the lasso was thrown
over the dog lion’s neck, and drawn tight, and he coughed and strangled
like a negro being lynched, and then he turned tail and ran down into
the den in the rocks, with all the other lions after him, dragging the
ship back into the entrance of the den, and closing the hole completely,
and we all rushed up and tied the rope to trees, so the gas bag was
right over the hole, tight as a drum, and Pa got down off the frame, and
as Mr. Hagenbach came up in a perspiration Pa said, “There’s your lions,
about a dozen of them captured down in that hole; help yourselves,” and
Pa sat down on the ground like a man who had conquered the world, and
was waiting for the applause. Mr. Hagenbach said that was all right, so
far as it had gone, but what he wanted was lions in cages, ready to ship
to Germany, and not down in a hole in the ground that might be as deep
as a copper mine, with no elevator to bring the lions to the surface.
“Well,” said Pa, as he lit a cigar, “there’s a perfectly good dog
Numidian lion, with a black mane, on the end of that lasso, and all you
got to do is to pull him up, just as you would a muscalonge on a line,
and when he comes to the surface after I have finished my cigar, I will
hog tie him and have him ready for shipment quicker’n a wink,” and Pa
yawned, as though capturing wild lions was as easy for him as catching
mice in a trap.
[Illustration: “There’s Your Lions, About a Dozen Captured Down in That
Hole; Help Yourselves,” Said Pa.]
So the crowd all got hold of the lasso and began to pull up, and of all
the snarling and howling you ever heard, that beat the band. The old
lion seemed to catch on to everything coming up, and all the other lions
roared until the rocks on which we stood fairly trembled like there was
an earthquake, but the old dog kept coming and I felt as though
something terrible was going to happen, and I began to get farther away.
Pa knocked the ashes off his cigar and asked the cowboy how much more
rope there was left, and was told about ten feet, so he told them to let
up a minute until the driver drove the cage up to a point on the rock
not far from where the lion would come out, and when the cage was ready
and the door open, so the lion could see a goat tied in the cage eating
hay, Pa said to the men to give a few more jerks, and, by Gosh, pretty
soon the lion’s head and neck came out of the hole, and he was the
maddest looking animal I ever saw, and the men looked scared.
The lion was bracing with his front feet, and using all kinds of
language, but Pa was the coolest man in the bunch. “Now, let him rest a
minute,” says Pa, “but hold the line taut,” and Pa took out a bag of
tobacco and a piece of paper and rolled a cigarette, and lit it, and we
all looked at Pa in admiration for his nerve.
After puffing his cigarette a little, and looking to see if the cage was
entirely right, he ordered the men who were not pulling on the rope to
line up in two lines from the hole to the cage, like the honorary pall
bearers at a funeral, and told them not to move until the lion was in
the cage, and when they were all in place, Pa said, “Now jerk his head
plumb off,” and the crowd pulled and the lion came out of the hole mad
and frothing at the mouth. Pa stepped one side and gave the lion a swift
kick in the ham, and the king of beasts put his tail between his legs
and started for the hearse cage, and Pa said, “Get in there, you measly
cur dog,” and Pa followed him, kicking him every jump, until the big
lion rushed into the cage and laid down, so completely conquered that he
bellowed pitifully when the goat butted him off of the hay, and Pa
closed the door and locked it and turned to Mr. Hagenbach and asked,
“How many of these vermin do you want?” and he said, “Now that we were
about it we had better get the whole bunch.” Pa said “all right, he was
there after lions, and he wanted to get the limit,” so they signalled
camp for some more cages, and Pa said we had better have lunch right
there on the rock beside the airship in the shade, while he prepared to
catch the rest of the lions.
[Illustration: “Get in There, You Measly Cur Dog,” Said Pa, Kicking the
Big Lion at Every Jump.]
Pa was attaching a long rubber hose to the gas bag, and as he got it
fastened and reeled about fifty feet of the hose down in the hole, Mr.
Hagenbach said, “Say, old man, I don’t want to kick on any of your new
inventions, but what are you going to do now?” and Pa said, as he turned
a faucet in the gas bag and let the gas into the hose, “Didn’t you ever
drown gophers out of a hole by pouring water in, until the gophers came
to the top strangling, and you put them in a shot bag and let them chew
your fingers? Well, I am going to drown out big gophers with gas, and in
about fifteen minutes after we have had lunch, you will see the dammest
procession of sneezing lions come up out of that hole that ever were in
captivity, and I want all of you brave ducks to hold the bags over the
hole, and when you get a lion in a bag tie the bag and roll the beast
over the rock, see?”
Well, they got the gunny sacks ready, and after we had our lunch and the
gas was filling the hole good and plenty, there was a lot of sneezing
and roaring down the hole, and Pa said the medicine was working all
right, and pretty soon Pa turned off the gas and unscrewed the hose, and
loosened the ropes on the air ship so she sailed off across the veldt
for a block or so, and then the trouble began.
First a big she lion came up with a mess of cubs, and they held the bag
all right, but she went right through it like a bullet through cheese,
and then there was an explosion away down in the bowels of the earth,
from the toe nails of some unmanicured lion striking fire on a flint
stone, and fire began to pour out of the hole, and about nine singed
lions of all sizes came up out of the hole scared to death, and the
smell of burned hair was awful.
The lions began to cuff the men and they stampeded down the rocks,
leaving Pa and two or three of us alone. Pa and I seized a couple of the
baby lions and started to run for camp, and the lions took after us and
chased us awhile, until Pa got out of wind, when we climbed trees with
the cubs, and the lions rolled in the grass to put out the fire, and
then they took to the jungle, and Pa said when Roosevelt got to Africa
and shot a few singed lions, he would think it was a new kind of beast.
We got back to camp with the two cubs, and called the roll to see who
was missing, and we found the natives had packed up and moved away,
claiming that the old man was a devil who had produced a burning
mountain, and the whole country would be devastated.
We sent all our animals to the coast to be shipped to Berlin and moved
our camp up to the jungle, about fifty miles, where there is a new tribe
of natives, and where it is said the country is inhabited with gorillas.
Pa says he is going to move a cage into the gorilla country, and call
the gorillas around him, learn their language, get their confidence, and
eventually reform them and bring them to realize that they are endowed
with certain inalienable rights, and teach them white man’s customs, and
Pa will do it or die trying, but I don’t like the idea, as it seems
dangerous to Pa. Say, those gorillas are bigger than John L. Sullivan,
and they hug like bears. Gee, but I want to see gorillas hanging by
their tails on trees, and Pa says I may go with him.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVI.
The Boy’s Pa Shows Bravery in the Jungles in Africa—Four Gorillas
Chase Pa—The Boy and His Pa Don’t Sleep Much at Night—The Boy
Discovers a Marsh Full of Wild Buffaloes.
I do not know whether Pa is an expert in hypnotism or what it is, but he
certainly delivers the goods when he goes after a wild animal in the
jungles of Africa, and he shows bravery at times that astonishes
everybody, but he admits that he is a coward at heart, and would run if
anybody pulled a gun on him, and I guess he would, but you turn him
loose in a wild animal congress and he will be speaker and make the
whole bunch get on their knees.
I was scared when Pa wanted to have a cage with iron bars hauled into
the jungle where the gorillas live, and insisted that he be left there
alone for two days, with rations to last a week, as he said he expected
to have some gorilla boarders to feed, but Mr. Hagenbach let Pa have his
way, and the cage was hauled about eight miles into the black
wilderness, with great trees and vines and suckes and gorillas all
around him, but Pa insisted on having a phonograph full of jig tunes,
and when we got the cage located and Pa in it and were ready to leave, I
cried, and the whole crowd felt as though we would never see Pa alive
again, and it was a sad parting.
When we left Pa he was cooking some bacon on an oil stove in the cage
and frying some eggs for his dinner, and as we took the trail back to
camp, in silence, we could smell the bacon frying, and when we got a
mile or so away we heard music and stopped to listen and could plainly
hear the phonograph playing “There will be a hot time,” and Mr.
Hagenbach said it reminded him of a dirge.
It was a long two days before we could go back and find Pa’s remains,
but the second day we hiked out through the jungle and into the woods.
Pa had told us that when we came after him to come quiet and not disturb
the menagerie, so when we got near the place where we left Pa we slowed
down and crept up silently and peeked through the bushes and a sight met
our eyes that scared me.
There were four big gorillas and several little ones around the cage,
and some were gnawing ham bones and others were eating dog biscuits, but
it was so silent in the cage that I thought Pa had been killed and that
the gorillas were eating him, so I yelled, “Pa, are you all right?” and
he answered back, “You bet your sweet life I am all right,” and then we
prepared to go the cage, when Pa said for us to climb trees, and just
then the gorillas started for us with their teeth gleaming, and we all
shinned up the trees around the cage, and we had front seats at the
biggest show on earth. Pa told us that the gorillas that treed us were
afraid we were going to harm him, and they proposed to protect him.
He said he had been feeding the animals for two days and had got their
confidence so he could make them understand what he wanted them to do.
“Now watch ’em dance when I turn on the music,” and then Pa gave them
the “Merry Widow” waltz, and by gosh if a big gorilla didn’t put his arm
around his wife, or some other gorilla’s wife, and dance barefooted
right there in front of the cage, and all the rest joined in, and the
baby gorillas rolled over on the ground and laughed like hyenas. Pa
stopped the music and called one big gorilla Rastus and told him to sit
down in the cactus, and the others did the same, and Pa repeated an old
democratic speech of his, and they clapped their hands just like a
caucus. “Well, what do you know about that already,” said Mr. Hagenbach,
and then he asked Pa how he was going to capture them.
[Illustration: Pa Stopped the Music and Repeated an Old Democratic
Speech of His and They Acted Just Like a Caucus.]
Pa said he had them in the cage several times and let them out, and when
we got ready to go to camp all he had to do was to let the phonograph
play “Supper is now ready in the dining car,” and they would come in and
he would slip out and lock the door and we could haul the cage to camp.
[Illustration: All He Had to Do Was to Play “Supper is Now Ready in the
Dining Car” on the Phonograph.]
Well, you ought to have seen my old gentleman call the whole bunch of
gorillas into the cage and feed them and see them act like a lot of boys
in camp, reaching for potatoes and bacon and wiping their lips on their
hairy arms, but none of them asked for napkins or finger bowls. When the
food was all gone they began to kick like boarders at a second-class
boarding house, and then Pa slipped out of the door and locked it, and
we came down out of the trees and surrounded the cage, and Pa acted as
barker and told us the names he had given to the gorillas.
Pa brought the phonograph out of the cage and set it going and the
gorillas began to dance. Mr. Hagenbach was so pleased that he fairly
hugged Pa, and we got ready to haul the cage to camp.
Pa always makes some mistake before he has a proposition well in hand,
and he did this time, of course. As we were about to start the gorilla
Rastus, who had become Pa’s chum, looked at Pa so pitiful that Pa said
he guessed he would let Rastus out and he and Rastus would walk along
ahead and get the brush out of the road, so he opened the door of the
cage and beckoned to Rastus, and the big gorilla came out with his
oldest boy, and Pa and the two of them took hold of hands and started on
ahead, and we started to haul the wagon by drag ropes, when the worst
possible thing happened. Rastus reached in Pa’s pistol pocket, where Pa
had just put a large plug of tobacco after he had bit off a piece, and
Rastus thought because Pa ate the tobacco he could, so he bit off about
half of the plug and ate it and gave his half-grown boy the rest of it,
and that was eaten by the boy. Pa tried to take it away from them, but
it was too late, and they were both mad at Pa for trying to beat them
out of their dessert.
It was not long before Rastus turned pale around the mouth, but his face
was so covered with hair that you couldn’t tell exactly how sick he was;
though, when he put both hands on his stomach, gave a yell and turned
some somersaults, we knew he was a pretty sick gorilla, and his boy
rolled over and clawed his stomach and had a fit.
Rastus had the most pained and revengeful look on his face I ever saw,
and he looked at Pa as though he was to blame.
Pa had one of the men get the medicine chest, and Pa fixed two seidlitz
in a tin cup, but before he could put in the water Rastus had swallowed
the powder from the white and blue paper and reached for a wash basin of
water, and before Pa could prevent Rastus from drinking it on top of
those powders, he had swallowed every drop of the water, and the
commotion inside of him must have been awful, for he frothed at the
mouth and the bubbles came out of his nose, and he rolled over and
yelled like a man with gout, and he seemed to swell up, and Pa looked on
as though he had a case on his hands that he couldn’t diagnose, while
Rastus’ boy just laid on the ground and rolled his eyes as though he
were saying his “Now I lay me,” and Mr. Hagenbach said to Pa he guessed
he had broke up the show, and Pa said, “Never you mind, I will pull them
both through all right.”
Finally the siedlitz powder fiz had all got out of Rastus’ system and he
seemed to be thinking deeply for a moment, and then he got off his
haunches and looked steadily into Pa’s eyes for a minute, and then he
took Pa by one hand and his boy with the other and started right off
through the jungle, Pa pulling back and yelling to us to rescue him from
the gorilla kidnapers, but Rastus walked fast and before he had got
ought of sight he had picked his sick boy up and carried him under his
arm and both were groaning, and he held on to Pa’s hand and went so fast
that Pa’s feet only hit the high places.
The gorillas in the cage looked at them disappear and tried to get out
of the cage to go along, but they couldn’t get out.
Finally Mr. Hagenbach said me, “Hennery, I guess your Pa has got what is
coming to him this time. Rastus will probably drag your Pa up a tree and
eat him when his appetite comes back, but we can’t help him, so we
better haul the cage and the gorillas that have not had any tobacco to
camp, and in a day or two we will all come out here and find your
father’s bones and bury them.”
And then we all went to camp, and the poor gorillas just remained
listlessly in the cage, mourning as though they knew Rastus and his boy
were dead. We fed them everything we could spare, but they would not
eat, and by watching them we found there was a case of jealousy in the
cage, as two male gorillas seemed to be stuck on a young female, and
they were scrapping all the time.
Gee, but we needed Pa worse than ever to settle the gorilla dispute, but
we all felt that Pa was not of this earth any more, and the camp took on
an air of mournfulness, and they all wanted to adopt me, ’cause I was
alone in the world. There was not much sleep in camp that night, and the
next day we were going out with guns to find Pa’s remains and shoot
Rastus, but a little after daylight we heard the night watchman say to
the cook, who was building a fire, “Look who’s here, and what do you
know about that,” and he called the whole camp up, and we looked out
across the veldt and there came Pa astradle of a Zebra, with Rastus’ boy
up behind him and Rastus thoroughly subdued, leading the Zebra with a
hay rope Pa had twisted out of grass.
The whole camp came to attention and Pa scratched a match on Rastus’
hair and lighted a cigarette, and when he got near enough he said:
“Slept in the crotch of a tree all night. Gave Rastus and his boy a
drink of whiskey out of my flask and cured them of the tobacco sickness,
had some mangoes for breakfast, sent Rastus to catch a Zebra, and here
we are ready for coffee and pancakes.”
Pa got off his zebra, opened the door of the cage and pointed to it, and
Rastus and his boy got in, and Pa kicked Rastus right where the hair was
worn off sitting down, and Rastus looked at Pa as though that was all
right and he deserved it. Then Pa closed the door, washed his hands and
sat down to breakfast, and when Mr. Hagenbach said, “Old man, you have
got Barnum and Forepaugh skinned a mile,” Pa said, “O that is nothing; I
have located a marsh full of wild Buffaloes, and we will go out there
and get a drove of them in a few days.
“They are the ugliest and fightingest animals in the world, but I will
halter break some of them and ride them without any saddle.” Mr.
Hagenbach said he believed it, and Pa said, “Hennery, one spell I
thought you would be an orphan, but whiskey saved you. When they got a
big drink of whiskey they began to laugh, and then fell on my neck and
cried, just like a white man when he is too drunk to fight. Well, I am
going to take a nap,” and Pa laid down on a bale of hay and slept all
day, and the crowd talked about what a hero he was.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVII.
The Boy’s Experience With an African Buffalo—The Boy’s Pa Shoots
Roman Candles to Scare the Buffaloes—The Boy’s Pa Tames the Wild
Animals.
When Pa told us that he had located a place where we could get all the
wild African buffalo that we wanted, I thought of the pictures I had
seen of the killing of buffaloes in America, where all the buffalo
hunter had to do was to ride a horse after a herd of the animals, that
couldn’t run faster than a yoke of oxen, pick out a big bull and ride
alongside of him and fire bullets into his vital parts at about ten feet
range, until his liver was filled full of holes and he had the nose
bleed, and when he fell down from loss of blood, dismount and skin him
for a lap robe. The American buffalo would always run away and the
hunter could kill him if he had cartridges enough, and never be in any
more danger than a farmer milking a cow.
I thought we would have about the same kind of experience with African
buffalo, only we intended to lasso them and bring them to camp alive for
the show business, but instead of the African buffalo running away from
you, he runs at you on sight and tries to gouge out your inside works
with his horns, and paws you with his hoofs, and when he gets you down
he kneels down on you and runs horns all through your system and rolls
over on your body like a setter dog rolling on an old dead fish.
The African buffalo certainly has a grouch, as though he had indigestion
from eating cactus thorns, and when he sees a man his eyes blaze with
fire and he gets as crazy as an anarchist and seems to combine in his
make-up the habits of the hyena, the tiger, the man-eating shark and the
Texas rattlesnake.
I wouldn’t want such an animal for a pet, but Pa said the way to get
buffaloes was to go after them and never let up until you had them under
your control. So we started out under Pa’s lead to capture African
buffalo, and while the returns are not all in of the dead and wounded,
we know that our expedition is pretty near used up.
These African buffaloes live in a marsh, where the grass and cane grows
high above them, and the only way you can tell where they are is to
watch the birds flying around and alighting on the backs of the animals
to eat wood ticks and gnats. The marsh is so thick with weeds that a man
cannot go into it, so we planned to start the airship on the windward
side of the marsh, after lining up the whole force of helpers, negroes
and white men, and building a corral of timber on the lee side of the
marsh. Pa and the cowboy and I went in the airship, with those honk-honk
horns they have on automobiles, and those megaphones that are used at
football games, and Pa had a bunch of Roman candles to scare the
buffaloes.
When the fence was done, which fifty men had worked on for a week, it
run in the shape of a triangle or a fish net, with a big corral at the
middle. Mr. Hagenbach sent up a rocket to notify Pa that he was ready to
have him scare the buffaloes out of the marsh, down the fence into the
corral.
Pa had the gas bag all full, a mile across the marsh, tied to a tree
with a slip noose, so when we all got set he could pull a string and
untie the slip noose.
Well, everything worked bully, and when Pa tied her loose we went up
into the air about fifty feet, and Pa steered the thing up and down the
marsh like a pointer dog ranging a field for chickens.
It was the greatest sight I ever witnessed, seeing more than two hundred
buffalo heads raise up out of the tall grass and watch the airship,
looking as savage as lions eating raw meat.
First they never moved at all, but we began to blow the honk horns, and
then we yelled through the megaphones to “get out of there, you sawed
off short horns,” and then they began to move away from the airship
across the marsh, and we followed until they began to get into a herd,
nearly on the other side of the marsh, but they only walked fast,
splashing through the mud.
When we got almost across the marsh Pa said now was the time to fire the
Roman candles, so we each lit our candle, and the fire and smoke and the
fire balls fairly scorched the hair of the buffaloes in the rear of the
herd, and in a jiffy the whole herd stampeded out of the marsh right
toward the fence, bellowing in African language, scared half to death,
the first instance on record that an African buffalo was afraid of
anything on earth.
We followed them until they got to the fence, but only about one hundred
got into the corral, the others going around the fence and chasing the
keepers into the jungle and hooking the negroes in the pants, and some
of the negroes are running yet, and will, no doubt, come out at Cairo,
Egypt.
[Illustration: Some of Those Negroes Are Running Yet, and Will No Doubt
Come Out at Cairo, Egypt.]
Mr. Hagenbach and the white men got up in trees and watched Pa and the
airship, and when we got where the fence narrowed up at the corral Pa
let the airship come down to the ground and anchored it to a stump and
yelled for the boss of the expedition and the men to come down out of
the trees and help capture some of the best specimens; so they came down
and tore out the wings of the fence and placed them across so we had the
buffaloes in a pen, and then Mr. Hagenbach, who had been getting a
little jealous of Pa, came up to him and shook his hand and told him he
was a wonder in the capturing of wild animals, and Pa said don’t mention
it, and Pa took the makings and made himself a cigarette and smoked up,
and Mr. Hagenbach asked Pa how we were going to get the buffaloes out of
the corral, ’cause they were fighting each other in the far end of the
pen, and Pa said you just wait, and he sent for the cages, enough to
hold about ten of the buffaloes, and we let the gas out of the airship
and went into camp right there, and Pa bossed things for about two days,
until the buffaloes got good and hungry, and then we backed the cages up
to an opening in the fence and put hay in the far end of the cages, and
the herd began to take notice.
We wanted the big bulls and some cows, and nature helped us on the
bulls, ’cause they fought the weaker ones away from the cages, and
walked right up the incline into the cages, and Pa went in and locked
the doors, and when we got the cages full of bulls and started to haul
the cages to camp by the aid of some of the negroes who had returned
alive, by jingo, the cows followed the cages with the bulls in, and you
couldn’t drive them away.
We loaded the gas bag on to a sort of stone boat, and Pa rigged up a
couple of ox yokes and in some way hypnotized a few cow buffaloes so he
could drive them, and they hauled the stone boat with the airship to
camp, and we got there almost as soon as the cages did, and Pa was
smoking as contented as though he was walking on Broadway, and with an
ox gad he would larrup the oxen and say, “Haw Buck,” like a farmer
driving oxen to plow a field.
Pa got his wild oxen so tame before we got to camp that they would eat
hay out of his hand, and when we rounded up in our permanent camp and
looked over our stock and killed some of the buffaloes that had followed
the cages, for meat for the negroes, and lit some sky rockets and fired
them at the balance of the herd to drive them away from camp, the
negroes, who had always had a horror of meeting wild buffaloes, thought
Pa was a superior being to be able to tame a whole herd of the most
savage animals, and they got down on their knees and placed their faces
in the dust in front of Pa and worshipped him, and they wouldn’t get up
off the ground until Pa had gone around and put his feet on the necks of
all the negroes in token that he acknowledged himself to be their king
and protector, and the wives of the negroes all threw their arms around
Pa and hugged him until he got tired, and he said he had rather fight
buffaloes than be hugged by half naked negro women that hadn’t had a
bath since Stanley discovered them, but Pa appreciated the honor, and
Mr. Hagenbach said Pa was the greatest man in the world.
[Illustration: Pa Had to Put His Foot on Their Necks and Acknowledge
Himself Their King and Protector.]
The next day we shipped the buffaloes to the coast and had them sent to
Berlin, and when we got the mail from headquarters there was an order
for a lot more tigers, so I suppose we will be tigering as soon as the
open season is on.
The idea is that we must get all the animals we can this year, for it is
rumored that Roosevelt is coming to Africa next year to shoot big game,
and all of us feel that wild animals will be scarce after he has
devastated Africa.
We got short of Salt Pork, and some time ago Pa salted down some sides
of rhinoceros, and yesterday was the day to open the barrel. Pa showed
the cooks how to fry rhinoceros pork, and I tell you it made you hungry
to smell rhinoceros frying, and with boiled potatoes and ostrich eggs
and milk gravy, made from elephant milk, we lived high, but the next day
an epidemic broke out, and they laid it to Pa’s rhinoceros pork dinner,
but Pa says any man who eats eight or nine fried ostrich eggs is liable
to indigestion.
Gee, but this is a great country to enjoy an outing in.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Boy and His Pa Start for the Coast in an Airship—Pa Saluted
the Crowd as We Passed Over Them—The Airship Lands Amid a Savage
Tribe—The King of the Tribe Escorts Pa and the Boy to the
Palace.
The animal capturing season is pretty near over, and we have had a
meeting of all the white men connected with the expedition and decided
to break up the camp and take our animals to the coast and sail back to
Europe and to the States.
It was decided that Pa and I and the cowboy and a negro dwarf belonging
to a tribe we have been trying to locate should start for the coast in
the airship, and the rest of the crowd should go with the cages, and all
round up at a place on the coast in three weeks, when we could catch a
boat for Hamburg, Germany. So we got the airship ready and made gas
enough to last us a week and filled the tank that furnishes the power
for the screw wheel with gasoline, and in a couple of days we were ready
to let her go Gallagher.
It was a sad parting for Pa, ’cause all the captured animals wanted to
shake hands with him, and some of them acted more human than some of the
white men, and when the cages were all hitched up and ready to move and
the negroes had been paid off and given a drink of rum and a zebra
sandwich, Mr. Hagenbach embraced Pa, and Pa got up on the framework of
the ship and took hold of the gear, and we got on and Pa told them to
cut her loose, and a little after daylight we sailed away towards the
coast and left the bunch we had been with so long with moistened eyes.
Pa saluted the crowd and throwed a kiss to the big ourang outang which
had become almost like a brother to Pa, the drivers whipped up the
horses and oxen hitched to the cages, and as the procession rattled
along to the main road going south Pa said, “Good-bye, till we meet
again,” and just then the wind changed, and in spite of all Pa could do
the airship turned towards the north and ran like a scared wolf the
wrong way.
The procession had got out of sight, or Pa would have pulled the string
that lets the gas escape, and come down to the ground; but he realized
that if we landed alone we would starve to death and be eaten by wild
animals, so he let her sail right away from where we wanted to go, and
we all said our prayers and prayed for the wind to change again.
Gee, but we sailed over a beautiful country for an hour or two, hills
and valleys and all kinds of animals in sight all the time, but now we
didn’t want any more animals, ’cause we had no place to keep them. But
the animals all seemed to want us. The lions we passed over would roar
at us, the tigers would snarl, the hyenas would laugh at Pa, the zebras
on the plains we passed over would race along with us and kick up their
heels like colts in a pasture, and the cowboy stood straddle of the
bamboo frame and just itched to throw his lasso over a fine zebra, but
Pa told him to let ’em alone, ’cause we didn’t want to be detained.
We passed over rivers where hippopotamusses were as thick as suckers in
a spring freshet, and they lookd at us as though they wouldn’t do a
thing to the airship if we landed in their midst.
We passed over rhinoceroses with horns bigger than any we had ever seen,
and we passed over a herd of more than a hundred elephants, and they all
gave us the laugh.
We passed over gnus and springboks and deer of all kinds, and when they
heard the propellor of the airship rattle, they would look up and snort
and run away in all directions. Some giraffes were feeding in the tree
tops at one grove, and Pa let the ship down a little so we could count
the spots on them, and I had a syphon of seltzer water, and I squirted
it in the face of a big giraffe, and he sneezed like a cat that has got
a dose of smelling salts, and then the whole herd stampeded in a sort of
hipty-hop, and we laughed at their awkwardness.
We sailed along over more animals than we ever thought there were in the
world, and over thatched houses in villages, where the negroes would
come out and take a look at us and then fall on their knees and we could
see their mouths work as though they were saying things.
Along towards noon Pa yelled to the cowboy that we would have to land
pretty soon, and to get the drag rope ready, ’cause we were going the
wrong way to hit the coast, and the first big village we came in sight
of he was going to land and take our chances.
Pretty soon a big village loomed up ahead on a high plane near a river,
with more than a hundred houses and fields of corn and potatoes and
grain all around it, and one big house like about forty hay stacks all
in one, and Pa gave the word to stand by, and when we got near the
village the whole population came out beating tom-toms and waving their
shirts, and Pa pulled the string, some of the gas escaped, and we came
down in a sort of plaza right in the center of the village, and tied the
drag rope to a tree and anchored the gas bag at both ends.
The crowd of negroes stood back in amazement and waited for the king of
the tribe to come out of the big shack, and while he was getting ready
to show up we looked around at the preparations for a feast which we had
noticed.
It was a regular barbecue, and the little dwarf we had brought along
began to sniff at the stuff that was being roasted over the fire, and Pa
looked at him and asked him what the layout was all about, and the
dwarf, who had learned to speak a little English, got on his knees and
told Pa the sky ship had landed in the midst of his own tribe, where he
had been stolen from a year ago by another tribe, and that the feast was
a canibal feast, got up in honor of the tribal Thanksgiving, and that
the bodies roasting were members of another tribe that had been captured
in a battle, and the dwarf got up and began to talk to his old friends
and neighbors, and he evidently told them we were great people, having
rescued him from the tribe that stole him, and had brought him back home
in the sky ship, safe and sound.
The people began to kneel down to Pa and worship him, but Pa said it
made him sick to smell that stuff cooking, and he told us that he felt
our end had come, ’cause we had landed in a cannibal country, and they
would cook us and eat us as sure as cooking.
Pa said if they roasted him and tried to eat him they would find they
had a pretty tough proposition, but he thought the cowboy and I would
make pretty good eating.
We got our Winchesters and revolvers off the airship and got ready to
fight if necessary, when suddenly all of the negroes, dwarfs and
full-grown negroes, got down on the ground and kissed the earth, all in
two lines, and up to the far end of the line, near the king’s house, out
came the king of the tribe, dressed like a vaudeville performer, and he
marched down between the lines with stately tread towards Pa and the
cowboy and your little Hennery.
He had on an old plug hat, fifty years old at least, evidently only worn
on occasions of ceremony, and the rest of him was naked, except a shirt
made of grass, which was buckled around his waist, and he carried an
empty tomatoe can in one hand and a big oil can, such as kerosene is
shipped in, in the other, and around his neck was a lot of empty pint
beer bottles strung on a piece of copper wire, and he had his nose and
ears pierced, and in the holes he wore tin tags that came off of plugs
of tobacco.
He was a sight sure enough, but he was as dignified as a southern negro
driving a hack. Pa kept his nerve with him, rolled a cigarette,
scratched a match on the seat of his pants and lighted it, and blew
smoke through his nostrils and looked mad as he laid his Winchester
across his left arm. The cowboy was trembling, but he had his gun ready,
and I was monkeying with an automatic revolver, and the King came right
up to Pa and looked Pa over, and walked around him, making signs. Then
he looked at the airship and gas bag and sniffed at the feast cooking,
and finally his eye fell on the dwarf, who had been mourned as dead, and
he called the dwarf one side to talk to him, and Pa said to the dwarf,
“Tell him we have just dropped down from Heaven to inspect the tribe and
take an account of stock.” The king and the dwarf talked awhile, and
then the king came up to Pa and got down on his knees and in pigeon
English, broken by sobs, he informed Pa that he recognized that Pa had
been sent from Heaven to take the position of king of the tribe, and he
announced to the tribe that gathered around him that he abdicated in
Pa’s favor, and turned his tribe, lands, stock and mines over to the
Heaven-sent white man, and for them to look upon Pa as king and escort
him to the palace and turn over to him all his property, wives, ivory,
copper and gold, and he would go jump in the lake, and in token of
abdication he turned over to Pa the plug hat, and was taking off the
beer bottles from around his neck when Pa stopped the deal and said he
would take charge of the property and the palace, but he would not have
the wives or the hat, and he would try to govern the tribe so it would
soon take its place besides the kingdoms of Europe, but the old king
must sit on his right hand as adviser and friend and run the family.
The king agreed, and the tribe escorted Pa and the cowboy and me to the
palace and placed Pa on the throne, the cowboy on the left, the old king
on the right and me at Pa’s feet, and then about one hundred of the
king’s wives came in with cow tails tied around their waists and danced
before Pa, and Pa covered his eyes and said to the cowboy, “Take this
thing easy and don’t get rattled and we will get out of it some way, but
I’ll be cussed if I eat any of that roasted nigger.”
After they danced awhile a tom-tom sounded afar off and the crowd
started for the feast, and some niggers brought in a tray of meat for
us, but Pa said we were vegetarians and the great Spirit would be
offended if we ate meat, and Pa made a sign of distress, and they took
away the boiled ham of a colored person and brought us some green corn
and sweet potatoes, and then they all drank something out of gourds, and
all got drunk except the old king and Pa and the cowboy.
When everybody was good and drunk Pa called us all into executive
session and took charge of the affairs of the tribe, and we were
assigned to a room, as it was night, and when we got in and shut the
door Pa says to the cowboy, “How does this compare with life with the
Digger Indians?” and the cowboy said, “This takes the cake,” and Pa
examined the old king’s valuables and found gold enough to pay the
national debt, and diamonds by the quart, as big as walnuts, and Pa
said, “This sure looks good to me, and we will tarry a while. You plug
up that gas bag so no guilty gas can escape, and some day we will load
up with diamonds and things and make a quick get away.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIX.
The Boy’s Pa Becomes King Over the Negroes—Pa Shows the Natives
How to Dig Wells—Pa Teaches the Natives to Become Soldiers—The
Boy Uses a Dozen Nigger Chasers and Some Roman Candles—The Boy,
His Pa and the Natives Assist at the 4th of July Celebration.
This being a king over a few thousand negroes, the position Pa holds,
with the regular king of the tribe reduced to the occupation of
interpreter to the white king, has its drawbacks, and Pa is getting
pretty sick of it, the cowboy that it with us is discouraged, and I have
no one to play with but some coons who never cared for anything but to
feast on human flesh, sleep and fight among themselves, so Pa is
arranging to skip out some morning with the airship when we get our
hands on the gold and diamonds this tribe have hidden around the camp.
But in the meantime we are educating these Africans into the methods of
civilization.
Pa has issued an edict that the eating of human flesh must cease, and he
has explained to them that the Great Spirit will have it in for any
person that kills except in self defense, and that all who are cannibals
will never get to Heaven, and the whole tribe has sworn off on eating
the bodies of human beings, and Pa has taught them the way to broil a
beef steak, and they can’t get enough of it. They never knew what it was
to eat the flesh of cattle, but just raised cattle for the hides, and to
sell at the Railroad stations, but they never knew what the white buyers
did with the cattle.
Pa has showed them how to dig wells, and get good water to drink,
instead of drinking surface water and liquor made out of some kind of
berries, that makes you drunk to smell of it.
The cowboy has got a buffalo trained to ride and a zebra that acts like
a regular cow pony of the plains.
The cowboy came near to getting us in trouble by getting drunk on the
berry juice. He got on the zebra with his lariat rope and put the spurs
to the animal and rode through the camp and threw his rope over the old
ex-king and tightened it up around his neck, just to show what he could
do, and the zebra ran away and dragged the king through the chaparral
and came near killing him, but Pa explained to the old king that the
cowboy was the agent of the Great Spirit, and was trying out the king to
see if he had patience, and could take a joke without letting his angry
passions rise, and that if he could and could smile at adversity, he
would be looked upon as one of the elect.
[Illustration: Pa Explained to the Old King That the Cowboy Was the
Agent of the Great Spirit.]
Pa told him that often King Edward, Emperor William and the Czar of
Russia were roped and dragged around by the neck, and they enjoyed it.
Pa’s diplomatic talk to the negro king so impressed him that he wanted
the cowboy to rope Pa, and drag him some, but Pa pointed his finger to
the sky and said he was so good that no rope could touch him. Gee, but
those niggers are easy marks.
Pa and the cowboy have been training the male members of the tribe in
the military drill, and we have got eight Companies that can march by
fours and in platoons, and come into line just like soldiers, and they
are proud of what they can do, but they only use clubs for guns, though
Pa has promised them that when he gets money enough he will buy
Winchesters for the whole army, and we will go and wipe out a tribe
about twenty miles away, and take all their gold and diamonds, and they
are going to dig up their gold and diamonds and give them to Pa to buy
guns. That is about when we will skip out for the coast and sail for
Paris and New York.
I suppose I ought to be killed, but I couldn’t help having some fun with
Pa’s colored troops. One night Pa had brought them into line, after
drilling them, and had made them break ranks and sit down around the big
camp fire while the women served a barbecue banquet.
All day the women had been cooking an ox and some pigs over a big fire,
under Pa’s supervision, cause Pa used to be a soldier and a politician
and had superintended political barbecues lots of times, and he had the
meat cooked so nice that wild animals had come near camp to smell of the
barbecue, and Pa’s soldiers sat there watering at the mouth, and
thinking how much better oxen and pigs were for food than human beings,
and Pa felt that he had made a big triumph for civilization, and that
his name would be handed down to future generations with the names of
Stanley, Livingston and Roosevelt.
The negroes were resting around the fire, talking over the day’s
drilling, and how, when they got the guns Pa was going to buy for them,
they would go on the war path, when the women began to bring the food,
the meat cut up in chunks, and sweet potatoes on big leaves and straw
mats, and all began to eat like wild animals. It was too peaceful a
scene for me to enjoy, so I went to a knapsack that I brought along from
Paris, and got out my fireworks, which I always carry along for
emergencies.
I got about a dozen nigger chasers and some Roman candles, and told the
cowboy I was going to have some fun scaring Pa’s troops, to see if they
were brave enough to fight an enemy.
[Illustration: Told the Cowboy I Was Going to Have Some Fun Scarring
Pa’s Troops.]
The cowboy had been drinking some berry juice and he said he would
assist at the Fourth of July celebration by taking his Winchester and
firing at some of the jackals and hyenas that had been attracted by the
barbecue smell, just as I touched off my fireworks.
Well, it was a crime to do it, but what is a boy going to do when he is
away off in a strange country and he has to create his own fun.
Well, just as the troops had got filled up with the meal, and the women
who had served the banquet had sat down with the colored soldiers to eat
what was left, and everybody was laughing, and Pa stood up by a tree in
the light of the fire, like a fat statue, patting himself on the back
and thinking he was the greatest man since Julius Caeser, I got a coal
of fire and touched off my nigger chasers and pointed them towards the
crowd sitting around the fire, and touched off a pinwheel I had fastened
to a tree by a thorn, and opened up my battery of Roman candles,
pointing them at Pa and the ex-king, who were the only ones standing up,
and the cowboy cut loose with the Winchester at the wild animals, with a
cowboy yell such as they give when they are shooting up a town out west.
O my, O my! I hope I may live to see another such a circus some day, but
I guess not, for if Pa does not kill me the niggers will, if they ever
come back. Those nigger chasers started the stampede. You know how
nigger chasers such as boys use in America, rush around in every
direction spitting fire, and acting like crazy snakes. Well, they went
into that crowd like pizen, run up the legs of the men, and chased the
women, and there was a stampede for fair. Men and women fell over each
other, clawed hair and got on their knees and said their “now I lay me,”
dodged the nigger chasers, and when they got away from one chaser
another one would meet them and run up their frames and jump off and go
for another and there was the scardest bunch of negroes that ever danced
a war dance, and when the balls from the Roman candles began to strike
all around Pa and the old king, and the pinwheel began to revolve, and
spatter out different colored lights, and the cowboy’s Winchester
boomed, and the wounded jackals howled, and a lion that got pretty near
the camp let out a roar that shook the earth the whole crowd made for
the woods and I touched off a rocket and let it go into the crowd there
was a breaking of brush and a yelling in the negro dialect, and all that
was left around the campfire was Pa and the cowboy and your little
Hennery.
Pa knew what was the trouble. He knew it was his little boy that created
the disturbance. “They’re off” says I, walking up to Pa, and putting my
arm around him. “That scarce pays me for all I have suffered since I
came to Africa on this fool expedition,” said the cowboy, as he picked
up a piece of roast pig and began to gnaw it. “Hennery,” says Pa,
picking up a club, “You have stampeded the noblest army in Africa, and
broken up a tribe that were my subjects, and left me a white king with
nothing to king it over; you have broken up the whole show and I must
proceed to kill you.”
I dodged and gave Pa the laugh, and told him his tribe would be back in
the morning, and he could make up a story that the Great Spirit had
become offended at the tribe, and turned loose the elements on them, and
Pa said, “Good idea, Hennery,” and we climbed trees to sleep while the
hyenas came into camp and ate up the remains of the banquet. Pa said,
“Hennery, you always raise hades on your watch, but I fear you have
overdone it this time,” and I said to Pa, “You wait till daylight and
the whole bunch will be back here worshipping you because they think you
are a baldheaded God, see?” and Pa said, “Mebby, boy, mebby so.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XX.
The Boy Goes Home from Church with a Girl—The Boy Meets the Girl’s
Pa at a Barbecue—Pa Fills the Gas Bag and They Get Ready to Sail
the Airship—Pa, the Boy and the King Take a Ride up in the
Clouds—Pa Meets a New Tribe and They Take Him for Mr. Roosevelt.
I have spent a good many terrible nights in my time, but I never spent
such a night as I did up the tree, the night I fired the nigger chasers
into the barbecue crowd in Africa, with hyenas and jackals sitting on
their haunches and looking up at us, licking their chops, and yapping
for us to come down and be chewed.
Once when I was quite a bit younger, a party of us boys went to rob a
melon patch, and the farmer shot us in the pants with rock salt, and
chased us up a tree, while the dogs stood at the foot of the tree all
night and barked, and the salt in our wounds was making us smart awful,
but it was not so dangerous as this hyena stunt.
Once I went home from church with a girl, and on the way back home the
father of the girl came out with a ghost sheet over him, with phosphorus
eyes, and scared me into a hen coop, and as I was praying to die, a
negro with a dark lantern came to steal the chickens, and when he saw me
in the coop he gave me some chickens he had stolen from another coop,
and he run one way and I run the other, and I guess he went around the
world one way and I the other, and we met last night at the barbecue,
sure, and he started back around the world the other way when my
fireworks went off.
But I was not as scared in the hen coop, with the ghost and the
frightened negro, as I was up the tree, looking down the throats of the
hyenas, with the lions howling around sniffing at the remains of the
barbecue, and a few tigers waving their tails from side to side, waiting
for us to drop off the limbs.
Pa went to sleep a-straddle of a limb because he was tired, and the
cowboy went to sleep on another limb because he was drunk, and your
little Hennery was on watch, crying to be put to bed.
When daylight came the animals slunk away into the jungle, and when it
got light enough I could see black faces peering through the bushes
trying to find out if it was safe to return, so I woke Pa and the
cowboy, and told Pa his subjects were coming into camp to cut his liver
out, and toast it on a forked stick, and Pa climbed down from the tree
and kicked the fire, and as the negroes began to come nearer he said,
“Welcome to our beautiful city.”
Pretty soon all of the tribe returned, but they did not kowtow to Pa
like they used to, until the old king showed up.
He was so scared he was fairly pale, and he had a grouch too, and Pa
noticed it, for he said to the cowboy, “You go and fill that gas bag and
get ready to sail, because there is going to be a mutiny, and we have
got to get out of this country pretty precious, or they will eat us,”
and the cowboy went to work to inflate the gas bag.
Pa stood around trying to look like a saint, and he pointed to the sun,
just rising over the hills, and got on his knees to worship the sun, and
motioned for all the tribe to do likewise, but they turned their backs
on Pa and the sun, and surrounded the old king whose place Pa had
usurped, and by the motions they made and the few words I could
understand it was evident they proposed to drive us out of the tribe.
The old king came to Pa and said his tribe wanted to have peace again,
and wanted him to run the shebang, and they wanted an old fashioned
cannibal feast, and that they insisted on eating Pa and the cowboy and
myself roasted. Pa said all right, he was willing to be roasted in the
evening but not in the morning. He said white meat always tasted better
in the evening, after a ride up in the clouds, and he propsed to the old
king that we all three, with the king, take a nice ride in the sky cart,
take along all the gold we had, and visit an adjoining tribe, buy all
their wives, and herd them, and let the cowboy drive them back to camp
and then they could roast us and have the time of their lives.
[Illustration: They Turned Their Backs On Pa and the Sun.]
This looked good to the old king, and he went and dug up all the gold
and diamonds they had, and put them in a bag, which was tied to the
bamboo frame of the airship, and after breakfast we got ready to sail.
We fixed a sort of chair for the king to ride in, tied with rawhide to a
cross stick right in front of where the cowboy always sits, and I heard
Pa whisper to the cowboy that he would head the ship direct to the
coast, and when we got away from camp a few miles, Pa would give the
signal and the cowboy was to cut the rawhide rope and let the king take
a fall out of himself.
Pa steered the airship South, and occasionally the negro king would yell
and point to the East, where the tribe was located whose wives we had
designs on, but Pa kept his direction, and after running an hour or so
we came to a beautiful lake of blue water, and Pa told the cowboy to get
ready to throw off about two hundred pounds of dead weight. The cowboy
said, “Aye, aye, sir,” and got his knife ready. Pa let the airship down
about fifty feet above the water of the lake, so the fall would not kill
the negro king, and when we got nearly across the lake, Pa said, “Cut
the rope,” and the cowboy reached over with his knife and cut it, and
down went Mr. McGinty, hanging on to the rope, and turning over in the
air a dozen times, and striking the surface of the lake with a spash
that shot the water up nearly to the airship. “So long, you senegambian
cannibal,” said Pa as the king struck the water, and the airship shot up
about fifty feet higher.
“Give my love to forty or fifty of your wives,” said the cowboy as he
sheathed his knife. “Take that from your little Hennery,” says I as I
lit a giant firecracker and threw it down near him, where it exploded
like a bomb. And then as we went along through the air we watched him
loosen himself from the chair and strike out for the shore, swearing in
negro dialect that he would eat us yet, without salt, and then we got
out of sight of the lake, laughing at our escape and wondering where we
would land.
[Illustration: “Take That from Your Little Hennery.”]
We sailed along for a couple of hours, and passed over villages of
natives, but Pa said he would not take chances on another nigger king,
but would run the ship towards the coast as long as the gas held out,
and on we went until after midday, when the gas bag began to flap as
though the gas was escaping, and Pa acted nearly crazy, because we were
over a dense jungle, filled with wild animals, and not a thing to eat.
After two o’clock P. M. we sighted a clearing ahead, with nice modern
houses, and as we got nearer we could see herds of Jersey cattle, and
girafs, and horses and elephants, and the queerest mixture of wild life
and civilization, and the nearer we got the more it looked like a Yankee
settlement, and when Pa saw some automobiles and a tennis court, with
men, women and children playing tennis and riding around in gasoline and
steam autos, and a creamery and a wind mill and an ice house, he said
that was the place he was looking for, and he pointed the airship for
the clearing, and told the cowboy to get the anchor ready.
The people on the plantation saw the airship and quit playing tennis,
the autos pointed towards where we were going to land, and when we threw
out the anchor and came down to the ground and made a landing right on
the golf links near the tennis court, we were soon surrounded by twenty
or thirty men, women and children, and Pa got out and took off his hat
and made a bow that would have captured any people of any nationality.
Pa was going to speak to the people in French or German, but a man in
riding breeches came up and in the purest English said, “I beg pardon,
but is this Mr. Roosevelt?” and Pa said, “Not on your life, but just as
good a man all right.”
The man said he was expecting Mr. Roosevelt but not until after the 4th
of March, but he didn’t know but what he had come a little ahead of
schedule time. Pa said he was a Roosevelt man all right, though he’d
always been a Democrat, and that he was an American.
“But what are you doing in Africa?” said the man who seemed to be the
leading citizen. “O!” said Pa, as he lit a cigarette, “I have been
taking in a large part of Africa, and just dropped down to see if you
had any news of the election in the United States.”
The man said he was an American too, and lived in Michigan when at home,
but he came out here for his wife’s health, and opened up a little
ranch. He said Taft was elected all right, and Pa said he thought it
would come out that way, and then the man asked us into the house, and
the others crowded around our airship, and before long the cowboy was
riding a polo pony, and I was playing tennis with some boys about as big
as me, and Pa was drinking highballs and club soda, and as the rum went
down and we sat around a regular dining table, eating off of regular
dishes, with knives and forks, and listening to people talk our
language, and laugh right out loud, the first experience of the kind we
had enjoyed in six months, and we thought how only a few hours before we
were with a tribe of canniballs, billed to be eaten at sundown, we
thought how small the world was, and joined in the prayer offered by the
host.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXI.
We Spend a Couple of Days at a Michigan Man’s Ranch in Darkest
Africa—Pa and the Cowboys Take a Bath—After Smoking about 50
Cigars—Pa Told What Cowards Lions and Tigers Were—Pa Walked up
to a Lion and Gave Him a Cut with a Whip.
We have spent a comple of days at the Michigan man’s ranch in Darkest
Africa, where he has brought civilization right into the Jungle, and
after spending six months with negro savages and wild animals, and
menagerie people, it has been the most enjoyable two days I ever knew.
It is good sometimes to see ourselves as others see us, and not having
looked into a mirror for half a year, we found that we were about the
most disreputable looking tourists that ever came in sight of beds with
linen sheets on, and pillows.
I noticed that the family of the Michigan man and the servants looked at
us with suspicion, and turned up their noses at us, but I never realized
what it was all about until they showed us to our rooms that night, when
I saw myself in a mirror, and found that my face and hands were black
with dirt and smoke, my clothes were greasy and patched with buckskin
patches, sewed on with strips of rawhide, and my torn coat was pinned
together with thorns. I could see Pa and the cowboy all the time, and
knew that they looked like tramps, but I thought I was all right.
The Michigan man showed us to our rooms, after Pa and the cowboy had
drank a few quarts of highballs, and they were going to go to bed with
their clothes on, but I knew they would ruin the beds if they did, so I
insisted that we all get in the bath tubs and take our semi-annual bath,
and as the man left us he said we could find clothes to put on in the
morning, in a closet, and to leave our clothes out in the hall and he
would have a servant take them away with the tongs and burn them in the
furnace.
That sobered Pa and the cowboy a little, and they decided to try the
baths.
Well, we didn’t do a thing to the running water, and before we retired
we had washed ourselves so clean, with real soap, the first we had seen
since we left Germany, that Pa and the cowboy had to be introduced to
each other, and I was so clean that I didn’t know myself, and we put on
pajamas that we found in the room, and crawled into the clean beds and
slept till morning, after putting all of our clothes out of the room, to
purify the air.
In the morning we dressed up in the clothes the Michigan man told us we
would find in the closet, and such a transformation was never seen
before.
Pa found a pair of gray pants and a frock coat, and a silk hat, and when
he was dressed and had on a white shirt he looked like a senator from
South Carolina.
The cowboy found a golf suit, with short pants, long socks, and putty
leggins, and a Tam o’ Shanter cap, and he looked like an escaped
Scotchman, while I found a Buster Brown suit that fit me, and all I
wanted was a dog to be complete, and we went down to breakfast, and made
a hit, the family acting as though they were proud to have us in their
midst.
During breakfast they all drew Pa out, and he told them of his
experiences capturing wild animals in Africa, and exploring the country,
and being made king of a tribe, and they called Pa “Your Highness,” and
Pa lied enough about his adventures to send him over the road for
disorderly conduct.
The women drew out the cowboy, and he lied some on his own account, and
the children got me to going, and you know how it is with me when I get
to going.
When the breakfast was over we were all heroes, and Pa pulled out a
handful of uncut diamonds and spread them on the table by his plate, and
gave each one a diamond as big as a hickory nut, and left a lot of
smaller ones on the table with the bread crumbs for the servants, and
when we left the table the whole family bowed low to us, and stood back
until the king and the cowboy and I had passed out on to the veranda.
Gee, but they seemed to think King Edward wouldn’t be ace high to Pa,
and Pa swelled up so I thought he might bust.
[Illustration: Pa Swelled Up So I Thought He Might Bust.]
After smoking some fifty cigars, Pa told of what cowards lions and
tigers were, and how he could take a riding whip and chase a lion up a
tree, and the Michigan man proposed to have an exhibit of his wild
animals, which he kept in his private forest outside of the clearing. He
had a race track in the clearing next to the forest, and told Pa that
every morning his herders turned a lot of lions, giraffes, rhinoceroses
and zebras into the track, and the family chased them around the track
in automobiles, and Pa said he would like to enter into such a race, and
the man ordered the herders to turn in the animals.
The cowboy wanted a saddle horse and a lariat rope, and they fixed him
out, and when the herders announced that the animals were on the track
all right, we got into the waiting autos, the man and Pa lit cigars and
sat on the front seat with the chauffeur, and some of us got in the back
seats and started out.
When the animals saw us coming they started down the home stretch, and
the auto gave chase, and we yelled and fired guns in the air, and the
chauffeur put a charge of bird shot into the hind hams of a lion that
didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry, and the lion turned on us, and Pa
told the chauffeur to stop and he would settle with the lion.
Pa got out with a horse whip and started for the lion, which gave a roar
like distant thunder, and as I looked at Pa with the frock coat and silk
hat, walking towards the lion I thought that was the last of Pa, and
begged him to come back, but he said, “Never you mind me, I have seen
lions before,” and Pa walked up to the lion and gave him a cut with the
whip, and yelled, “Get back into the jungle, you Tom Cat.”
Well, really, that lion ought to have turned and put his tail between
his legs and galloped for the woods, but Pa had made a mistake in his
lion, for the animal went up to Pa and took a mouthful of his pants, and
shook him like a dog would shake a rat, and Pa yelled for them to take
away their lion if they didn’t want the animal injured.
The animal rolled Pa over on the ground in the dust, chewed his silk
hat, and Pa got loose and made a rush for the auto and crawled under it
to fix something, and just then the cowboy came along on a pony and
threw his lariat over the lion’s head and pulled him away across the
track, and Pa came out from under the machine and took a big
monkey-wrench and started again for the lion, bareheaded, and so mad he
fairly frothed at the mouth, after he saw the lion was choked nearly to
death, and then Pa mauled the apparently dead lion until the cowboy
dismounted from the pony and gave his lariat rope back.
Pa gave the lion a couple of kicks, and got back into the auto, and the
Michigan man patted him on the back and said, “Old man, you are a king
of beasts, sure enough;” and Pa said, “O, I don’t know; I never did like
a cowardly lion, no how.”
We chased some more animals around the track, and the Michigan man said
he hoped the toothless old lion would not die, as he was saving him for
Roosevelt to practice on when he came to the ranch after the 4th of
March.
The cowboy went across the field where a tame giraffe was grazing in a
tree top, and took the saddle off his pony and put it on the giraffe,
and we run up to where he was, and the Michigan man asked him what he
was going to do, and he said he was going to ride the giraffe, as he had
ridden almost everything that walked on four legs except a giraffe.
The Michigan man told him he had better leave the giraffe out of his
repertoire, because a giraffe was mighty uncertain, but the cowboy got
the saddle on, and climbed into it, and then the trouble began.
The giraffe didn’t have any bridle on, and no mane to hold on to, and he
was built so that the saddle slipped down by his rump, and when the
animal turned around and saw he had the cowboy where he wanted him, he
started off towards the forest on a hop, skip and a jump, kicking up his
heels like a bucking broncho, and the last we saw of the expedition the
giraffe had jumped over a wire fence and took to the woods, with the
cowboy dangling by one stirrup, swearing in the Wyoming dialect.
[Illustration: The Giraffe Didn’t Have Any Bridle On—and No Mane to Hold
On To.]
Then we went back to the house to play golf, and the Michigan man sent
some servants into the woods with a strecher to bring in the remains of
the cowboy.
As we dismounted at the veranda, Pa lit a cigarette and said to the man,
“You certainly have all the comforts of a home here, and all the
facilities for enjoyment that anybody has outside of a traveling
menagerie, except draw poker.”
“We can fix you all right on the draw poker,” said the Michigan man.
“Boy, bring the chips and the cards, and let me know when they find the
remains of Mr. Cowboy,” and they began to play poker, and I went out to
see them milk a Jersey cow.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXII.
Pa and the Boy Have a Series of Ups and Downs—Pa Plays Poker with
the Michigan Man and Loses All His Money—Pa Puts Up His Airship
and Loses—Pa and the Boy Start for Hamburg—The Boy Makes a
King’s Crown Out of Tin—The Boy Tells How They Escaped from the
Negro Tribes in Africa.
It seems to be just one series of ups and downs with Pa and I. One day
we are kings and things, and the next day we are just things and not
kings, or ninespots, or anything in the deck, except it’s Jacks.
That short stay at the ranch of the Michigan man in Africa, which seemed
like being set down from hades in Darkest Africa to Heaven in America,
terminated just as everything else does with us.
After we had enjoyed the morning with the wild animals on the race
track, Pa and the Michigan man set into a game of draw poker with some
other sharps and the cowboy, and they must have stacked the cards on Pa
and the cowboy, for before night they had got all Pa’s money away, and
the cowboy was burst, too, and in the evening Pa put the airship up
against the creamery and a drove of Jerseys, and Pa lost the airship,
and then Pa gave checks on a bank in the River Nile, and lost all the
checks, and about a pint of the diamonds, and when we went to bed the
Michigan man said he hated to part with us, but if we must go he would
send us over to Lake Victoria Nigouza, where we could take a steamer for
Hamburg.
We didn’t sleep much that night, and the next morning the auto was at
the door, and we took what little stuff Pa had not lost playing poker,
and crossed the country to the lake, at a town where Pa sold some of his
uncut diamonds for money enough to pay for our passage to Hamburg, and
we got on board the vessel and got into our state rooms.
Just before we were ready to start an officer came on board looking for
two white men who had been giving checks that were no good, and for
selling diamonds that would not wash.
I heard about it, and there was such a crowd that the vesselmen did not
remember Pa and the cowboy, but they said the officers could search the
vessel if they wanted to.
I went to the state room and told Pa and he turned pale, and trembled
like a leaf, and the brave cowboy had a fit. They were scared at the
prospect of being taken ashore and put in an English jail, and Pa sweat
so he looked like a hippopotamus sweating blood.
Pa said they were up a stump, and asked me if I could think of anything
to help them out. I told Pa the only thing for us to do was to take a
burned cork and black up, and pretend that Pa was an African king, on
the way to England to have a conference with King Edward about tribal
affairs.
Gee, but Pa and the cowboy bit like a bass and I got a champagne cork
and burned it over the lamp and went to work bleaching us all up, and in
half an hour we were three of the blackest niggers that ever emigrated
from Africa. I even blacked the place on Pa’s leg where the lion had
chewed a hole through his pants.
We looked at ourselves in the mirror, and inspected each other, and
couldn’t find a white spot, and then I told Pa what to do when the
officers of the law came.
He was to be seated in state, on a high chair, looking like a nigger
king, and the cowboy and I were to get down on our knees before him and
kowtow.
I got a crown made out of a tin basin, and a feather duster for a plume,
and fixed Pa up so that any tribe would have gone wild over him.
Just as we got Pa fixed up, and we had all stopped laughing, there was a
knock at the door of the state room, and I opened it, and two
semi-Englishmen came in looking for Pa and the cowboy, but when I waved
my hand and said, “Behold the King of Natabeland,” and the cowboy bit
the duster and saluted Pa, and Pa looked savage and said in broken
negro, “What, ho! varlets,” the officers said, “Beg pardon, don’t you
know, your ’ighness,” and they backed out of the door, making salaams,
and soon disappeared. Gee, it was a close call.
Soon after the engine began to turn the screw of the propeller, and when
we looked out of the porthole the vessel was going towards the ocean,
and when I told Pa he got down off his throne and danced a jig and
hugged the cowboy, and we were having a jollification when there was
another rap at the door, and Pa jumped up on the throne and put on his
tin basin crown, and I opened the door, and the steward of the vessel
came in with his hat in his hands, and asked Pa what he would have for
supper. Pa said he didn’t care what he had if he only got it quick, and
the steward said mostly when they were carrying African kings to England
they served the meals in the state rooms, as the kings did not care to
sit at the same table with the common herd, and Pa said that suited him
all right, and the steward added that the passengers also complained of
the manners of the African kings, and the smell that they emitted in the
cabin.
[Illustration: There Was a Knock at the Door of the Stateroom.]
Pa was going to get hot at that remark, but I was afraid the burnt cork
would rub off, so I said His Highness would be served in his state room,
and to bring the best the ship offered, and bring it quick if he didn’t
want trouble aboard, and he bowed low and went out, and pretty soon the
waiters began to bring in oysters and soup and turkey and boiled
pheasants, and ice cream, and we kings and things didn’t do a thing to
the food, and when the dishes were taken away empty, and the wine had
been drank, and the cigars brought in, King Pa got down from his throne
and just yelled, and he said to the cowboy, “Say, Alkali Ike, wouldn’t
this skin you?” and Ike said he guessed it would when they found out
what frauds we were, and after awhile we turned in and slept just like
we were at home.
For several days they fed us like they were fattening us for a sausage
factory, and the ocean was blue and calm, and we were let out on deck
near our state room for exercise, and I kept burning cork and keeping us
all blacked up nice, and Pa would repeat African words that he had
picked up, mixed with English words, and everybody kept their distance
and thought we were the real nigger thing.
Well, everything was going along beautifully, and we thought we had
never struck such a snap in all our lives, until about the fifth day.
We had eaten so much that our appetites had gone, and Pa and the cowboy
took to drinking more and more, and one night it began to blow, and the
vessel was part of the time on one end and then on the other, and then
rolling from side to side, so that Pa couldn’t sit on his throne without
sideboards, and towards morning we all got seasick and fell all over the
state room, and Pa had a pain under his belt that doubled him up like a
jackknife, and he yelled for a doctor. I told him never to send for a
doctor until the boat tied up at a dock, because it was dangerous, but
Pa said he had to have a doctor, and the cowboy had drank a bottle of
Scotch whiskey and had laid down under a bunk, and he was no good, so I
rang for the ship’s doctor, but I told Pa he must keep the parts of his
body that were not black covered up, or the doctor would find out he was
a white man, and then it would be all off in the nigger king masquerade.
Pretty soon the ship’s doctor came with a female trained nurse, and Pa
was a pitiful sight when he saw them. The doctor felt of Pa’s pulse, and
asked him where the pain was, and Pa, like a darn fool, put his hand on
his stomach, and before Pa could stop it the doctor had opened Pa’s
shirt, and was feeling where the appendix gets in its work.
[Illustration: Pretty Soon the Ship’s Doctor Came with a Nurse.]
It was a little dark, but the doctor said, “You old seney ambion, you
have got about the worst case of appendicitis that was ever pulled off
on this vessel. Boy, bring me that lantern.”
I hated to do it, because I knew Pa would be discovered, and I delayed
bringing the lantern as long as I could, but, turning the wick down, but
the doctor snatched a match so he could see Pa’s stomach, and then he
said, “Say, old skate, you are no more nigger king than I am; you are a
white man blacked up;” and the trained nurse said, “The ’ell you say,”
and then I got the lantern and they looked at Pa’s white skin, and the
doctor asked Pa what he had to say for himself, and Pa admitted that he
was a white man, but said he had many of the estimable qualities of a
nigger, but that he was traveling incog, to throw his enemies off the
track, and then Pa fainted away from the pain, and the cowboy got sober
enough to wake up and take notice, and we told the doctor who we were,
and how we had escaped from negro tribes and draw poker sharps and
officers of the law, and the cowboy fell in love at first sight with the
trained nurse, and then Pa came to, with the aid of a bucket of water
and some whiskey, and the storm went down, and the doctor said Pa would
have to have an operation performed to remove his appendix, and Pa
kicked about it, but they took him to the ship’s hospital, with the
cowboy for an assistant nurse, and I was left alone in our state room,
the only king there was left, and when I washed off my burnt cork I was
so white and pale that they gave me medicine, and the trained nurse held
me on her lap and sang English songs to me, with all the h’s left out,
and every day she told me how they removed Pa’s appendix, and it was
swollen up bigger than a weiner sausage, but that he would live all
right, and when he got well enough the captain would put Pa in irons for
passing himself off for a nigger king, and that he would probably be
transported for life, if he couldn’t raise the price of a ransom. And
there you are.
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Transcriber’s Notes
Spelling and possible printer’s errors have mostly been retained.
Likewise, inconsistencies in hyphenation, spacing and capitalization
have also been retained. Changes made to the text are noted in the
comments below.
Pg. 8: The page number for CHAPTER XIX. has been added in the Table of
Contents.
Pg. 8: The last page of the Table of Contents, containing the last
chapters, is missing in all known editions of the text.
Pg. 9 - 10: Three entries from the List of Illustrations refer to
non-existent illustrations. They have been removed because the
illustrations were not in the original publication:
“Am Going to Have Him Mended and Keep Him for a Souvenir,” Said the
Pussy Woman.
My Lawyer Told Me to Groan When Anyone Was Present.
I Never Saw a Giant Negro So Mad as That Husband Was.
Pg. 11: The last eight illustrations in the book are missing from the
end of the List of Illustrations.
Pg. 28: Punctuation fix: ‘..Orphan’ to ‘Orphan’ - Extra periods removed
in block quote at start of chapter
Pgs. 38, 58 & 197: The following three illustrations do not seem to
correspond to the printed text and are by a different illustrator, but
are present in all known editions. Their source is ‘Peck’s Bad Boy
Abroad’ (1905).
Pg. 38: ‘Tossed him over the fence.’
Pg. 58: ‘Started on a stampede.’
Pg. 197: ‘Dad started to run for the fence.’
Pg. 78: Heading standardization: ‘VI.’ to ‘CHAPTER VI.’ - Missing word
in heading inserted to match other headings
Pg. 87: Caption fix: Added missing caption present in List of
Illustrations: ‘When it Exploded the Jap Was the Scaredest Person I
Ever Saw.’
Text on Pg. 117, from ‘Pa has had the hardest time ...’ and until
chapter end is replicated at the beginning of Chapter X, Pg. 145, with
minor differences inluding punctuation and initial capitals on some
words. Both have been retained as they appear in the original.
Pg. 131: Heading standardization: ‘IX.’ to ‘CHAPTER IX.’ - Missing word
in heading inserted to match other headings
Pg. 157: Heading standardization: ‘XI.’ to ‘CHAPTER XI.’ - Missing word
in heading inserted to match other headings
Pg. 278: Punctuation fix: ‘Cigars Pa Told’ to ‘Cigars—Pa Told’ - Added
missing em-dash in heading block-quote
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