"There, I knew you would get into trouble," said the grocery man to the
bad boy, as a policeman came along leading him by the ear, the boy having
an empty champagne bottle in one hand, and a black eye. "What has he been
doing Mr. Policeman?" asked the grocery man, as the policeman halted with
the boy in front of the store.
"Well, I was going by a house up here when this kid opened the door with a
quart bottle of champagne, and he cut the wire and fired the cork at
another boy, and the champagne went all over the sidewalk, and some of it
went on me, and I knew there was something wrong, cause champagne is too
expensive to waste that way, and he said he was running the shebang and if
I would bring him here you would say he was all right. If you say so I
will let him go."
The grocery man said he had better let the boy go, as his parents would
not like to have their little pet locked up. So the policeman let go his
ear, and he throwed the empty bottle at a coal wagon, and after the
policeman had brushed the champagne off his coat, and smelled of his
fingers, and started off, the grocery man turned to the boy, who was
peeling a cucumber, and said:
"Now, what kind of a circus have you been having, and what do you mean by
destroying wine that way! and, where are your folks?"
"Well, I'll tell you. Ma she has got the hay fever and has gone to Lake
Superior to see if she can't stop sneezing, and Saturday Pa said he and me
would go out to Oconomowoc and stay over Sunday, and try and recuperate
our health. Pa said it would be a good joke for me not to call him Pa, but
to act as though I was his younger brother, and we would have a
real nice time. I knowed what he wanted. He is an old masher, that's
what's the matter with him, and he was going to play himself for a
batchelor. O, thunder, I got on to his racket in a minute. He was
introduced to some of the girls and Saturday evening he danced till the
cows came home. At home he is awful fraid of rheumatiz, and he never
sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured off'n him, and he
stood in the door and let a girl fan him till I was afraid he would
freeze, and just as he was telling a girl from Tennessee, who was joking
him about being 'a nold batch,' that he was not sure as he could always
hold out a woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with the
charming ladies of the Sunny South. I pulled his coat and said, 'Pa how do
you spose Ma's hay fever is to-night, I'll bet she is just sneezing the
top of her head off.' Wall, sir, you just oughten seen that girl and Pa.
Pa looked at me as if I was a total stranger, and told the porter if that
freckled faced boot-black belonged around the house he had better be fired
out of the ball room, and the girl said 'the disgustin' thing!' and just
before they fired me I told Pa he had better look out or he would sweat
through his liver pad.
"I went to bed and Pa staid up till the lights were put out. He was mad
when he came to bed, but he didn't kick me, cause the people in the next
room would hear him, but the next morning he talked to me. He said I might
go back home Sunday night, and he would stay a day or two. He sat around
on the veranda all the afternoon, talking with the girls, and when he
would see me coming along he would look cross. He took a girl out boat
riding, and when I asked him if I couldn't go along, he said he was afraid
I would get drowned, and he said if I went home there was nothing there
too good for me, and so my chum and me got to firing bottles of champagne,
and he hit me in the eye with a cork, and I drove him out doors
and was just going to shell his earth works, when the policeman collared
me. Say, what's good for a black eye?"
The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home. "What do
you think your Pa's object was in passing himself off for a single man at
Oconomowoc?" asked the grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the
boy's father.
"That's what beats me. Aside from Ma's hay fever she is one of the
healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose he does it for his health, the
way they all do when they go to a summer resort, but it leaves a boy an
orphan, don't it, to have such kitteny parents?"