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Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler · English · Gutenberg #44154 · 421,583 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

Author: Ellis Parker Butler

Illustrator: W. B. King


        
Release date: November 10, 2013 [eBook #44154]
                Most recently updated: March 11, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44154

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SWATTY: A STORY OF REAL BOYS ***




Produced by David Widger






SWATTY

A Story of Real Boys

By Ellis Parker Butler

With Illustrations

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

1920

TO FRED ERNST SCHMIDT

OF MUSCATINE, IOWA THE FAITHFUL COMPANION OF MY BOYHOOD THIS BOOK IS
MOST GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED





SWATTY

A STORY OF REAL BOYS




I. THE BIG RIVER

I guess if teachers always knew how lickings were going to turn out they
wouldn't lick us fellows so much. I am thinking about Miss Murphy, the
one that taught the room me and Swatty and Bony was in, and about the
time she was going to lick Swatty. One of the times. There were plenty
of others.

You see, me and Swatty and Bony is chums, and we go together mostly,
but this was when we was in Miss Murphy's room. She's a good-looker, but
she's a tartar, too, when it comes to licking.

The way of it was this: My sister Fan was mushy over Swatty's brother
Herb and she didn't care who knew it, because they were engaged, and Fan
was fixing up her things to get married in, and she wished I was a girl
so I could be her flower girl at the wedding, but she didn't know what
she'd do with me. She thought maybe she'd lock me in the cellar, she
said, but she didn't mean it. She was always codding me and Swatty.
She'd cod us that way, and then she'd give us a dime or something. She
was all right, and Swatty thought so too.

So then Fan and Herb had a fight, like girls and fellows always do have;
but this was a good one. It was because Herb said maybe Fan would like
to have Miss Murphy for a bridesmaid, and Fan got mad because Herb had
gone with Miss Murphy once. So then Fan wouldn't forgive Herb. Herb came
over and fought for three evenings, and then Swatty brought a note from
him to Fan, and I took one from Fan to Herb, and that was the end of it.
The note I took had a ring in it, because I could feel it. Then Fan just
moped around the house and cried some, and after a while Herb had to go
and teach the eighth grade at school, because Professor Martin broke
his leg on the ice the janitor ought to have scraped off the steps but
didn't. So right away Herb began to get thick with Miss Murphy, but that
didn't make any difference to me. As soon as a fellow hasn't got one
girl he has another one, anyway, and I didn't blame Herb. I was
just sorry for Fan. And I thought Herb was crazy to make up to a
school-teacher, especially a tartar like Miss Murphy. She was an awful
licker. She'd lick a fellow for anything.

Well, one day me and Swatty was going to school and we was talking at
each other the way we always did, and I said he thought he was great,
didn't he, because his brother was Miss Murphy's beau, and Miss Muiphy
wouldn't lick him when his brother was her beau. I didn't mean anything,
I just said it, but Swatty hauled off and hit me one and dared me to
say that again. So I said it again, and all the fellows got around and
yelled “Fight! Fight!” and I had to fight him. It would have been a
pretty good fight if Miss Murphy hadn't come along. She jumped right at
us and grabbed us both.

“Who started this fight?” she asked, hopping mad.

“He did,” I said.

“Didn't neither!” said Swatty. “He did.”

“Who struck the first blow?” says Miss Muiphy.

Well, everybody told her Swatty did, which was the truth, and she let me
go.

“Just as I thought, you--you little bulldozer,” she said, shaking him.
“You've been getting entirely too uppish of late, young man. You think
you can take advantage of--of circumstances; but I'll teach you a thing
or two. Get into school there, and wash yourself, and see that you are
in your seat when the bell rings.”

So Swatty did it. Me and the Bony Highlander stayed out till the bell
rung, and then we went in, too, and as we went past Swatty's desk he
whispered, “She thinks she's going to lick me, but she ain't.”

“Bet she does, if she said so,” I says; and I bet she would, too. So did
the Bony Highlander, because we knew she was the sort that would rather
lick a fellow than not.

Well, that was in the morning, and they never lick at noon because the
way some fellows wriggle and twist it takes a long time to lick them,
and it would use up the noon hour. So they lick after school in the
afternoon when there is plenty of time. So me and the Bony Highlander
waited for Swatty, and we tried to scare him. We told him we bet Miss
Murphy would make him holler, because she licked with a rawhide pony
switch and whipped on the legs where the switch would wrap around and
sting, but we couldn't get Swatty to even pretend he might holler. He
said no teacher in the world could make him holler. We all said it. Or,
I don't know whether the Bony Highlander said it or not. He'd never been
licked in school. He wasn't the kind that gets licked, somehow. But he
was a pretty nice fellow, anyway. We liked him just as well, but not as
well as Swatty and me liked each other of course, because me and Swatty
was cow-cousins.

Me and Swatty was both raised on the milk of the same cow, but it was
Schwartzes' cow, and when I was being raised on it Herb Schwartz used to
fetch the milk around, the way Swatty does now. I guess that's how Herb
got to know Fan. But the Bony Highlander was just a kid that moved into
the neighborhood.

His name wasn't really Bony Highlander, but we called him that because
when he was reading a piece of poetry out of the Reader in school, and
ought to have said “bonny Highlander,” he said “bony Highlander.” But
we mostly called him Bony for short, like we called Schwartzy Swatty for
short. He was all right, but he never started to do things; he just
went along when we did them, and waited on the outside of the fence, and
things like that.

Well, we waited on the corner for Swatty that afternoon until the bell
rung but he didn't come, so we went along, and he was at school already,
and after he had stayed in to be licked and Miss Murphy let him out, he
told us why he went early. He knew where she kept her rawhide, in the
closet at the end of the room on the shelf where the chalk boxes were,
and he went early at noon and took his pocket-knife and cut the rawhide
into little pieces about an inch long. He laid them all out on the shelf
in a row, and he said he nearly died laughing when she went to pick it
up and it was all in pieces. So Miss Murphy went to get another rawhide
from another teacher, but everybody had gone home, and she told Swatty
she would tend to him to-morrow.

“I'd rather have been licked to-day and then I'd be done with it,” I
said, but Swatty didn't say so.

“If you've got a licking,” he said, “you've got it, and you can't ever
un-get it, but I ain't ever going to get this one. I'll run away first.”

“Ah, I bet you get it to-morrow,” I said, and the Bony Highlander said
so too.

“Bet I don't!” said Swatty. So we made a bet. I bet him my clay pipe
against a nigger-shooter rubber he had.

So the next day was when we'd know, and at noon Swatty came over to my
barn to get some oilcloth we had in the barn to put in his pants so the
licking wouldn't hurt so much, and I guessed I would win the bet. But he
couldn't fix the oilcloth so it would do any good and let him sit down.
He thought Miss Murphy would be onto it if he couldn't sit down. So he
gave that up. So we went to school.

When school was nearly out Swatty got up and started to walk down his
aisle and up the next, like he was going out for a drink, but Miss
Murphy, who was doing an example on the blackboard for the B class,
turned around and saw him.

“Where are you going?” she asked, like tacks in a bottle.

“Just to get a drink,” said Swatty.

“You take your seat this instant!” said Miss Murphy, and when she said
it, Swatty started to run; but she got there first and headed him off
and grabbed him by the arm. He kicked at her shins, but she gave him
a shake that made him see stars and marched him back to the end of the
room. I thought she was going to take him to his seat, but she didn't.

Our schoolhouse has four rooms on a floor--two in front and two in
back--and the hall comes in the middle, but it don't run all the way
from front to back. In the middle in front on the second floor there is
a little room with some books in it, and they call it the library room.

It has a window and three doors--one into the hall and one into our
room, and one into the room across the hall. So Miss Murphy yanked
Swatty into that room and locked all three doors. So she had him safe
until she got ready to lick him. Then she was going to unlock the door
and bring him out and do a good job, because she had a new rawhide all
ready. I guess she made up her mind she'd lick him until he hollered
that time.

So Swatty waited until school was out. Then he had to wait until Miss
Murphy got rid of the ones she had kept in to write their names five
hundred times, and things like that, but he didn't wait. He opened the
window and looked out, and right below him was the peak roof of the
porch. It wasn't very big, and it was slated, and if he slipped he'd
be a goner and break a leg or something, but he got onto the window
sill and hung down with his hands on the sill, and dropped. He dropped
straddle of the roof and hung on the best way he could.

He said the only thing he thought about was what a fool he had been not
to shut the window, but it was J une and most of the windows were wide
open anyway, and I guess Miss Murphy didn't notice. She unlocked the
door and looked into the room and Swatty wasn't there. Then I guess she
thought maybe somebody had come to the library room for a book and had
let Swatty out. She never put her head out of the window at all. So she
was beaten that time, and she went home.

So Swatty waited until the janitor had swept all the rooms and started
to sweep the walk and he hollered to him. It is none of the janitor's
business who gets licked or who don't, so he came up to the room and
helped Swatty get in the window. He just laughed about it.

So the next day Swatty went to school just the same as always, but at
noon he came over to my barn and Bony came with him. They generally came
because I had to feed my rabbits at noon. This time Swatty sort of poked
at the sawdust that was the floor of our barn and didn't say much. He
most generally wore his hat on the back of his head, but this time he
had it pulled down over his eyes and that was the way he did when he was
getting ready to fight a fellow.

After a while he looked up.

“Are you fellows going to school this afternoon?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Ain't you?”

“Go and get licked? I guess not!” he said. “I'm going down to the
river.”

“What are you going to do down at the river?” Bony asked.

“Going to look at it; what you think I'm going to do?” said Swatty.

Well, looking at it wasn't a bad thing to do, because the river was
away up, and when the Mississippi is up it is worth looking at. It looks
twice as big and sort of rounded up in the middle, and all sorts of
things floating down it--dead trees, and boxes, and logs, and dead pigs,
and sometimes sheds and things. It generally gets up in June, and we
always go down on Saturdays to see how she's getting along.

“She's higher than she ever was,” said Swatty.

“Well, I guess she'll be mighty high by Saturday,” said Bony.

“No, she won't,” said Swatty, “because she's going to begin falling
to-day, the paper says. Why don't you come along down with me?”

“Yes, and get licked for staying out of school!” I said.

“All right for you fellows, then!” said Swatty. “I'll be mad at you for
good. If you were going to get licked I'd just _want_ to do something
so I could get licked too. Don't I always stick by you fellows? And when
I'm going to get licked you go back on me. You're 'fraid-cats.”

“Who's a 'fraid-cat?” I asked, for I don't let anybody call me that.

“You are!” said Swatty. “And so's Bony. You're afraid to stay out of
school one afternoon. You're afraid to stay out the day the river hits
high-water mark. You'll look nice, won't you, with just you and Bony and
a lot of girls in school!”

“Who said we'd be the only kids there?” I asked.

“Who said it? Why, I said it. You don't think any kids will go to school
this afternoon, do you? Everybody will be down at the levee--men and
everybody. If the river don't drop this afternoon she'll go over the
island levee. And you sit around in school like it was a common day!
Why, it's like--like election, or Fourth of July, or something like
that! It's worse than when the ice goes out.”

Well, I never knew a boy to get licked for staying out of school when
the ice was going out of the river. He gets kept in the next day, or
something, but nobody can blame a boy for wanting to see the ice go out,
not even a teacher. So I guessed I'd go with Swatty, if I could sneak
it. Bony didn't want to go much, but he didn't like both of us to call
him a 'fraid-cat, so he came. We climbed out of my barn window, because
Swatty said we'd have to be careful; but I guess it wasn't much use,
because if we had gone out of the back gate it would have done just as
well, and if we had gone out of the front gate nobody would have thought
anything but that we were going to school. We kept in the alley all the
way down to Indian Creek, and Indian Creek was worth seeing, I tell you.

Mostly there is nothing in it but a little bit of water twisting along
in the wet sand, away down in the bottom of the creek bed, but now the
creek was full right up to the top, and there were rowboats moored in
it. We played in the rowboats a while, until a man came and chased us
away, and then we went down along the creek to the river. I tell you,
she was some river!

She went rushing along, all big and muddy and foamy, and she was half
covered with floating stuff--bark and whole haystacks and old trees and
boards and boxes and things. It scared a fellow just to look at her. It
made me feel the way a little baby feels when a big twelve-wheel mogul
engine comes roaring up to the depot platform, only ten times as scary.
It was like a whole ocean starting out to rush away somewhere. We just
stood and looked at it, and pretty soon Swatty says, “Gosh!” Only he
always says “Garsh!” And I said, “Gee!” That was all we said, and Bony
didn't say anything. He just stepped backward three or four steps and
looked frightened. That's the way you always feel when you see the old
Mississippi on a rampage. You feel as if you ought to do something to
stop it, and you know you can't--that nobody can. When it gets going it
is going to keep right on. So we went down to the levee.

Well, there wasn't any levee! Our levee is just a long down-hill of
sand, and it wasn't there. The river had backed clean up to the railroad
tracks and was sploshing against the second rail of the outside track,
and at the down-river end of the levee it had gone under the tracks
and was all over Front Street at the corner. The ferry dock, that was
usually away down at the bottom of the levee, was tied right up close
to the railroad track, and the ferry was tied in behind the steamboat
warehouse, so she wouldn't wash away. The water was clean up over the
floor of the steamboat warehouse, too, and nothing looked the way it
used to look. It was worth forty lickings just to see how different
everything was. We just stood and looked and couldn't believe it.

“Come on,” said Swatty, all at once, “let's have some fun. Let's take
off our shoes and stockings and have some fun.”

We went across the street and asked a man if we could leave our shoes
and stockings in his store, and he said we could, and then we went back
and began to wade where the water wasn't very deep. There were a few
other boys there, wading, and a lot of men standing around, looking at
the water. Some would come down and look a while and then go away again,
and all at once Swatty said, “Garsh! What if our fathers came down
here!”

So we got away from there, quick. We went down below the steamboat
warehouse, where the ferryboat was tied, because nobody was apt to come
down there, and nobody did. We played on the ferryboat a while and then
we got off her, and Swatty saw where somebody had fastened a lot of logs
and bridge timbers to the railway track. I guess they were stuff some
men had gone out in skiffs to catch as they floated by, before the river
got so rampageous. The way they fastened them was to drive a spike
in one end and tie a rope to that, and then tie the other end to the
railway track. So Swatty said, “Come on! Let's have some fun with these
logs and bridge timbers,” or something like that; so we did. We walked
on them, and some of them would sink under us, and then we would jump to
another.

Well, there below the steamboat warehouse the water made an eddy, and
the bark and foam and some sticks kept going around and around in the
eddy, and pretty soon Swatty said: “Let's ride on these logs,” and that
was all right, too, because we could sit straddle of a log or a bridge
timber and paddle with our feet. So we did that. Swatty cut three of
them loose, and we each took a bridge timber, because they didn't turn
over like the logs did, and we paddled around in the eddy and played
we were steamboats. I was the “War Eagle,” and Swatty was the “Mary
Morton,” and Bony was the “Centennial.” We played that a long time and
then we took boards for paddles, and we could go better that way so we
played Indians in canoes, and I got on Swatty's timber and let mine go,
which was all right because the timbers would just go around and around
in the eddy. But Bony wouldn't get on with us, because he was afraid the
timber would sink.

It got along to about five o'clock, and Bony said we had better go home.
He was always the first to want to go home. He told Swatty that Swatty
would be late going for his cow if he didn't start right away, but
Swatty said he didn't care if the old cow never got home. He said it
wouldn't hurt the old cow to wait a while, anyway. So we started to
paddle around the eddy again, and that time we got almost too far out,
I guess, and the end of the timber stuck out beyond the eddy into the
swift water.

“Back her up! Quick!” Swatty yelled, and we both tried to back her with
our board paddles, but it was too late. The swift water caught her on
the side and swung her right out into the current. Gee, but she went!
Right away she was half a block away from Bony and I began to cry, for
there was no telling where she'd stop. You couldn't expect her to stop
this side of St. Louis or New Orleans. So I began to cry, and I stooped
down and hung onto the timber with both arms. It was all I could think
of to do. But Swatty let on he wasn't scared at all. He tried to paddle
toward shore, but there was so v much driftwood and stuff floating that
he couldn't do it.

“Aw, shut up! Don't be a cry-baby!” he yelled at me. “This ain't
nothing. Grab your paddle, and we'll paddle out to the Tow Head and
we'll be all right.”

The Tow Head is the big island in the river below town, but more to this
side of the river than to the other side. It is shaped like a horseshoe,
with the two ends down-stream. Me and Swatty knew it pretty well because
sometimes we used to row down there. It was all trees except a strip of
sand on each side, and in low water there used to be a sandbar below it.
It looked like a good idea to get to the Tow Head if we could; but I was
afraid to sit up so I just stayed the way I was. But Swatty paddled like
a good fellow. I guess the current helped him some. In low water there
are two channels, one on each side of the Tow Head, but when the river
is on a rampage it don't care anything about channels--it just goes. But
it kind of bends below town and I guess that helped Swatty.

He kept yelling at me not to be a 'fraid-cat and to paddle, but I didn't
dare. So he paddled, and pretty soon I saw he was going to hit the Tow
Head all right. That made me feel better and I kind of raised up on
my hands and stopped crying, but when I looked I was scared worse than
ever. It looked as if the Tow Head was coming up-stream like a big
packet at full tilt. It didn't look as if we were floating down to
it, but as if it was tearing up-stream toward us, and it was coming
lickety-split. At its nose, where the water hit it, the river reared up
in a big yellow wave, like the bow wave of a ship, and was cut into foam
and spray where it hit the trees and then rushed away on either side
like mad. So I saw Swatty had made a mistake in trying to land on the
Tow Head.

There wasn't really any Tow Head to land on. The river was way up in
the branches of the trees, and I guess the water was ten feet deep all
over the Tow Head, or deeper, and rushing through the trees like it was
crazy. But we didn't have time to think much about it. We just had time
to be scared, and to see the old Tow Head come rushing and foaming at
us, and then it sort of nabbed us, like a cat nabs a mouse. It was all a
big swosh of water noises and a big swosh of tree branches being slashed
by the water, and then me and Swatty was splashed all over, and the
bridge timber banged into two trees and stuck. Swatty went off the
timber like a stone out of a nigger-shooter, but I hung on. I've got
a black and blue spot inside my leg yet, where it hit the edge of the
timber. Right away the water began to surge over the timber like a giant
pushing against me, and I saw I couldn't hang on there very long, so I
reached up and grabbed a branch of one of the trees and hoisted myself
up and got up in the tree. And there was Swatty! He wasn't in my tree,
but he was in the tree next below mine.

“Garsh!” he said, and that was all he said right then. So I began to
cry. It would make anybody cry to be there, up in a tree, with the whole
Mississippi River rushing along under him, so near he could stick his
toes down into it. It's an awful thing to think about. You can sit in a
tree and look at a creek run under you and you don't care, but when the
Mississippi is on a tear it is different. It's the biggest and strongest
thing in the world, and there was all of it rushing along right under
us, and the tree sort of waving back and forth.

So I cried.

“Aw, shut up!” Swatty said. “What are you crying about?”

Well, I guess we were in a pretty bad fix--worse than we thought we
were. No boat there ever was could get at us where we were. No boat
could come at that Tow Head the way we did and last a minute, because
it would smash against the trees. And even if anybody knew where we were
they couldn't get to us. Even if the strongest men in town tried to
row a boat up-stream from below the Tow Head they couldn't get to us,
because they couldn't row among the trees on it. So I cried.

“Shut up!” Swatty yelled at me. “Ain't it bad enough without you
bellering?”

So there we were.

When Bony saw us go out into the river he sat on his timber with his
mouth open, and he couldn't even holler--he was so scared--and then he
just paddled for shore and jumped off his timber and ran. He didn't know
where he was running--he was just running away from there. He was scared
stiff. When he come to, he was halfway home, and blubbering and panting,
and then he sat down on a horse block and didn't know what to do. He
thought we were drowned, sure. So he thought the best thing to do would
be to not say anything about it. He was afraid. First he thought he
would go home and act as if he had been at school and just stayed out
playing a while, and not do anything else about it and let folks find
out anyway they could; and then he thought that Mrs. Schwartz would miss
Swatty when it was time to fetch the cow, and that she would come over
to his house to see if Swatty was there, and he didn't know what else.
So he thought he would go over to Swatty's house first and sort of keep
Mrs. Schwartz from doing anything like that. So he went. He forgot he
was in his bare feet, or that he had ever had shoes and stockings.

When he got to Swatty's house Mrs. Schwartz was on the front terrace
in her calico dress and with a birch switch in her hand, looking for
Swatty, because Swatty knew what time the cow ought to be fetched home.
Bony went up to the steps.

“Do you want me to fetch the cow home, Mrs. Schwartz?” he asked.

“What for should you fetch the cow home?” said Mrs. Schwartz, as angry
as could be.

“I thought maybe Swatty was late, and I didn't want to keep you
waiting,” he said.

“For why should you think he was late?” Mrs. Schwartz asked. She always
talked in a funny way, because she was German.

“I thought maybe he was playing down at the river,” said Bony. “Lots of
boys were playing down there to-day.”

“So!” said Mrs. Schwartz. “And he sends you home to get his cow, yes? He
could get his own cows. I wait for him.”

