The Bad Boy and His Dad Have Trouble with a New Breakfast Food--Dad
Rides a Bucking Broncho.
San Antonio, Texas.--My Dear Chum: Dad and I left Hot Springs because
the man who kept the hotel where we stopped got prejudiced against me. I
suppose I did carry the thing a little too far. You see dad has got
into this breakfast food habit, and reads all the advertisements that
describe new inventions of breakfast food, and he has got himself so
worked up over the bran mash that he is losing appetite for anything
substantial, and he is getting weak and nutty. Ma told me when I went
away with dad that she wanted me to try my best to break dad of the
breakfast food habit, and I promised to do it. Say, kid, if you ever
expect to succeed in life, you have got to establish a reputation for
keeping your promises. Truth is mighty, and when anybody can depend upon
a boy to do as he agrees his fortune is made. Dad saw a new breakfast
food advertised in an eastern magazine, and as the hotel people only
kept thirty or forty kinds of mockingbird food for guests, dad made me
go out to the groceries and round up the new kind. I brought a box to
the table at breakfast, and dad fell over himself to fill his saucer,
and then he offered some to eight boarders that sat at our table. Dad
had been bragging for a week about how he had adopted the breakfast food
fad, first for his health, and then to get even with the beef trust. He
had convinced the boarders at our table that it was a patriotic duty of
every citizen to shut down on eating meat until the criminal meat trust
was ruined.
[Illustration: “Hennery, I Feel as Though Your Dad Was not Very Long for
This World.” ]
“The breakfast food I put up on dad was some pulverized cork that I got
at a grocery out of a barrel of California grapes. It looked exactly
like other breakfast food, but you'd a died to see dad and several
invalid Southern colonels, and two women who were at the table, pour
cream on that pulverized cork, and springle sugar on it, and try to
get the pulverized cork to soak up the cream, but the particles of
cork floated on top of the cream, and acted alive. An old confederate
colonel, who had called dad a dam yankee ever since we had been there,
and always acted as though he was on the point of drawing a gun, took
the first mouthful, and after chewing it a while he swallowed as though
his throat was sore, but he got it down, and ordered a cocktail, and
looked mad at dad. Dad noticed that the others were having difficulty in
masticating the food, and so he pitched in and ate his food and said
it was the finest he ever tasted, but the rest of the crowd only took a
spoonful or two, and et fruit. One woman who is there to be cured of the
habit of betting on the races, got the cork in amongst her false teeth
and it squeaked when she chewed, like pulling a cork out of a beer
bottle. They all seemed to want to please dad, and so they munched
away at the cork, until the woman with the false teeth had to leave the
table, then a colonel went out, and then all quit the table except
dad and I, and by that time dad felt as though he had swallowed a life
preserver, and he said to me:
“'Hennery, either the baths or the climate, or something has upset me,
and I feel as though your dad was not very long for this world. Before
I die I want you to confess to me what that stuff is that I have been
eating, and I can die in peace!'
“I told him that he had wanted a light breakfast, and I though there was
nothing quite so light as cork, and that he was full clear to the muzzle
with pulverized cork, and he couldn't sink any more when he took a bath.
Dad turned pale and we went out in the office and found that all the
people who sat at our table, and ate breakfast food were in the hands of
doctors, and dad went in the room with them, and each had a doctor, and
how they got it out of them I don't know, as I was busy organizing a
strike among the bell boys. I told them they could double their wages
by striking at exactly at ten o'clock, when all the boarders wanted
cocktails sent to their rooms.
[Illustration: Dad Among the Cowboys.]
“They struck all right, and the breakfast food people had all got pumped
out, and then it came my turn. Dad gave me a licking, the boarders
kicked at me, the landlord ordered me out of the house, and the striking
bell boys who had their places filled in ten minutes, chased me all over
town, and when I got back to the hotel dad had bought tickets to San
Antonio, because the doctor told him to get out on the prairies and take
horseback exercise to shake the pulverized cork and the monkey-wrench
out of his system, and everybody threw stones at the buss that we rode
to the depot in. Gosh, but I hate a town where genius has no chance
against the mob element. The worst was that woman with the false teeth,
because she lost them somewhere, and had to hold her handkerchief over
her mouth while she called me names when the porter took me by the
collar and the pants and flung me into the buss. Dad told the porter,
when he handed out the regular 'tip,' that he would have made it large
if the porter had taken an axe to me. Dad is getting so funny he almost
makes me laugh.
