The Bad Boy Arrives in France—The Boy’s Pa Is Suspected of Being
an Anarchist—The Boy Finds Pa Seated at a Large Table Bragging
About America—He Told Them the Men in America Were All
Millionaires and Unmarried.
The greatest relief I ever experienced was getting off of that cattle
ship, which I did somewhere in France, because the ship had become so
foul smelling that one had to stay on deck to breathe, and there was no
more fun to have, cause the officers and crew got on to me, and everyone
expected to be blown up or electrocuted if they got near to me, and the
last three days they wouldn’t let me eat in the cabin or sleep in my
hammock, so I had to go down with the cattle and eat hot bran mash, and
sleep in the hay. Gee, but when you eat hot bran mash for a few days you
never want to look at breakfast food again as long as you live.
I traded my electric battery to a deck hand for a suit case, and so I
looked like a tourist, because I went to a hotel and got a square meal,
and had a porter paste some hotel ads. on my suit case, and I took a
train for Paris, looking for Pa, cause I knew he wouldn’t be far away
from the bullyvards.
I left my baggage at a hotel where we stopped when we were in Paris
before, and the man who spoke shattered English told me Pa was rooming
there, but he was not around much, because he was being entertained by
the American residents, and had some great scheme that took him away on
secret expeditions often, and they thought he was either an anarchist or
grafter, and since the assassination of the king and crown prince of
Portugal the police had overhauled his baggage in his room several
times, but couldn’t find anything incriminating, so I had my baggage
sent to Pa’s room, and went out to find Pa, and pick up something that
would throw suspicion on him if he showed any inclination to go back on
me when I found him.
It was getting along towards dark when I walked down a bullyvard where
Pa used to go when we were in Paris before, and as I came to a café
where there was a sign, English spoken, I saw a crowd out on the
sidewalk surrounding tables, eating and drinking, and there was one big
table with about a dozen men and women, Americans, Frenchmen and other
foreigners, listening to an elderly man bragging about America, and I
saw it was Pa, but he was so changed that but for his bald head and chin
whiskers I would not have known him.
He had on French clothes, one of those French silk hats that had a flat
brim and a bell crown, and he had a moustache that was pointed at the
ends and was waxed so it would put your eyes out.
Pa was telling them that all the men in America were millionaires and
unmarried, and that all of them came abroad to spend money and marry
foreign ladies, to take them back to America and make queens of them,
and he looked at a French woman across the table with goo-goo eyes, and
she said to the man next to her, “Isn’t he a dear, and what a wonder he
is not married before,” and Pa smiled at her and put his hand on his
watch chain, on which there hung gold nuggets as big as walnuts, and he
fixed a big diamond in his scarf, so the electric light would hit it
plenty.
They ate and drank and the party began to break up, when Pa and the
beautiful woman were alone at the table, and they hunched up closer
together, and Pa was talking sweet to her, and telling her that all
wives in America had special trains on railroads, and palaces in New
York, and at Newport and in Florida, and yachts and gold mines, and she
could be the queen of them all if she would only say the word, and she
was just going to say the word, or something, and had his fat, pudgy
hand in both of hers, and was looking into his eyes with her own liquid
eyes, and seemed ready to fall into his arms, when I got up behind him
and lighted a giant fire cracker and put it under his chair and just as
the fuse was sputtering, I said, “Pa, ma wants you at the hotel,” and
the fireworks went off, the woman threw a fit and Pa raised up out of
the smoke and looked at me and said, “Now, where in hell did you come
from just at this time?” and the head waiter took the woman into a
private room to bring her out of her fit, the waiters opened the windows
to let the smoke out, and the crowd stampeded, and the police came in to
pull the place and find the anarchist who threw the bomb, and Pa took me
by the hand and we walked up the sidewalk to a corner, and when we got
out of sight of the crowd Pa said, “Hennery, your ma ain’t here, is
she?” in a pitiful tone, and I said no she wasn’t along with me this
trip, and Pa said, “Hennery, you make me weary,” and we walked along to
the hotel, Pa asking me so many questions about home that it was a like
a catekism.
[Illustration: The Fireworks Went Off—the Woman Threw a Fit, and Pa
Raised Out of the Smoke.]
When we got to the hotel and went to Pa’s room and I told him what I had
been doing since he abandoned me, he said he was proud of me, and now he
had plenty of work and adventure for me to keep him in.
He said he had tried several airships, by having someone else go up in
them, and that he was afraid to go up in one himself, and he seemed glad
that I had been ballooning around home, and he said he could use me to
good advantage.