So then Bony didn't know what to say. He stood around. And after a while
he said:

“Maybe he won't come home to get the cows.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Schwartz. “Maybe he's drowned,” said
Bony. “Maybe him and Georgie went down to the river and--and--”

So then _he_ began to cry, and the first thing anybody knew he had me
and Swatty drowned and our bodies floating down to St. Louis or New
Orleans, and Mrs. Schwartz wringing her hands and hollering for Herb. So
Herb come out on the porch, and Bony told him me and Swatty had floated
away on a bridge timber and got drowned, and Herb got Mr. Schwartz out
of the house, and then he come over to my house to tell my father,
and my father and mother and Fan and all the Schwartzes and a lot
of neighbors all went running down to the levee, and took the Bony
Highlander with them to show them where we had got drowned from. So that
was why Bony didn't go home, and why he got licked when he did get home.

By that time it wasn't dark but it was getting dark. Me and Swatty just
hung onto our trees, and that was all we could do; but all our folks and
most everybody in town got down to the levee, because Tim Mulligan at
the waterworks pump-house blew the alarm whistle. The firemen all came,
too, with their hose carts and ladder trucks, but most of the folks just
went around saying it was too bad, but that it was hopeless. Even the
mayor said it was hopeless. You see, nobody knew we were on Tow Head.
They thought we were drowned in the river, like Bony said. So there
wasn't anything to do, because it was too hopeless to do anything. The
only thing to do was to wait until the river fell, in a couple of weeks
or so, and then maybe they'd find what was left of me and Swatty
down-river, where we'd be washed up, if we ever was.

Well, that was what everybody thought. My mother cried, and Mrs.
Schwartz cried, and I guess most of the women cried, and the men looked
mighty sober, and said what a pity it was so hopeless; but what could
they do? Everybody was sober or crying, I guess, except Fan, and I guess
she'd been so mad at Herb she just couldn't be anything but mad. She was
so full of mad that it had to come out, so while everybody was crying
and all she just flew up in the air and went over and gave Herb a good
raking.

“Well!” she says. “And you call yourself a man! Do you mean to stand
around here like a bump on a log and do nothing?” she says. “I'm glad
I found out in time what a helpless ninny you are,” or something
like that. She gave it to him good, I tell you! “This trash,” she
says--meaning the mayor and the firemen and the city council and
everybody--“I don't expect anything else from, but I once thought you
had some gump.” Or something like that. So Herb got red.

“Very well,” he says, like a man ready to jump off the high school roof,
“if you say so, I'll take a skiff and go out upon the river. You can't
call me a 'fraid-cat, Fan. You'll never call me that.” Or something like
that, he said.

“Skiff indeed!” says Fan. “You'd have a nice picnic with a skiff,
wouldn't you? Have some sense, Herbert Schwartz. What good is that
ferryboat doing, tied up here?”

Well, that was what they done. At first Captain Hewitt didn't want to
take the ferryboat out. He said it was hopeless, and that she was an
old rotten hull, and that a log would go through her like a needle,
and she'd sink, and she couldn't make headway up-stream against such a
flood, and a lot more, but with all the folks in town there he couldn't
keep that up long; so he went aboard and fired up, and sent up-town
for Jerry Mason, who was the regular fireman. By that time it was dark
enough for anybody, so Mr. Higgins, the steamboat agent, went and got
the two flambeaux he uses when steamboats unload at night, and everybody
that had a porch lantern with a reflector got that, and they put them
all on the ferryboat. Flambeaux are big iron baskets on iron poles,
and the poles are pointed at the bottom so they can be jabbed into the
ground or a floor or anything. You fill the baskets with tar and wood
and light them. So when that was all ready most of the firemen got
aboard with their hooks, off the hook and ladder trucks, and a lot of
other men got aboard with pike poles and grapple hooks, and Herb went
up in the pilot house with Captain Hewitt, and they set out to find our
bodies.

But me and Swatty wasn't bodies yet, we was still folks. We were
feeling a little bit better, too, because Swatty found out that the tree
he was in was a slippery elm tree, and he peeled off some slippery elm
bark and chewed it, and he tossed some over to me, and I chewed that.
So we wondered how long a fellow could live on slippery elm bark, and if
Swatty would have the tree peeled clean before the river went down. If
he did we'd starve to death; but Swatty said that, as the water went
down, more and more of the tree trunk would be above water and we
could peel it and eat it. So we both felt better, only there was a dead
something had caught in the tree branches and when the wind changed it
didn't smell very good. It smelled worse than that, even. So about then
we began to see the lights come out on shore, and pretty soon we saw
the big, smoky light the flambeaux made. We thought it was a bonfire on
shore up at town.

Well, I guess we'd have been bodies before anybody got to us, anyway,
if we hadn't had some bad luck. Me and Swatty was there in our trees
chewing away at slippery elm when all at once something big and black
come slamming down onto the point of the Tow Head. It looked like a
house, but I guess it was only a cow shed or something like that, that
had got floated off the river bottoms by the flood. It came all of a
sudden, and before we knew what had happened it hit the Tow Head point
and banged into the tree I was on, and the water began to rush over
it, and then all at once the tree I was on began to give. It began to
topple. It went slow at first and then it went quicker, and it fell over
against the tree Swatty was in, and the shed came bumping after it, and
then Swatty's tree keeled over, too, and me and Swatty went down under,
and the shed come grating over us--right over our heads and pushing our
trees down into the water.

All I ever knew was that the next thing I knew I was slammed up against
the side of the shed by the water and pushed against it like a big hand
was pushing me, and I was fighting to get more out of the water, and
then the shed sort of melted and went to pieces and I was holding onto a
board and going down with the current between the trees of the Tow Head.
Sometimes the board hit a tree, and sometimes it didn't, but I thought
I was all over with, anyway, and then right ahead of me I saw the water
rushing and roaring up against something.

I didn't know what it was, but it was a log raft the mill folks had put
in behind the Tow Head so it wouldn't get washed away. It was in the
inside of the horseshoe, and all across the front of it was driftwood
and trash and old boards and everything, and that was what the water was
splashing against, and before I knew it I was slammed up against it--me
and my board. And what I slammed up against was the bridge timber I had
been on before, or one like it. If I had slammed up against where it was
just bark and driftwood I would have clawed at it a while and then gone
under, I guess; but I crawled onto the timber and just lay there and
tried to get the water out of my nose. It looked like half a mile of
driftwood was jammed in between me and the log raft--jammed in and
pushed together the way a flood can jam it and push it.

Well, that timber wasn't any place to be. The water rushed against it
and over it, so I was getting ducked all the time, and I put out my hand
and tried the drift stuff, but it didn't seem like it would hold me up,
but there was one board that was on top of the stuff, and I tried that.
I slid over onto it and it seemed all right, so I edged along it, and
when I got to the end of the board the drift stuff seemed firmer and
I got on my stomach and edged out onto it. It was firm enough, but not
very firm, but on my stomach that way I covered a good deal of it at a
time, and I sort of wiggled along, and the more I wiggled the firmer it
got. It had to, with all the river pushing it, and the driftwood back of
it pushing too.

So it took me about an hour to get to the log raft, and when I got to
the edge logs, that are chained together, I was all scratched and sore
and I just sat down and cried, because I knew Swatty was dead.

And all at once he said, “Hello, Georgie!” and there he was, crawling
along the logs toward me. He said he went under when the tree fell over,
and that he went under all the driftwood and come up through a hole
in the raft. Maybe he did. There were holes enough in the raft. But I
didn't get there that way.

Anyway, there he was, and that made me feel a lot better, and we crawled
around the edge of the raft, because we wanted to get to the lower side.

Swatty said maybe we could push a log under the outside chain of logs
and paddle to shore on it, but I wasn't going to do it. Only I wanted
to see him do it if he did it. So we got to the lower edge of the raft,
where it stuck out below the Tow Head, and just then along came the
ferryboat. She was back-paddling and going as slow as she could, and she
looked like an excursion with all the porch lamps and the flambeaux.
So me and Swatty hollered, but I guess they saw us before we hollered.
Everybody came over on our side and that tipped the ferry over a little,
and a lot of the men threw ropes at us and held out their pike poles,
and me and Swatty grabbed them and they yanked us aboard. So then she
whistled five times and waited and whistled five times again, and so on,
because that was the signal they was to make if they found our bodies,
and they had found them, but they were alive yet. So then Herb made the
captain whistle long and steady without stopping, so maybe they'd know
we were alive yet. But nobody knew it, because nobody thought we would
be.

Well, the old ferry let out so much steam whistling she couldn't go
up-stream. I guess she couldn't anyway. So they ran her into the shore
just where she was and tied her to a big tree, and when we got to the
road there was Mother and Father and Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz in a livery
rig, because they had followed the boat all the way down. And Fan was
in the rig, too. So they all pawed me and Swatty over and saw how bad we
was scratched and all, and said we was suffering from exhaustion, but we
wasn't. We was only played out.

So then Herbert said, “All right!” and started to go away, and Fan said,
“Herbert!”

“What is it?” he said.

“I want you to ride up-town with us,” she said.

“No,” he said, “I'll go back and help Captain Hewitt get the boat in
shape. I guess I've done enough to show you I 've some gump.”

“But I _want_ you to come,” Fan says. “I want to talk to you.”

So he came. Him and Fan sat on the front seat and drove and talked, and
I guess their talk was all right, because they fixed everything up. And
that was where Miss Murphy got left. Just because she wanted to lick
Swatty she lost her beau. That's why I say I guess if teachers always
knew how their lickings were going to turn out they wouldn't lick us
fellows so much. Not when the fellow is the brother of their beau,
anyway.




II. MAMIE'S FATHER

I guess this is a good time to tell about Mamie Little, because now you
know who me and Swatty and Bony are. Mamie Little was my girl, only she
didn't know it. Nobody knew it but me. It was a secret I had. That's
the way a fellow has a girl at first: she's a secret and she don't know
she's his girl. Sometimes she don't never get to know it and the fellow
has to get another girl. But while he “has” her the fellow knows it, and
it makes him feel bashful and uncomfortable and frightened when she is
near by and it is pretty bully.

The reason I picked out Mamie Little for my girl was because she had
the nicest eyes and nicest hair of any girl I ever saw and the way she
swished her dress when she walked. She lived across the street from my
house and mostly played with my sister Lucy. So when I played with
Lucy I could play with Mamie Little, too, and nobody would think it was
because she was my girl. They would think I was just playing with my
sister.

Mamie Little had been my girl a good while like that, with nobody
knowing it but me, and I guessed that pretty soon it would be time for
me to fight Swatty or somebody about her and have her for my real girl,
if she didn't mind; but just then Toady Williams came to town and he
picked out Mamie Little to be his girl and didn't care who knew it. And
Mamie Little didn't care who knew it.

Toady was a new kid in town, because his father had come to Riverbank
to start a store. We never said Toady could be one of our crowd and we
never wanted him to be, but he just joined on because he felt like it.
That's the kind of boy he was. He thought anybody would be tickled to
death to have him be around with them. He wasn't a fat boy, but he was
a plump one, and his breeches always fit him so close they were like
the skin on a horse; when he wrinkled they wrinkled. He wore shoes in
summer. He looked all the time like company come to visit, and I guess
that was one reason we didn't care for him much.

The reason we called him Toady was because of his eyes. They popped out
like a frog's eyes, sort of like brown marbles, and the more he talked
the more they popped out. When he talked he couldn't do anything else
but talk. Swatty could lie on his stomach and chew an apple and play
mumblety-peg and kick a hole in the sod with one toe and talk, all at
one time, but Toady couldn't. He had to sit up straight and pop his eyes
out. When he got started talking you could cut in and say, “Was your
grandmother a monkey?” and he'd say, “Yes,” as if he hadn't heard,
and go right on talking. He wouldn't fight, like me and Swatty, and
sometimes Bony, would. If you thought it was time to have a fight with
him and pitched into him he would bend down and turn his back and let
you mailer him until you got through. But, mostly, he would talk somehow
so you wouldn't want to fight him. That's no way for a boy to talk. It's
the way girls talk. Or preachers.

Toady didn't get Mamie Little for his girl the right way. He never said
she _wasn't_ his girl, he just said she _was_. The right way is that
when the other fellows find out he has a girl they holler at him: “Mamie
Little is Georgie's girl! Mamie Little is Georgie's girl!” And he has
to get mad and fight them about it to prove it's a lie, but after he has
fought enough to prove she isn't his girl, why, then she is his girl
and he can have her for his girl and nobody hollers it at him. So
then she is the one he chooses to kiss when they play “Post-Office” or
“Copenhagen” at parties, and if he's got anything to give her he gives
it to her, like snail shells or a better slate pencil than she has, and
such things. So it's pretty nice, and you feel pretty good about it and
are glad she's your girl.

Well, a short while before Toady Williams came to our town they had an
election to see whether the state was to be prohibition or not, and all
the school children whose fathers were prohibition paraded; so Mamie
Little paraded because her father had the prohibition newspaper in
Riverbank, and I paraded because Mamie did and my father didn't care
whether there was prohibition or not. Swatty didn't parade because his
father was a German tailor, and when he felt like a glass of beer he
wanted to have it, and every fall Swatty's mother made grape wine out of
wild grapes that me and Swatty got from the vines in the bottom across
the Mississippi. When they had the election, prohibition was elected all
over the state, but not in Riverbank; but we had to have it in Riverbank
because the state elected it.

Of course I was prohibition, because I had paraded and because Mamie
Little was, but Swatty was antiprohibition. I didn't say a thing to make
Swatty mad; all I said was: “Huh! You thought you was so smart, didn't
you? You thought prohibition was going to get licked, but it was you
got licked. Next time you won't be so smart. I guess you and your father
feel pretty sick about it.”

“Don't you say anything about my father!” Swatty said.

“I'll say he was licked, because he was licked,” I said.

So Swatty pulled off his coat and I pulled off mine, and we had a good
fight. He licked me because he always did; and when he was sitting on my
ribs and had his knees on my arms so I couldn't do anything, he asked me
if I had had enough, and I said I had. Because I had had.

“I guess I showed you how much the prohibitions can lick the
anti-prohibitions!” he said.

“Let me up,” I said.

“Are you prohibition?” he asked.

I said, “Yes, I am.”

“All right!” he said, and he put his hand on my nose and pushed. He
pushed my nose right into my face. I never had anything hurt like that
did. I yelled, it hurt so much. I told him to stop.

“All right,” he said, “if I stop what are you?”

I knew what he meant. He had already got me from being a Republican
to being a Democrat that way once before. I wasn't thinking of Mamie
Little; I was thinking of my nose. So I said:

“I'm an anti-prohibition. Now let me up. You 've busted my nose and some
of my ribs, and I want to put some plantain on my eye before it swells
up.”

We felt of my ribs and couldn't find that any seemed busted, and my nose
stopped hurting and came back into shape, so me and Swatty were
better friends than we had ever been, because we were now both
anti-prohibitions. We went around and made a lot of prohibitions into
anti-prohibitions because Swatty showed me how to push a nose the way he
pushed mine. But it didn't do much good, I guess. The election was over
and, anyway, there were always more anti-prohibitions in Riverbank than
there were prohibitions.

It was almost right away after that that me and Swatty and Bony met
Mamie Little and Lucy one Saturday afternoon. Lucy is my sister, and
they were going down-town. Me and Swatty and Bony were sitting on the
curb telling whoppers; or I guess Swatty and Bony were, I was just
telling some things that had happened to me sometime that I'd forgot
until I happened to think them up just then.

Swatty was telling how he went up to Derlingport and his uncle
introduced him to the man that had the government job of making up new
swear words, when Mamie and Lucy came along. I said:

“Where are you going?”

“Down-town,” Lucy said.

“Did Mother give you a nickel?” I asked, and I was sort of mad, because
Mother owed me a nickel and hadn't paid me, because she said she didn't
have one, and if she gave one to Lucy, why, all right for Mother!

“No, she didn't give me a nickel, Mr. Smarty!” Lucy said. “If you want
to know so much, we're going down to Mr. Schwartz's shop to see if he'll
let Mamie have a father.”

I guess that would sound pretty funny if you didn't know what she meant.
It was paper dolls.

Girls always play paper dolls, I guess; so Mamie and Lucy and all the
girls played them; they got them out of the colored fashion plates in
the magazines--brides and mothers and sons and daughters.

The trouble was that a good family has to have anyway one father in it,
and the magazines didn't have colored fashion plates of fathers. They
didn't have any fathers at all.

Some of the girls drew fathers on paper and painted them, but they
looked pretty sick. I guess all the girls were jealous of Lucy because
she was kind of Swatty's girl, and Swatty sort of borrowed an old
colored tailor fashion plate out of his father's store and gave it to
Lucy. So Lucy had the only real fathers that any of the girls had. She
gave Mamie a couple of fathers out of the fashion plate, but they were
the ones that had been standing partly behind other fathers and had
mostly only one leg, or pieces cut out of their sides or something. They
didn't make Mamie real happy, I guess, so she thought she'd try to
get some good fathers. They were going down to ask Mr. Schwartz for a
fashion plate.

Swatty was frightened right away, because he hadn't asked his father if
he could have the old fashion plate but had just sort of borrowed it. So
he said:

“What are you going to ask my father?”

“I'm going to tell him he gave you one for me,” Lucy said, “and I'm
going to ask him if he'll give me one for Mamie.”

So then Swatty was scared.

“No, don't do it!” he said.

“I will, too, do it!” Lucy answered back. “I guess I know your father,
and I guess my father buys clothes of him, and I guess we take milk of
your mother, and I guess I will, too, ask him if I want to!”

Well, Swatty couldn't answer back because he had Lucy for his secret
girl like I had Mamie Little.

So I got up and stood in front of Lucy and pushed her a little, because
she wasn't my girl but only my sister, and I said:

“You will not do it. You go home!”

“You stop pushing me! I won't go home.”

“Yes, you will, when I say so!” I said.

I was going to tell her that as soon as there were any more old fashion
plates at Swatty's father's, Swatty would swi--would get one for Mamie,
but Lucy got mad because I just took hold of her arm too hard between my
thumb and finger. She said I pinched her, but I did not; I just sort of
took hold of her that way. She ran back a way and stuck out her tongue
at me.

“Now, just for that, Mr. Smarty,” she yelled, “I'm going to tell Mamie
on you!”

“You just dare!” I started for her, but she skipped off.

“Mamie,” she shouted, “you'll be mad when I tell you! Georgie Porgie
is an anti-prohibition!” Mamie just stood and looked at me, because I'd
said I'd always be a prohibition.

“Are you?” she asked.

If Swatty hadn't been right there I would have changed back to a
prohibition again and it would have been all right, but he was there and
I wasn't going to have him think I would change just on account of a
girl. So I said:

“Uh, huh!”

“All right for you, Mr. Georgie! You needn't ever speak to me again as
long as you live!” she said.

I felt pretty cheap. I tried to say something, and I couldn't think of
anything to say, so I made a face at her and she made one at me, and
then we were mad at each other and she went away. She went toward
down-town, and Lucy skipped across the street and ran and went with her.
And that was one reason Mamie was glad that Toady Williams had her for
his girl when he came to town. She guessed I did not like it. And I
didn't.

Mr. Schwartz said Mamie could have the fashion plate as soon as he was
through with it, which would be at the end of the season when he got a
new one. Lucy let me know that, all right! I guess it was on account
of Lucy he promised to let Mamie have the fashion plate, because he was
awful fond of Lucy.

Anyway, Mamie was mighty pleased to know she was going to have a good
father.

When she played paper dolls with Lucy I used to sort of go over where
they were and maybe stand there to see if Mamie was mad at me still.
About all she said was how glad she'd be when she had a good father. I
guess I heard her say it a hundred times, but she never let on she knew
I was there at all. Sometimes I'd sort of drop an apple or something
so it would fall where she could reach it, but she never paid any
attention. The most she would do would be to pick up a one-legged father
and say:

“'Where are you going, Mr. Reginald de Vere?' 'I'm going down-town to
vote a while if you do not need me to take care of the baby.' 'Not at
all, but I do hope you will show folks you are a prohibition.
If I ever heard you were an anti-prohibition I would cut you up into
mincemeat.'”

So then I most generally went away.

I got kind of sick of girls. I made up my mind they were no good anyway,
and that I'd never have another one if I lived to be a million years
old, and when I wrote notes to Mamie in school it wasn't any use
because she always tore them up without reading them. It made me feel
awful to have her so mean. Because she wasn't mean to Toady.

Well, it came to examination time and we began to be examined. Swatty
and Bony and I didn't have to be examined in arithmetic until Thursday
afternoon and neither did Lucy or Mamie, so Swatty and Bony and I
thought we might as well go fishing that morning. We got our poles and
some bait and started, and we went down Third Street and when we came to
the railway track we cut across through Burman's lumber yard toward the
river because that was the quickest way.

Burman's sawmill was the biggest one in Riverbank then. I guess you know
how big those sawmills were. Great big red buildings with gravel roofs
where they sawed the logs that came down the river in rafts, and where
they made shingles, and the row of sheds where they dried the lumber
with steam, and another big one where the planers were. There were
hundreds and hundreds of piles of lumber, each one as tall as a house,
and all the ground was made of sawdust and rattlings, because it was
filled ground.

