Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

“George, there is a fire across the Square, and I think it is Mr. Veek’s barn. You can go if you want to.”

I hid my raw ankle, because if my mother knew it was so bad she would n’t let me skate any more until it got well, and I pulled on my boot and went to the fire.

There was a pretty big crowd there already and the barn was burning bully. I found Swatty first and then we found Bony, and we watched until the fire burned out, and then we went home.

The next day was Sunday, and when I got up I told my mother I had a headache, like I always told her Sunday mornings; but I had to go to Sunday school just the same. After dinner I went over to the ruins, and Swatty and Bony and Toady and a lot of folks were there. It was good to see and smell. When we got tired we went back to my yard, and it was too cold to go into the barn, so we went up to my room. As soon as the door was shut Swatty sat down on the edge of my bed and said:

“Well, men, the Red Avengers have been true to their oath! The enemy’s property lies in ruins!” You see it was like this: Me and Swatty and Toady and Bony were the Red Avengers. Maybe you never read the book – “The Red Avengers, or The Boy Heroes of the Trail” – but it is a bully book. It’s a dime lib’ry, and if it hadn’t been for Toady we would never have had it. There was one thing about Toady that was pretty good – he had lots of books. Dime lib’ry books. He got the new ones as fast as they were printed, and he read them behind his geography at school, and it was because he had them that we got to read “The Red Avengers.” The Chief of the Red Avengers was a boy named Dick, and when he was a young and tender nursling his fond parents took him out West and they started a ranch that covered almost a whole state. They had millions of cattle, but a lot of Mexicans came and burned the ranch and Dick’s parents were burned to death and Dick only escaped by creeping into the chaparral and hiding until he grew up into a sturdy youthhood. So then the Mexicans had divided up the ranch and had built houses and barns and things, and when Dick asked for the ranch back they laughed at him. So he got together a lot of true and faithful youths and started the Red Avengers of the Trail and whenever they came to one of the Mexican houses or bams they burned it down. Whenever anybody did anything mean to anybody in the band of the Red Avengers, Dick wrote a note saying the mean person’s house would be burned at a certain minute, and the note would appear mysteriously on the door of the house. And the house burned down just as the Red Avengers said it would, and right on the minute.

So me and Swatty and Bony we started a Red Avengers band. We swore a solemn oath never to divulge the secrets of the band or to tell what any of us did, and to follow the orders of the Chief, whate’er might betide. We had an election for Chief, and me and Swatty and Bony each got one vote, so we made Swatty the Chief. Swatty made us make him. So I was elected Secretary and Bony was elected Treasurer. The Secretary had to write the vengeance warnings and keep track of them in a memorandum book, so we wouldn’t forget who we were going to be revenged on. The Treasurer didn’t have anything to do. It was an easy job.

We did all that one day out in our barn, and, just when we had the Red Avengers all fixed up, in came Toady. He wanted the dime lib’ry back.

“Aw! come on, Toady!” Swatty said. “Let us keep it! You don’t want it!”

“Yes, I want it,” said Toady.

“All right for you, then, Toady!” Swatty said. “I was going to tell you something, but if you’re going to be that mean I won’t.”

“What was it?” he asked.

“It’s all right what it was!” said Swatty. “You’ll never know! Think we’d tell you when you want your old dime lib’ry back? We won’t ever tell him, will we, George? Will we, Bony?”

So we said no, we wouldn’t.

So then Toady looked at us and his eyes popped out; but Swatty threw “The Red Avengers” book at him.

“Take it!” he said. “We don’t want it anyway. We know everything that’s in it and we don’t need it. Only, if your house burns down you’ll know why. Garsh! here we were all ready to make you one of the band, and give you the oath, and elect you – what were we going to elect him, George?” “Librarian,” I said.

“Yah!” said Swatty, as if Toady made him sick. “That’s the kind of a fellow you are!”

So Toady didn’t know what to do. He picked up the dime lib’ry and stood looking. So Swatty didn’t pay any attention to him. He said to me:

“Seckertary, write in the Book of Doom that the first house the Red Avengers will burn down will be Toady Williams’s house, because he’s a stingy-cat and took his tom, old, no-good dime lib’ry away from us!”

Toady looked awhile. Then he said:

“Oh, I didn’t know you were going to make me a librarian. I didn’t know you were going to do that. What do I have to do if I’m Librarian?”

