No Encouragement for Inventive Genius in Orphan Home—The Boy Uses
His New Invention, a Patent Clothes Wringer, in Milking.
There is no encouragement for inventive genius in this orphans’ home
that I am honoring with my patronage.
I always supposed that an orphanage was a place where they tried to make
an orphan feel that it wasn’t such a great loss not to have a regular
home, among your people as long as you could be lovingly cared for in
big bunches by charitable people, who would act like a High School to
you, and when you got a diploma from an orphans’ home you could go out
into the world and hold up your head like a college graduate, but I can
see from my experience at this alleged home that when we boys get out
the police will have a tab on us, and we will be pinched like tramps.
What encouragement is there to learn anything but being chambermaid to
cows? Gee, but I never want to look a cow in the face again. When I
failed to milk that cow and she galloped all over the place, and kicked
my liver around where my spleen ought to be, the one-eyed warden of the
place told me I must practice on that cow till I got so that I could
milk her with my eyes shut, and that I wouldn’t get much to eat until I
could show him that I was a he-milkmaid of the thirty-third degree.
I told him I saw a machine last year at the State Fair that had a
suction pump that was put on to the cow’s works, and by touching a
button the milk and honey flowed into a pail, and if he would get such a
machine I could touch the button all right. He said the orphanage
couldn’t afford to buy such a machine, but if I wanted to invent any
device to milk cows I could go ahead, but it was up to me to produce
milk, one way or another.
Well, an idea struck me just like being hit with a base ball bat, and in
a short time I was ready.
I got a clothes wringer out of the laundry, and went to corral the cow.
I thought if a clothes wringer could squeeze the blue water out of a
wash tub of clothes, it would squeeze a pail of milk out of a cow, so I
took my clothes wringer and the milk pail and got under the cow and
gathered all her four weiners together in my hands and put the ends of
them between the rubber rollers, just easy, and the boys gathered round
to see where my inventive genius was going to get off at. Then when my
audience was all ready to cheer me, if the machine worked, I took hold
of the handle of the machine, which was across my lap, and turned the
crank with a yuck motion, until all the cow’s weiners went through
between the rollers, and I noticed the cow flinched, and just there one
of the sophomore boys threw a giant firecracker under the cow’s basement
near the milk pail, and when the explosion came, just when I was
cranking her up a second time and turning on the high speed clutch, the
cow bleated as though she had lost her calf, and she went up into the
air like the cow that jumped over the moon, and she went across the
country on a cavalry charge, with me hanging on the handle of the
wringer with one hand, on her tail with the other, and the boys giving
the orphan school yell, and the cow bellowing like a whole drove of
cattle that have smelled blood around a slaughter house.
Gosh, but I never had such an excursion. The cow went around the house
and on to the porch where the manager and some women were, and finally
rushed into the kitchen, and everybody came and tied me loose from the
cow, and got the clothes wringer off her vital parts, and shooed her
back to the barn, and then they took me to the manager’s office, and I
fainted away.
[Illustration: Gosh, But I Never Had Such an Excursion!]
When I came to the one-eyed manager had a bandage over his nose where
the handle of the clothes wringer hit him when he tried to turn the
handle back to release the pressure on the cow’s bananas, and he was so
mad you could hear him “sis,” like when you drop water on a hot griddle.
He got up and took me by the neck and wrung it just like I was a hen
having its neck wrung when there is company coming and he dropped me
“kerplunk” and said I had ruined the best cow on the place by flattening
out her private affairs so that nothing but skim milk could ever get
through the teats, and he asked me what in thunder I was doing, milking
a cow with a clothes wringer, when I ought to have known that a clothes
wringer would squeeze the milk up into the second story of the cow.
I told him I had never been a dairy farmer, anyway, and a cow was a new
proposition to me, and he said I could go and live on bread and water
till doomsday, and that I was the worst orphan he ever saw, and he
pushed me out of the room.
The boys met me when I came out of the presence of the one-eyed manager,
and we went off into the woods and held an indignation meeting, and
passed resolutions condemning the management of the orphanage, and I
suggested that we form a union and strike for shorter hours and more
food, and if we did not get it, we could walk out, and make the orphan
school business close up.
We discussed what we would do and say to the boss, and just before
supper time we lined up in a body before the house and called out the
manager and made our demands, and gave him fifteen minutes to accept, or
out we would go, and I tell you we looked saucy.