There were railway sidings here, and there were flat cars and box cars
being loaded.

Burman's sawmill and lumber yards were just under the bluff. Once there
had been a brickyard there, and the bluff was cut down steep where
they had dug clay. Across the street there was still a brickyard, with
hundreds and hundreds of cords of wood, ready to be used to burn brick,
and with the kilns loosely roofed over. Back toward the town was a sash
and door factory, a pretty big building, and then some houses, and
then the stores began. About the fifth store on one side was Swatty's
father's tailor shop. It was a building all by itself, and it was one
story high and frame, and it had a false front above the first story,
with Swatty's father's name on it, and there was one window on the
street.

Well, Swatty and Bony and me went through the lumber yard to the place
where Burman's oil shed was.

The oil shed was right up against the bluff, almost at the railway,
and it was up on stakes, so that it was safer. It was about as big as a
kitchen, and was painted red and the floor and part of the and part of
the stakes were soaked with oil, and the grass underneath was withered
and oily because the oil had dripped and killed it.

Just as we got there we saw Slim Finnegan, who was in our class at
school but ever so much older than we were, and he was under the oil
shed smoking a corncob pipe. His coat was on the grass beside him, and
just as we got there he jumped up and began slamming at the grass with
his coat, for the grass was afire. Before we could guess what happened,
the flames seemed to run up the stakes like live animals, and all at
once the whole bottom of the floor of the oil shed was afire.

Slim Finnegan gave one look at it, and tucked his coat under his arm and
ran. There were piles and piles of lumber right there and he jumped in
among them, and I guess he hid. We didn't see him any more.

Swatty ran for the sawmill. He shouted to the first man he saw before he
was halfway to the sawmill, and the man hollered “Fire!” and ran for a
hose wagon they had under a shed and began jerking it out, and Swatty
ran on, shouting “Fire!”

It wasn't a second before all the men began piling out of the sawmill
and came running from the lumber yards, and the mill whistle began
blowing as hard as it could. It almost made you deaf when you were that
close. Right away the whole place seemed to fill up with men, and they
all had axes or hooks or whatever they ought to have had.

The mill whistle kept blowing without stopping, and in a minute the
whistle on the sash and door factory joined in, and then the regular
fire whistle on the waterworks started up. The oil house was just one
big red flame that went up in the air and turned into the blackest kind
of smoke. We saw the men with the mill's hose trying to throw water on
the oil house, and every one was shouting at the tops of their voices.
We saw men on top of the nearest lumber piles, but almost as soon as we
saw them we saw them dodge away and climb down as quick as they could,
and the next minute those lumber piles were afire on one side. They were
red flames, and they climbed right up the sides of the piles and waved
at the top.

Me and Swatty and Bony kept backing down the railway track as the fire
got too hot for us. There were hundreds of people, but there were more
than that in other parts of the neighborhood. Almost everybody in town
came to the fire, because by this time dozens of lumber piles were
afire, and the sawmill had set fire to the dry-sheds and the planer. You
couldn't see the bluff at all, because there was just one big wall of
flame in front of it. Whole boards went sailing right up into the air,
burning as they went, and the blue smoke that blew over the town was
full of pine cinders and burning pieces of wood. There never was such a
fire in Riverbank. The ground seemed to burn, too, and it did, because it
was sawdust and rattlings.

The brickyard burned--everything that could burn--and the bluff of yellow
clay, there and beside the sawmill, was burned red, like brick--and the
flat cars and the box cars all burned. It was an awful fire! Wet lumber
in the newest piles burned as if it was dry. The railway bridge and two
other bridges burned. At noon it was like evening, because the smoke hid
the sun.

Me and Swatty and Bony kept backing away as the fire came toward us.
Sometimes we would turn, and run. We backed away as far as ten city
blocks would be, I guess, before we were where we did not have to back
away any more. We forgot all about school, and about fishing, and about
everything. It was the kind of fire where nobody thinks of going home
until it is all over.

It was about two o'clock when the people in front and the firemen in
front of them gave a sort of roar, as if they were a lot of animals, and
everybody crowded back. The firemen on top of the sash and door factory
ran from one edge of the roof to the other, looking down. Two of them
jumped off. They were killed, but the others got down the ladders,
and the next minute the factory and its oil house were all afire at
once--just sort of spouted fire from all the windows as if the fire had
been all fixed to break out that way.

Before you could turn around and then look back, the sash and door
factory was one big, hot flame, and then the houses began to go. First
one and then another caught fire.

We got crowded back until we were in the street right opposite to
Swatty's father's tailor shop, and Swatty's father was on the front step
of it shaking his hands in the air and shouting like a crazy man, but
nobody paid any attention to him. He was a little man and he had gray
hair, but he was mostly bald. He didn't have a hat on and he looked
pretty crazy standing there and shouting.

Well, we didn't know until afterward what he was shouting about, but I
know now, so I might as well tell it. There was a cellar under his shop
and it was full of barrels of whiskey. When prohibition was elected the
saloons thought they would have to stop for a while and that then they
could go ahead again, so they hunted for some place to hide the whiskey
they owned, where it would be safe for a while, and Mr. Schwartz's
cellar was one of the places they hid it in. What Swatty's father was
trying to shout was that if his shop caught fire all the whiskey in the
cellar might explode and the people standing around might be killed and
the whole town burn up. I don't wonder he was sort of crazy about it. I
guess Swatty felt sort of ashamed that his father was acting so crazy.

So then the house next to Swatty's father's shop caught fire, and the
next minute the side of Swatty's father's shop began to smoke.

The policemen were sort of crowding us back all the time, but we would
n't go back much, and all at once Mamie Little started out of the crowd
and began to run toward Swatty's father's shop. But when she was halfway
there the fire marshal just caught her by the arm and gave her a sort of
twist and slung her back, and then the policeman nearest us caught her
and jammed her back against me and Swatty. She was crying all the time;
she kept moaning, “My father! My father!”

So just then Swatty's father ran out and grabbed the fire marshal by the
arm and talked to him in German, because they were both German, and the
fire marshal ran toward his firemen and shouted through his trumpet, and
all the firemen up the street came running back, dragging all their hose
and all shouting.

It was all wild and sort of crazy, and suddenly the fire marshal ran
back to where the firemen were tugging at the heavy hose and shouting,
and four firemen who were holding on to a nozzle pointed the stream into
the air. It was worse than any rain you ever saw. It was just “whoosh!”
 and we were all soaked. So all the crowd hollered and screamed, and we
all turned and ran, and all I knew was that I had hold of Mamie Little's
hand and was helping her run. I was awful sorry for her because she was
crying and her father was going to burn.

So Swatty said: “What's she crying for? Why don't she shut up?”

He meant Mamie Little. So I said:

“She can cry if she wants to! I'd like to see you try to stop her! She's
crying because your father gave her his fashion plate and it's going to
be burned up, and if you say much I'll lick you!”

So Swatty said: “If that's all she's crying for, come on. We'll get her
old fashion plate for her.” So I said to Mamie Little: “Stop being a
baby and shut up, and we'll get your old fashion plate for you.”

Swatty just cut in through the crowd, and me and Bony followed after
him. He went up the side street, and we climbed over the fence into
the yard of the corner house and cut across that yard and over another
fence. That way we got to the back of Swatty's father's shop without any
one stopping us. Bony kind of kept behind us.

It was mighty hot, because the house next door was all afire, but the
firemen were keeping all their hose on the side of Swatty's father's
shop, trying to keep it from burning. We crouched down and kept our
backs to the fire so the heat wouldn't shrivel us, and we got to
the back door and it wasn't locked. We went in. It was hot--like an
oven--inside, and the noise of all the water on the side of the house
was like thunder, only louder. The inside of the shop was like under
a waterfall. You wouldn't think anything so wet could burn, but it did.
Before we were halfway to the front window the fire began to eat into
the shop along the floor. The water on that side just turned to steam
and dried as fast as it ran down.

Bony began to cry, but we hadn't any time to stop. Swatty took him _by_
the hand and jerked him along, and we got to the window and I grabbed
the fashion plate. Then we couldn't go back because the shop was mostly
afire and we would have been burned up. So then Bony got real scared and
ran to the front door and threw it open, and a stream from a hose
caught him and sent him head over heels back into the shop where it was
burning; he was knocked unconscious because his head hit a table leg.

So I didn't know what to do. I guess I began to cry. I crouched down
in the window because I couldn't get out at the door on account of the
stream of water that was coming in there a hundred miles a minute, and
I couldn't go back because the back of the shop was all afire now. But
Swatty crawled on his hands and knees under the table where Bony was,
where the fire was beginning to burn harder, and he grabbed Bony and
yanked him along the floor back to the window. I guess I helped him jerk
Bony onto the window shelf, but just then another stream of water busted
the window in. The glass fell all around us and one piece cut Swatty on
the hand, but he only said, “Jump! Jump!”

Maybe we would have jumped, but we didn't. The firemen had got to the
back of the building and had turned the hose in at the back window, and
just when Swatty said, “Jump!” the stream of water hit us like a board.
It took us as if we were pieces of paper and slammed us out of the
broken window and halfway across the street, and threw us head over
heels in the mud, and the fashion plate, with Mamie Little's father,
came flying with us.

[Illustration: 66]

So I crawled over to where the fashion plate was and took hold of it and
began to drag it to where Mamie Little was. A policeman came and took me
by the shoulder and lifted me up, but I couldn't stand, and that was the
first I knew my ankle was sprained. But Swatty got up himself and sassed
the policeman that came to get him. He told him he had a right to go
into his father's own shop if he wanted to, and that if the policeman
said much more he would go back again.

I guess the whiskey exploded all right. Three more houses burned before
they stopped the fire, but we didn't see that because Bony ran all the
way home, and somebody carried me to a wagon, and drove home with me,
and Swatty's father got him and took him up the main street and waled
him on the hotel corner with a half-burned shingle that had blown from
the lumber fire.

The next day my ankle hurt pretty bad and I stayed in bed with linament
on it and after school Lucy came up to see me. “Come on up in my room
and play,” I told her.

“No,” she said, “I don't want to. I want to go down and play with Mamie
Little; we're playing paper dolls. We're having lots of fun.”

“Ho!” I said. “Paper dolls! They're no fun.”

“They are, too,” Lucy said. “And we've got to cut out Mamie's fathers.
She's got a whole fashion plate full.”

“Where'd she get them?” I asked, because I guessed right away what
fashion plate it was.

“Why, Toady Williams gave them to her,” Lucy said. “He got them out of
the fire or somewhere and gave them to her. He's helping us cut them
out.”

Gee! I felt sore!




III. THE “DIVORCE”

After I got out of bed and went back to school I fought Toady Williams
a couple of times, but it wasn't much good because he wouldn't fight
back. All the good it did was to make Mamie Little tell Lucy I was a
mean, bad boy and that she would never speak to me again as long as she
lived. Once I almost told her that it was me that got the father fashion
plate out of the fire and that Toady Williams didn't do anything but
pick it up out of the mud after I had got it for her, but I didn't tell
her because then she would have thought I was sweet on her. That _would_
have made me feel cheap.

It made me feel pretty mean, just the same, to see the way Toady
Williams was playing with her all the time, when I had picked her out to
be my secret girl. He gave her pencils and apples and everything and
I guess she liked it. I wished I was grown up, so I could ride up on a
bucking bronco and sling a lasso over Toady's head and jerk him into
the dust. Then Mamie Little would say, “Hello, Georgie! Can I get up
and ride behind you over the wild plains, because I don't want to have
anything more to do with a 'fraidy-cat like Toady.”

But it didn't seem as if anything like that was going to happen. Not for
years, anyway.

One day Swatty came over to my yard and he said, “Say!” so I said, “Say
what?” and he said, “Say, you know Herb's tricycle?” and I said I did.
Herb was Swatty's brother that wanted to marry my sister Fan and he
had got the tricycle a couple of years ago, when all the bicycles were
high-wheel bicycles. He had got it for him and Fan to ride on, and
it was a two-seat one--side-by-side seats--and after a few times Fan
wouldn't ride on it because it made her as conspicuous as a pig on a
flagpole. So Herb rode on it alone some, and with some other fellow
some, but mostly he kept it chained up in Swatty's barn and said he
would scalp Swatty and skin him alive if Swatty ever touched it.

So this day Swatty came over and he said, “What do you think!” because
Herb said when he was married to Fan, Swatty could have the tricycle.
You bet Swatty was tickled. So I asked him who would ride on it with
him.

“Well--you will,” he said. “And Bony. That's when I ain't taking
somebody else.”

He didn't say who else, but I knew, because I knew Swatty was having my
sister Lucy for his secret girl.

“And part of the time,” I said, “I can have it alone, can't I, Swatty?”

“It's my tricycle--” he started to say.

“It ain't yet,” I told him, “and I guess if I go to work good and plenty
it never will be, because if I want to I can think up how to make Fan
mad at Herb again and then you wouldn't get it. And, anyway, if Lucy went
to ride on it she might fall off and get hurt, so I guess I'd tell my
mother not to let Lucy ride on it. Unless I could take it sometimes and
find out that it was safe.”

Because I guessed that if Mamie Little had a chance to ride on that
tricycle with me she'd be pretty sick of that fat, old Toady Williams
mighty quick. So me and Swatty fixed it up that way, that I was to have
the tricycle part of the time and he was to have it part of the time.
The only thing was to get Herb and Fan married off as soon as we could,
and to look out that nothing turned up to scare them away from each
other again like that Miss Murphy fuss did. It wasn't going to take
much to scare Herb away. I knew that.

Well, I guess grown folks don't care whether they have a divorce or not,
because they are always having them and so maybe they get used to having
them and don't think much about it and are not ashamed to have them,
but I guess a kid is always kind of ashamed when his folks get them. We
never had one in our family but we had babies and I guess a kid feels
about the same way when there is a divorce in his family as he does
when there is a baby. It makes him feel pretty sick and ashamed and
miserable. It ain't his fault but he feels like it was. He goes out the
back gate and sneaks to school through the alley and when a kid sees him
the kid says: “Ho! you had a baby at your house,” and the kid that had
the baby come to his house wishes he could sneak into a crack in the
sidewalk or die or something.

I guess that's the way it is when you have a divorce at your house. It
ain't your fault but you feel like it was and you don't have any of the
fun of fighting and getting the divorce, like your folks do; you just
have the feel-miserable part.

So one day about when the river began to fall again, only it was still
mighty high, me and Swatty and Bony went up to Bony's room in Bony's
house. It was muddy weather, in June, and I guess we had been wading
in the mud or something so we knew Bony's mother wouldn't let us go
upstairs to his room unless we washed our feet first, unless we sneaked
it. So we sneaked it.

The reason we went up was so Bony could prove it that the Victor bicycle
his father might maybe buy for him weighed only forty-five pounds. He
had a catalogue to prove it with but it was up in his room, so we went
up to get it. It proved it, all right. Swatty said that was pretty light
for a bicycle to weigh, and I said it, too. So then we said a lot of
more things about a lot of other things but mostly we talked about the
bicycle, because Bony was going to let me and Swatty learn to ride on it
if he got it. Swatty bet he could get right on it and ride right off
as slick as a whistle because he had an uncle in Derlingport that had
a dozen bicycles. So then Bony said he'd like to know why, if Swatty's
uncle had that many, he didn't send Swatty one, and Swatty said maybe he
would. We just kind of talked and let the mud dry on our feet and crack
off onto the floor.

Well, in the floor in one place there was a hole and Bony showed us
how he could look through it down into the dining-room and see what
his mother was putting on the table for dinner whenever she was putting
anything on. The hole was about as big around as a stovepipe and it had
a tin business in it to keep the floor from catching afire because that
was where the stovepipe from the dining-room stove came up through the
floor to go into a drum to help heat Bony's room when it was winter. So
we all looked down into Bony's stovepipe hole to see if it was like he
said. And it was.

Just then Bony's father came into the diningroom. He had his hat on
but it wasn't time for dinner or anything and he didn't come into the
dining-room as if he was coming for dinner. He came in fast and threw
his hat on the floor and pounded on the table twice with his fist. The
dishes jumped and a milk pitcher fell over on its side and spilled the
milk.

“Mary! Mary!” he shouted.

So Bony's mother came in from the kitchen. “Why, Henry!” she said;
“what's the matter?”

“Matter? Matter?” he shouted. “I'll tell you what's the matter! I'll
show you what's the matter! Look at this! Look at this, will you!”

Me and Swatty looked but Bony kind of drew back from the hole and his
mother didn't look. I guess she didn't have to. I guess she knew what it
was without looking. It was a bill, all right. Me and Swatty could see
that but we didn't know what it was for--whether it was for a hat or a
dress or what. So Bony's father threw the bill on the table and stood
with one fist on the edge of the table and the other fist opening and
shutting. Bony's mother had been paring potatoes or something, I guess.
She wiped her hands on her apron but she didn't pick up the bill.

“Well?” she said.

“Of all the useless, idiotic, ill-timed, outrageous, unheard-of
extravagance ever incurred by any brainless, gad-about, senseless, vain
peacock of a woman--” Bony's father said.

“Henry! Stop right there!” Bony's mother said. “This time I will
not listen to your abuse. Year after year I have put up with this
browbeating. I go in rags, and if I so much as buy--”

“Rags!” Bony's father shouted. “Rags! You in rags? You dare taunt
me with that, when you crowd enough on your back to support a dozen
families? Rags? When from year's end to year's end I do nothing but
struggle to pay your eternal bills!” Well, maybe I haven't got what
Bony's father and mother said just the way they said it, but it was like
that. So they had a good start and they went right on and pretty
soon Bony's father was walking up and down the room, talking loud
and pounding the table every time he passed it, and Bony's mother was
sitting with a corner of her apron in each hand and the hands pressed to
her cheeks. Her eyes were big and scary. So then Bony's father stopped
in front of her and said a lot and she didn't talk back. So that made
him mad and he took the tablecloth and jerked it and all the dishes fell
on the floor and broke.

Bony just went to the bed and lay on his face and squeezed his hands
into his ears. I guess he felt pretty mean. He was crying, but we didn't
know that then. We found it out afterward.

So then, when all the dishes broke, Bony's mother sort of yelled and
jumped up. Swatty said:

“Garsh! What's she going to do?”

But she didn't do anything like we thought she was going to. She bent
down and picked up a dish that wasn't all smashed to pieces and put
it on the table as easy as could be and then she untied her apron and
folded it up and laid it over the back of a chair as neat as a pin. She
looked at herself in the mirror in the sideboard and then walked around
Bony's father and went toward the door into the hall.

“Where are you going?” Bony's father asked.

“Going?” she said, or something like that. “I'm going to see if I can't
put a stop to this sort of thing. I have had enough years of it. I'm
going to see Mr. Rascop.”

Well, we knew who he was; he was a lawyer.

“Very well,” said Bony's father, “go! I assure you you cannot get a
divorce too quickly to suit me!”

I guess that when the loud noise stopped Bony thought the fight was over
and listened again. Anyway he was listening now and he heard what they
said.

“I thought that,” said Bony's mother. “This is not the first time, by
many, that I have thought it. You will be glad to be rid of me and I
of you. My mother will be glad enough to have me with her. I shall, of
course, take the boy.”

“As you like!” said Bony's father.

“The boy” was Bony, so he began to blubber worse than ever. He was
pretty much ashamed and when his folks began to talk quiet-like, without
shouting, me and Swatty began to be ashamed, too. We felt the way you
feel when there's just been a baby at your house--as if we hadn't ought
to be there. So Swatty picked up his hat.

“Come on!” he said. “Let's go. It ain't no fun up here in Bony's room.”

“Wait!” Bony whispered, like he was scared to be left there alone, so we
waited. He came along with us.

We tiptoed downstairs and outdoors and I tell you it was good to get
outside where there wasn't any divorce but just good spring mud and
things. So Swatty whistled at a kid down the street but it was a kid
Swatty had said he would lick if he caught him, so the kid ran.

Well, we sat down on the grass under the tree and me and Swatty talked
pretty loud and fighty because Bony wasn't saying anything at all and
was looking so earnest it made us feel sort of ashamed. He was thinking
of the divorce. So me and Swatty talked fighty to each other to try and
make Bony forget.

But Bony didn't laugh. He didn't even smile. So Swatty took some mud and
stuck it on his nose and pretended it was medicine or something; to make
Bony laugh. But Bony didn't laugh. I guess he felt pretty bad. Maybe a
kid always feels that way when his folks are going to get divorced. So
then Swatty said:

“Hey, George! this is the way I'll ride on Bony's bicycle when he gets
it!”

So he pretended he was on a bicycle and he pretended to fall off all
sorts of ways and to run into a tree and everything. Then I thought of
something. I said:

“Say! if they get a divorce and Bony goes away we can't learn bicycle
riding on his bicycle!”

We hadn't thought of that before and right away we forgot about whether
Bony was feeling sick or not. We hadn't stopped to think that a divorce
Bony's folks were getting would make a big difference like that to me
and Swatty. It kind of brought us right into the divorce ourselves.
Swatty looked frightened.

“Garsh! that's so!” he said. “We can't learn to ride on a bicycle that's
in another town.”