“Why, you keep charge of the library,” I said. “You take an oath to keep and preserve it, in that starch box over there.”

“And then you can be one of the band and take the oath, and if anybody is mean to you we’ll burn their houses down,” said Swatty. So Toady said all right, he would be Librarian, and we gave him the oath, and he put “The Red Avengers” in the starch box, and we held a council. We talked about whose houses the Red Avengers ought to burn down first.

I guess we all thought about Miss Carter first, because she had kept us in school after hours that very afternoon; but she lived in a boarding house and we couldn’t burn down her room without burning down the rest of the house, so we thought we would just record her in the book and wait until she got married sometime, and had a house of her own, and then burn that down. We thought of everybody, but the one we thought was the meanest was old Dad Veek. So we wrote his name at the top of the list in my memorandum book, and we said we’d burn his barn, and that we would do it at nine of night on the eighteenth of December. I wrote the letter of warning that was to be stabbed onto his door with a dagger, because I was Secretary, and I wrote the date of revenge in the memorandum book, and we all went out and over to Veek’s barn.

We hid in the dead weeds at the side of the road and drew straws to see which of the Red Avengers had to go up and dagger the warning onto old Dad Veek’s barn, and Bony drew the fatal straw; but of course he was afraid to do it, so Swatty did it. He sneaked through the fence into Veek’s yard and up to the barn door. He didn’t have a dagger, so he took a sort of splinter and ran it through the warning and stuck the point in a crack in the door, and scooted back to us. It was a daring deed, worthy of our fearless Chief, and we received him with silent cheers, because we had scarce hoped he would return from his perilous mission alive. (That’s from the dime lib’ry book.)

Well, that was pretty good, and we felt bully. I guess we would have gone ahead and put up some more warnings another day, but it turned cold that night and the skating got good and we forgot to be Red Avengers. You can’t be everything all the time. We didn’t think any more about it until the day after the fire. That was the Sunday we were up in my room and Swatty said:

“Well, men, the Red Avengers have been true to their oath! The enemy’s property lies in ruins!”

So I said:

“Yes, Chief, I carried out the orders of the band to the fullest. My trusty torch has laid the vermin’s dwelling low.”

“You?” said Swatty. “You didn’t do it. I did it.” Toady was sitting on the window sill, and Bony was in a chair looking at a magazine. Toady just sat and popped his eyes at us.

“Aw, now!” he said, “you didn’t burn that barn down, either of you. You’re just fooling.”

Well, I guess that was a little too much for anybody to say, especially when he was a member of the Red Avengers himself.

“I did, too!” I said. “I took my oath to do it, and I did it. Do you think I’d take my oath to do it, and then not do it? Of course I burned it down, when I said I would!”

“Of course you would,” said Swatty. “If you took your oath to burn down Veek’s barn you’d do it. Only I was the one that took the oath; you wasn’t. Toady had better not say I’d take an oath and then not do it! When you trust a job to the Chief of the Red Avengers it’ll be done. At nine of night I sneaked up to old Dad Veek’s barn – ”

“Ho! Nine!” I said. “Well, no wonder! No wonder you thought you did it, sneaking up at nine! Now I know why you thought you did it, when I was the one that really did it! Why, I wouldn’t wait until nine when I had promised to set a barn afire at nine. I’d be afraid I might not get the match lit in time, or something. I was there at a quarter of nine, and I had the barn on fire long before nine.” Swatty kind of looked at me.

“Oh!” he said. “Whereabouts did you set the fire going?”

I thought a minute.

“Around at the far side, away from the road, Chief,” I said.

“Well, then, no wonder!” said Swatty. “That’s why I didn’t see you doing it. I set the side toward the road burning. So I guess I was the one that set the barn afire first, because it would take you a long time to go around the barn to the other side.”

“Maybe we both set it afire at the same time,” I said.

“All right, maybe we did,” Swatty said. “Because,” I said, “I ain’t going to be cheated out of having set it afire by you or anybody, Swatty, when I went to all the trouble I did.”

“I know,” said Swatty, “but you can’t say I didn’t set it afire, either, because when I was walking down to the creek from the West I turned my ankle and had to take my skates off and limp home. Ain’t that so, Bony?” Bony said yes, it was. “And Bony thought I had really sprained my ankle,” said Swatty, “but you know what I was up to. Throw ‘em all off the track! Be alone so I could do the deed!”

