A Bad Railroad Wreck—The Boy Contrasts Their Ride to One in a
Parlor Car—The Lawyer Is the Greatest Man on Earth—The Boy
Settles His Claim for $20.
The accident by the wrecking of the freight train on which my chum and
myself were touring the country, viewing the scenery through an auger
hole in the side of a box car, was a darn sight worse than I thought it
was. What a come down it was for me, who have always traveled with pa,
in a parlor car, to have to ride in a box car, with live stock, and
feast on dog biscuit, instead of ordering from the menu in a dining car.
No one likes the luxuries of foreign travel any better than I do, but
that freight car experience showed me that we do not know when we are
well off, but when a boy goes out into the world to make his fortune,
and cuts loose from home ties, and pie, and bath tubs, and a warm bed,
and victuals such as mother makes, and winds up in a wreck, under a
horse that he does not know the name of, he is going some.
When we got to the hospital a lawyer, who had chased the ambulance on a
motorcycle, retained me as his client and offered to sue the railway
company for a million dollars damage, and he would furnish all the
evidence, and take half of what he got for his fee. I thought it was a
good proposition, and probably I can own a railroad if I take stock for
my damages, but I shall take nothing but money, and let my lawyer have
the railroad stock. Gee, but a lawyer is the greatest man on earth. This
one has been riding alongside the railroad track on a motorcycle for
years, waiting for an accident, and when he selected me for a client he
just cried for joy, and he has drawn a complaint against the Railroad
Company that is a work of art.
[Illustration: Started on a stampede.]
When he read it to me, and I saw how I had been broken up and damaged by
the soulless corporation, and how my promising career had been ruined, I
never was so overcome in my life. While I was not hurt any, except where
the horse laid on me and squeezed my dog biscuits in my stomach so my
backbone was poulticed by the chewed biscuit, the lawyer had the doctors
at the hospital put my legs and arms in plaster of paris casts, and had
my body done up in splints and bandages, and my face covered with strips
of court plaster, until nothing but my mouth was in working order, and I
wore out a nurse bringing me things to eat, and I never enjoyed myself
more in my life than I did in that hospital, just eating and being
petted by good looking nurses.
My lawyer told me to groan all the time when anybody was present, and
when a railroad lawyer called at the hospital to take an invoice of my
wounds, and my lawyer was present to see that I groaned plenty, it was
all I could do to keep from laughing, but my lawyer would run a paper
knife into my slats every time I quit groaning, so we were working the
railroad all right, and the hospital doctors, who were going to have a
share in the money, made a list of my broken bones, and the railroad
lawyer wanted to be shown every break in my anatomy.
Well things went on this way for several days, and I was getting nervous
from the plaster casts on me.
I didn’t like it very much when the railway lawyer offered to settle for
five dollars, claiming I was a tramp stealing a ride, but he brought my
chum to see me, and my chum who had his neck twisted around by a bale of
hay falling on him, settled for twenty dollars, and so I did the same,
and when the nurses were asleep in the afternoon, my chum and me left
the hospital with forty good dollars, and started across the bridge for
St. Louis, to find the air ships.
We were sitting down on a railroad track, at the east entrance to the
bridge, and I had taken off my clothes, and was breaking the plaster of
paris off my limbs, when my lawyer came along on his motorcycle, on the
way to the hospital to make me groan some more, and when he saw us he
had a fainting spell, and when I told him we had been discharged cured,
he said it was hard for a deserving lawyer to be knocked out of a half
million dollar fee by a dumb fool client who didn’t know enough to look
out for his own interests, and he was going to have us arrested for
highway robbery, but I told him I wouldn’t have known what to do with so
much money if we had kanoodled the railroad out of a million dollars, in
addition to a free ride on its palatial freight car, and besides it
would be cheating, and the lawyer drew a long sigh and told us to get
out of the country and he would continue the suit on the ground that we
had been injured so bad that we became insane and jumped into the river,
and he offered to throw us in the river, but we jumped on a street car
and went across to St. Louis in search of the park where the balloon man
was that had offered us a job riding in balloons.