“And, say!” I said, frightened, “if Herb hears about it, and how married
folks fight and get divorces over hat-bills and things he's going to be
scared to marry Fan, because hat-bills are the things father scolds Fan
most about. He'll ask Fan if she has hat-bills--”

“Garsh!” said Swatty again, “we've got to stop the divorce,” only he
said “diworce,” because that was how he talked.

I thought so, too. If Bony's folks got one and Herb heard about it and
got scared of marrying Fan, then Swatty wouldn't have the tricycle and I
couldn't take Mamie Little riding on it and make fat, old Toady Williams
look sick. So I thought like Swatty did, but I said:

“Well, how are you going to stop it?”

“If Bony was to get the diphtheria, and get it bad, that would stop it,”
 he said.

I saw that was so. If Bony got the diphtheria, and got it bad, they
wouldn't let him travel on the train, and so his mother couldn't go to
his grandmother's and that would stop it. So I said:

“Yes, and while he was sick we could use his bicycle all the time. How's
he going to get diphtheria?”

“Why, as easy as pie,” Swatty said. “They've got it down at Markses.
All he's got to do is to go down there and sneak in and stand around in
Billy Markses bedroom until he gets it. Diphtheria is one of the easiest
things you can get. Anybody can get it!”

It looked like a mighty good plan to me. Me and Swatty went on talking
about it and the more we talked the better it was. We talked about how
long it would be after Bony got exposed to it before he would really
have it and Swatty said that wouldn't matter. All Bony would have to do
would be to go right down to Markses and get exposed and then hurry home
and tell his mother. The divorce would stop right away and wouldn't have
to wait until he was sick in bed before it stopped. So then I said that,
anyway, Bony's father would send for the bicycle right away, because
fathers always hurry up to get things when their boys are good and sick.
It was all bully and fine and me and Swatty felt pretty good about it,
but Bony spoke up.

“I ain't going to get diphtheria!” he said.

Well, that's the way some fellows are! You go and work your brains all
to pieces thinking up things to help them out of their troubles and then
they say something like that. We saw it wasn't any use to coax him.
If we wanted to stop the divorce we would have to do it another way. I
said:

“I know the preacher that Bony's mother goes to the church of.”

“Well, what's that got to do with it?” Swatty asked.

“Well, couldn't we tell him about it and get him to stop the divorce?
When Jim Carter wouldn't marry our cook my father told the Catholic
priest and he made Jim Carter marry her as easy as pie.”

“That's no good,” Swatty said. “That was marrying. That's what priests
and preachers are for--marrying folks together--they ain't for diworcing
them apart again. If it was somebody I wanted to have married together
of course I'd have thought of a preacher right away. You don't think I'm
so dumb as not to have thought of that, do you? But this ain't marrying
them together, it's keeping them married together; it's keeping them
from diworcing apart.” Then, all at once he said, “Garsh!”

“What are you garshing about?” I asked him.

“Garsh!” he said again. “I guess I am dumb! I guess I ought to let a
mule kick me! I ought to have thought of it right off!”

“Thought of what, Swatty?”

“Why, the judge! You, talking about preachers and priests and all them
and not thinking of the judge! It's a judge that always diworces people
apart, ain't it? Well, what we've got to do is see the judge and tell
him not to diworce Bony's folks apart!”

“Come on! We'll go see the judge and tell him not to diworce Bony's
folks apart.”

Well, I guess we didn't think when we started how we would do it. We
just started.

When we got down to the court-house, where the judge stays, I didn't
feel so much like doing it and Bony didn't feel like doing it at all. It
was different when we got down there than it was when we were sitting
on the grass under my apple tree. All along the front edge of the front
porch of the court-house were big pillars and each pillar was as big
around as twenty boys standing in a lump would be. So me and Bony we
sort of peeked into the hall and went out on the porch again, but Swatty
went right inside. So we sort of frowned at Swatty and shouted in a
whisper: “Aw! come on, Swatty! Let's go home.”

But Swatty spoke right out, as if he wasn't afraid of the court-house at
all.

“Aw, come on!” he said. “What are you afraid of?”

I wouldn't have talked out loud like that for anything. His voice came
back in echoes: “Aw-waw-come-um-um-on-non-non!” Like that. Every word he
said said itself over and over that way.

But Swatty, when we didn't come, went down the hall and when he found an
open door he went right in. He asked for the judge. We looked into the
hall and we saw Swatty come out of the door he had gone in at and we saw
him go up the wide stairs and push open the green door at the head
of the stairs and go in. After a while he came out again and came
downstairs and out on the porch.

“Did you see him?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I'd ought to have remembered that this was Saturday.
Judges don't have court on Saturday; they go fishing.”

So then Bony began to cry. He leaned against one of the big pillars and
began to snigger like a little kid that's lost, and then he turned his
face to the pillar and I guess he bawled to himself. I guess he had sort
of thought Swatty would have everything fixed so there wouldn't be any
divorce when he came from the judge's room and it disappointed him. So
Swatty said: “Aw! shut up your bellerin'! We ain't going to let your
folks get diworced, are we? You make me sick, acting like we was. I
guess me and George knows what we are going to do, don't we, George?” So
I says, “Yes; what is it?”

Well, Swatty knew just what we were going to do; and so did I, after he
told me. We were going to go to the judge where he was fishing and tell
him not to divorce Bony's folks. And that was all right because Bony's
mother was afraid of the water and wouldn't ride in a rowboat and so
even if she wanted to get divorced quick she couldn't be until the judge
came back from fishing. So then I said:

“Aw! there ain't no fishing when the water is so high in the river!”

“Aw! who told you so much?” Swatty said. “You think you know all the
kinds of fishing there is, don't you? Well, I guess you don't! I guess
me and the judge knows more kinds of fishing than you do.”

So we walked down to the river and Swatty told us. It was buffalo
fishing you do with a pitchfork. I guess you know what kind of a fish a
buffalo is. At first nobody ate buffalo fish but niggers, and they ate
dogfish, too, but pretty soon the fishmarket men got so they shipped
buffalo fish to Chicago and everywhere just like they shipped catfish.
But nobody in our town ate them but niggers, because they tasted of mud.
Maybe the Chicago people liked to taste mud.

Well, anyway, the buffalo fish eat grass or roots or something and in
the spring, when the river is high and up over the bottoms, the buffalo
fish swim up to wherever the edge of the river has gone in the grass and
weeds and sometimes they swim in so close that their backs stick out
of water and they sort of swim on their bellies in the mud--dozens and
hundreds of them, big fat fellows. So then the farmer can't plough yet,
because it is too muddy in the fields, and they get their farm wagons
and some pitchforks and drive down to the river. Then they separate
apart and wade out and come together again when' they are out about
waist deep and they wade in toward shore and the buffalo fish are
between them and the shore. Then the farmers go with a rush and the
buffalo fish get scared. Some of them get so scared they try to swim
right up on shore on their bellies, and some try to swim out into deep
water, but whatever they try to do the farmers just pitchfork them up
onto shore. Wagon loads of them! So, before the Chicago folks got to
like buffalo fish, the farmers chopped the buffalo fish into bits and
ploughed them into the ground to make things grow better, but now they
mostly hauled them to town and sold them to the fishmarket men for one
and one half cents a pound. So that was where the judge was. He was
over to a farmer's named Shebberd, in Illinois, because he had never
pitchforked buffalo fish before and he wanted to do it once and see what
it was like.

Me and Swatty and Bony knew where Shebberd's was, because when you were
over in Illinois you could get a drink of water there.

I guess it was almost a mile across the river and then it was almost
five miles back to Shebberd's bottom land cornfield. We got a skiff at
the boathouse and me and Swatty and Bony rowed across the river. The
water was mighty high and the current was everywhere and not just in one
place, and it was strong. Bony sat in the stem and me and Swatty rowed
and we had to row almost straight up-stream. It was hard work. My wrists
swelled up and got hot and tight but we kept thinking about the divorce
we didn't want Bony's folks to get and we kept on rowing. Even with the
boat pointed almost straight up-stream we were about half a mile below
where we started, when we reached the Illinois side and rowed in among
the trees. It was easier there; not so much current.

It was fine rowing through the trees, seeing everything, and nothing
looking like it usually does. We came to the First Slough and it was
just water--like a road of water between the trees--and we kept on
rowing and came to the Second Slough and the Third Slough and they were
like that, too, and then we came out of the trees and we were in a whale
of a lot of water. Bony said, “Oh!” and Swatty looked over his shoulder
and said, “Garsh!” and stopped rowing. It looked like miles and miles of
water--water we had never seen before--and all at once you felt little
and lost and sort of frightened.

“Garsh!” Swatty said. “I was never here before.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

Swatty looked all around.

“I don't know,” he said. “I never heard of a place like this.”

“Swatty!” I said.

“What?”

“Let's go home!”

I guess I sort of whined it, and so Bony began to cry. Swatty stood up
and let his oars rest and looked all around. He looked anxious and when
Swatty looked anxious it was time to be frightened. Anyway, I thought
so.

When Swatty had looked all around and didn't know any more than he did
before, he sat down and looked over the edge of the boat at the water.
So I did it.

“What do you see, Swatty?” I asked, because I was afraid he saw
something to be frightened of. But what he saw was little flecks of
leaves and things floating by in the water the way dust floats in the
sunlight, and the reason he looked was so he could see which way the
current was running, because no matter where we were we wanted to row
up-stream. We had gone into the woods below the bottom road and when the
water was as high as it was now the bottom road either made a dam across
the bottom or the water came over it like a waterfall or rushed through
in a rapids nobody could row up. So Swatty knew we couldn't have passed
the bottom road but must be below it somewhere and the place we wanted
to be at was just where the bottom road hit the hill, so what we had to
do--wherever we were then--was to row up-stream. So we rowed. We rowed I
don't know how far and all at once Bony said:

“Look out! you're rowing into something!”

Me and Swatty backed water as quick as we could and looked over our
shoulders. What we had nearly rowed into was a pile of sticks and a heap
of dried grass. It was a good deal as if somebody had chucked a couple
of forks full of hay on a lot of driftwood and set it adrift.

“There's something alive in it!” Bony sort of shivered.

Swatty looked and I looked.

“Mush-rat's house!” Swatty said right away, and it was. It was the kind
the mush-rats make so that when a flood comes it will float and not
sink, and there it was right out in the middle of the lake we were lost
in.

Then all at once Swatty said: “Say!”

Gee, but he scared me!

“What, Swatty?” I asked.

“Say!” he said; “we're floating away from that mush-rat house and it
ain't floating with us. I never heard of a mush-rat house out in the
middle of a lake, with a current floating by, that didn't float with the
current!”

“Are you scared, Swatty?” I asked, for if he was scared I didn't know
what I would be.

“No, I ain't scared,” he said, “but it ain't right. It ain't possible,
that's all! I bet this is a haunted lake. I bet there is a haunted house
around here, or an ol' witch, or something.”

“Come on, let's get out of it, then. Let's row!”

I said.

“You bet I'll row!” Swatty said, and we did. We steered off to one
side of the mush-rat's house and rowed hard. We had a good double-ender
skiff, rounded bottom and not flat bottom, and we made her hump! All of
a sudden Swatty's left oar came out of the oarlock and he nearly fell
backwards into the bottom of the boat. He got up and slapped the oar
back into the oarlock and we both rowed hard.

“We ain't moving!”

Bony said that. He was hanging onto the sides of the skiff with both
hands, looking scared and white, and you never heard anybody say
anything the way he said that! It was like he had seen a ghost. Me and
Swatty stopped rowing and looked. About twenty feet away from us was
that old mush-rat house and we could see a little ripple of water on
the upper side of it but it wasn't moving and we weren't floating away
from it. There was the same kind of ripple against the bow of our boat.

We rowed again and we rowed hard and the skiff didn't move! There we
were, out in the middle of that haunted lake, or whatever it was, and no
bottom that you could reach with an oar, and we couldn't row up-stream
and we didn't float downstream. And over yonder was a mush-rat's house
just like we were. It sure looked like we were in a haunted lake and I
didn't blame Bony for being scared and crying. I was scared myself. It
looked like we were in a haunted lake we could not row out of and that
we might have to stay there forever.

“Well, garsh!” Swatty said, “we rowed up here, we ought to be good and
able to row back where we come from.” So we swung the skiff around and
rowed down-current. No good! We didn't move at all. Or we just moved a
foot or two.

It wasn't like when you run up on a snag or a rock. It wasn't stiff
like that. We floated all right but we couldn't go anywhere.

“Listen!” Swatty said.

Away off far we heard voices and splashing, sounding the way things
sound when you hear them across water. Swatty shouted. “Hello!” he
shouted, and his voice came back to him, “Lo-wo-wo!” in an echo, the way
echoes do.

“All right!” he said. “Now we know where the Illinois hills are, anyway.
That's the way they echo back at you, so they must be over there. And I
bet those men splashing in the water are after buffalo with pitchforks.
So that's where we want to row.” That was pretty fine, wasn't it, when
we couldn't row at all? I told Swatty so. I said we'd better shout and
have the men come and get us. Swatty said they'd just think it was kids
shouting for fun; and I guess that's what they did think, for we shouted
and shouted, and when we quit we could still hear the men laughing and
talking and splashing. So then Swatty sat down and put his head in his
hands and thought. When we looked up he said:

“Do you believe in haunts and things?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Do you?”

“I don't know, either,” Swatty said. “Maybe I do and maybe I don't, but
I know one thing: I ain't going to believe in them until I have to. I
ain't going to believe this boat is 'witched here until I know it ain't
stuck here some other way. I'm going to find out.”

“How?” I asked.

“Well, if we're stuck we're stuck on something under the water and
that's sure, and I'm going to skin off my clothes and find out.”

So he did. I wouldn't have done it for a million dollars and I tried to
make him not, but he did it. He took off his clothes and lowered himself
over the side of the boat and said, garsh! how cold it was! So then he
edged himself along, holding onto the side of the boat and all at once
he swore.

“What?” me and Bony both asked at once.

“Bob wire!” he said, and he let go with one hand and felt down into
the water. Then he took hold of the boat with both hands and felt along
under the boat with his feet. “It's a post,” he said. “It's a bob-wire
fence.”

So that was what it was. There was a bob-wire fence and we had
rowed right on top of one of the posts and stuck there, on a nail or
something, and the post was loose in the mud and gave when we rowed, so
we couldn't wrench loose by rowing. And that was why the mush-rat house
did not float downstream; it was caught on another post. So all at once
Swatty said:

“I know where we are; we're in Shebberd's lower cornfield!” And that was
where we were. The water had come up and covered it up to the tops of
the bob-wire fence posts.

Well, Swatty's teeth were chattering but he wouldn't get right into the
boat. He made me and Bony row while he was out, and I guess with the
boat lighter it floated off the post easier, for it did float off. So
then Swatty got in and dressed and we rowed toward the voices and the
splashing.

It was Judge Hannan all right. He was pitch-forking buffalo fish with
the Shebberds. He had on rubber hip boots and he was hot and having a
good time. We rowed in close to where he was and watched them pitchfork
awhile and then Swatty backwatered the skiff up to where the judge was
standing and said:

“Say, mister judge!”

The judge leaned his hand on the stem of the boat and said:

“Yes, my lad, what is it?”

“Are you the judge that gives diworces?”

“I'm the one that don't give them unless I have to, son,” the judge
laughed. “Looking for one? You don't look as if you had reached that age
and state yet.”

“It ain't mine,” Swatty said. “It's Bony's folkses. They're having a
fight and they're going to get a diworce and me and Georgie and Bony
don't want them to. So we rowed over to tell you not to give them one.”

The judge felt in his pocket and got out his spectacles and put them on
and looked at us. He asked which was Bony and then he knew who Bony was
and that he knew Bony's folks. He said he did.

“And you don't want any divorces in your family, hey?” he said. “Why
not?”

Bony didn't say anything, so Swatty started to tell about the bicycle,
but before he got very far Bony just doubled over and put his head on
his knees and began to beller like a real baby. So the judge stopped
Swatty.

“Son,” he said to Swatty, “I guess you've mistooken the proper legal
grounds for not giving divorces. The desire of a youth to learn to ride
one of the condemned things when he is related to the separating parties
only by neighborhood is not sufficient to sway the court. But you, son,”
 he said to Bony, “have got exactly the right idea. You've swayed this
old, bald-headed court right down to the mud he's standing in and, so
help me John Joseph Rogers! if those two parents of yours get a divorce
it will only be over my dead body! Hey, Sheb! can these kids go up to
your house and get some buttermilk?”

So I said I didn't like buttermilk and the judge said: “Caesar's ghost!
I didn't mean get it for you; I meant get it for us!”

So we got it. So Bony's folks didn't get a divorce. Anyway, if they
did they didn't separate apart from each other and that was all me and
Swatty cared for because Herb Schwartz wouldn't be scared to marry Fan,
and maybe we could hurry up the wedding and get the tricycle sooner.




IV. THE STUMP

Well, you never can tell how things are going to go in this world, I
guess. I don't mean that I spent all my time thinking how getting the
tricycle with two seats would make Mamie Little think more of me than
she thought of Toady Williams, because I didn't. I had school and my
chores and me and Swatty and Bony was building a capstan in our side
yard, to pull up stumps and move houses if we wanted to, but once in a
while I did think how I would ride up to Mamie Little's front gate on
the tricycle and say, “Say! wanta take a ride?”

It looked as if it wouldn't be long before Herb and Fan got married,
because they hadn't fought for a long while and Fan was embroidering
towels by day and by night. One reason it all looked good was that Miss
Murphy, who was my teacher and had had Herb for a while, had gone away
for a while and Miss Carter was substituting for her in our room. So Fan
needn't be jealous of Miss Murphy any more.

So I felt pretty good mostly but I was feeling pretty mean this day,
because Swatty and Bony had been let out on time and Miss Carter had
kept me in after school. I was feeling mean because they would be
working on the capstan, and it was the day we thought we would get it
finished and begin capstaning things with it, and I wouldn't be home
when they got it done. I wanted to be there when they started to use
it. So that made me feel mean one way, and teacher made me feel meaner,
another way.

I liked Miss Carter better than any teacher I ever had. So all I did
was not know my geography-lesson, or my arithmetic-lesson or my
grammar-lesson, or my history, and I missed in spelling. I guess maybe I
read all right, because she didn't say I didn't, but maybe she forgot to
talk about that because she was so busy saying my deportment was bad and
it was certainly an outrage that my copy-book was so poorly kept. So she
kept me in to study, and it was four o'clock pretty soon, and she put
her papers in her desk and shut down the lid and came back to my seat.
Everybody else had gone home. I was sort of scared. I thought she was
going to say her patience was exhausted and then whale me with the
rawhide she kept in the closet.

But she didn't. She came back to where I was, and when she got to my
seat she sat down in it beside me and I had to move over so she would
have room. I guess I ought to have put my hands in my pockets, but of
course I didn't know what she was going to do, and the first thing she
did was to put her left hand on top of my hand and hold it, like that,
on top of my desk. So I tried to pull it away, but she held on. So then
she put her arm--her right arm--along the desk back of me, and I felt
mighty mean. A boy don't like to be armed around that way, or his hand
held like that.

“George,” she said, “what is it? Why are you acting the way you are? Are
you doing it to try to distress me?”

Well, I couldn't say anything to that, could I? I just looked at the top
of the desk and moved my feet around.

“Tell me!” she said as if she wasn't mad at all but as if she was
sorry. “I can't understand it. It is no use for you to pretend you can't
learn your lessons, for I have seen that it is no trouble at all for
you, when you want to. And you are such a naturally good, well-behaved
boy at heart--why are you trying to act as if you were not? Are you
doing it to distress me?”

I guess I sort of said “No!” I don't know what I did say. I felt pretty
bad, with my hand held like that and her arm right there and liable to
get around my shoulders the way she does to the girls when she's fond of
them and they disappoint her and she has a talk with them and makes them
cry.

“Then what is it, George?” she asked.

Well, you can't blat right out and say nothing is the matter only you
don't feel like learning any old lessons or anything, can you? There
wasn't anything the matter. I didn't have it in for teacher or anything.
I just didn't feel like learning any lessons about then, and it was mean
of teacher to let on I was doing things because I didn't like her or
something. So I didn't say anything. I sort of scrooged down in my seat
so she couldn't put her arm around me any more than it was.

“Is it Mamie Little?” she asked then, all of a sudden.

That was an awful mean thing to say, and I guess she knew it was,
because when a fellow has a girl he don't want anybody to know it or
talk about it. He'll fight any fellow that says it, but he can't fight
his teacher when she says it.

“I think it must be Mamie Little, George,” she said next, “because
I have noticed you keep your eyes on her more than you do on your
lessons.”

That made me squirm, I guess! But that wasn't the worst. She wasn't
hardly started.

“I don't blame you for liking Mamie, George,” she said. “She is a sweet
child and I love her, too, and I am glad you are fond of her; but don't
you think she would like you better if you learned your lessons and
behaved in a manner she could admire, instead of trying to attract her
attention by smarty tricks? Don't you think a boy with your ability
should try to impress her by his excellence rather than by his smarty
tricks?”

Gee! I felt mean! Running a fellow's girl in on him like that! I was
so ashamed all over that I couldn't move. I didn't dare to move even a
finger. I couldn't do anything but swallow.

