I was down in the perfessor's labertory one day, and that was a queer
place. They was every kind of scientifics that has ever been discovered
in it. Some was pickled in bottles and some was stuffed and some was
pinned to the walls with their wings spread out. If you took hold of
anything, it was likely to be a skull and give you the shivers or some
electric contraption and shock you; and if you tipped over a jar and
it broke, enough germs might get loose to slaughter a hull town. I was
helping the perfessor to unpack a lot of stuff some friends had sent
him, and I noticed a bottle that had onto it, blowed in the glass:
DANIEL, DUNNE AND COMPANY
“That's funny,” says I, out loud.
“What is?” asts the perfessor.
I showed him the bottle and told him how I was named after the company
that made 'em. He says to look around me. They is all kinds of glassware
in that room--bottles and jars and queer-shaped things with crooked tails
and noses--and nigh every piece of glass the perfessor owns is made by
that company.
“Why,” says the perfessor, “their factory is in this very town.”
And nothing would do fur me but I must go and see that factory. I
couldn't till the quarantine was pried loose from our house. But when it
was, I went down town and hunted up the place and looked her over.
It was a big factory, and I was kind of proud of that. I was glad she
wasn't no measly, little, old-fashioned, run-down concern. Of course,
I wasn't really no relation to it and it wasn't none to me. But I
was named fur it, too, and it come about as near to being a fambly as
anything I had ever had or was likely to find. So I was proud it seemed
to be doing so well.
I thinks as I looks at her of the thousands and thousands of bottles
that has been coming out of there fur years and years, and will be
fur years and years to come. And one bottle not so much different from
another one. And all that was really knowed about me was jest the name
on one out of all them millions and millions of bottles. It made me feel
kind of queer, when I thought of that, as if I didn't have no separate
place in the world any more than one of them millions of bottles. If any
one will shut his eyes and say his own name over and over agin fur quite
a spell, he will get kind of wonderized and mesmerized a-doing it--he
will begin to wonder who the dickens he is, anyhow, and what he is, and
what the difference between him and the next feller is. He will wonder
why he happens to be himself and the next feller _himself_. He wonders
where himself leaves off and the rest of the world begins. I been that
way myself--all wonderized, so that I felt jest like I was a melting
piece of the hull creation, and it was all shifting and drifting and
changing and flowing, and not solid anywhere, and I could hardly keep
myself from flowing into it. It makes a person feel awful queer, like
seeing a ghost would. It makes him feel like _he_ wasn't no solider than
a ghost himself. Well, if you ever done that and got that feeling, you
_know_ what I mean. All of a sudden, when I am trying to take in all
them millions and millions of bottles, it rushed onto me, that feeling,
strong. Thinking of them bottles had somehow brung it on. The bigness
of the hull creation, and the smallness of me, and the gait at which
everything was racing and rushing ahead, made me want to grab hold of
something solid and hang on.
I reached out my hand, and it hit something solid all right. It was
a feller who was wheeling out a hand truck loaded with boxes from the
shipping department. I had been standing by the shipping department
door, and I reached right agin him.
He wants to know if I am drunk or a blanked fool. So after some talk
of that kind I borrows a chew of tobacco of him and we gets right well
acquainted.
I helped him finish loading his wagon and rode over to the freight depot
with him and helped him unload her. Lifting one of them boxes down from
the wagon I got such a shock I like to of dropped her.
[Illustration: 0197]
Fur she was marked so many dozen, glass, handle with care, and she was
addressed to Dr. Hartley L. Kirby, Atlanta, Ga.
I managed to get that box onto the platform without busting her, and
then I sets down on top of her awful weak.
“What's the matter?” asts the feller I was with.
“Nothing,” says I.
“You look sick,” he says. And I _was_ feeling that-a-way.
“Mebby I do,” says I, “and it's enough to shake a feller up to find a
dead man come to life sudden like this.”
“Great snakes, no!” says he, looking all around, “where?”
But I didn't stop to chew the rag none. I left him right there, with his
mouth wide open, staring after me like I was crazy. Half a block away I
looked back and I seen him double over and slap his knee and laugh loud,
like he had hearn a big joke, but what he was laughing at I never knew.
I was tickled. Tickled? Jest so tickled I was plumb foolish with it. The
doctor was alive after all--I kept saying it over and over to myself--he
hadn't drownded nor blowed away. And I was going to hunt him up.
I had a little money. The perfessor had paid it to me. He had give me a
job helping take care of his hosses and things like that, and wanted me
to stay, and I had been thinking mebby I would fur a while. But not now!
I calkelated I could grab a ride that very night that would put me into
Evansville the next morning. I figgered if I ketched a through freight
from there on the next night I might get where he was almost as quick as
them bottles did.
I didn't think it was no use writing out my resignation fur the
perfessor. But I got quite a bit of grub from Biddy Malone to make a
start on, fur I didn't figger on spending no more money than I had to
on grub. She asts me a lot of questions, and I had to lie to her a
good deal, but I got the grub. And at ten that night I was in an empty
bumping along south, along with a cross-eyed feller named Looney Hogan
who happened to be travelling the same way.