“Well, I guess we both did it at the same time,” I said, and Swatty said he guessed we did, so that settled it. But when Swatty got ready to go home I whispered to him:

“You didn’t really do it, did you?”

“No,” he said, “I just wanted to make Toady and Bony think I did. I was in my kitchen putting arnica on my ankle. Did you really do it?”

“Of course I didn’t!” I said. “I was up here in my bedroom looking at my raw ankle. But we won’t let on.”

“Sure not!” said Swatty.

Well, pretty soon some of the fellows or somebody began saying maybe old Dad Veek would have to go to jail for setting his own barn afire, like I told you in the beginning. Then, after while, I heard my mother say to my father, that some of the Ladies’ Aid ladies were bestirring themselves because they were sure that old Dad Veek wouldn’t set his own barn afire, and they had asked Tom Burton to help them and he was helping. But one day we were up in my barn – me and Swatty and Bony – and Toady came up.

He came up the stairs far enough to see into the hayloft, then he stopped and when we saw him he came on up. I said:

“Hello, Toady!”

“Hello!” he said.

“What do you want?” I asked, because he hadn’t been playing with us much.

“Oh, I just thought I’d get my dime lib’ry,” he said. “You don’t want it any more, do you?”

“No, we don’t want it,” I said, and he went to the starch box and got it, and he came over to where we were, and he said: “I guess you have n’t set any more barns afire, have you?”

“What barns?” Swatty asked.

“Well, you did set one afire, didn’t you?” said Toady. “You and George set Veek’s afire, didn’t you?”

Swatty stood up then, all right! He stood up and folded his fists.

“Who said we set Veek’s barn afire?” he asked, and he was pretty mad. But I wasn’t; I was just scared. It’s incenderyism, or something like that, if you set a barn afire, and you get sent to reform school for life.

“Who said it? I didn’t say it,” said Toady. “You said it. You and George said you did.”

Well, of course I hadn’t been lying when I told Toady and Swatty and Bony how I had set Dad Veek’s barn afire, but I had just been fooling. So I said:

“Aw! I never said no such thing! I never either said I set it afire. Swatty said he set it afire. I couldn’t have set it afire, because I was sitting on my bed when it got afire.”

So Swatty got mad. I guess he wanted to lick somebody, but he didn’t know whether to lick me or to lick Toady.

“Aw! I never either said I set it afire!” he said. “If anybody set it afire George did, because I was home, putting arnica on me, when the fire started.”

“Well, you said you did,” I said. “You said so right up in my room. You did so.”

“I did not! You said you did.”

“I did not! I never said anything like it. If anybody said he set Veek’s barn afire, Swatty said it.”

“Aw! I did not!” Swatty said. “You said it. You said it. You said you took a torch, and went around to the far side and set the barn afire. I heard you say it. And you said I couldn’t have set the barn afire because you had it all afire before I got there. Didn’t he say that, Toady?”

Well, I guess Toady knew mighty well that if he was going to get mallered for saying either of us said it he had better say I said it, because Swatty could lick any of us. So he said I did say it.

So I went for him and mallered him as much as I could. I got so mad I cried, and I guess I kicked him. Not Swatty, Toady. So when I got tired I was still mad, and I sat down on a box and cried. Then Toady sneaked over to the stairs and went part way down, and just before he was out of sight he looked back.

“Cry-baby!” he said, and that meant me. Then he said: “All right, you’d better look out! You both said you did it, and you both said you said it, and Dad Veek’s got that Red Avengers’ notice you fastened on his barn door and Tom Burton knows all about it.”

Gee, we were scared! I was so scared I didn’t throw anything at Toady, and Swatty was so scared he just said: “Garsh!” and stood there. Well, me and Swatty we talked it over.

We knew we hadn’t set the barn afire, but we knew we had said we had, and we knew old Dad Veek would do ‘most anything to keep out of jail, and that my mother and the Ladies’ Aid ladies were bestirring. So then we knew why Toady had come up to get us to say again we had done it; he was one of the Red Avengers and unless we said we had set the barn afire ourselves all the Red Avengers would be sent to reform school, and he wanted to get out of it and had gone and told Tom Burton about us and the Red Avengers and that we had set the barn afire.

“Garsh!” said Swatty, “he took the memorandum book you had old Veek’s barn wrote down at the top of the list of!”