“Now, we won't say anything more about it,” she said, and she patted my
hand! “You know how much I like you, George, and how proud I usually am
of you, and I think Mamie is fond of you, too. I don't think you need to
be a smarty to attract her. If you don't care to do it for me, George,
tell me you will try to learn your lessons and behave better on Mamie's
account. You will, won't you? Say you will!”

I guess I tried to say I would, but I couldn't even swallow. I didn't
know how I'd even get away from there, because Miss Carter might stay
until I said I would or something, and I couldn't work my voice: it had
dried up, I guess. But I didn't have to say anything. Miss Carter put
her hand on my head and let it stay there a minute, and then she smiled
and jumped up as if everything was fixed and I had said I would, and she
said: “All right, George; you can go home.” And I went, you bet.

Well, that settled Miss Carter with me! She had been one of the three
women I thought were dandy, because the other two were my mother and my
grandmother that everybody calls “Ladylove” because she is so dear, but
after that I was done with Miss Carter. Anybody that would talk to a
fellow about his girl as if she _was_ his girl! I guessed maybe I would
n't go back to school any more unless I could get transferred to another
teacher's room.

So I felt pretty mean and sore and everything when I got home, and I
started around to the side yard, where Swatty and Bony were finishing
the capstan, and all at once my mother came to the end of the porch and
pulled the vines aside and said:

“George, come here!”

I tried to think what I had done to make her say it like that, but I
couldn't, only a fellow is always doing something, so it didn't matter
much what it was. I went around and onto the porch.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“George,” my mother said in the way they call severe, “Mrs. Martin was
here.”

“Yes'm,” I said, for I didn't know what else to say, because I didn't
know why Mrs. Martin had been there. I knew who Mrs. Martin was and
where she lived, because she was the lady that had the lame boy that
would never grow up but would always be about five years old. He was
thirteen years old, and he played with a rag doll and always stayed
in his yard, but sometimes he looked out between the fence-pickets.
Sometimes when I went downtown on errands and got a nickel for it and
bought some candy, I'd give him a piece when I went by, and so would
Swatty and so would Bony. Sometimes he'd say, “Where you get that ball?
I want it!” just like a little baby, and if we didn't give it to him,
he'd cry, but we couldn't give him our ball, could we? So when we went
by his house we hid anything he might cry for, so he wouldn't cry for
it. That was all I knew about Mrs. Martin, only she was a widow and she
was cross sometimes. Anyway, sometimes she looked cross.

“George,” my mother said--and I guess she never spoke to me any sadder
than she did then--“Mrs. Martin told me something I would never have
believed of my boy. I have always thought you were a kind-hearted,
considerate boy. Oh, George, why--why did you strike that poor, helpless
little cripple?”

“I did not! I didn't do any such thing! It ain't so!” I said, because I
knew she meant I had hit Sammy Martin.

My mother sort of threw out her hand.

“Don't!” she said. “It is enough without that. It is enough to be a
bully without being a liar. Mrs. Martin has told me--”

“I ain't a liar!” I said, because I was so mad I could have cried. “If
she said that, she's a liar; that's what she is!”

Well, I oughtn't to have called a lady that, or anybody, but I was so
mad I didn't think. I wasn't thinking about how I said it, and when a
fellow's mother looks at him the way my mother was looking at me, and
won't believe him when he's telling the truth, what's he going to do? I
guess my mother was feeling pretty bad herself or she wouldn't have said
any such thing to me as that I was one. Because I wasn't one! Not about
that! I had never hit Sammy Martin. I had never done anything to him but
give him candy once in a while.

“George!” said my mother, and she was sad about it, as if she was now
quite hopeless about me.

Then she went on, as quietly as if we were at a funeral:

“That poor child's mother came here to beg me to protect her child
against you--to beg me to ask you not to harm him again! You called him
to the fence and struck him across the face with a stick or a switch.
Oh, don't deny it! She has seen you coax him to the fence before and
give him candy, and when he came crying to her with a welt rising on
his poor face, he told her you had done it. And I thought you were--I
thought--”

So then she cried, and I couldn't do anything but stand there and
feel--oh, I don't know how I felt! I guess I had never felt like that in
my life. It wasn't so, and I knew it wasn't so, and nobody would ever
believe it wasn't so. I couldn't do anything but stand there and wish
I was dead or grown up or something. I just stood and looked down, and
once in a while I blinked. So then, after a while, my mother wiped her
eyes and walked past me without saying anything or looking at me and
went into the house, and I stood there awhile and then I sort of turned
and went to the edge of the porch and sneaked around to the back yard.
It wasn't fair to think such things of me when they were not so, and
I felt awful bad. I never wanted to see my mother again. So then Swatty
saw me and shouted.

“Come on!” he yelled. “We've got her done! She's a dandy!”

So I ran to where the capstan was, and she was a dandy!

I guess you know what capstans are--the things they use in moving
houses? In Riverbank they move a lot of houses, because people are
always wanting to build other houses where houses already are, and you
can't move a house without a capstan. They have them on boats, too, but
not quite the same kind. The house-moving kind is like a square box,
without sides. In the middle, up and down, is a kind of roller that the
rope rolls onto, and the roller has to stick up above the top of the box
so there can be a place to stick a pole into to turn the roller. When
they move houses they set the capstan in the middle of the street a long
way from the house, and carry a rope back and fasten it to the house,
and then a horse that is fastened to the pole walks around and around
the capstan, stepping over the rope every time he passes it, and winds
up the rope, and that pulls the house. Only we didn't have any horse,
so we thought maybe we'd use Swatty's cow. But we didn't. We turned the
capstan ourselves. All the time we were making the capstan Swatty said
the cow would turn it, but when we got it done he said:

“Who ever heard of a cow turning a capstan?”

“I did,” I said. “In the Bible-book there is a picture of a cow turning
a capstan.”

“Well, that ain't the same thing,” Swatty said. “That's a Bible-cow, and
ours is part Alderney and part Holstein.”

“And this isn't any cow-capstan, anyway,” Bony said. “A cow couldn't
work this capstan, because a cow has two toes, and she'd get the rope
caught between her toes and fall and kill herself.”

“Whose cow are you saying would fall and kill herself--my cow?” Swatty
asked, the way he did when he meant: “Take it back or I'll lick you!”
 Then he says: “You'd better not say my cow would fall and kill herself.
If my cow couldn't step over a rope without getting it between her toes,
I'd take her and kill her.”

“Aw, you would not!” I said.

“Yes, I would, too!” Swatty said. “We had a cow once that couldn't step
over a rope without getting it between her toes, and my father took her
down to the river and killed her. You needn't say we'd have a cow that
can't step over a rope--”

“I never said it,” I said.

“Well, if you didn't say it, who did say it, I'd like to know,” Swatty
asked. “Bony didn't say it and you'd better not say he said it, because
he came over and helped me finish the capstan, and you stayed in school
and let us do it.”

“I didn't stay in school; I was kept in.”

“Well, you say you was, but I don't have to believe it, do I?”
 Swatty said. “I don't have to believe everything you say just because
I'm--because I'm in your yard, do I?”

Well, I saw Swatty wanted a fight, and I wanted a fight anyway. I felt
like it. So I said; “Who are you calling a liar?”

I went up close to him, and he went up close to me; and then I pushed
him and he pushed me back; and then I hit him and he hit me back. And
when he had me down and asked me if I had had enough and got off of me,
we went ahead with the capstan. I wasn't hurt _anywhere_ except on the
inside of my cheek, where a tooth cut it.

The capstan was a good one. Swatty showed how it worked, and pushed the
pole around, and it worked fine. So then I got my sled out of the barn,
where it had been since last winter, and we took turns being pulled on
the sled. So then we wished we had a house to move, but there wasn't
any house or building we dared move. I bet we could have done it. So we
looked for something we couldn't move without a capstan, so we could use
the capstan to move it. There is no use having a capstan if you haven't
anything to do with it. You might just as well not have made one. So I
said:

“I'll tell you! Let's pull up the old stump that's in our front yard!”

“All right--let's!” Swatty said.

We had a lot of trees in our yard--a big silver poplar in the back yard
that was twice as big around as a barrel, and a yellow-mellow apple,
and a Benoni apple, and a black-heart cherry, and a row of pines leading
down to the gate, and big maples inside the fence, and maybe some more.
There were trees all over town, lots of them, and you would have thought
there had always been trees, but I guess that isn't so. People planted
them. When people came to Riverbank and made a town of it, they planted
the trees because there were none when they came, and I guess they
liked it better with trees growing than when it was all bare. I know my
grandmother did.

My grandmother was an old, old woman, and she lived with us because the
house had been built by my grandfather, and my grandfather had planted
the trees. That was a long time before I was ever born. We called my
grandmother “Ladylove,” because I guess that is what my grandfather
called her. Nobody ever called her anything else but Ladylove, not
“Gran'ma” or anything like that.

I guess nobody ever loved trees the way she loved them. I guess she was
always sorry she had come away from Pennsylvania where there are lots of
trees and hills. Sometimes, early in the morning, she would come out on
the porch and look up and say, “I lift up mine eyes to the hills!” and
then she would sigh and shake her head. That was because there was no
hills in Riverbank when she lifted? up her eyes from our porch, and I
guess she was thinking of the hills in Pennsylvania, because when she
was a girl and lived there, there were always hills to lift up her eyes
to--hills that were covered with trees.

That was the way my grandmother Ladylove was, as old as old, and nobody
ever loved trees the way she did. She liked boys too. She liked all the
boys that ever came to play with me. She was the only one that never
scolded me. Plenty of times when we had fresh cookies and nobody was to
touch a single one until the next day, Ladylove would see us playing in
the yard and she would come out with a china plate with a napkin on it
piled up with cookies. Then she would say a verse of poetry and give us
the cookies and go into the house just as happy as could be. Sometimes
she would forget she had brought us any and would come right out with
another plateful and say the poetry over again and be just as happy over
that one as she was over the other.

When I said, “Let's pull the old stump that's in the front yard,” I
didn't think anything but that it would be a good thing to pull. I
didn't even know it had ever _been_ a tree; it had always been a stump
since I was a little bit of a kid, anyway. It wasn't much of a stump
any more. It was only about as high as my knee, and right at the ground
it was only as big around as a man's knee. Once I had a little hatchet,
but it wouldn't cut much, but I chopped the stump with it. I could only
chop off a little splinter at a time, and I never got much off. It only
made the stump raggedy at the top. It was just an old stump that wasn't
worth anything and wasn't any good to anybody.

Swatty and Bony and me started to move the capstan into the front yard
where the stump was. It was so heavy we could hardly wiggle it, so after
we had moved it an inch or two I said:

“Aw! we can't move it!”

So Bony said the same thing; but Swatty stood and looked at the capstan
awhile, and then he said: “Yes, we can move it, too! We can make it move
itself.”

“How can we?”

“You come ahead and I'll show you,” he said; and he did. He drove a
stake into the ground about as far as our capstan rope would reach, and
fastened the rope to it. Then he made Bony turn the capstan pole, and
that wound up the rope, and the capstan just had to move toward the
stake. When we got it to the stake we knocked the stake out with an
axe and put it in again farther along. That way we moved the capstan to
where we wanted it. Swatty thought of how to do it.

So then we had the capstan in the front yard, and we tied the rope
around the old stump and tried to pull it, but the capstan just moved
up to the stump. So Swatty said he knew what was the matter and that we
were all crazy because we didn't think of it before, and that all the
house-movers, when they were moving houses, drove stakes in front of
their capstans to keep them from moving, and stakes behind them to keep
them from tipping up.

We got some stakes and did it. Swatty drove the stakes because he was
strongest, and anyway, he knew how to swing an axe, because he had
often studied how the circus roughnecks swung them. Anyway he said he
had. He said he had sat for over an hour and just studied how they swung
axes at stakes and that then he asked one roughneck to let him try
it, and he did, and he drove over a hundred. He said that while he was
driving stakes Mr. Barnum came out of the big tent and watched him, and
that he liked the way he was driving stakes so well that he offered him
a hundred dollars a year just to drive stakes for the circus. So I asked
Swatty if he took up the offer, and he said he did. He said he went with
the circus all over the United States, driving stakes, and that he drove
so many he got so he could drive a stake with one blow. So then he said
he went to Mr. Bamum and asked him to pay him two hundred dollars a
year, but Mr. Bamum said he couldn't afford it. He said Swatty was worth
two hundred dollars a year but the show couldn't afford it. So, Swatty
said, he came home. That's what Swatty said, but I didn't hardly believe
it. But, anyway, we had to let him drive the stakes.

Well, the stump didn't come out as easy as we had thought it would. It
was pretty rotten, and it pulled off piece by piece, but the inside was
tough. Our rope was old, too, and broke nearly every time we tautened
it. But it was good fun, anyway. We took turns turning the capstan pole.
One would turn and the other would keep the rope on the stump and the
other would be boss and shout, “Whoa! Get up! Whoa there, you!” A lot
of boys came and looked through the picket fence and wished we would let
them come in and help us capstan the stump, but we wouldn't. What's the
use of having something somebody else hasn't got, if you are going to
let them have it too?

Pretty soon we got the stump all pulled. There was only a hole where it
had been and the rotted wood was scattered around on the grass, and we
felt pretty good about it, because nobody wants old stumps sticking up
in their yards. Swatty said maybe my father would give me a quarter for
pulling the stump and I thought maybe he would, too. We all felt as if
we had done something pretty fine, and I wished I could go and get my
mother and have her come out and see how good our capstan was and have
her say, “Why, that's fine, Georgie! I'll have your father give you
a quarter when he comes home.” But I remembered about Mrs. Martin. I
remembered that my mother would probably never think anything I ever did
again was any good at all. So I didn't call her.

Just then Ladylove--my grandmother--came out of the side door. She stood
a moment on the top step, looking, and then she came down to the grass
and started toward us. She had a plate in her hand, and there were
graham crackers on it, because there were no cookies that day. I guess
she heard us shouting and thought we would like some graham crackers,
because we were boys.

As soon as I saw her I jumped and ran toward her, because she was some
one we could show what we had done.

“Come here, Ladylove,” I shouted. “Come on, we want to show you what we
did with our capstan!”

“Yes! yes!” she said.

So I took the plate of crackers, and with the other hand I sort of
steadied her elbow, because our yard wasn't very smooth and she didn't
walk very steady or very fast. We came to where the capstan was, and she
steadied herself with one hand on it.

“There!” I said. “See what we did, Ladylove! We pulled that old tree
stump right out of the ground. We got rid of that old stump all right!”

Ladylove stood quiet so long that I got frightened. She looked up at the
sky and when she looked down at me there were tears in her eyes. I could
see them.

“My tree! My beautiful tree!” she said. “Ah, Georgie, could you kill my
tree?” And then she closed her eyes and held out her hands and said:

     “Degenerate Douglas! Oh, the unworthy lord!
     Whom mere despite of heart could so far please
     To level with the dust a noble horde,
     A brotherhood of venerable trees!”

It wasn't a horde of trees at all, nothing but an old rotten stump and
no good to anybody, but I felt awful bad about it as soon as she spoke
that poetry--not because the old stump was any good but because my
grandmother was so old and seemed to think so much of the old stump.

Me and Swatty and Bony just stood and didn't know what to say. We wished
she had scolded us or something instead of feeling that way.

“Gone! Gone!” she said, letting her hands fall, as if that old stump was
the only thing she ever cared for. “Gone!”

     “It is not now as it has been of yore;
     Turn wheresoe'er I may,
     By night or day,
     The things which I have seen
     I now can see no more!”

Well, we couldn't say anything, could we, when she felt like that? We
could just feel mean. It didn't matter that we knew it was just an old,
rotten, no good stump, because she thought it was a tree and that we had
cut it down. She shook her head, and then:

     “Some they have died, and some they have left me,
     And some are taken from me; all are departed;
     All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”

So then she turned and walked away with her head bent down and the tears
running down her cheeks, and I stood there with the plate of graham
crackers in my hand and didn't know what to do or what to say, and
Bony stood and looked kind of scared. I didn't dare look after my
grandmother. I just felt mean and sneaky and ashamed and sort of
miserable about everything, because I knew she thought I had done it
when I knew I oughtn't to have done it. At the step of the side door
she stopped and looked back and then went into the house, all old and
sad-looking. I guessed I had broken her heart, she felt so bad about it.

So then Bony started to go home. He didn't say anything, but he sort of
edged off as if he wanted to sneak away and get out of any trouble I was
in. Swatty spoke right up.

“You come back here!” he said. “You come back, or I'll show you!”

I was glad to have anybody say anything, even that.

“Aw, I got to go home,” Bony said. But he came back. He knew what Swatty
would do to him if he didn't. So then Swatty made a face at the pieces
of old stump.

“Garsh!” he said. “Garsh! who'd of thunk anybody cared for that old
stump? We didn't know Ladylove cared that much for it, did we? Well,
come on!”

“Come on where?” Bony sort of whined.

“Where do you think?” Swatty asked. “What do I care where? Anywhere we
can get a tree to plant--that's where. We'll get a big tree, like those
maple trees, and we'll fetch it here and plant it; that's what we'll
do! I'll tell you what. We'll take the capstan rope and go out to the
cow pasture and dig up a big tree and let my cow drag it here. We'll
play she's a team of oxen.”

Well, we got to fighting about who would drive the team of oxen and who
would ride on the tree, and we forgot all about being ashamed of pulling
up the stump. We took a spade and the axe, and went out to the pasture,
but when we saw how big a big tree was, we guessed we'd get one that
wasn't so big, and then we guessed we'd get one that wasn't as big
as that, because Swatty said he didn't want his cow to strain herself
pulling it. So the one we got wasn't very big, after all, but it was
more of a tree than that old rotten stump was. It was a willow tree. We
got a willow tree after we'd tried to dig up the roots of an elm tree.
Swatty said that a willow tree didn't need any roots.

The cow didn't like pulling a tree very well, but she got used to it
before we got home--only we couldn't ride on such a little tree. We had
to take turns being the ox-driver. But we got home all right and dug a
hole where the old stump had been, and we planted the tree. She looked
bully. She looked almost like a real tree. So then I went into the house
to get my grandmother, to show her, so she wouldn't feel so bad about
the old stump.

I guess she had forgotten all about it. She was sitting by the window,
reading the limber-backed psalm-book, and when I came in she looked up
and smiled.

“Come on out in the yard, Ladylove,” I said. “I want to show you what me
and Bony and Swatty did.”

She closed the psalm-book with her glasses inside and put the book on
her sewing-table and went with me. I took her right to where the tree
was.

“There!” I said. “Me and Bony and Swatty planted a new tree for you
where that old stump was.”

THE STUMP

My grandmother looked at the tree. Her eyes were full of tears again,
but they weren't the kind that worried me. She held out a hand toward
the tree and said some more poetry:

     “What plant we in this apple tree?
     Buds, which the breath of summer days
     Shall lengthen into leafy sprays;
     Boughs, where the thrush with crimson breast
     Shall haunt and sing and hide her nest.
     We plant upon the sunny lea
     A shadow for the noontide hour,
     A shelter from the summer shower,
     When we plant the apple tree.”

Well, it wasn't an apple tree, but I didn't care, and neither did
Swatty or Bony. I was just glad because Ladylove was glad, and I guessed
she knew it wasn't an apple tree, because when you use poetry you have
to use the kind there is, and it don't always fit. But this one fitted
close enough to show how happy Ladylove was. She was very happy, and
when she had said the verses she laughed and kissed Swatty's hand, and
then Bony's and then mine, and took her skirt in two hands and made us a
curtsy and went away as happy as anything. I felt pretty good.

So just then my father came home, because it was supper-time. He came
into the yard, and he walked across the grass to where we were. He
looked sort of sober, the way fathers do when they want to know what
their sons have been doing.

“What's that?” he asked, short.

“It's a capstan,” I said. “Me and Bony and Swatty made it.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I don't know. Maybe nothing.”

“Hm! And what is this tree doing here?”

“Why--” I said, and then I didn't know what to say.

“Why, there was an old stump here,” said Swatty, “and we pulled it up
with the capstan, and Ladylove, she came out, and she felt pretty bad--”
 “She couldn't remember it wasn't a tree #ny more,” said Bony.

“And so we went and got a tree and planted it for her,” I said.

My father looked at me. Then he turned away. “Don't do any damage with
that capstan thing,” he said, and that was all.

Well, nobody said anything at supper, so after supper I went out and sat
on the porch, and Herb Schwartz had come over to talk with Fan awhile
and they were there too. So pretty soon my father came out and lighted
a cigar and gave Herb one. Then my mother came out and I guessed I would
go into the back yard or somewhere, because I knew she would tell my
father about what Mrs. Martin had lied about me hurting her crazy boy.
So I went and sat on the woodshed step awhile, because if my father was
going to lick me he would do it out there anyway.

But he didn't come, so after a while I went around front again. I
stopped by the vines at the end of the porch, because my father was
talking.

“And I will tell you something else,” he was saying. So he told them
about the stump, and how we had pulled it up and then gone and got
another tree because Ladylove felt so bad about it. “And Mrs. Martin nor
any one else need tell me that a boy that would do that would torment
a crippled child,” my father said. “I think I know my son George fairly
well. What did George say about it?”

“He said Mrs. Martin--lied,” said my mother. “And she probably did,”
 said my father. “Unintentionally but none the less wickedly. I am going
to see her. I think she is going to apologize.”

So I felt bully about that, and my father went down the walk and mother
went into the house. I felt bully because father was right. Only I was
n't the one that thought of planting the new tree. That was Swatty. But
I guess I'd have thought of it if Swatty hadn't.

I was just going to go up on the porch when Fan said something. What she
said was:

“Poor father! The way he lets Georgie behave and then stands up for
him!”

“Why, Fan,” Herb said, “you don't think George did anything of the sort
Mrs. Martin said, do you?”

“I wouldn't put it beyond him,” Fan said.

“That's not fair! That's unjust!” Herb said.

“Oh! I'm unfair, am I? I'm unjust, am I?” Fan flared up.

“You are if you say such things about George,” Herb said, and he said it
out flat, too, as if he meant it.

“Oh!” Fan said. “The last time I was jealous. Now I am unjust! I'm sure
I thank you for your opinion of me--”

“And, now, Frances,” said Herb, standing up because Fan was, “you are
unfair and unjust to me. Either that or frivolous.”

“Oh!” Fan cried out and she slung something on the porch that bounced
and rolled. It came through the vines and to where I was, and I picked
it up. It was her engagement ring, but she didn't care where it went,
because she went slamming into the house, and Herb went stamping to the
gate and out of the yard.

So I stood there and looked at the ring and felt pretty sick, because
it was just because Herb thought I wasn't a liar and a mean
cripple-torturer that he had stood up for me. And, just because I was
n't, his wedding was off again and nobody could tell when me and Swatty
would get his tricycle.




V. SCRATCH-CAT

Well, when mother heard that Herb and Fan had had another fight she was
so hurt by it she just set down and cried and said, “Fan! Fan! I don't
know what is going to become of you with that temper of yours, because
Herbert Schwartz is one of the finest young men in the whole world and
if you keep on you 'll delineate his affections away from you entirely
forever,” or something like that.

And it did look like it. Professor Martin's leg didn't get any better
and he had to go over to the hospital at Chicago to have it broke
again and fixed and Herb was made a regular professor at our school and
principal of it, and every day he used to come into our room and talk
awhile with Miss Carter, and walk home with her. I tell you it looked
mighty bad for Fan, and I didn't blame Herb, because Miss Carter was
nice. She was nice for a teacher, I mean, and sweet and pretty and
everything.

Well, I had the engagement ring. I didn't know whether it was mine or
whose it was, because Fan had thrown it away and Herb hadn't bothered to
pick it up. So it looked as if it was mine, because finders is keepers.
So I asked Swatty. So Swatty wanted to look at the ring and when he saw
it had a diamond in it he said it was my ring, because Herb and Fan had
thrown it away, but that half of it was his, because Herb was as much
Swatty's brother as Fan was my sister, and if they had of had the fight
on Herb's porch instead of Fan's porch, it would of been Swatty that
found the ring. So we had it in pardnership and said we would keep it,
because if Herb got engaged again to Fan or to Miss Carter or anybody we
could trade it to him for his two-seat tricycle, maybe.

Bony was sitting there all the time, listening to us, so all at once he
said:

“Ain't any of the ring going to be mine?”

The reason he said it was because most of the things we have we have
sort of in cahoots, the three of us.

“Garsh, no, Bony,” Swatty said. “We'd like to have you part own it but
you ain't got no excuse to. Herb ain't your brother, and Fan ain't your
sister, like they are mine and Georgie's, are they? You ain't related to
the ring no way. We wish he was, don't we, Georgie? but he ain't.”

Well, Bony was sort of mad at it, but it wasn't our fault. So then
Swatty said to me:

“I ain't going to play with your sister any more.”

“Why ain't you?” I asked him.

“Because I ain't,” he said. “If my brother Herb ain't good enough for
your sister Fan, then I ain't good enough to play with Lucy. And I
won't.” Well, I knew what he meant, even if he didn't say it out in
words. He meant that he had been having Lucy for his secret girl, like
I wanted to have Mamie Little for mine, and now he wasn't going to have
her any more because Fan had been mean to Herb.

“Well, I don't blame you,” I said. “I wouldn't either.”

So none of us said anything for a while. Then all at once Bony said
something.

“Say!” he said.

“Say it yourself and see how you like it,” Swatty said.

“Why, say!” Bony said, getting red in the face and digging into the
grass with his toe; “if--if you don't want to play with her, can I play
with her?”

He meant with Lucy. He meant could he have Lucy for his girl if Swatty
didn't want her any more, only he didn't say it right out, of course.
So Swatty said he could. He said he didn't want her and Bony could have
her.

“Well, then--” Bony said. “Well, then, I'd ought to be part owner of the
ring.”

So we talked it over and me and Swatty thought that would be all right,
because if Bony wasn't a brother or sister of Herb or Fan he was going
to have Lucy for his girl and Lucy was my sister and Fan's. So we told
Bony he was third pardner in the ring.

I guess Bony felt pretty set up and proud to have a girl that Swatty had
had, when he had never had any girl before. Right away he began to get
mad when we said Lucy was his girl, and that's a good sign, because
that's the way fellows feel.

But girls don't feel that way when they Have fellows. Right away they
begin to wiggle their skirts when they walk, and want their mothers
to curl their hair every day, and put fresh hair-bows on them. So they
start right in saying how they hate the fellow that's their fellow; but
they take slate pencils and apples and things from him when he gives
them on the sly, and they begin writing notes to him in school, like
“Don't you think you 're smart with your new shoes on,” and things
like that. So he feels pretty good after all, and gives her apples when
nobody is looking, and pushes her around mean-like when anybody does
look.

But she don't mind being pushed around, because that's one way she knows
he's her fellow. So, when there is a party, she is the one he drops a
pillow before, and if she don't kiss him, all right for her! But mostly
she does. She lets on that she hates it, but she don't. She likes it.

Well, I guess one reason Swatty was glad to get rid of Lucy was because
Swatty didn't care for kissing games anyway, and it wasn't much fun for
him to have a girl, because nobody hardly dared yell at him:

     “Swatty! Swatty! Swatty!
     Lucy she is your girl!”

He was too good a fighter. And half the fun of having a girl is getting
mad because they yell it at you. And, anyway, Swatty was sort of rough
to have Lucy for his girl, and she didn't like to have him for a fellow
very much. As soon as school was out Swatty would begin clod fighting
with the Graveyard Gang, or make a bee-line for the baseball lot, or
get up a good fight. He never wanted to sort of walk on the edge of the
sidewalk when the girls were walking on the middle of it, and cut up
funny to make them look and giggle. It was boys he liked to push around,
and not girls.

One reason Lucy didn't care much to have him for her fellow was because
his father and mother were German, and none of the girls like a Dutchy
for a fellow, because lots of Dutchies worked in the sawmills and
couldn't talk good English. But Swatty's father didn't work in a
sawmill; he was a tailor. But he was a Dutchy just the same, and when
the fellows got mad at Swatty sometimes they would yell:

     “Dutchy! Dutchy!
     Stuffed with straw
     Can't say nothing but
     'Yaw! yaw! yaw!'”

Well, when I had time to think it over I thought it was funny that
Swatty had let Bony have a third partnership in the engagement ring as
easy as he had. And then one day I found out why it was. It shows how
slick Swatty was to keep a secret or anything.

The vacation before the time I'm telling about--which was almost
vacation time again--there was a new girl came to Riverbank. She lived
in a little house across Main Street that had a picket fence and a yard
that ran mostly down the gully toward Front Street, and the first I knew
about her was one day when I had to go down town on an errand and went
past her house.

I had on some new shoes, so I knew everybody would see them and be
thinking of them, and I felt pretty mean; and when I went by the little
house the girl was behind the picket fence, looking out. So I made a
face at her, because it was none of her business if I did have on new
shoes.

It was summer, of course, and hot; but the girl had on a woolen
dress--red and black checks--and it fitted her pretty tight all over,
and was too short and little, so that it was tight like skin, and her
wrists stuck out too far. She was barefoot, too, and that was funny,
because girls don't go barefoot. It was as funny to see her barefoot as
to see me with shoes on.

I was going to yell something at her, but I didn't, I only made a face
at her. But she didn't make one back at me. She just looked.

She wasn't like any girl in Riverbank that I ever saw. She was
brown--almost like an Indian--but she had reddish cheeks, and her hair
was as black as tar and cut short, like a boy's, only it was banged in
front, and her bangs were so long they came down to her eyes, and were
cut as straight as a string.

She stood behind the picket fence and just looked at me, and I didn't
like it. Her eyes were like big black marbles and her mouth like a
painted red. So I whistled and looked the other way and the first thing
I knew she was out of the gate and after me. I tried to run, but she
cornered me and took me by the hair and jerked me back and forth. I
thought she was going to jerk my head off. So I pulled loose and ran,
because no girl can jerk me around by the hair like that. So all she got
for her smarty business was just a handful of hair or two. And who cares
for a handful of hair?

Well, you bet I got even with her, all right! I never went past her
house alone after that.

So that's the way she was. She stayed in her yard, and when a boy came
along she would jump out and grab him by the hair, or slap him, and
chase him away from in front of her house. She was a tartar, all right.
She was like a spider that is always waiting and comes out and grabs
flies; only what she grabbed wasn't flies--it was boys. So we all got
afraid of her, and we didn't dast go past her house unless we were
two or three together. And then we generally went round some other way.
Except Swatty.

Because one day Swatty he went past her house, and she come out and was
going to pull his hair, like she did the rest of us; and when she came
at him he backed up against the fence, and when she reached out for his
hair he hit her hand away with one hand and slapped her on the face good
and plenty. He slapped her two or three times and dared her to touch
him. So she didn't say anything, and Swatty didn't say anything, and
they just stood there.

And pretty soon Swatty went on downtown. So she just stood there.

Well, me and Bony used to play with girls sometimes because they let us
be the husbands and fathers, and boss them around and whip the children.
So when we did Swatty used to come along. Mostly he would sit and
whittle until me and Bony got through, but sometimes he would be the
policeman to arrest the husbands when they got drunk, or a pirate, or an
Indian lurking to scalp the wives, or a 'rangatang to carry the children
off.

I guess the girls wished he wouldn't come, because a 'rangatang is such
an interruption to plain housekeeping, and pirates and policemen are
an awful nuisance to mothers who want to bring up a peaceful family
and don't want their husbands taken to jail just when the mud pies are
cooked and dinner is ready. But they couldn't help it, because if they
didn't let him me and Bony would go where Swatty went.

Well, one time when teacher kept Swatty in school to have the principal
lick him, she went out to get the principal and locked Swatty in the
room, and he climbed out of the window onto a maple tree branch and
got away. So the principal licked him the next day. Anyway, the trees
darkened the room all up, so they had the janitor cut down the two trees
and they fell down the bank back of the schoolhouse.

So that day the leaves were only beginning to wither, and the branches
of the trees made a bully place to play in. So Mamie Little and my
sister and me and Bony went right out there after dinner and played
house; and when Swatty had been licked, or whatever he had been kept in
for, he came there too. We made houses among the branches and
leaves, and were fathers and mothers; and Swatty had a lair and was a
'rangatang, and hung by his knees and swang from branch to branch.

It was pretty good fun, even if it was playing with girls, because it
was a jungle, and me and Bony hunted the wild 'rangatang between meals;
and we were playing along all right when I saw my sister standing and
looking. I guess you know how a girl stands and looks--the way a cow
does--when she don't like something. So I looked, and out in the street
was the girl in the red and black check woolen dress. She was just
standing and looking back at my sister. It made my sister mighty mad. I
guess girls can look the things boys generally holler at each other. So
my sister said:

“Bony, I don't want that girl to look at me!”

So Bony looked, and when he saw who was looking he said:

“Aw! let her look! Let her look, if she wants to. She ain't hurting
anybody!”

So then my sister got awful mad. She stamped her foot.

“I _won't_ let her look at me that way.”

So she started on a run for the girl. She didn't get quite up to her.
Before she got quite to her, the girl sort of flashed up to my sister.
That was about all I could see. The next I saw, she was standing just
where she had always been, and my sister was flopped down on the ground
with her arms over her head, yelling bloody murder. So I jumped out of
the tree and ran up to my sister. Her face was all scratched up. There
were four long scratches on each side of her face where the girl had
raked her with her claws. So Mamie Little came running too, and helped
my sister up.

“If I was a boy,” she said, “I wouldn't let anybody do that to my sister
unless I was a 'fraid-cat.”

“Aw! who's a 'fraid-cat?” I said. I wasn't no more 'fraid-cat than she
was, but I guess J knew that girl.

So Mamie Little took my sister by the arm. “Come on,” she said. “I guess
everybody around here is a 'fraid-cat. You and me will be mad at them
and stay mad for ever and ever!”

So I had to go. I wasn't going to hit the girl. I just thought I'd sort
of push her away--only maybe a little rough--until I pushed her
inside her gate, so I could show a smarty like Mamie Little who was a
'fraid-cat and who wasn't. I walked over to where the girl was, and
she waited for me. All I had time to see was the girl's eyes turning to
something like prickly black fire, and something plumped against me like
a bag of flour shot out of a sling. It was as if her body hit against
me everywhere at once. And then something grabbed my hair and yanked
me, and I felt scratches burning on my face, and, somehow, I was on the
ground, yelling and holding my arms above my head. The girl was standing
where she had always been. I heard Mamie Little and my sister yelling:

“Scratch-Cat! Scratch-Cat!”

Swatty came on the run. He was pretty mad, because him and me was chums,
and I was his cow-cousin and his double Dutch uncle, and he ran right
past me and up to the girl. He gave her a push with his hand, and it
sort of pushed her around; but she straightened up again and just looked
at him.

“You scratch-cat!” he said, as mean as he knew how. “Who are you
scratching around here, I'd like to know?”

I thought she'd jump on him and claw him, like she did me; but she
didn't.

“I ain't going to hurt you,” she said.

“You bet you ain't!” Swatty said. “'Cause why? 'Cause you darsent,
that's why!” Only he said, “'Cors why?” like he always does.

She didn't say she did dare, and she didn't say she didn't dare. She
said:

“Come over in my yard and play with me. Don't you play with them. I can
play good.”

So Swatty pushed her again, and she stepped back a step.

“Don't you play with girls!” she said. “You come and play with me.”

“Aw! you're a girl too,” Swatty said. “Go awrn home and play with
yourself.”

So he gave her another push. She looked as if she hadn't ever thought
that she was a girl before. She said:

“I can beat you running. I can beat you jumping. I can beat you climbing
trees. I can beat you skinning the cat. I can chin myself ten times more
than you can. I can stand on my head longer than you can.”

“Go awrn home!” Swatty said, and gave her another shove.

She stepped back again.

“Come on and play in my yard,” she said again. “I can throw you any hold
you want. I can fight you and lick you.”

“Becors you're a scratch-cat,” Swatty said, and pushed her again.

“I can lick you without scratching,” the girl said. “Well, then, do it!”
 said Swatty. “Go on and do it, why don't you? I want to see you do it!”

So each time he said it he gave her a push.

“I won't!” she said. “I ain't going to fight you.”

“You darsent!”

“I ain't going to!”

“You don't dare!”

“I ain't going to!”

So every time Swatty said anything he shoved her again, and pretty soon
he had her pushed clear back against the fence of her yard, and he left
her there and came back. We went on playing. But every once in a while
we thought of her, and when we looked she was standing just where Swatty
had left her.

Well, we found out her name was Dell Brown, because my father went to
speak to her father about the way she scratched my sister. Her father's
name was Reverend Brown; but he had adopted her because her folks died,
and she was a sore trial, but no doubt willed by the Almighty. The
Reverend Brown was a sort of preacher, and had an old white horse and
drove around the country and preached wherever he thought they needed
preaching. Mrs. Brown was a sort of invalid and old, like Reverend Brown
was, and he was almost too old to adopt Dell Brown for his daughter.
He had ought to have adopted her for his granddaughter when he was
adopting.

So he said he would pray about it, and Mrs. Brown said she couldn't
understand Dell Brown, hardly, why she had the fighting streak in her,
because at home she was all love and affection to Mrs. Brown, and a word
made the child weep. I guess Dell Brown had just so much fight in her
and had to get it fought out. I guess she thought it was better to go
out and fight than to fight Mr. and Mrs. Brown. Maybe she was sort of
fond of them because they were funny and old and had adopted her. I
guess she was like George Washington: she was good and nice, but she
liked to fight.

Well, after while school started again. I kind of hated to go, because
I always hate to, but more because I thought Dell Brown would go to
school. So she did, and the first time she got me alone she took me
by the hair and walloped me good. I hadn't done nothing to her, except
maybe yell “Scratch-Cat!” at her sometimes when I was far enough away.
So after that I didn't go to school very early, but kind of hung around
until Dell Brown went in, and then I went in. I never told on her. If
she says I did she tells what ain't so. It was Toady Williams.

Me and Swatty was kept in that day, like we 'most always were, and Bony
was waiting outside. So Miss Murphy thought it wasn't any use talking
to Dell Brown any more; it was time to rawhide her. She got the rawhide
out of the closet, and told Dell Brown to come to the back of the room,
and Dell Brown went. Miss Murphy put one hand on Dell Brown's shoulder,
and lifted up the whip to switch her across the legs, and the next thing
she did was to let out a scream, and you couldn't have believed her
dress could be tom so in just a second if you hadn't seen it. Her hands
were beginning to get red in streaks where Dell Brown had scratched
them. So Dell Brown just threw Miss Murphy's hair switch on a desk, and
stood there with her chest swelling in and out under her red and black
checked dress, and Miss Murphy backed away and began winding her switch
on her head again.

When Miss Murphy got her hair on, she went out and locked the door and
got Professor Martin, the principal, who is her beau. He came in, and he
was pretty mad. He grabbed Dell Brown and gave her a shake, and she
flew at him like a cat and scratched him across the face. He slung her
around, and she hit a desk and fell on the floor. It made her cry, and
Professor Martin was scared of what he had done and went to pick her up.
But when he stooped she clawed at him and scratched his other cheek, and
he left her alone and told her to get up and go home, because she was
expelled from school.

So Dell Brown got up, and held her hand to her side, and went and got
her books and went home. But there was only one rib broke, and I guess
it healed all right, because she was young and tough. But nobody whipped
any more girls in school. I guess they thought it was safer to whip
boys. They are more used to it, and their ribs ain't so brittle. Or
maybe the school board stopped it. Professor Martin almost got fired
because he had broken a rib for Scratch-Cat and he would of been fired
only Scratch-Cat was such a ruffian, everybody said.

Well, of course the expelling didn't take, and Dell Brown came back
after while, when Miss Murphy went away and Miss Carter came. She didn't
fight much, because her rib was brittle yet, but she was cross all the
time. It looked like she hated everybody and everybody hated her.

But one day Miss Carter was walking down the aisle and she had some
flowers pinned on, and one dropped in the aisle, and Dell Brown picked
it up and put it in a book. She used to open the book and look at the
flower. She used to sit and look at Miss Carter, and you couldn't tell
whether she was mad at her or not, because her face was so dark and her
bangs so long that she always looked scowly. But I guess she wasn't
mad, I guess she wanted Miss Carter to like her, but didn't know how to
make her.

None of the girls played with Scratch-Cat because she scratched; and
none of the boys played with her either, because they were afraid of
her. As soon as school was out she would go home and play in her own
yard. I guess she was pretty lonely.

Well, that was how it was up to the time I'm telling about, just before
school closed, in June, and the weather was bully and warm. It made you
want to do things. So on Saturday me and Swatty and Bony was sitting in
my barn and talking about what we would do that afternoon. We thought of
a lot of things, and said them, but, every time, Swatty said: “Aw! no,
let's don't!” So we didn't. So then I said:

“I'll tell you what!”

“What?” Swatty asked.

“Pshaw, no!” I said. “It ain't no use. We couldn't get any. It ain't
time for them yet.”

“Aw! what are you talking about?” Swatty asked. “What ain't it time
for?”

“Water-lilies,” I said. “If it was time for waterlilies we could row up
to the water-lily pond and get some water-lilies.”

So then Swatty he talked up.

“Well, we could row up the river anyway, couldn't we?” he said--only he
said “rowr” instead of “row,” like he always does. “We could rowr up the
river and get some pond-lily roots and sell them.”

“Aw! who would buy old pond-lily roots?” Bony wanted to know.

Well, I thought at first that the reason Swatty said we could sell
pond-lily roots was because once I had told him about a man or somebody
who had made money getting pond-lily roots and selling them to people
who wanted to raise pond-lilies in a tub in their gardens. But that was
n't why he said it.

“Why, garsh! plenty of people would want to buy them,” Swatty said. “I
guess I ought to know. I guess I've got an uncle in Derlingport, ain't
I? I guess he ought to know about pond-lily roots, oughtn't he?”

It looked like that ought to be so, because Derlingport is three times
as big as Riverbank, and Swatty's uncle was older than any of us. But
Bony said: “Aw! what does your old uncle know about pond-lily roots,
anyway?”

“I guess he knows plenty about them,” Swatty said. “I guess if you went
up to Derlingport to visit him you'd see whether he knows anything about
them or not! I bet my uncle is the richest man in Derlingport, and the
reason he is is because once, when I was out pond-lilying, I sent him
a pond-lily root and he grew it in a tub, and when folks saw it they
wanted to grow some too. So my uncle he rowred up the river to a
pond-lily pond, and he got some roots and sold them. First orff he only
got a few and sold them; but pretty soon he had a hundred men getting
pond-lily roots for him, and he had to build a pond-lily root elevator,
like the grain elevator down on the levee, but ten times bigger.”

“Gee-my-nentily!” Bony said. “Ten times bigger! Gee!”

“Ho! that ain't nothing!” Swatty said. “That was when he was just
beginning to start out. He's got ten of them elevators now, and--he's
got almost ten trillion-billion pond-lily roots in them. He's got a
railway switch and a steamboat dock to each elevator, and when he ships
pond-lily roots he ships them by the trainload. Only, when he sells them
in Dubuque or Keorkuk, he ships them by the boatload.”

“Gee-my-nentily!” said Bony again. “Come on! Let's--”

“Well, I guess so!” said Swatty. “I guess it's no wonder he's the
richest man in Derlingport! And I can just go and visit him any time I
want to. I can go visit him and take a bath right in his china bathtub.”

“Aw! go on!” I said. “He ain't got a china bathtub!”

“Yes, sir! just like a tea-cup.”

“Gosh!” Bony said. “Did you take a bath in it?”

“Garsh, no!” said Swatty. “Do you think I'd go taking bath-tub baths
when I didn't have to? When I visit him my uncle lets me do just what I
want to. I don't have to wash my feet, or take a bath, or go for a cow,
or fetch in wood--”

“Who fetches in the wood?” Bony asked.

“Nobody,” Swatty said. “My uncle don't burn sawmill slabs or cord wood.
He burns coal.”

“Well, somebody has to fetch in the coal, don't he?” I wanted to know.

“Well, I guess not!” said Swatty. “He--he has a--a bridge built right
over the top of his house, so he can run a railroad over it, and he has
a big iron box on top of his house under the bridge, and the railroad
hawrls the cars of coal right up on top of the roof and dumps the coal
into the iron box, and it runs down the chimbleys right into the stove.”
 Well, me and Bony didn't say nothing. We just sat there and thought what
we thought.

“And he's got a road scooped out under his house for a railroad to run
on,” Swatty said, “and there is a train of cars under the house, and
when my uncle, or anybody, shakes the grate the ashes fall right down an
iron pipe into the cars.”

“Come on!” I said. “Come on! Let's go somewhere.”

So Swatty looked at me; but I hadn't said he was a liar or anything, so
there was nothing to fight about. If I had wanted to I could have said I
had an uncle somewhere that didn't bother with dirty old coal and ashes
at all, but had his own natural gas well and used natural gas; but my
nose was sore yet from the last time Swatty had pushed it into my face,
so I didn't say it.

We went down to the boat-house and hired a skiff and rowed up the river
to the pond-lily pond. The river was pretty low and it was muddy on the
bank of the river--over knee-deep in mud. Swatty got out over the bow of
the skiff to pull it up on the mud, so the wash from any steamboat would
n't send it adrift, and he went in over the knees of his pants, so we
thought we had better undress in the skiff, and we did. It felt bully to
be undressed outdoors again.

I guess you know how the lily-pond is. On one side is the railroad and
on the other side is the river; but between the pond and the river
is narrow sand, with willows on it--bush willows. It makes a bank all
around the lower end of the pond-lily pond and ends at the railroad. So
me and Bony and Swatty talked it over, and thought we'd better not leave
our clothes in the skiff, because somebody might steal them. First we
thought we'd hide them in the willows, and then we thought we'd carry
them around by the sand spit to the railroad, because the pond-lily
roots were over by the railroad more. So we did. We walked around to the
railroad and left our clothes there, and waded in. Swatty went first.

It was pretty tough. You went into the mud pretty deep, and there
were plants that had scratch-els on them, and the lily plants and the
arrow-leaf plants were so thick you could hardly wade. They were all
around the shore for two or three rods, and you couldn't see over them.
They rustled like corn when we pushed through them. But we knew there
was a big clear place in the middle of the pond, so we waded on out
to it. It was the place where I learned to swim. It wasn't over head
anywhere.

Well, Swatty came to the open place first, and he stopped and said:

“There's somebody out there.”

Me and Bony peeked, and there was. Right off we saw who it was--it was
Scratch-Cat. She was in where the water was under-arm deep, and she
was sort of crying, she was so mad. Then we saw what she was trying
to do--she was trying to learn herself to swim. It was enough to make
anybody laugh.

It looked like she had been at it a long time, for she was so cold she
was shivering. We were near enough to her to see that the black spot on
her arm was a mole and not a leaf or a vaccination, and we could see her
shiver as plain as could be. The way she was learning herself to swim
was this: she put her hands out in front of her and sort of jumped off
her feet and then kicked and pounded the water and went down under. I
guess you know how that feels. You can't get your head above water when
you are that deep unless you stand up; so you paw in the mud, and get
scared because you can't get to your feet. Dell Brown would come up
scared to death, and spit and blow, and sort of cry, and shiver, and
then she would do it all again.

I guess it was pretty tough. Every time she went down she must have
got scratched up by the weeds with scratchels on them--some kind of
smartweed--and she was scared and chilly. It was mighty funny. I guess I
laughed out aloud.

Anyway, all at once she saw Swatty and us. She ducked like a shot, until
only her head was out of water, and me and Bony laughed. But Swatty
didn't. He pushed me and Bony back and said: “Hey! Scratch-Cat! Wait;
I'll show you how to swim.” Only, he said, “I'll showr you how to swim,”
 the way he always says “show.”

So he slid his hands out on the water and turned on his side and swam
towards where she was. He didn't mean nothing. All he meant was to show
her how to swim, because she would never learn the way she was trying.
But Scratch-Cat turned and held her arms straight out in front of her
and hurried for the shore, pushing the weeds away with her hands.

Swatty kept telling her to wait, and once he came up to her, and she
turned and hammered him with her fists, crazy mad, and he let her go on.
The weeds must have scratched her pretty bad, ripping through them that
way; but she got to the railway track and began putting her clothes on
fast. So Swatty said: “Garsh! I bet she gets our clothes and hides them
or something!”

So me and Swatty and Bony hurried to where our clothes were and dressed.
We got most of our duds on and were putting on the rest, when we heard
somebody yelling. It was a woman, and she was over on the river road,
across a cornfield from where we were, and she was yelling like she was
being murdered. I was mighty scared. All I thought of was that whoever
was murdering her would murder her and then come over and murder us.

I guess Bony thought the same thing, for he got white and started to
run down the railway bank toward our skiff. So I started after him. But
Swatty he started to run the other way, down the bank to the cornfield,
towards where the woman was screaming. He rolled under the bob-wire
fence and started down between the com rows as hard as he could go. Me
and Bony stopped and looked, and then we went after him, only slower.
When we got deep into the com we got more scared. We didn't like to be
so far from where Swatty was, with a woman screaming like that and being
murdered. So I hurried up, and Bony came along, blubbering. I told him
to shut up.

We came to the edge of the cornfield and stopped. It was Miss Carter,
our teacher, and a tramp had her by the throat, trying to make her stop
her yelling. And just then Swatty jumped on the tramp. He had a rock,
and he lammed at the tramp with it and hit him on the arm. So then Miss
Carter went limp and stopped yelling, and fell in a pile on the road,
because the tramp let go of her and she fainted.

The road was all tramped up and covered with walked-on flowers Miss
Carter had been getting; but the tramp reached around and grabbed
Swatty and got him by the neck and began to pound his head. Me and Bony
crouched down and looked between the boards of the cornfield fence,
because we was too scared to run away.

Swatty done the best he could, but it wasn't much use. He was getting
killed, I guess. But all at once Scratch-Cat came a-sailing out of the
cornfield and lit on the tramp with both hands.

When her eight claws came raking down his face he let loose of Swatty
and grabbed for Scratch-Cat; but she wasn't where he grabbed. She was
standing away, with her hands clawed and her head sort of pointed at
him, ready to jump again. So Swatty picked up the rock and slung it, and
caught him in the back of the neck. He hollered like a bull and turned,
and Scratch-Cat went at him and raked him on the side of his face. He
lammed at her, and I guess he caught her on her brittle rib, because she
hollered.

She didn't care what happened, I guess, when he hit her brittle rib,
so she went right at him, and Swatty made a dive for his legs and got a
hold on them. The tramp fought good and hard. He went down, but he kept
on fighting; and Swatty hollered for me to get a rock and whack the
tramp on the head with it. Maybe I would have. I don't know. Just then a
top buggy came around the bend of the road, and the tramp showed all he
was worth and beat off Swatty and Scratch-Cat and cut into the woods.
We heard him cracking the brush as he scooted, and that was all we knew
about him.

Well, the man in the top buggy was Herb Schwartz. So he got out and
picked up Miss Carter and fetched her to, and Swatty told him what had
happened. So Herb went to where Scratch-Cat was sitting on the side of
the road, with her hand where her brittle rib had busted. So Swatty went
over there too.

“Garsh! I'd of been killed if you hadn't come!” he said. But she stood
up and looked at him.

'“What'd you come swimming at me when I was naked for?” she said, and
she was as mad as hops. I guess her rib hurt her and made her sort
of crazy mad, and Swatty was the first one that came near her, so she
picked on him. “Why'd you dare?” she screeched at him. “I'll show you
not to!”--or something like that.

So she went for him. She didn't scratch, either; she used her fists. She
fought like crazy, and got her leg back of his, and threw him and piled
on top of him. He had to fight as hard as he knew how to, and it was all
right, because she wasn't a girl--she was something crazy mad. It was
a quick fight and a good one, and then Herb Schwartz grabbed Scratch-Cat
by the shoulder and pulled her off Swatty; but that didn't matter,
because the fight was over anyhow. Swatty had said: “Enough! I won't do
it again!”

Well, as soon as Herb had stood Scratch-Cat up, she turned white and
fell down. She had fainted. It was a good deal of a mess-up. Miss Carter
had got hysterical, and was laughing and crying so she couldn't put
her hair up where it had fell down, and Scratch-Cat was stretched out
fainted, and I guess Herb Schwartz was never so busy in his life before.
He sent me and Bony and Swatty over to the pond-lily pond for a hatful
of water, and while we were gone he hugged Miss Carter until she wasn't
hysterical, because I guess that was what she needed to cure her, and
then he soused Scratch-Cat with the water and she came around all right.
So he took Miss Carter and Scratch-Cat back to town in the top buggy,
and me and Swatty and Bony went back to our skiff and rowed home.

Swatty was pretty quiet. I guess he thought Herb and Miss Carter would
tell all over town how he had been licked by a girl; but he told me and
Bony he would kill us if we told it, so we didn't. But neither did Herb
or Miss Carter. The reason was that Scratch-Cat told them not to tell
she had been fighting. Herb told Swatty that Scratch-Cat had asked them
not to.

After a while Scratch-Cat's brittle rib healed up again and she didn't
have to stay in bed, and I was going down-town on an errand past her
house, and I saw Swatty in her yard. They were playing mum-bledy-peg. So
after that she played with me and Bony and Swatty, and pretty soon with
Mamie Little and my sister and the other girls, and she was almost the
one they liked best.

So one day Swatty said to me:

“Don't you ever darst yell at me that Scratch-Cat is my girl!”

“Aw! I never yelled it!” I said.

“You better not!” he said. “Because she ain't.” So then I knew she was.




VI. THE CARDINAL'S SIGNET RING

Well, for about a day I guess Bony thought he was about the smartest kid
that ever lived. Anyhow, he acted that way and the reason was that his
house had been burglared and mine and Swatty's houses hadn't been. But
that wasn't our fault.

Swatty didn't say much because he thought maybe the burglar would come
around and burglar his house and then he would be as good as Bony. But
the burglar didn't go to any more houses, and me and Swatty got pretty
sick and tired of hearing Bony bragging about the burglar climbing right
in at his window and almost falling over his bed, and about how--if he
had wakened up--he would have gone into his father's room and got his
father's shotgun and shot the burglar.

We got pretty sick of hearing about the reward Bony's father had
offered, and about how the policemen came to the house and looked at
Bony's bedroom window and everything and wrote it all down.

“Garsh!” Swatty said; “it ain't nothing to brag about to be burglared!
The way you talk you'd think nobody in the world could be burglared but
you. If I wanted to I could write to my uncle in Derlingport and he'd
send down a burglar to burglar my house in a minute. And he'd burglar
Georgie's house, too. And my uncle would send down a real burglar, too.”

That was a good one on Bony, because the newspaper said the policemen
said the burglar that bur-glared Bony's house wasn't a real burglar but
only “local talent.”

“Well--well--” Bony said, “well, if your uncle can send down so many
real burglars, why don't he do it, and not leave you sitting there
talking about what he can do all the time?”

“Aw! if you say much more about your old burglar I will write to my
uncle to send some down,” Swatty said.

“Aw! and if you did he wouldn't get nothing! What'd he get at your
house? I bet he wouldn't get any cardinal's signet ring.”

Well, I guess that made Swatty pretty mad. I guess we had heard about
all we wanted to hear about that old signet ring, so Swatty started to
go away, and he said to me:

“Come on! he thinks there ain't nothing in the world but that old signet
ring. I bet it was brass, anyway.”

But the cardinal's signet ring wasn't brass, because it said in the
newspaper it was gold.

I guess I knew plenty about that signet ring before the burglar ever got
it, because once Bony told us about it when we were at his house and he
would have showed it to us, only his mother would not let him.

It had been in the family from generation unto generation. So when
Bony's mother would not let us see it because her hands were in the
dough and boys are too careless, Bony told us what it was like and said
he guessed it was worth a million dollars, or maybe a hundred, anyway,
because it was solid gold and had a red, carved stone in it, and the
cardinal had given it to his son, and he had given it to his son, and it
had always been in the family. So I said:

“Aw! 't ain't so! Because cardinals couldn't give anything to their
sons; they don't have any sons to give anything to.”

“Well, this cardinal gave this ring to his son, so he did,” Bony said.
“This cardinal had a son.”

“No, he didn't!” I said. “I guess I know about cardinals. They don't
have any sons. They can't have sons. That's the law.”

Well, Bony didn't know what to say, because he knew I was right, because
I read a lot of books and he don't. So, if it hadn't been for Swatty I
don't know what we would have done about it. I guess me and Bony would
have been mad at each other forever, or had a fight or something, but
Swatty had just been listening and spoke up.

“Aw!” he said; “that ain't nothing to fight about. The cardinal's signet
ring could be an heirloom from generation to generation and the cardinal
needn't have any son either. He could give it to his grandson, couldn't
he?”

“Of course he could!” Bony said. “That's what he did.”

“Sure he did!” said Swatty. “That's how all cardinals do. When they want
to start an heirloom going they look around for a son to give it to, and
when they haven't any sons they give the heirloom to their grandsons.”

Well, the burglary was about Monday of the last week of school, and
about Tuesday we were sick and tired of it--me and Swatty was--but we
didn't know how to shut Bony up, because we couldn't have burglars come
to our houses just because we wished they would. So Tuesday after school
when I went home my sister Fan was out in the side yard, where the vines
grow on the porch, and she was down on her hands and knees.

Fan had been looking pretty sick for a good while and it was because
Herb had gone back on her, or her on him. I felt mighty sorry for her,
even if she was my sister, and mother said she was worried and that the
only thing to cheer Fan up would be to send her somewhere, far from the
scene. So Fan had said she would go.

So there she was on her knees in the grass and when she saw me she said,
“Georgie!”

“What?” I said.

“Georgie,” she said, “I lost a ring here--one with just one diamond in
it--”

“I know. The ring Herb gave you.”

“Yes. If you find it for me, George,” she said, “I'll give you--I'll
give you ten dollars.”

Well, I tried to divide three into ten, and you can't do it, so I said:

“Maybe I can find it for fifteen dollars,” because that would be five
dollars apiece for me and Swatty and Bony.

Fan looked at me, and then said, “Very well, find it if you can,
please.”

And that wasn't like Fan, because what she would mostly say, would be,
“You little imp, you know where that ring is! You get it this instant or
father will attend to you.”

So I knew she was pretty sick about Herb.

Well, as soon as Fan said that I skipped out the back way, over
to Swatty's, and asked him for the ring, because we had had it in
pardnership, and I had let him have it awhile. I told him what I wanted
it for and he said:

“I ain't got it. I thought you or Bony had it; I gave it to Bony.”

So we went over to Bony's house, and the minute we said “ring” he was
scared stiff. “It was stole,” he said. “The burglar stole it out of my
pants pocket, but I didn't say nothing because I guessed the police
would get it back again.” So that was a nice one, wasn't it? So me and
Swatty were mad at Bony and we wouldn't talk to him or let him play with
us unless we got the ring back, and none of the policemen caught
Bony's burglar. Bony's father printed a reward of fifty dollars in the
newspaper, but my father said that whoever caught the burglar would
n't be half as lucky if he caught him as he would if he ever got fifty
dollars out of Bony's father, because my father would be blessed if he
believed Bony's father had ever seen fifty dollars at one time. So maybe
the policemen knew that. Anyway, they did not catch the burglar. I guess
folks thought he would never be caught, and he never would have been
if it hadn't been for me and Swatty and Mamie Little. I guess he would
never have been caught if Mamie Little had known how to spell “sulphur.”

The burglar got plenty of other things from Bony's house, too, but the
signet ring is the thing I'm telling about because it was the signet
ring that helped Swatty to catch the burglar. That and Mamie Little,
only Mamie Little didn't know she helped until I told her, and then she
didn't understand any better than she did about the sulphur bag. I guess
nobody will know unless I tell it. So I'll tell it.

Thursday afternoon I went past Mamie Little's yard about five o'clock
and she was trying to fix up a couple of old boxes to make a playhouse
and I leaned on the fence and was glad I was there, because nobody else
was there to see me. So I said: “Aw! that's no way to make a playhouse
out of boxes!”

“Oh, dear!” she said. “I know it ain't. I want this one on top of the
other one but I can't lift it.”

“I bet I could lift it!” I said.

“I know you could,” she said. “Boys are stronger than girls.”

“If you don't tell anybody,” I said, “I'll come in and lift it for you.”

So I went in and lifted it, and she was glad. She said it made a dandy
upstairs for her playhouse, and she said boys were fine, because they
were so strong. So I felt pretty good. So she took a hammer and began to
nail some nails, to make shelves and things, and I told her girls didn't
know how to nail, and she said she knew they didn't.

So I took the hammer, and just then I saw Swatty coming. So I threw down
the hammer mighty quick and said:

“I got to go now. My mother wants me, but if you want me to I'll come
over Saturday and we'll fix up the playhouse nice.”

So she did want me to; and I said I'd come and I felt gladder than I
had ever felt before, and I dodged behind the lilac bushes and got out
of her yard the back way, and Swatty did not see me. So that was all
right.

Well, I guess there was diphtheria or scarlet fever or something in town
then and, anyway, my mother and lots of the kids' mothers made us wear
sulphur bags. That was so we wouldn't catch it, whatever it was. They
were little bags about as big as a watch, and there was sulphur in them
and aseophidity, or asophedeta, or asofiditty, or whatever you spell it.

It smells pretty rank but it keeps away whatever you might catch.

Well, going to school Swatty met me and he said:

“Say, let's go fishing down the Slough, tomorrow.”

“I can't, Swatty,” I said, because I wanted to do what I had said I
would do for Mamie Little, only I didn't want to tell Swatty that, so I
said: “I've got to stay home and work.”

“Pshaw!” Swatty said, only he said it “Pshawr!” like he always does. “If
you can't go I won't go, either! If you can't go I'm going to stay home
and split the wood I ought to split.”

“Well, I can't go,” I said. So we went into the schoolhouse and into our
room. Mamie Little was there. She had just hung up her hat and she was
standing by her desk, nearly across the room, and she looked fine, her
cheeks were so red and her eyes were kind of sparkly. There were only
one or two there besides us.

So, while she was standing by her desk she sort of picked at her dress
on her chest a couple of times the way I had been picking at my shirt
front, and I was glad to think she had a sulphur bag, too, like I had.
It was nice to think we both had the same, only she didn't know I had
one.

So I whistled a little whistle--“Wheet!”--and she looked at me. I
guess she smiled at me. I felt mighty brave. So I started with the
deaf-and-dumb alphabet, pointing at my eye for “I,” and rubbing my hands
across each other for “h” and I spelled out “I have a” and she nodded
her head at each word to show she knew what I was spelling. So I spelled
out “sulphur,” because what I wanted to tell her was “I have a sulphur
bag, too,” but when I got to “sulph” she shook her head and I had to
begin again, because she couldn't understand.

I was standing up and she was standing up and she was standing so she
looked right at me, and I spelled and spelled. Sometimes I began at the
beginning and spelled “I have sulph” and sometimes I spelled “sulphur”
 over and over, but she just shook her head each time and smiled and
waited. She was awfully interested, and more and more scholars came in,
and pretty soon they were all watching me and trying to spell what I was
spelling, but nobody did, I guess. Mamie Little got awfully interested
and she was mighty eager to find out what I was trying to spell. Then,
all at once, I knew why she couldn't tell; it was because she didn't
have any sulphur bag on. So, all at once, I felt mighty cheap! There
she was, thinking I had something awfully important I was trying to tell
her, and she didn't have a sulphur bag, and I was making a fool of her
before the whole school, because what would she think of me telling her
I had a sulphur bag if she didn't have one? And making such a fuss about
it, as if it was something wonderful like telling her her father was
dead, or something.

Then, all of sudden, I remembered I was going to her yard the next day,
to help her with her playhouse, and I felt worse than ever. The first
thing she would want to know would be what I had tried to spell out,
and if I told her she would think I was crazy to make so much fuss about
such a thing, and if I did not tell her she would be mad at me forever
and maybe talk about me to the other girls. I couldn't bear to think
about it and I couldn't help thinking about it. So, after school, I
hurried away as fast as I could, and when Swatty caught up with me I
told him I had changed my mind and that I would go fishing with him. So
that is how Mamie Little helped catch Bony's burglar. If it hadn't been
for Mamie Little not knowing how to spell “sulphur” I wouldn't have gone
fishing, and Swatty wouldn't have gone either, and the burglar wouldn't
have been caught.

So Saturday morning I got in enough wood for all day and it wasn't
much, because it was summer and the kitchen wood was all I had to get
in. Then I hunted up a new tin can, because when we get through fishing
we always throw the old one into the Slough, because by that time the
worms that are left are pretty; bad. Sometimes, if the can has been
in the sun, they are even worse than that. So I got a new can and went
around to the other side of the barn and the spade was there yet, from
the last time I had dug worms, so I dug some more.

Just then Swatty came into the yard and he was ready to start. So my
mother came to the back door with some sandwiches and things in a box,
and I said:

“Aw! I don't want to carry a big box like that! Aw! I just want a couple
of sandwiches in my pocket!”

“Georgie!” she said. “You take this box! You 'll be glad enough of
everything that's in it!”

Me and Swatty went up over the hill and down past the Catlic church to
South Riverbank and we stopped at the pump on the corner and had a good
drink and cooled off our feet in the mud under the pump spout, because
the sidewalks were hot.

The water in the Slough wasn't high and it wasn't low. Once the Slough
ran through to the river at this end but now it was all filled in with
sawdust from the sawmill, and a big conveyor blowpipe kept blowing more
sawdust into the Slough from the mill, and all the surface of the Slough
was floating sawdust. Then, a little further along, it was water-lily
leaves. Then, further along, it was plain Slough for miles and miles and
miles.

The water was three or four feet down from the top of the bank and the
bank was covered with pretty good grass, and all along the Slough there
was a path worn, because kids and fellows had fished in the Slough ever
since there was a Riverbank, and before that the Indians had fished in
it, I guess. Everywhere, close to the edge of the bank in the shade of
the trees, there were places worn smooth-like an old chair seat--where
fellows had sat and fished for years and years until they were regular
fishing places. When you saw one of them you knew it was a good fishing
place and that there was a bent root, all worn smooth and sometimes
almost worn in two, part way down the bank, to rest your feet on.

It was all quiet and still, like a fishing place should be, except for
the “urr-urr” of the mills away off, or the “caw caw!” of crows or, once
in a while, somebody knocking the ashes out of a pipe against a root,
across the Slough or a little splash when somebody caught a fish. Then
everything would be quiet again.

So me and Swatty walked along down the path, because we thought we would
go as far as we had ever been, or farther, this time. Once we stopped
and ate 'most all of my lunch. It was nine o'clock but we were mighty
hungry. Then we went on.

We got two or three miles down the Slough and most of the fishing places
were empty there and I wanted to stop but Swatty said: “Aw! come on!
Let's go on down to the point!” so we went.

The point wasn't much of a point but you felt more out in the Slough
when you were on it. There was a big water maple at the end of it, with
fine roots to sit on, and I sat on some of the roots and fished and
Swatty sat on some others and fished. It was good and hot and the Slough
smelled warm and weedy and we liked it, because that was part of the
regular fishing smell. There was just a little ripple and the corks
bobbed up and down gently and we set our poles among the roots and just
leaned back and felt good. Over across the Slough was another point, but
more rounded and bigger, and it was green and cool looking, with grass
and three big elms on it, and back in the fields a cow's bell jingled
once in a while, and the crows cawed, and the sawmill hummed away off in
the distance, and it got hotter and hotter. I watched my cork until
it seemed to lose itself in the ripples and my eyes got sleepier and
sleepier and, the next thing I knew, I woke up and Swatty wasn't there!
Neither was my cork!

The first thing I did was give my pole a yank and out came a jim-dandy
goggle-eye sunfish, just about as good as I ever caught. I held him so
the stickers wouldn't sting me and got the hook out of him and strung
him on a piece of twine and I was tying the string to a root so the
goggle-eye would be in the water when somebody down the Slough a ways
hawked, clearing the tobacco out of his throat, and I looked around and
saw Swatty coming back to the point, not making any noise. He held up a
finger for me to be quiet and then he climbed out onto the roots of the
maple and sat down.

“I caught a dandy goggle-eye, Swatty,” I whispered.

He leaned over toward me.

“Don't make any noise!” he whispered. “Bony is over on that point.”

I looked and I saw him. It was pretty far across the Slough and Bony
couldn't hear us if we whispered.

“Well, he can't hear us, can he?” I whispered back.

“No,” Swatty said and then he climbed over beside me and sat on a root.
“There's a man down there,” he said and he pointed.

“I heard him spit.” I whispered. I began to feel scary because there was
n't any use for Swatty to be so whispery unless there was something to
feel scary at, was there?

“He's got Bony's father's signet ring,” Swatty whispered. “Anyway, I
guess he's got it. He's got a ring like what Bony says his father's ring
is like. He's fishing and he's got the ring on his thumb.”

Well, then I knew what Swatty had done. While I was asleep he had
sneaked down to see what luck the man was having and he had seen the
ring.

“Gee!” I said.

Swatty sat awhile with his forehead wrinkled and looked at the Slough
and he was thinking.

“Garsh!” he said; “I'd like to be the one to get that fifty dollars. I
wish I knew for certain it is Bony's father's ring. Fifty dollars is a
lot of money. If I had it I'd put it in the bank.”

“What bank?” I asked him. “The Savings Bank or the Riverbank National?”

“I guess maybe I'd put half in one and half in the other,” Swatty said.
“Then if one bank busted I'd have half left, anyway.”

“Well, if one did bust maybe you'd get some of your money back,” I said.
“My father had money in a bank once and it busted and he got part of it
back.”

“That's so,” Swatty said. “If I put in twenty-five and the bank busted
maybe I'd get back fifteen of it. That would be forty dollars I'd have,
even if the bank did bust. I'd like to have it.”

So we sat there awhile and the crows cawed and the cowbell jingled and
it was quiet, but we didn't catch any more fish.

“If we hadn't got mad at Bony he would be over here,” Swatty said after
a while.

“Well, what if he was?” I said.

“Well, he could sneak up and see if that ring is his father's ring,
couldn't he?” said Swatty.

“Well, then,” I said, “why don't you call to him to come over?”

As soon as I said it I knew it wasn't much to say, because it was two
or three miles back to the end of the Slough and four or six miles
Bony would have to go to get around to us, and he wouldn't come anyway
because he'd think maybe we wanted to lick him or something. And if we
shouted what we wanted him for, the burglar would hear us and would get
away from there mighty quick.

“I'm going over and get Bony.”

“How are you going to get him?” I asked.

“I'm going to row over,” he said. “You stay here and watch that man and
I'll go over and get Bony.” Well, I guessed that if he said he would,
he'd find some way to row over whether there was a boat or not, because
that was the way Swatty was. When he wanted to do anything he did it. So
I looked down the Slough and I could see the end of the man's fishpole
sticking out over the water and his cork floating and Swatty climbed
onto the bank and took his fishpole and went up the Slough. He had to
go pretty far before he found a boat and the boat he found was not much
good. It was an old flatboat and one end was busted some and it was
water-logged. Swatty had to stay away up in one end to keep the busted
end out of water and he paddled the best he could with a piece of fence
board. He paddled out to the middle of the Slough and stopped there and
pretended to fish a while and then he paddled a little nearer Bony and
pretended to fish a while longer, and then he paddled to shore near
where Bony was and got out of the flatboat and went up to Bony. For a
while they sat together and I guessed Swatty was talking to Bony about
the ring and the fifty dollars and the man, and coaxing Bony to come to
our side of the Slough and see if it was his father's ring the man had
on his thumb.

So all the time I kept looking three ways--at Bony and Swatty, and at
my cork, and at the end of the man's fishpole--and all at once when I
looked the man's fishpole wasn't there. It was gone!

So I looked harder, but it was gone, no matter how hard I looked. So
then I knew Swatty would give me a whale of a licking if he came back
and found out I had let the man get away while he was fetching Bony, and
I climbed off the root and up the bank and I was just starting to run,
to go where the man had been, when I saw him. He was right in the middle
of the path near where he had been fishing and he was bent down with
his back toward me, picking up fish, because the string he had had them
strung on had broken. He was stringing them again and as he picked them
up I could see the ring on his thumb.

Pretty soon he had all his fish strung again and then he straightened
up and took a chew of tobacco and looked up into a tree that was right
there, and I looked up and saw he had put his fishpole up the tree, so I
guessed maybe he fished there pretty often, or was coming back sometime.
So then he slouched off. I watched him.

He was big but he wasn't very old. Maybe he was twenty or thirty. His
clothes were pretty old and faded and he looked lazy in the arms and
legs and when he walked he walked tired. He went down the path a ways
and then he climbed over the fence there was along there and I went
across the path and watched him from behind another tree. It was a
ploughed field there and he walked in a furrow clear across the field to
the road that was on the other side and climbed over another fence. So I
climbed up on my fence and watched to see where he would go. There were
three little houses across the road and he went into the one on the end
toward town. So then I guessed that was where he lived and I got down
off my fence and went back to the point.

Swatty and Bony were in the boat and Swatty was paddling it as well as
he could but it was only halfway across. Then, all at once, Swatty began
to paddle harder. He paddled as hard as he could and then, I guess, he
said something to Bony and Bony began to bail out the boat as fast as he
could. Then Bony began to cry. I could hear him where I was and Swatty
shouted at him and looked over his shoulder to see how far he had to
paddle. Then Swatty dropped his paddle stick and began to bail with
his hat like he was crazy. And before I could see it, almost, the old,
rotten flatboat took a dive and Swatty and Bony were in the water.
Bony yelled and went under but Swatty came right up, spitting water and
kicking out with his hands. It was a good thing he was barefoot.

Well, Swatty looked all around as soon as he got the water out of his
eyes but he couldn't see Bony. So he dived for him.

There's one place nobody ever swims and that is the Slough. All you have
to do is to look down into it anywhere and you know why. All you see
when you look down is seaweed--tons and oceans of it--all tangled and
twisty, and old trees and branches sticking around in it to get caught
onto. When the Slough is low you can't row on it because the seaweed
grabs your oars and holds on like it was some mean man trying to drown
your boat. It scares you. And all in among the seaweed are tough weeds
and water-lily stems and water vines. There have been plenty of boys
drowned in the Slough, I guess. So Bony had got caught in the weeds and
vines and things.

Pretty soon Swatty came to the top but he didn't have Bony, but his arms
were covered with seaweed. He spit out water and scraped the seaweed
off his arms and then he took his nose in his hand and dived again. That
time he got him. He got him by one leg and he swam for shore dragging
Bony behind him and the seaweed strung out behind Bony. His head was all
covered with it.

I was crying pretty hard, I guess. So Swatty told me to shut up and
he turned Bony over on his back and began scraping the seaweed off his
face, and Bony's face was scratched a good deal from the rough weeds and
maybe from where I had dragged him up the bank on his face. I thought he
was dead but Swatty didn't. He leaned down and listened to Bony's heart
and said all he needed was to be pumped out. So he started to pump him
out.

Swatty got down on his knees a-straddle of Bony and took Bony's hands
in his and pumped him the way he had heard you ought to pump a drowned
person. He pushed Bony's arms clear back until they touched the ground
over his head and then he drew them forward until they touched the
ground again, and he kept right at it. Every once in a while Swatty
would shake his head to shake the water out of his ears but he went
right on pumping. So I stood and blubbered.

Well, no water pumped out of Bony. Swatty pumped and pumped but no
water came out of Bony's mouth and pretty soon Swatty stopped and took a
couple of deep breaths.

“Garsh!” he said; “I thought he would pump easier than that!”

So he pumped him again a few times and then stopped again. It looked as
if it wasn't any use.

“I know what's the matter,” Swatty said. “We've got to prime him. There
ain't enough water in him to start unless he's primed. When our cistern
is low at home we have to prime it before the water starts pumping up,
and that's what we've got to do.”

Well, I guessed that was so. Our cistern pump was that way too. So I
took my bait can and washed it out good and clean and got a can of water
and I primed Bony. I poured a little water in Bony's mouth and Swatty
pumped.

“Prime him some more,” Swatty said.

So I primed him some more. It didn't seem to do any good.

“Aw, prime him a lot!” Swatty said, so I poured all the water I had in
the can into Bony's mouth and went and got some more.

“Keep on!” Swatty said. “He'll start pretty soon. We've got to get the
water pumped out of him.”

So I was priming Bony again when somebody behind us said:

“What are you trying to do to that boy?”

I looked around, and Swatty looked around. It was the man with the ring
on his thumb.

“He's drowned,” Swatty said, “and we're trying to pump him out.”

The man took ahold of Swatty's shoulder and threw him almost into the
fence. He stooped down and grabbed Bony and threw him across a big maple
root, face down, and began to pump and pretty soon Bony began to pump
out. The man pumped him pretty dry and then he put him in the sun and
began to rub him good and after a while Bony opened his eyes. To see him
open his eyes was one of the best things I ever saw. I was mighty glad I
had helped to undrown him.

Bony was pretty much wilted. Me and Swatty didn't know how we would ever
get him home but we didn't have to.

“About one more can of water in this kid and he would have been gone for
good,” the man said. “Now, you help him onto my back and I'll get him
home for you.”

We got Bony onto his back and Bony hung around his neck and the man held
Bony's legs under his arms. He climbed the fence with him that way and
started off across the ploughed field and me and Swatty went after him.
We didn't even think about taking our fishpoles along. We went across
the field and the man stopped at his house and called his mother and
she gave Bony some whiskey in hot water while the man went over to a
farmer's house and got a team and a wagon. So, while he was gone Swatty
said to Bony:

“Is it?”

He meant the cardinal's signet ring, and was it it.

“Yes, it's it,” Bony said, but not very loud. He was pretty much drowned
yet.

So we all went back to town in the farmer's wagon; me and Bony and
Swatty and the man and the farmer kid that was driving. So Swatty sat
with the farmer kid and talked to him.

“That man saved Bony's life,” Swatty said. “Who is he?”

“Him? He's Lazy Joe,” the farmer kid said. “He's Lazy Joe Mulligan. He
don't do nothing but fish and loaf.”

So then Swatty knew who the burglar was.

We drove up to town and Swatty told the farmer kid where to drive and
pretty soon we came to Bony's house. The man, Lazy Joe Mulligan, looked
pretty funny, you bet, when we drove right up to the house he had
burglared. He put his hand in his pocket and when he pulled it out the
ring was gone.

“Come on!” Swatty said to me.

“Where to?” I asked him.

“Down to Bony's father's to get that fifty dollars,” Swatty said. So we
went.

Well, I guess we forgot to tell Bony's father about Bony being drowned
and pumped out. We just told him we had the burglar up at his house and
that we wanted the fifty dollars, and he rushed out and up the street
and got a policeman and hurried to his house. Lazy Joe was there yet,
telling Bony's mother how he had pumped Bony out, but the farmer kid was
n't there, because Bony's mother had sent him down to get Bony's father.
She wanted Bony's father to give Lazy Joe five dollars or something for
pumping Bony out.

Then me and Swatty and Bony's father and the policeman came in and
Bony's father was saying: “Officer, arrest him! He's the man that stole
my property,” while Bony's mother was saying: “Edward, give him five
dollars or something! He's the man that saved your son's life.”

“How is that?” asked Bony's father, and he was pretty much mixed; “I
thought this was the burglar.”

“He is the burglar,” said Swatty. “He's got the cardinal's ring in his
pocket right now. I seen it, and Georgie seen it, and Bony seen it.”

Then Lazy Joe didn't know what to say. Then he said:

“I'll give everything back.”

So that was how they fixed it. Bony's father saved fifty-five dollars.
He saved the five dollars he ought to have given Lazy Joe for saving
Bony's life and he saved the fifty dollars he ought to have given
Swatty. So all me and Swatty knew next was that we were out on the
street and we didn't have anything to show for catching the burglar. All
we had was what Bony's father said. What he said was:

“Get out of here, you little rats! Be thankful you haven't my child's
death on your shoulders!”

Well, I was going, but Swatty stood right there.

“No, sir!” he said. “I won't go. You can cheat us out of fifty dollars
reward, maybe, but you've got to give back the diamond ring this burglar
has that belongs to Herb and Fan. You got to give that back, because it
ain't yours.”

“Have you got a ring like that?” the policeman asked Lazy Joe.

“Yes,” he said, and he took it out of one of his pockets. So Swatty took
it and we skipped out. We went right over to my house, because it was
dark by now, and I went to Fan and told her we had her ring for her. I
didn't know what I would say when she asked me where I got it, but she
didn't ask. She just went to her drawer and got out fifteen dollars and
gave it to me and didn't say anything. Only when I went out of the room
I heard her bed creak sudden, and I knew she had sort of thrown herself
down on it, broken-hearted, like in a novel.




VII. THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Well, it looked like that vacation would be a sort of nice one--at the
beginning of it, anyway--because Fan had taken mother's advice and gone
over to Chicago to visit Aunt Beatrice, and Mamie Little had gone down
to Betzville to be on her uncle's farm awhile, because it would do her
good.

When Fan went she went in a closed carriage as far as the depot, because
she was so pale and peaked she didn't want anybody to see her and have
Herb hear of it. She sent him his ring back, I guess, before she went.

I thought it was pretty mean that Fan had to be mostly sick like that,
while Herb was as well as ever and having a good time with Miss Carter,
as far as I knew, but it wasn't any of my business. Mother said she
guessed Fan would get over it, because she was young yet and, goodness
knew! there wasn't so much difference between one man and another, but
that if people like Bony's mother didn't stop coming over and talking
about it she would go mad. And I guess that was so because Bony's mother
is some talker. I 've heard her talk.

I heard her talk about Fan one day, and it made me sick. And then she
talked about Bony, and it made me sicker.

I was sitting on the edge of our porch waiting for Swatty and Bony. I
was tying a piece of salt pork on the bottom of my foot to keep from
getting the “lockjaw, because I had stepped on a rusty nail, and I
thought maybe I had better scrape some of the sand out of the nail hole
before I put the pork on, so it would heal quicker, and I was scraping
it out with my barlow knife. That's how I happened to be sitting on the
edge of the porch; but Bony's mother and my mother were at the other end
of the porch. So then Bony's mother said:

“No, I have never used a switch on my son. I have never struck him
with my hand, nor has his father. We don't believe in it. We use moral
suasion.” That means they jaw Bony. They corner him up somewhere and jaw
him until he blubbers, the way the teachers jaw the girls when they get
too big to paddle, and then Bony's mother blubbers and makes Bony kiss
her and say that now he will be a better and truer boy and keep the Ten
Commandments and not smoke com silk any more. Or whatever it is.

So my mother didn't say anything because when she thinks I need it
she wales me good. Anyway, I'd rather be waled ten times a day than be
moral-suasioned like Bony, and so would Swatty, and so would all the
kids, and so would Bony. But my mother didn't say anything because
Bony's mother was a caller and you don't fight with callers until after
they've got you so perfectly exasperated you just have to speak your
mind.

So Bony's mother said:

“Yes, indeed!” and she said it the way women say things when they 're
being stylish. “Yes, indeed! the rod implants fear in the child, and we
should rule by love. My child shall never know fear. The normal child
never knows fear.”

Well, that's when I almost laughed out loud. Such a smarty, sitting
there and letting on she knew anything about boys! Say, I guess she
never was a boy! “Normal boys never know fear!” She must have thought
she was in heaven, talking about kid angels and not about boys!

Boys are always afraid of something. Even Swatty used to be afraid of
that old witch, Mrs. Groogs. We other boys used to go across the street
from where she lived and holler:

     “Old Mother Groogsy, oh!
     Lost her needle and couldn't sew!
     Old Mother Groogsy, oh!
     Lost her nee-dul and could-dent sew!
     Old Mu-uth-er Gur-roog-sy, oh!
     Lu-ost her nee-eedul and ku-uld-dent sew!”

And then we'd throw clods at her shanty until she came out with a stick
or broom--mostly it was the cane she used to walk with--and then we'd
all throw clods at her at once and run. It made her pretty mad. But
Swatty made her maddest. He knew a German rhyme he could say pretty
fast, and he'd say it and she would get so mad she would shake all over.

Well, one day when we were all sort of teasing her like that, and Swatty
was with us, she came out with a sword. It was a horse soldier's sword,
a saber, and it was so big she could hardly lift it, but she could with
both hands, and she came right at us across the street, swinging it
around her head

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