Riding on trains without paying fare ain't always the easy thing it
sounds. It is like a trade that has got to be learned. They is different
ways of doing it. I have done every way frequent, except one. That I
give up after trying her two, three times. That is riding the rods
down underneath the cars, with a piece of board put acrost 'em to lay
yourself on.
I never want to go _anywheres_ agin bad enough to ride the rods.
Because sometimes you arrive where you are going to partly smeared over
the trucks and in no condition fur to be made welcome to our city, as
Doctor Kirby would say. Sometimes you don't arrive. Every oncet in a
while you read a little piece in a newspaper about a man being found
alongside the tracks, considerable cut up, or laying right acrost them,
mebby. He is held in the morgue a while and no one knows who he is, and
none of the train crew knows they has run over a man, and the engineer
says they wasn't none on the track. More'n likely that feller has been
riding the rods, along about the middle of the train. Mebby he let
himself go to sleep and jest rolled off. Mebby his piece of board
slipped and he fell when the train jolted. Or mebby he jest natcherally
made up his mind he rather let loose and get squashed then get any more
cinders into his eyes. Riding the blind baggage or the bumpers gives me
all the excitement I wants, or all the gambling chancet either; others
can have the rods fur all of me. And they _is_ some people ackshally says
they likes 'em best.
A good place, if it is winter time, is the feed rack over a cattle car,
fur the heat and steam from all them steers in there will keep you warm.
But don't crawl in no lumber car that is only loaded about half full,
and short lengths and bundles of laths and shingles in her; fur they
is likely to get to shifting and bumping. Baled hay is purty good
sometimes. Myself, not being like these bums that is too proud to
work, I have often helped the fireman shovel coal and paid fur my ride
that-a-way. But an empty, fur gineral purposes, will do about as well as
anything.
This feller Looney Hogan that was with me was a kind of a harmless
critter, and he didn't know jest where he was going, nor why. He was
mostly scared of things, and if you spoke to him quick he shivered first
and then grinned idiotic so you wouldn't kick him, and when he talked
he had a silly little giggle. He had been made that-a-way in a reform
school where they took him young and tried to work the cussedness out'n
him by batting him around. They worked it out, and purty nigh everything
else along with it, I guess. Looney had had a pardner whose name was
Slim, he said; but a couple of years before Slim had fell overboard
off'n a barge up to Duluth and never come up agin. Looney knowed Slim
was drownded all right, but he was always travelling around looking
at tanks and freight depots and switch shanties, fur Slim's mark to be
fresh cut with a knife somewheres, so he would know where to foller and
ketch up with him agin. He knowed he would never find Slim's mark, he
said, but he kept a-looking, and he guessed that was the way he got the
name of Looney.
Looney left me at Evansville. He said he was going east from there, he
guessed. And I went along south. But I was hindered considerable, being
put off of trains three or four times, and having to grab these here
slow local freights between towns all the way down through Kentuckey.
Anywheres south of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River
trainmen is grouchier to them they thinks is bums than north of it,
anyhow. And in some parts of it, if a real bum gets pinched, heaven help
'im, fur nothing else won't.
One night, between twelve and one o'clock, I was put off of a freight
train fur the second time in a place in the northern part of Tennessee,
right near the Kentuckey line. I set down in a lumber yard near the
railroad track, and when she started up agin I grabbed onto the iron
ladder and swung myself aboard. But the brakeman was watching fur me,
and clumb down the ladder and stamped on my fingers. So I dropped off,
with one finger considerable mashed, and set down in that lumber yard
wondering what next.
It was a dark night, and so fur as I could see they wasn't much moving
in that town. Only a few places was lit up. One was way acrost the town
square from me, and it was the telephone exchange, with a man operator
reading a book in there. The other was the telegraph room in the depot
about a hundred yards from me, and they was only two fellers in it,
both smoking. The main business part of the town was built up around the
square, like lots of old-fashioned towns is, and they was jest enough
brightness from four, five electric lights to show the shape of the
square and be reflected from the windows of the closed-up stores.
I knowed they was likely a watchman somewheres about, too. I guessed
I wouldn't wander around none and run no chances of getting took up by
him. So I was getting ready to lay down on top of a level pile of boards
and go to sleep when I hearn a curious kind of noise a way off, like it
must be at the edge of town.
It sounded like quite a bunch of cattle might shuffling along a dusty
road. The night was so quiet you could hear things plain from a long
ways off. It growed a little louder and a little nearer. And then it
struck a plank bridge somewheres, and come acrost it with a clatter.
Then I knowed it wasn't cattle. Cows and steers don't make that
cantering kind of noise as a rule; they trot. It was hosses crossing
that bridge. And they was quite a lot of 'em.
As they struck the dirt road agin, I hearn a shot. And then another and
another. Then a dozen all to oncet, and away off through the night a
woman screamed.
I seen the man in the telephone place fling down his book and grab a
pistol from I don't know where. He stepped out into the street and fired
three shots into the air as fast as he could pull the trigger. And as he
done so they was a light flashed out in a building way down the railroad
track, and shots come answering from there. Men's voices began to yell
out; they was the noise of people running along plank sidewalks, and
windows opening in the dark. Then with a rush the galloping noise come
nearer, come closet; raced by the place where I was hiding, and nigh
a hundred men with guns swept right into the middle of that square and
pulled their hosses up.