Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

“I don’t like that mean old Toady Williams.” So I went home.

That evening Mr. Murphy, the detective, came up to my house and Mr. Little came with him; and Mr. Murphy asked me all the questions Mr. Little had asked, and a lot more, and I told him all about Slim Finnegan. He asked where Swatty and Bony lived and how to get to their houses. So then Mr. Murphy said:

“If the boy is telling the truth this may be more important than we imagined. I have thought for some time that the reason Slim Finnegan left town was because he knew something of this affair.”

So I guess that was the reason Slim Finnegan hadn’t come around to stab us – he wasn’t in Riverbank. I guess it was a month more before they found him down in Oklahoma and fetched him back to Riverbank because me and Swatty and Bony had oathed that he had stolen the keg of powder. Petty larceny was what it was called. That was what they arrested him for.

Well, come to find out, Slim Finnegan hadn’t blown up anything, and it wasn’t even his keg of powder that done it. He had stole the powder to load a shotgun with, to go hunting, and he showed Mr. Murphy the dry powder keg, with most of the powder in it yet. So he wasn’t the dynamiter, after all.

But his father was. Mr. Murphy gave Slim Finnegan three degrees and said to him, “I guess you know who blew up the houses and if you don’t tell I’ll send you to the penitentiary for twenty years,” and Slim Finnegan – the mean sneak – told that his father and two other men had done it, and they were arrested and went to prison.

So me and Swatty and Bony talked about which of us ought to have the one-thousand-five-hundred-dollars reward, and we made up our minds that Swatty ought to have it because he was the one that went back and saw that Slim Finnegan was really stealing a keg of powder, and that if Swatty didn’t get it I ought to have it, because I was the one that told Mamie Little, and that if I didn’t get it Mamie Little ought to have it, because if it hadn’t been for her I never would have told.

But none of us got it. Mr. Murphy got it. The only thing Swatty and Bony got was that they didn’t get stabbed. And I got Mamie Little back for my secret girl again.

XI. “THIEF! THIEF!”

While Mamie Little’s father’s house was getting fixed up, after being dynamited, they went someplace else to live, and the only people that lived across the street from us were the Burtons. There weren’t any Burtons to play with, because the only children they had was Tom Burton, who was older than my sister Fan, and that summer he began taking Fan to ride with the dandy horses and carriage the Burtons’ hired man took care of.

The Burtons’ hired man’s name was Jimmy, and everybody called him that except Mrs. Burton – she called him James. I guess Jimmy was forty years old. Or maybe he was fifty, or thirty-five, or something. He was thin and balder than hired men generally are, and his only bad habit was putting angle worms in a pickle bottle and setting the bottle in the sun to dissolve the worms into angle-worm oil for his rheumatism in the winter; but summer was when the worms were, so he had to get a lot of worms in the summer to last through the winter.

Well, Jimmy had been with the Burtons six years and Annie, our hired girl, had been with us on and off, for five years. I guess everybody thought she hadn’t any other name at all until one evening when Jimmy came over and knocked at the back door and asked Mother if Miss Dombacher was home. She wasn’t, because she had gone to the Evangelical Lutheran Church; but after that Jimmy used to come over, and Annie would put two chairs out in the? yard under the apple tree and they would sit and talk. Or Jimmy would talk. He would talk and talk and talk, and every once in a while Annie would say, “Yes,” and, after she learned it, “No.” So, after a couple of years, Jimmy began to hold Annie’s hand when he talked to her, and in a couple of years more they got engaged. I guess they liked each other.

I was in our dining-room one day, looking to see if Annie had put any fresh cookies in the jar in the closet, when I heard my mother say, “Oh, Annie!” in the kitchen, as if she was sorry about something. So then Annie said:

“I bin sorry to go avay, too, ma’am, but it is right everybody should get married once or twice.”

“I know,” my mother said; “but I don’t know what I will ever do without you, Annie.”

So then Annie cried, and there were no cookies, so I went out.

Well, it was like this: Jimmy had been saving his money ever since Annie came to our house and now he had enough to get married on and buy a couple of acres; so they were going to be married, and he was going to leave the Burtons and raise garden stuff and peddle it. Annie was going to raise chickens and sell eggs, and they would have a cow and sell milk.

So now I come to the story part of the story. I guess what the story is about is that sometimes it is a good thing for a fellow to have a girl, because if Mamie Little hadn’t been my girl maybe Jimmy and Annie would never have been married.