I never saw anything act as quick as that strike did. In five minutes
the manager came out and said he wouldn’t grant a thing, and besides we
were locked out, and couldn’t ever get back into the place unless we
crawled on our hands and knees and stood on our hind feet like dogs, and
barked and begged for food, and he shut the door and the dining room was
closed in our faces, and we were told to get off the place or they would
set the dogs on us.
For a few minutes not a word was said, then the boys pitched on to me
and another boy that had brought on the strike, and gave us a good
licking, and made us run to the woods, and when we got nearly out of
sight we turned and all the brave dubs that were going to break up the
orphanage were down on their seats on the grass, begging like dogs to be
taken back, because supper was ready, and my chum and me were pulling
for tall timber, wondering where the next meal was coming from, and
where we are going to sleep.
We were the only boys in that bunch of strikers that had sand enough to
stand up for union principles, and as is usually the case the fellows
who had the most gravel in their crops had little else, and I was never
so hungry in my life.
A diet of fried bull heads and skim milk, and sour bread for a few days
in the orphanage had left me with an appetite that ought to have had a
ten course banquet at once, but we walked on for hours, and finally
struck a railroad track and followed it to a town.
My chum stopped at a freight car on a side track and began to poke
around one of the oil boxes on a wheel, and when I asked him what he was
going to do, he said that to a hungry man the cotton waste and the
grease in a hot box of a freight car was just as good as a shrimp salad,
and he began to poke the stuff out of the hot box to eat it. He said the
lives of tramps were often saved by eating out of hot boxes. I swore
that I would never eat no hot box banquet, and I pulled him away from
the box car just as a brakeman came along with a hook and a can of oil
and a bucket of water to cool it off, and we escaped.
I told him we would have a good supper all right, if he would stick by
me.
We went into the little town and it was getting dark, and all the people
were out doors looking up into the sky, and saying, “there it is, I see
it,” and I asked a man in front of a saloon what the excitement was
about, and he said that they were watching the balloons from St. Louis,
about two hundred miles away, which were sailing to the east.
Did you ever have an idea strike you so sudden that it made you dizzy?
Well, I was struck with one so quick that it made me snicker, and I
pulled my new chum away and told him how we would get supper and a place
to sleep, and that was to go into the woods near where the people were
looking up into the air, and when a balloon went over, after it got good
and dark, we could set up a yell, as though murder was being done, and
when the crowd came to see what was the matter, he could say we fell out
of a balloon, and landed in a tree and squirmed down to the ground.
Well, I didn’t want to lie, but my chum, who had once been in a Reform
School, did not care so much about lying, so he was to do the talking
and I was to be deaf and dumb, as though the fall from the balloon had
knocked me silly.
Well, when we saw a light in the sky over us and the people were going
wild over thinking they saw a balloon, we began to scream like wild
cats, and groan like lost souls, and yell for “help, help.” When the
people came on the run, and when they found us with our clothes torn,
and our hair standing on end, and our eyes bulging out, and my chum, the
old liar, said when we were leaning over the basket of the balloon to
see what town we were passing over, we fell out in a tree, and we were
so hungry.
[Illustration: “Tossed him over the fence.”]
Well, the way those good people swallowed that yarn was too comical, and
they picked us up and took us into a house. A pussy woman got me under
her arm and said “Poor dear, every bone in his body is busted, but I saw
him first, and I am going to have him mended and keep him for a
souvenir,” and I hung my legs and arms down so I would be heavy, and she
dragged me to the house. All I said was, “pie, pie, pie,” and she said I
was starving for pie, and when they got us in bed, with nice night
shirts on, they crowded around us and began to feed us, and we took
everything from soup to mints, and went to sleep, and the last thing I
heard was balloon talk, and the woman who drew me in the shuffle said,
“The ways of Providence are past finding out,” and as I rolled over in
bed I heard my chum in another bed say “You can bet your sweet life,”
and then the people began to go away, talking about the narrow escape of
those dear boys, and my pussy fat lady held my hand and stroked my
aching stomach until long after midnight, and then she tip-toed off to
bed.
I spoke to my chum and said, “Did it work out all right?” and he groaned
and said, “Gee, but I et too much, I otter have saved some of it for
breakfast,” and then we went to sleep in nice feather beds instead of
those beds at the orphanage made of breakfast food.
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