I asked him about the woman he was talking to about marriage, and he
said that was all guff, that she had a husband who had invented a new
airship, and he was trying to get title to it for use in America, for
war purposes, and that the only way to get on the right side of these
French women was to talk about marriage and money, because for money any
of them would leave their husbands on fifteen minutes’ notice. He said
he had arranged for a trial of the airship the next day, from a place
out in the country, and that I could go up with the inventor of the ship
and see how it worked and report, so we went to bed and I slept better
than I had since I shipped on the cattle ship.
In the morning while we were taking baths and preparing for breakfast, I
found that Pa had been flying pretty high on government money, and he
had all kinds of gold and paper money and bonds, and he made people
think he owned most of America.
Pa asked me how the people at home looked upon his absence, and if they
advanced any theories as to the cause of his being abroad, and I told
him that everybody from the President down to Rockefeller knew about
what he was out looking after, and that when I left Bob Evans at
Fortress Monroe he told me to tell Pa to send a mess of airships to him
so he would meet them when he got to San Francisco, as he wanted to
paralyze the Japs if they got busy around the fleet, which pleased Pa,
and he said, “Just tell the people to wait, and I will produce airships
that can fight battles in the clouds, but it will take time.”
Then we went out in the country about a dozen miles, and met the
inventor and his wife, and the inventor filled a big balloon that looked
like a weiner sausage with gas that he made over a fire out in a field,
and the inventor and I got on a bamboo frame under the balloon, and he
turned on the gasoline that runs the wheel for steering, and they cut
her loose and we went up about fifty feet and sailed around the country
a half mile either way and watched Pa and the wife of the inventor as
they sat under a tree and talked politics.
We came back after a while and Pa was proud of me for having so much
nerve, and I told him the government at home was complaining because Pa
didn’t go up in the airships, cause they said he couldn’t buy airships
intelligently unless he tried them out, and that if he didn’t look out
they would send some expert out to take his place and spend the money,
and as we were landed on the ground I dared Pa to get on the frame and
go up with us for a little spin, and he was afraid the woman would think
he was a coward if he didn’t, so he got up and straddled the ridge pole
of the bamboo frame, and said he would take a whirl at it if it killed
him. The balloon thing couldn’t quite lift all of us, so I got off and
give her a lift, and up she went with the inventor steering, and Pa
hanging on for dear life and saying, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”
[Illustration: Up She Went with the Inventor Steering, and Pa Hanging On
for Dear Life.]
I have seen some scared men in my life, but when the machine got up
about as high as a house, so Pa couldn’t get off, and the woman waved a
handkerchief at Pa, he swallowed his Adam’s apple and said, “Let her go
Gallagher,” and Gallagher, the Frenchman, let her go.
Well, you’d a died to see the thing wobble and see Pa cling on with his
feet and hands. For about a quarter of a mile she went queer, like a
duck that has been wing-tipped, and then she began to descend.
First she passed over a lot of cows that women were milking, and the
cows stampeded one way and the women the other way, and the women were
scared more than the cows, cause when they got out from under the ship
they prayed, but the cows didn’t.
Then the ship struck a field where about forty women were piling onions
on the ground, and it just scattered women and onions all over the
field, and of all the yelling you ever heard that was the worst.
Pa yelled to them that if he ever got off that hay rack alive he would
pay the damages, and he thought he was swearing at them. Then the worst
thing possible happened. The airship went up over a tree, and Pa was
scared and he grabbed a limb and let go of the bamboo, and there he was
in the top of a thornapple tree. The balloon went over all right, and
the inventor steered it away to where it started from, and the woman and
I watched Pa. The thorns were about two inches long and more than a
hundred of them got into Pa and he yelled all kinds of murder, and then
the women who owned the cows and onions the ship had wrecked surrounded
the tree with hoes and rakes and pitchforks, and they made such a
frantic noise that Pa did not dare to come down out of the tree. So Pa
told us to take the train back to Paris and send the American Consul and
the police and a hook and ladder company to get him down and protect
him.
I told Pa I didn’t want to go off and leave him to be killed by strange
women, and maybe eaten by wolves before morning, but he said, “Don’t
talk back to me, you go and send that patrol wagon and the hook and
ladder truck, and be quick about it or I won’t do a thing to you when I
catch you.”
So we went and put the airship in a barn and went back to town and
turned in a police and fire alarm to rescue Pa. The chief said there was
no use in going out there in the country before morning, because the
women couldn’t get up the thornapple tree and Pa couldn’t get down. So I
went to bed and dreamed about Pa all night, and had a perfectly lovely
time.
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