There were two parts about the story. One was that a circus was coming to town and me and Swatty weren’t going; the other was that the schoolhouse wore out and they built a new one.

The night before the circus was coming there was going to be a reception in the dandy big new schoolhouse to raise money for a library. Everybody was going to go, and I guess everybody old enough was going to take his girl. Anyway me and Swatty and Bony got to talking about taking girls to parties and receptions and things, and the first thing you know we said we’d do it.

I guess I said Swatty was afraid, and Swatty dared me back, and we both dared Bony, and so we wouldn’t any of us take the dare. So Bony asked Lucy and she said she’d go with him if my mother would let her. When Bony told me I didn’t believe him, but I asked Lucy and she said Bony had asked her, and that Mamie Little was as mad as mad because I hadn’t asked Mamie. So I said:

“Aw! How could I ask her when I hain’t seen her yet?”

“You could, too, see her, if you wanted to,” Lucy said. “You could see her every minute of every day, if you wasn’t a ‘fraid-cat.”

“‘T ain’t so. I’m not a ‘fraid-cat!” I said.

“‘T is so, and you are! ‘Fraidie-cat! You ain’t going to take Mamie Little, and you’re her fellow!”

“I am, too, going to take her!” I said back.

But I wasn’t going to take Mamie Little. I wouldn’t have asked her for a million dollars. But I didn’t have to ask her. I met her that afternoon. She was on the other side of the street and I just went along as if I didn’t see her. So she called across: “Oo-oo! Georgie! You know!”

“Aw! What do I know?” I asked back.

“You know! The reception!” she said. Well, I just went along and didn’t say anything. But that evening when I got home my mother said:

“I hear you are getting to be quite a beau, Georgie.”

I didn’t know what she meant, so I said, “Huh?”

“Mrs. Little called this afternoon,” my mother said, “and she told me you had asked Mamie Little to go to the new school reception with you. That’s very nice.”

I didn’t say anything. It was Lucy, and I was mighty mad at her for telling Mamie Little I was going to take her; but I was kind of glad, too. I thought, “Well, anyway, Swatty and Bony are going to take girls.”

The reception was the next night, so when Swatty and Bony came over the next afternoon I told them I was going to take Mamie Little, and Swatty said that was right, everybody was going to take a girl.

So I asked him who he was going to take, because he had never let on he had a girl.

“Garsh!” he said, “I ain’t going to take any girl!”

That made me sick. Me and Bony had stood right up like men and had asked girls, and Swatty had promised he would take one, and now he was backing out. So I said:

“Aw! You said you would take one!”

“Well, don’t I know it?” Swatty said. “Of course I said I would, but I forgot.”

“What did you forget?” I asked.

“I forgot I was married,” Swatty said.

We were all sitting under our apple tree, out in the yard, and it was a good thing we were not sitting on a roof, because I would have fell off and killed myself, I was so surprised.

“Aw! When was you married?” I said.

“That time I went to Derlingport to visit my uncle,” Swatty said.

“Aw! Who did you marry?”

“A girl,” he said.

“Well, if you married a girl why didn’t you ever tell us about it before?”

“Garsh! I can’t remember everything that happened when I was in Derlingport, can I? Mebbe I forgot I was married.”

“Aw, pshaw!” I said. “What did you want to go and get married for, Swatty?”

“Well, I couldn’t help it, could I?” he asked.

“You don’t think I’d go and get married if I could help it, do you? My – my uncle made me.”

“Why did he make you?” asked Bony.

“Because my aunt had a felon on her finger. She had a felon on her finger and it almost killed her to dam stockings, so my uncle said if I wore any more holes in my stockings I’d have to get a wife of my own to dam them.”

So then we asked Swatty what his wife was like, and he told us a lot about her. She was an Indian princess, and when you first looked at her she looked all right, but pretty soon you saw she had a tomahawk in her belt and the edge of it was all dried over with blood, because she had had eight other husbands before Swatty, and she had got mad at all of them and had killed them and scalped them. She had an album on her parlor table, but instead of photographs in it she had the scalps of her husbands.

Swatty said there was just room in the scalp album for one more scalp, and that every once in a while when he was at her house having his stockings darned she would look at his head and kind of sigh.