We found the man and he said they were all going to start for somewhere
the next morning and we could go along, my chum in one balloon and I in
another, and all we would have to do was to throw out ballast when told
to do so, and open cans of stuff to eat, and for us to buy thick
sweaters, and show up at nine o’clock in the morning, and write the
address where we wanted our remains sent to in case we were killed, and
pin the address on our sweaters.
It wasn’t cheerful and my chum and I talked it over until late that
night, and I am sorry to say my chum showed a streak of yellow, and he
confessed to me that he was a coward, and came from a family of cowards,
and that he didn’t have sand enough to go up in a balloon, and he would
let me go up, but he would rather stay on the ground, where he could
feel the earth with his feet, and watch the balloons.
He said that people who go up in balloons were either crazy, or had met
with some disappointment in life, and took the balloon method of
committing suicide, and he would side step balloons, and if the time
ever came when he was tired of life, he would take a job firing on an
engine, or go into burglary, or get in love with some old man’s wife, or
marry a chorus girl, or something that would be fatal, but on land.
Gee, but I was disappointed in my chum. He had been in a reform school,
and I thought he had gravel in his crop, but he proved to have the
chilblains, and so I went to the balloon man in the morning alone, and
told him I had made my will, and was ready to go up to heaven or down to
Helena, Arkansas, any minute he was ready, but my chum had weakened and
gone glimmering.
I got in the basket and looked things over, and jumped out and in
several times, and asked questions of the two men who were to go up in
it, and they seemed pleased that I was not afraid, and they asked me if
I thought my father would make a kick if I was killed or lost at sea, or
anything, and I told them from my last conversation with Pa I thought he
would take it as a kindness if they should find it convenient to spill
me out somewhere or lose me, and when they landed, if they could make
affidavit that I had been permanently disposed of, like a mess of
kittens under water in a bag, with a stone in it, that Pa would be
willing to cough up quite a premium.
That held them for a little while, and then they asked me who I was,
anyway, and when I told them that I was the only original “Peck’s Bad
Boy,” they said that from their recollection of my tricks on my father
they could readily see how a fatality might be a blessing, and they
seemed relieved of any responsibility, and we went to work to get things
in the basket, and they instructed me what I was to do.
The basket was about nine feet square, and it had more things in it than
a delicatessen store.
At about ten o’clock in the morning, with thousands of people watching
the balloons, they began to cut loose and go shooting into the air, and
it was a race.
The man told me that the balloon that went the farthest from St. Louis
before being compelled to land would get the prize, and I began to feel
anxious to have our balloon win.
I watched those that started first, and they went up so far I could only
see little specks in the sky, and I thought of balloons I had seen go up
on fair grounds, where a girl sat on a trapeze bar, and jumped off, and
a parachute opened and took her safely to the ground, and I looked
around our balloon for a parachute, but there was none, and I wondered
what would happen if the balloon came down, with its gas all escaped,
like the fair ground balloon, and there is where I came the nearest to
weakening and climbing out, but I thought if I did I would be a coward
like my chum, and then I thought if those two grown men, with families
depending on them for support, were going up, they were not doing it for
any suicidal purpose, and I could go if they could, and when the boss
man said, “Now, Bub, if you want to stay ashore, this is your last
chance,” I said, “Your little Hennery is ready to go where you go, and
you can’t tie her loose any too soon to suit me,” and he patted me on
the head and said, “Hennery, you sure are game,” and then all was ready
and he said to them to let go. My heart went up and rubbed against my
palate, and the balloon made a jump like a horse going over a five foot
fence, advertising a brand of whiskey, and we shot up into the air, the
people yelling, and I saw my chum sitting on a dray, driving a mule, and
I thought of the difference between a brave boy and a mucker like my
chum, the houses began to look smaller, until St. Louis looked like play
houses, with a ribbon of gray on the side of it, which was the river.
The boss looked at a machine and said we were five miles high, and I
thought how I had always enjoyed high life, and I was trying to get my
heart swallowed down where it belonged.
The balloon basket was as steady as a house, and I got up and looked
over the side of the basket, and it seemed awful, cause I had never been
higher than the top of a twenty story building before, and I began to
weep tears, and the air seemed queer, and I was just going to faint when
the boss told me to open a can of lobsters, and I woke up.
------------------------------------------------------------------------