HIS PA AND DYNAMITE--THE OLD MAN SELLING SILVER STOCK--
FENIAN SCARE--“DYNAMITE” IN MILWAUKEE--THE FENIAN BOOM--
“GREAT GOD HANNER WE ARE BLOWED UP!”--HIS MA HAS LOTS OF
SAND--THE OLD MAN USELESS IN TROUBLE. THE DOG AND THE FALSE
TEETH.
“I guess your Pa's losses in the silver mine have made him crazy,
haven't they?” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came in the
store with his eye winkers singed off, and powder marks on his face, and
began to play on the harmonica, as he sat down on the end of a stick of
stove wood, and balanced himself.
“O, I guess not. He has hedged. He got in with a deacon of another
church, and sold some of his stock to him, and Pa says if I will keep my
condemn mouth shut he will unload the whole of it, if the churches hold
out. He goes to a new church every night there is prayer meeting or
anything, and makes Ma go with him, to give him tone; and after meeting
she talks with the sisters about how to piece a silk bed quilt, while
Pa gets in his work selling silver stock. I don't know but he will order
some more stock from the factory, if he sells all he has got,” and the
boy went on playing “There's a land that is fairer than Day.”
“But what was he skipping up street for the other night with his hat
off, grabbing at his coat tails as though they were on fire? I thought I
never saw a pussy man run any faster. And what was the celebration down
on your street about that time? I thought the world was coming to an
end,” and the grocery man kept away from the boy, for fear he would
explode.
“O, that was only a Fenian scare. Nothin' serious. You see Pa is a sort
of half Englishman. He claims to be an American citizen, when he wants
office, but when they talk about a draft he claims to be a subject of
Great Brit-tain, and he says they can't touch him. Pa is a darn smart
man, and don't you forget it. There don't any of them get ahead of Pa
much. Well, Pa has said a good deal about the wicked Fenians, and that
they ought to be pulled, and all that, and when I read the story in the
papers about the explosion in the British Parliament Pa was hot. He said
the damnirish was ruining the whole world. He didn't dare say it at the
table or our hired girl would have knocked him silly with a spoonful
of mashed potatoes, 'cause she is a nirish girl, and she can lick any
Englishman in this town. Pa said there ought to have been somebody
thereto have taken that bomb up and throwed it in the sewer before it
exploded. He said that if he ever should see a bomb he would grab it
right up and throw it away where it wouldn't hurt anybody. Pa has me
read the papers to him nights, cause his eyes have got splinters in 'em,
and after I had read all there was in the paper I made up a lot more and
pretended to read it, about how it was rumored that the Fenians here
in Milwaukee were going to place dynamite bombs at every house where an
Englishman lived, and at a given signal blow them all up. Pa looked pale
around the gills, but he said he wasn't scared.
“Pa and Ma were going to call on a she deacon that night, that has lots
of money in the bank, to see if she didn't want to invest in a dead sure
paying silver mine, and me and my chum concluded to give them a
send off. We got my big black injy rubber foot-ball, and painted
'_Dinymight_' in big white letters on it, and tied a piece of tarred
rope to it for a fuse, and got a big fire cracker, one of those old
fourth of July horse scarers, and a basket full of broken glass. We
put the foot-ball in front of the step and lit the tarred rope, and got
under the step with the firecrackers and basket, where they go down into
the basement. Pa and Ma came out the front door, and down the steps,
and Pa saw the football, and the burning fuse, and he said 'Great God,
Hanner, we are blowed up!' and he started to run, and Ma she stopped to
look at it. Just as Pa started to run I touched off the fire cracker,
and my chum arranged it to pour out the broken glass on the brick
pavement just as the fire cracker went off.”
[Illustration: Great God, Hanner, we are blowed up 048]
“Well, everything went just as we expected, except Ma. She had examined
the foot-ball, and concluded it was not dangerous, and was just giving
it a kick as the firecracker went off, and the glass fell, and the
firecracker was so near her that it scared her, and when Pa looked
around Ma was flying across the sidewalk, and Pa heard the noise and
he thought the house was blown to atoms. O, you'd a died to see him go
around the corner. You could play crokay on his coat-tail, and his face
was as pale as Ma's when she goes to a party. But Ma didn't scare much.
As quick as she stopped against the hitching post she knew it was us
boys, and she came down there, and maybe she didn't maul me. I cried
and tried to gain her sympathy by telling her the firecracker went off
before it was due, and burned my eyebrows off, but she didn't let up
until I promised to go and find Pa.
“I tell you, my Ma ought to be engaged by the British government to hunt
out the dynamite fiends. She would corral them in two minutes. If Pa had
as much sand as Ma has got, it would be warm weather for me. Well, me
and my chum went and headed Pa off or I guess he would be running yet.
We got him up by the lake shore, and he wanted to know if the house fell
down. He said he would leave it to me if he ever said anything against
the Fenians, and I told him he had always claimed that the Fenians were
the nicest men in the world, and it seemed to relieve him very much.
When he got home and found the house there he was tickled, and when Ma
called him an old bald-headed coward, and said it was only a joke of the
boys with a foot ball, he laughed right out, and said he knew it all the
time, and he ran to see if Ma would be scared. And then he wanted to
hug me, but it wasn't my night to hug and I went down to the theater. Pa
don't amount to much when there is trouble. The time Ma had them cramps,
you remember, when you got your cucumbers first last season, Pa came
near fainting away, and Ma said ever since they had been married when
anything ailed her, Pa has had pains just the same as she has, only he
grunted more, and thought he was going to die. Gosh, if I was a man I
wouldn't be sick every time one of the neighbors had a back ache, would
you?
“Well you can't tell. When you have been married twenty or thirty years
you will know a good deal more than you do now. You think you know it
all, now, and you are pretty intelligent for a boy that has been brought
up carelessly, but there are things that you will learn after a while
that will astonish you. But what ails your Pa's teeth? The hired girl
was over here to get some corn meal for gruel, and she said your Pa was
gumming it, since he lost his teeth.”
“O, about the teeth. That was too bad. You see my chum has got a dog
that is old, and his teeth have all come out in front, and this morning
I borried Pa's teeth before he got up, to see if we couldn't fix them in
the dog's mouth, so he could eat better. Pa says it is an evidence of a
kind heart for a boy to be good to dumb animals, but it is a darn mean
dog that will go back on a friend. We tied the teeth in the dog's mouth
with a string that went around his upper jaw, and another around his
under jaw, and you'd a dide to see how funny he looked when he laffed.
“He looked just like Pa when he tried to smile so as to get me to come
up to him so he can lick me. The dog pawed his mouth a spell to get the
teeth out, and then we gave him a bone with some meat on, and he began
to gnaw the bone, and the teeth come off the plate, and he thought it
was pieces of the bone, and he swallowed the teeth. My chum noticed it
first, and he said we had got to get in our work pretty quick to save
the plates, and I think we were in luck to save them. I held the dog,
and my chum, who was better acquainted with him, untied the strings and
got the gold plates out, but there were only two teeth left, and the dog
was happy. He woggled his tail for more teeth, but we hadn't any more.
I am going to give him Ma's teeth some day. My chum says when a dog gets
an appetite for anything you have got to keep giving it to him or he
goes back on you. But I think my chum played dirt on me. We sold the
gold plates to a jewelry man, and my chum kept the money. I think,
as long as I furnished the goods, he ought to have given me something
besides the experience, don't you? After this I don't have no more
partners, you bet.” All this time the boy was marking on a piece of
paper, and soon after he went out the grocery man noticed a crowd
outside, and on he found a sign hanging up which read:
WORMY FIGS
FOR PARTIES.