Well, we talked it over, and Swatty made us promise never to tell any one he had been married, because if his mother knew it she would take him out in the stable and wale him with a strap. He said that was why he didn’t dare take any girl to the new school reception, because if his wife heard of it she would be jealous and she would come down and tomahawk him and maybe kill him. And if she didn’t kill him his mother would notice his scalp was gone, the next time she washed his head, and would wale him anyway.

Well, my mother helped me dress for the reception, and then she gave me twenty cents to spend. I had five cents of my own she didn’t know about. So that was all right.

It was dark already. I went along, kind of dragging my hand along the pickets of the fences and wishing I was dead or something, and it got darker and darker. The new house Mamie Little lived in was away out over Grimes’s Hill, and when I got to the door Mr. Little and Mrs. Little and Mamie were just getting ready to come out, and Mr. Little said: “Well! Here is our cavalier!”

Mamie and me walked in front, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but I kept feeling sort of chilly when I thought of going into the reception with Mamie. But before we got to the schoolhouse Mamie said to me:

“Say, Georgie! Don’t you want a ticket for the circus?”

I said aw, I didn’t want to take her ticket away from her; but she said she had one too, because her father was editor of the paper and he got them complimentary.

As soon as we got to the reception Mrs. Little said: “Now, you children run along and enjoy yourselves.”

Mamie said, right away: “Shall we get some ice cream first?”

I said that would be all right, because mebbe people wouldn’t notice I was with Mamie Little and think I brought her. So we sat down at a table and a girl took our order and brought us strawberry and vanilla – big dishes – and passed us the cake and we took two pieces of cake apiece.

That was all right; but when we were eating Swatty and Bony came past and said: “Ho, Georgie! He brought a girl!”

That was all right for Bony! He had sneaked out of bringing a girl, and that was mighty mean, after he had gone and got me to bring one. I said I’d fix him when I got him, and he was scared, too! So then we ate our ice cream slow, to make it last longer, and I forgot how mean I felt because I had brought a girl, when whoever was opposite us got through and asked how much he owed.

“Let me see!” the girl said. “Two ice creams at ten cents is twenty cents, and two pieces of cake. That makes thirty cents.”

Well, I almost rammed my spoon down my throat! I had never thought about the cake being extra, and we had had four pieces, and that made twenty cents, and the ice cream was twenty cents so it made forty cents all together, and twenty-five cents was all the money I had! I was so scared my throat sort of closed up on me. I guess my face got as red as fire, and I leaned forward and took a big bite of cake, so Mamie Little would n’t see how red my face was, and then I choked on the cake! I guess I never was so choked in my life. And I put a paper napkin up to my face and went out into the hall.

I guess Mamie Little sat there at the table; I don’t know. As soon as I was out in the hall I knew what I was going to do. I squeezed in among the people and got to the door and skipped.

As soon as I got home my father asked me did I take Mamie Little home; so I didn’t say anything. I went right upstairs to bed. After while my father came up and asked me again if I had gone home with Mamie Little, so I said I hadn’t; I said I didn’t want to. I said her folks could take her home if they wanted to. So Father said he had a mind to lick me; but he didn’t. So I guess Mamie Little got home all right. It wouldn’t have helped her home if my father had licked me, but that’s the way fathers are.

The next morning, about four o’clock, me and Swatty and Bony went down to see the circus unload. We saw it. And then we went up to the circus grounds and saw the tent go up and everything. So Bony said:

“Aw! Don’t you wish you was going to the circus?”

So I said he needn’t be so smart, that I was going, because I had a ticket. So then I remembered that I had the twenty cents my mother had given me to buy the ice cream with, only I hadn’t spent it because I came away so quick. So I told Swatty he could have the ticket, because I had twenty-five cents to get into the circus with. So Swatty was glad. He said he’d be my Dutch uncle as long as I lived, and that the first dollar he saw rolling uphill he’d pay me back, if he could catch it.

Well, we walked downtown with the parade and saw it, and walked back to the circus grounds with it. Me and Swatty and Bony was the first to go into the tent. We were right up against the rope when the ticket taker let it down. So we hurried right through, because a lot of folks was pushing behind us. The ticket taker yelled something at us, but I didn’t hear what it was and we scooted for the menagerie tent.

When we were looking at the ostriches in their cage Swatty got close beside me and said: “Lookee here!”

I looked down, and he had his ticket in his hand yet, because that was why the ticket taker had yelled at us. Swatty had sneaked in without giving his ticket.