“Well, kid, we arrived here next day, and got acclimated before night.
Dad bought a wide gray cowboy hat, with a leather strap for a band, and
began to pose as a regular old rough rider, and told everybody at the
hotel that he was going to buy a ranch, and run for congress. Everybody
here is willing a northern man should buy a ranch, but when he talks
about running for Congress they look sassy at him, but dad can look
just as sassy as anybody here. He told all around that he was a cavalry
veteran of the war, and wanted to get a horse to ride that would stir up
his patriotic instincts and his liver, and all his insides, and a real
kind man steered dad to a livery stable, and I knew by the way the
natives winked at each other that they were going to let him have a
horse that would jounce him all right.
“They saddled up a real nice pony for me, but when they led out the
horse for dad I knew that trouble was coming. The horse was round
shouldered on the back, and when they put the saddle on the horse humped
up and coughed most pitiful, and when they fastened the cinch the horse
groaned and the crowd all laughed, A negro boy asked me if my old man
was ever on a horse before, and when I told him that dad had eaten
horses in the army, the boy said that horse would eat him, 'cause he was
a bucker from Buckersville in the western part of the state.
[Illustration: “Dad Began to Pose as a Regular Old Rough Rider.”]
I told dad the horse was a dangerous bucker, but he tipped his hat on
one side and said he had broken more bucking bronchos than those Texas
livery men ever saw. Dad borrowed a pair of these Mexican spurs with a
wheel in them as big as a silver dollar, and the men held the horse by
the bridle while dad got on, and I must say he got on like he knew how.
He asked which was the road to Houston, and we started out of town.
“Well, sir, I have been in a good many runaways, and I was filling a
soda fountain once when it exploded, and I have been on a toboggan
when it run into a cow, and I have been to a church sociable when a boy
turned some rats loose, and a terrier went after them right among the
women, but I never was so paralyzed as I was to see dad and that horse
try to stay together. The first two miles out of town the horse walked,
and acted as though it was going to die, and my pony would get away
ahead and have to wait for dad and the camel to come up. Dad was mad
because they gave him such a slow horse.
“'What are those things on your heels for?' I says to dad. 'Why don't
you run the spokes into his slats?' I said, just to be sociable.
“'Never you mind me,' says dad. 'After I have looked at the scenery a
while I will open the throttle on this dromedary, and we will go and
visit the Pyramids.'
“I was a little ahead and I did not catch dad in the act of kicking open
the throttle, but I heard something that sounded like a freight train
wreck, and dad and the horse went by me like a horse race, only that
horse was not on the ground half the time, and he didn't go straight
ahead, but just lowered his head between his legs and jumped in the air
and came down stifflegged and then jumped sideways, and changed ends and
did it all over again, all over the prairie, and dad was a sight. His
eyes stuck out, and his teeth rattled, and every time the horse came
down on his feet dad seemed to get shorter, as though his spine was
being telescoped up into his hat. I think dad would have fallen off the
first jump, only he had rammed the spurs in amongst the horse's ribs,
and couldn't get them out. Gee, but you never saw such actions, unless
you have seen a horse go plum crazy. The horse kept giving dad new fancy
side steps, and jumps until dad yelled to me to get a gun and shoot him
or the horse, and he didn't care which. I yelled to dad to loosen up on
the bridle, and let the horse run lengthways instead of sideways, and I
guess he did, for the horse lit out for some musquite trees and before I
could get there the horse had run under a limb and scraped dad off, and
when I got there dad was lying under a tree, trying to pray and swear
all to wonst, and his spurs were all blood and hair, and things a horse
wears on the inside of his self, and the horse was standing not far
away, eating grass, and looking at dad. If dad had had his revolver
along he would have killed the horse, but the horse seemed to know he
had been fooling with an unarmed man. I got dad righted up, and he rode
my pony to town, and I had to lead the bucking horse, and he eat some of
the cloth out of my pants.
[Illustration: Dad on a Bucking Broncho.]
“Say, this is a bully place down here; just as quiet and sunshiny as
can be, only dad is in a hospital for a week or so, having operations
on where the horse let him drop once in a while on the saddle, and the
livery man made dad buy the horse 'cause he said dad had ripped his
sides out with the spurs. Dad says we will have a picnic when he gets
out of the hospital. He is going to buy some dynamite and take the horse
out on the prairie and blow him up. Dad is _so_ fond of dumb animals. I
got your letter about your being in love. Gee, but you can't afford it
on your salary.
“Yours quite truly,
“HENNERY.”