And he had! So Bony sort of doubled down in his corner and cried, but me and Swatty sat down on a box to think and talk and see what we had better do.

Well, the way Tom Burton had gone to work to help my mother and the Ladies’ Aid ladies who were bestirring themselves, was this: He found out that the reason old Dad Veek had so much insurance was because he was a slow worker, and sometimes he had the barn almost full of stuff he was working on, and then it was worth as much as it was insured for. So that helped some. Then old Dad Veek showed him the Red Avengers’ warning Swatty had fastened on his barn door, and that was pretty bad, because the time it said the barn would burn down was the time it did burn.

I guess he might have thought it was some men or something, if it hadn’t been for the name of the Red Avengers. It sounded like boys. So Tom Burton found out there was a dime lib’ry named “The Red Avengers,” because one was hanging in Toady Williams’s father’s store window, and then he knew it was boys. So he asked Toady Williams if he knew anything about it, and Toady went and told him. He told him me and Swatty and Bony was the Red Avengers and that we had set the barn afire.

We found all that out mighty soon, because it wasn’t half an hour after Toady went out of the barn before Tom Burton came up. The tattle-tale had gone right to him.

Tom Burton came up and he stood and talked to us. He told us he knew all about the Red Avengers and that he had our memorandum book with Dad Veek’s name in it and everything, and that he knew who had written the memorandum book, and the notice that was daggered on Dad Veek’s door, and everything, and he asked us which one of us done it. Gee, I was scared! But none of us said anything. Maybe we were too scared to.

So then he said, “All right! it will only be a little while before all will be known, and the one that did it will surely be sent to reform school, so the other two, that didn’t do it, had better tell on the one that did do it.”

But none of us said anything. So he talked awhile and then he went away. Me and Bony didn’t say anything.

“Garsh!” Swatty said. “It’s mighty bad.”

Me and Bony didn’t say anything yet. We was too scared. Bony began to blubber.

“You don’t need to cry,” Swatty told him. “You ain’t going to be sent to reform school. You didn’t do it.”

“Well – well,” Bony blubbered. “You and Georgie didn’t do it, either.”

“Well, it don’t matter whether we did it or didn’t do it,” Swatty said. “We wrote down that we were going to do it, and they’ve got the warning and the memorandum book, and we both said we’d done it ourselves, and we both said the other had done it, and I guess they’ll send us to reform school.” Bony kept on blubbering, so we told him he had better go home if he was a cry-baby, and he went. So then Swatty said:

“I guess it ain’t much use; but we’ve got to say, no matter how they ask us, that we ain’t the Red Avengers.”

“That’d be a lie,” I said.

“Well, no, it wouldn’t,” said Swatty, “because there won’t be any Red Avengers, and we’ll say, ‘No, we ain’t!’ and that’ll be the truth, because we won’t be then. We’ll bust up the Red Avengers right now.”

So we took a vote and voted that we were not the Red Avengers any more and that we never had been the Red Avengers. So that settled that, but it didn’t make us feel much better. We sat and thought awhile and then Swatty said:

“I know! Georgie, you can ask Fan to tell Tom Burton to let us go free.”

“Aw! that won’t do any good,” I said.

And I didn’t think it would, but Swatty said it was our only chance, so I said I would ask Fan, and I did. I hated to, but I did it.

XIII. THE ICE GOES OUT

First, of course, I made Fan promise she would never tell, hope to die and cross her heart, and she promised, and then I told her all about the Red Avengers and how, if we did set Dad Veek’s barn afire we didn’t mean to, and she said she would talk to Tom Burton about it, but she said Tom Burton was stubborn and she would have to wait until she had the right chance. She was nicer than she had ever been to me.

“Have you told anybody else?” she asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Did Swatty tell his brother Herbert?” she asked.

“No. Nobody has told anybody,” I said.

Well, me and Swatty felt pretty bad and scared and sick, and one reason was that Bony stopped playing with us. His father found out about the Red Avengers and made him promise he wouldn’t play with me and Swatty any more because we were bad boys and would ruin Bony. So we never expected to play with Bony again, but we did, and this was how it happened.

Bony’s father and mother used to fight like everybody else, and about bills, because they were having a fight like that when Bony’s father took the shotgun and went away from home. I guess it was a hat Bony’s mother had bought that was the worst, but Bony wasn’t sure. He said they began to fight when the grocery bill came and fought harder and harder the more bills there were, but it wasn’t until the hat bill came that Bony’s father stopped sassing back, and got solemn and quiet and said that sometimes he felt that it was no use trying to keep up the struggle against poverty and starvation, and that sometimes when these evidences of extravagance came in he felt just like going off somewhere by himself and ending everything. So then Bony’s mother said, “Oh! nonsense!” and pretty soon Bony’s father got his shotgun and went out of the house.

So Bony just sat there in the room expecting every minute to hear the shotgun and to run out and see his father dead in the stable. He sat there and pretended to be studying his geography lesson for Monday, but all he was doing was listening to hear the shot. It was a mighty mean job, I guess, sitting there listening like that, and waiting to hear his father kill himself; but he didn’t hear anything.

So pretty soon he shut up his hook and sort of tiptoed out of the house, but he did not dare go near the stable. He didn’t know what to do. He went out on the front steps and stood there, and pretty soon he saw me and Swatty at the corner, and he waved to us and came running, and we waited for him.

It was January, but it wasn’t cold because we were having a thaw. It was good snow to make snowballs of, so when Bony started to come toward us we made a few snowballs and just threw them at him. I guess we hit him five or six times, but he didn’t beller for us to stop, like he usually does; he put his arm in front of his face and came right on. When he got too close for us to throw at him any more we stopped and then we saw he was crying.

“Aw, shut up and don’t be a baby!” Swatty said; “we didn’t hurt you.” But Bony kept right on bawling. He didn’t bawl the way a cowardy-calf bawls when he gets hurt, he bawled like – well, I guess he bawled like a fellow bawls when his father has gone off with a shotgun to shoot himself. So then we didn’t tell him to shut up any more. Swatty said:

“What’s the matter, Bony?”

So then Bony put his arm up against a tree and cried into it, and after he had cried awhile he said:

“My – my fath-father’s out in the barn sh-shooting himself with his shotgun!”

“He ain’t neither!” Swatty said, and I said it too.

“He is, too, killing himself!” Bony said, and he blubbered at the same time. “You needn’t think, just because your fath-fathers don’t kill themselves, nobody else’s father never kik-kills himself! My fa-father said he’d kik-kill himself, and if he said so he w-will!”

“Aw! He ain’t neither killing himself in the barn!” Swatty said, and I guess that made Bony mad, because it was like saying Bony’s father was a liar, or that Bony was, anyway. Mostly Bony wouldn’t fight, no matter what you said, because he’s a cow-ardy-calf; but I guess when a fellow’s father is killing himself in a barn or anywhere he don’t care what happens to him, so Bony was so mad he forgot how easy Swatty could lick him, and he sort of howled like a cat when you step on its tail and he pitched into Swatty with both fists. So Swatty had to lick him. He licked him good. So when Swatty had him down and was sitting on him, Swatty said:

“Now is your father killing himself in the barn?”

“Yes, he is!” Bony blubbered, and then we knew that Bony’s father was really going to kill himself, because if Bony hadn’t been pretty sure he would have said he wasn’t, because he knew how Swatty can push a fellow’s nose into his face with the bottom of his hand when he has got him down and he don’t say what Swatty wants him to say. So we knew it must be pretty serious. So Swatty didn’t push Bony’s nose, but he said:

“Well, your father ain’t killing himself in the barn, because he went by here a little while ago with his shotgun. How do you know he’s going to kill himself?”

“I know it because him and Mother was fighting over bills, and he said he would,” Bony said.

So then Swatty said, aw! he didn’t believe anybody would kill himself because he was fighting over bills. He said he didn’t believe any grown-up man would fight over a little thing like bills; so that made me mad, and I said, aw! any man would fight over bills, and that my father did, and that my father was a better man than Swatty’s father any day in the week and could lick Swatty’s father any time they wanted to try it. And that was true, and Swatty knew it, because my father was bigger than his father and not so old. So Swatty said, aw! well, his oldest brother could lick my father, anyway. So I said he’d better try it if he wanted to find out, and Swatty said, Aw! And I guess that’s all we said about that.

Anyway, it didn’t seem to make Bony feel any better that his father had taken his shotgun and had gone off somewhere else to kill himself instead of killing himself right at home in the barn. He kept right on with a kind of whine-blubber, even when Swatty and me were jawing, so Swatty said: