George W. Peck

“ Pa’s shirt was no protection at all in a cat fight, and the cat just walked all around Pa’s stomach, and Pa yelled ‘police,’ and ‘fire,’ and ‘turn on the hose,’ and he called Ma, and the cat yowled. If Pa had had the presence of mind enough to have dropped the cat, or rolled it up in the mat-trass, it would have been all right, but a man always gets rattled in time of danger, and he held onto the cat and started down stairs yelling murder, and he met Ma coming up. ”

“ He knows where every melon patch in the neighborhood is located, and at what hours the dog is chained up. He will tie an oyster can to a dog’s tail to give the dog exercise, or will fight at the drop of the hat to protect the smaller boy or a school girl. He gets in his work everywhere there is a fair prospect of fun, and his heart is easily touched by an appeal in the right way, though his coat-tail is oftener touched with a boot than his heart is by kindness. ”

“ Pretty soon we heard Pa’s window open, and I looked out, and Pa and Ma had their heads and half their bodies out of the window. They had their night shirts on and looked just like the pictures of Millerites waiting for the world to come to an end. Pa looked up and seed the stove pipe and he said:
“Hanner, for God’s sake, look up there. That is the damest comet I ever see. It is as bright as day. See the tail of it. Now that is worth getting up to see.”
“Just then my chum lit the two Roman candles and I touched off the rocket, and that’s where my eye winkers went. ”

“ I tell you, I have got too old to be mauled as though I was a kid, and any man who attacks me from this out, wants to have his peace made with the insurance companies, and know that his calling and election is sure, because I am a bad man, and don’t you forget it.” And the boy pulled on his boots and looked so cross and desperate that the grocery man asked him if he wouldn’t try a little new cider. ”

“ When my chum and I run away to Pewaukee, Ma thought we had gone off to be piruts, and she told Pa it was a duty he owed to society to go and get us to come back, and be good. She told him if he would treat me as an equal, and laugh and joke with me, I wouldn’t be so bad. She said kicking and pounding spoiled more boys than all the Sunday schools. ”

“ I look back at the happiness of the past two weeks, during which I have been permitted to gaze into the fond blue eyes of my loved one, and carry her rubbers to school for her to wear home when it rained, to hear the sweet words that fell from her lips as she lovingly told me I was a terror, and as I think it is all over, and that I shall never again place my arm around her waist, I feel as if the world had been kicked off its base and was whirling through space, liable to be knocked into a cocked hat, and I don’t care a darn. ”

“ Do you think your little Sunday school boy would catch ants in a pop bottle on the lake shore, and bring them home, and put them in the hole of your liver pad, just before you put it on to go to church? ”

“ It don’t look reasonable that a man would catch epizootic and rheumatism just to fool his boy, does it? What did he give me the dollar for? Ma and Pa don’t seem to call each other pet any more, and as for me, they both look at me as though I was a hard citizen. I am going to Missouri to take Jesse James’s place. There is no encouragement for a boy here. Well, good morning. If Pa comes in here asking for me tell him that you saw an express wagon going to the morgue with the remains of a pretty boy who acted as though he died from concussion of a bed slat on Peck’s bad boy on the pistol pocket. ”

“ All I got was a ’come to Jesus’ Christmas card, with brindle fringe, from Ma, and Pa gave me a pair of his old suspenders, and a calender with mottoes for every month, some quotations from scripture, such as ‘honor thy father and mother,’ and ‘evil communications corrupt two in the bush,’ and ‘a bird in the hand beats two pair.’ Such things don’t help a boy to be good. What a boy wants is club skates, and seven shot revolvers, and such things. ”

“ Try one of those pickles in the jar there, wont you. I always like to have a boy enjoy himself when he comes to see me,” said the grocery man, winking to a man who was filling and old fashioned tin box with tobacco out of the pail, who winked back as much as to say, “if that boy eats a pickle on top of them mumps we will have a circus, sure.” ”

“ You see my chum and me had to carry the goat up to my room when Pa and Ma was out riding, and he blatted so we had to tie a handkerchief around his nose, and his feet made such a noise on the floor that we put some baby’s socks on his feet. Gosh, how frowy a goat smells, don’t it? I should think you Masons must have strong stummix, Why don’t you have a skunk or a mule for a trade mark. Take a mule, and annoint it with limburg cheese and you could initiate and make a candidate smell just as bad as with a gosh darn mildewed goat. ”

“ But I rasseled with it till I got off enough white meat for Pa and Ma and dark meat enough for me, and I dug out the dressing, but most of it flew into my shirt bosom, cause the string that tied up the place where the dressing was concealed about the person of the turkey, broke prematurely, and one oyster hit Pa in the eye, and he said I was as awkward as a cross-eyed girl trying to kiss a man with a hair lip. If I ever get to be the head of a family I shall carve turkeys with a corn sheller.”
“But what broke your Pa up at the roller skating rink,” asked the grocery man. ”

“ The grocery man said that when a man had truly been converted his heart was softened, and he was always looking for a chance to do good and be kind to the poor, but if he only had this galvanized religion, this roll plate piety, or whitewashed reformation, he was liable to be a harder citizen than before. ”

“ Say, what’s good for a black eye?”
The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home, “What do you think your Pa’s object was in passing himself off for a single man at Oconomowoc,” asked the grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the boy’s father.
“That’s what beats me. Aside from Ma’s hay fever she is one of the healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose he does it for his health, the way they all do when they go to a summer resort, but it leaves a boy an orphan, don’t it, to have such kitteny parents.” ”