“What did you do that for?” I said.

“Because I’m hungry,” he said.

“You can’t eat your ticket,” I said.

“You wait and you’ll see,” he said, so then we went into the big tent and we climbed up to the top row. When we poked our heads out we could see right down where the ticket taker was taking tickets and all the people were crowding to get in. Right down below us on the ground a bum, or tent man, was asleep on his face with his arm under his head. His coat was beside him. He was breathing hard.

So then Swatty leaned out as far as he could and waved the ticket he had, and called out who wanted to buy a ticket for a quarter. That was just like Swatty anyhow. He was pretty slick. So pretty soon a man said he’d buy the ticket, and he tossed a quarter up to Swatty. With a quarter we could get enough peanuts to keep alive until supper time.

Me and Swatty and Bony was just going to draw our heads in when we saw Jimmy and Annie. I was going to yell at them when I saw something that made me forget to yell. Swatty saw it, too.

There was a man standing by the ropes that made the narrow place people had to go through, but he was outside of the ropes on our side, and just when Jimmy came opposite him and got a step past him his hand went out like a flash and something dropped on the ground and the bum slid out his hand and grabbed what had dropped, and slid it under the coat and went on pretending he was asleep. The man by the ropes had picked Jimmy’s wallet out of his pocket.

Well, I didn’t know it, but Jimmy had all the money he was going to buy a farm with in that wallet. It was circus day, and he didn’t dare leave it at home, because of thieves; so he brought it with him.

I didn’t think of anything to do, and neither did Bony, but Swatty did. He looked down, and then slid one leg and then the other over the wall of the tent and hung there a second and looked down. He hand-over-handed a reach or two and then gave himself a sort of push and let go. He came down right on the bum’s head, straddle of his neck, and yelled: “Police! Police!” Only he yelled it “Porlice! Porlice!” like he always says it. I guess the bum was surprised, but he reached up and grabbed Swatty.

It wasn’t a fair fight, Swatty against a man, but it was a good one while it lasted. Everybody on the top seats stuck their heads out and yelled, and everybody down where Swatty was came running. One of the town cops was first – the cross-eyed one – and he leveled a lick at the bum with his club and caught Swatty across his breeches, and Swatty yelled and let go of the bum. He could fight one bum but he couldn’t fight a cross-eyed policeman with a club, too.

The minute the bum got loose he dived under the tent. We saw him scutter along under the seats, and then we saw him come out away down the side of the tent and scoot. The cross-eyed cop started after him, but he never got him.

Swatty didn’t run. He just stood on the bum’s coat, with his feet spread out, and in a minute Jimmy and a lot of folks were crowded around him. Then he lifted up the coat. We could see it all. Under the coat was Jimmy’s wallet and about six more. Jimmy just dropped on his wallet and hugged it. He sort of blubbered and didn’t know what to do, so he kissed Swatty, and Swatty hit out at him and hit him in the chest.

By that time a circus man in uniform had come up. He had a big hickory club, peeled, and he pushed into the crowd. Behind him were four or five more circus men, but they had tent stakes.

“What’s this row?” he asked.

Somebody started to tell him. The man that took the wallet from Jimmy was right there, and he turned away. So I shouted out:

“Hey, mister! there’s the man that took it.”

The circus man looked around and the thief started to hurry. He didn’t have a chance to hurry much. The circus man made one jump for him and caught him by the collar and gave one jerk, and the thief’s coat and vest came off and his shirt ripped right off him. The other circus men were on him. If it had been me it would have killed me, but I guess he was tough.

When I turned around Mr. Little was standing right back of me. He had come up to see what it all was, so he could put it in his paper. When he saw it was me that had yelled, he said:

“Why, hello, it’s our gallant cavalier! These hard seats are no place for a lady’s man; come on over in the reserved seats.”

“I can’t,” I said, “I’ve got to wait for Swatty.” He didn’t know who Swatty was, so I told him. So when Swatty came in we went over into the reserved seats, right in front of the middle ring. So Mr. Little asked Swatty all about it, and Swatty told him, and Mr. Little wrote it down and went downtown to his paper with it. He told Mrs. Little to take good care of the three heroes. He meant me and Swatty and Bony.

So Jimmy and Annie got married. All Mamie Little ever said about my going home was:

“I guess you think you were pretty smart, going home and letting Papa take me home and pay for the ice cream!”