“ I guess I know when I hear a man pray. Coup’s Daniel talked just like a deacon at class meeting, and told the girl to go to the place where the minister says we will all go if we don’t do different. Pa says it is wicked to speak of Daniel in the same breath that you speak of a circus, so I am wicked I ’spose. Well, I couldn’t help it and when he wanted me to ask him questions about Elijah going up in a chariot of fire, I asked him if he believed a chariot like the ones in the circus, with eight horses, could carry a man right up to the clouds, and Pa said of course it could. ”

“ We got him to join the Good Templars last night.”
“No, you don’t tell me,” said the grocery man, as he thought that his trade in cider for mince pies would be cut off. “So you got him into the Good Templars, eh?”
“Well, he thinks he has joined the Good Templars, so it is all the same. You see my chum and me have been going to a private gymnasium, on the west side kept by a Dutchman, and in a back room he has all the tools for getting up muscle. There, look at my arm,” said the boy, as he rolled up his sleeve and showed a muscle about as big is an oyster. ”

“ You can’t play no pickle on me, not when I have the mumps. Ma passed the pickles to me this morning, and I took one mouthful, and like to had the lockjaw. But Ma didn’t do it on purpose, I guess. She never had the mumps and didn’t know how discouraging a pickle is. Darn if I didn’t feel as though I had been struck in the butt of the ear with a brick. But about Pa. He has been fuller’n a goose ever since New Year’s day. I think its wrong for women to tempt feeble minded persons with liquor on New Year’s. Now me and my chum, we can take a drink and then let it alone. ”

“ He seemed discouraged, and the proprietor asked him what was the matter. “Well,” says he, as he put his hand on his pistol pocket and groaned, “There is no encouragement for a boy to have any fun nowadays. If a boy tries to play an innocent joke he gets kicked all over the house.” ”

“ Well, if I go to the Reform School, somebody’s got to pay attention, you can bet your liver. A boy can’t have any fun these days without everybody thinks he is a heathen. What hurt did it do to play comet? It’s a mean father that wont stand a little scorchin’ in the interests of science.”
The boy went out, scratching the place where his eye winkers were, and then the grocery man knew what it was that caused the fire engines to be out around at four o’clock in the morning, looking for a fire. ”

“ If Pa had had another pair of roller skates on his shoulders, and castors on his ears, he couldn’t have slid along any better. Pa is a short, big man, and as he was rolling along on his back, he looked like a sofa with castors on being pushed across a room by a girl. Finally Pa came to the wall and had to stop, and the girl fell right across him, with her roller skates in his neck, and she called him an old brute, and told him if he didn’t let go of her polonaise she would murder him. ”

“ Ma ain’t to blame for all the young ones in this town, but she has got up a reputashun, and when we hear the bell ring in the night Ma gets up and begins to put on her clothes, and the next morning she comes in the dining room with a shawl over her head, and says, ‘its a girl and weighs ten pounds,’ or a boy, if its a boy baby. Ma was out on one of her professional engagements, and I got in bed with Pa. I had heard Pa blame Ma about her cold feet, so I got a piece of ice about as big as a raisin box, just zactly like one of Ma’s feet, and I laid it right against the small of Pa’s back. ”

“ It is a mean boy that won’t speak to his Pa when he sees him standing on a corner, I went up street and I saw Pa cross over by the drug store in a sort of a hurry, and I could see a girl going by with a water-proof on, but she skited right along and Pa looked kind of solemn, the way he does when I ask him for new clothes. I turned and came back and he was standing there in the doorway, and I said, “Pa you will catch cold if you stand around waiting for a man. You go down to the Consistory and let me lay for the man.” ”

“ CHAPTER XXIV. HE QUITS THE DRUG BUSINESS. HE HAS DISSOLVED WITH THE DRUGGER—THE OLD LADY AND THE GIN—THE BAD BOY IGNOMINIOUSLY FIRED—HOW HE DOSED HIS PA’s BRANDY—THE BAD BOY AS “HAWTY AS A DOOK”—HE GETS EVEN WITH HIS GIRL—THE BAD BOY WANTS A QUIET PLACE—THE OLD MAN THREATENS THE PARSON.
“What are you loafing around here for,” says the grocery man to the bad boy one day this week. “It is after nine o’clock, and I should think you would want to be down to the drug store. How do you know but there may be somebody dying for a dose of pills?” ”

“ Doc, you dismember that leg, and I will attend to the stomach and the upper part of the body. He will be dead before we are done with him. We must remember that society has some claims on us, and not let our better natures be worked upon by the post mortem promises of a dead drunkard.’ Then I took my icicle and began fumbling around the abdomen portion of Pa’s remains, and my chum took a rough piece of ice and began to saw his leg off, while the other boy took hold of the leg and said he would catch it when it dropped off. ”

“ It’s a mean boy that won’t help a nold vetran cure his liver, so I told him to try Pa’s liver remedy, and he took a regular cow swaller, and said, ‘here’s to your livers, boys.’ He must have a liver bigger nor a cow’s, and I guess it is better now.
“Then my liver begun to feel curus again, and my chum said his liver was getting torpid some more, and we both took another dose, and started home and we got generous, and give our nuts all away to some boys. Say, does liver medicine make a feller give away all he has got? ”

“ Just then my chum and me got there and we amputated Pa from the girl, and lifted him up, and told him for heaven’s sake to let us take off the skates, cause he couldn’t skate any more than a cow, and Pa was mad and said for us to let him alone, and he could skate all right, and we let go and he struck out again. Well, sir, I was ashamed. An old man like Pa ought to know better than to try to be a boy. ”