But that didn’t hurt me any. Girls are always saying things like that.

XII. THE RED AVENGERS

Well, vacation got over, and school started again, and me and Swatty and Bony got promoted into the A Class in Miss Carter’s room, and so did Mamie Little and Scratch-Cat. Lucy got promoted into the B Class in Miss Carter’s room, and she hated Miss Carter. I guess the reason was because Miss Carter got in love with Herb Schwartz when Fan was mad at him.

Anyway Miss Carter heard Lucy tell somebody that if Fan wanted Herb Miss Carter would never have got him, and that anybody could catch a second-hand fellow that a body had thrown away, so Miss Carter and Lucy didn’t like each other. But I guess it was Lucy’s fault, because I always liked Miss Carter all right. Most always.

So school started again. Professor Martin came back with only a limp in his leg and Herb Schwartz stopped being a professor and was in Judge Hannan’s law office all the time. He began smoking a curved pipe and wearing spectacles and his hair pompadour, because he would pretty soon be a lawyer, and he kept on going with Miss Carter, but I didn’t care, because Fan had stopped dying of love. She was going with Tom Burton.

We liked Tom Burton good enough – me and Swatty and Bony did – until the time Dad Veek’s barn burned, but after that we didn’t. We had it in for him after that.

I guess old Dad Veek was a cabinet maker or something. Anyway, he used to work in his barn with a saw and a plane and he made a lot of shavings. His barn was level, but to make it level it had to be up on posts at the hind end because it was on a side hill, and that made a kind of cave under it, and sometimes me and Bony and Swatty, when we got tired playing in the creek, or it was raining, or we got cold skating, would go up there and maybe smoke com silk or maybe just talk. So we got all the shavings old Dad Veek swept out of his barn, and we made a kind of nest under the barn, and we called it that – the Nest.

Dad Veek did not like to have us under his barn, because when we smoked com silk the smoke would go up between the boards of the floor and he would come out and chase us. He didn’t like us much, anyway, for any boys, because there were grapevines between his barn and his house and he thought maybe when we thought he wasn’t around we crawled through the fence and took some grapes. And we did. But only when they were ripe and we happened to be over there.

So one night his barn burned down.

I guess that don’t sound like much, but it was a good deal more than it sounds like. You don’t know about Toady Williams and the Red Avengers and the fire insurance inspector yet. The fire insurance inspector was a man who came over from Chicago and said old Dad Veek had set the barn afire to get the insurance money, and said he guessed he would put old Dad Veek in jail for it, because there was too much of that sort of thing just now, and it was time to learn somebody a lesson. And I guess nobody would have cared much if it hadn’t been for Mrs. old Dad Veek.

The reason my mother felt sorry for Mrs. old Dad Veek was because when my mother was a little girl Mrs. old Dad Veek’s name was Tilly, and she worked for my mother’s mother, and now she was a dear old lady and it was too bad her husband was going to jail. So she thought somebody ought to bestir themselves.

Well, while my mother and the Ladies’ Aid were bestirring themselves me and Bony and Swatty and Toady Williams were out in our barn, and I felt pretty bad, because it was tough to have my mother bestirring herself about that barn fire when the chances were that I would be one she would bestir into jail if she kept old Dad Veek out. Now you know that much, you can see why we felt pretty sick out there in my barn.

It was winter when old Dad Veek’s barn burned down, and it was about nine o’clock at night. I was going to bed because I had been skating all day. I wore boots to skate in, like all the fellows, and my boots kind of wrinkled around the ankles and they rubbed my ankles until they were raw. So about eight o’clock I said, “Aw, come on, Swatty! Let’s go home!” but he wouldn’t.

“Well, if you won’t go home with me I’m going up to the Nest and I’ll wait for you up there,” I said.

So then Toady came up, and he asked where I was going and I told him I was going to the Nest, and he said he was going to skate some more, but Swatty and Bony said, “All right, we’ll go up with you awhile.” They didn’t take off their skates. They walked up the hill to the barn on their skates and we sat awhile in the Nest under old Dad Veek’s barn and smoked some com-silk cigarettes. Then Swatty and Bony wanted to skate some more, and they did and after a while I went home. Gee! but there was a raw spot on my ankle when I got my boot off! I was sitting on the edge of my bed looking at it, about nine o’clock, when the fire-house bell rang. Right away my mother came into my room and said: