IN the course of the next few days Dan decided that there was no danger
of trouble from the hands. Things settled back into their accustomed
rut. He was only a little less popular, perhaps.
He was indebted to Clarence for the first warning he received as to what
was in store for him.
It came about in this way. Clarence had retired to the yards, where,
secure from observation, he was indulging in a quiet smoke, furtively
keeping an eye open for McClintock, whose movements were uncertain, as
he knew from sad experience.
A high board fence was in front of him, shutting off the yards from the
lower end of the town. At his back was a freight car, back of that again
were the interlacing tracks, and beyond them a cornfield and Billup's
Fork, with its inviting shade of sycamores and willows and its tempting
swimming-holes.
Suddenly he heard a scrambling on the opposite side of the fence, and
ten brown fingers clutched the tops of the boards, then a battered straw
hat came on a level with the fingers, at the same instant a bare foot
and leg were thrown over the fence, and the owner of the battered straw
hat swung himself into view. All this while a dog whined and yelped;
then followed a vigorous scratching sound, and presently a small,
dilapidated-looking yellow cur squeezed itself beneath the fence.
Clarence recognized the intruders. It was Branyon's boy, Augustus,
commonly called “Spide,” because of his exceeding slimness and the
length of his legs, and his dog Pink.
As soon as Branyon's boy saw Clarence he balanced himself deftly on the
top of the fence with one hand and shaded his eyes elaborately with the
other. An amiable, if toothless, smile curled his lips. When he spoke it
was with deep facetiousness.
“Hi! come out from behind that roll of paper!”
But Clarence said not a word. He puffed away at his cigarette,
apparently oblivious of everything save the contentment it gave him,
and as he puffed Spide's mouth worked and watered sympathetically.
His secret admiration was tremendous. Here was Clarence in actual and
undisturbed possession of a whole cigarette. He had to purchase his
cigarettes in partnership with some other boy, and go halves on the
smoking of them. It made him feel cheap and common.
“Say I got one of them coffin-tacks that ain't working?” he inquired.
Clarence gazed off up the tracks, ignoring the question and the
questioner. Spide's presence was balm to his soul. But as one of the
office force of the Buckhom and Antioch he felt a certain lofty reserve
to be incumbent upon him. Besides, he and Spide had been engaged in
a recent rivalry for Susie Poppleton's affections. It is true he had
achieved a brilliant success over his rival, but that a mere school-boy
should have ventured to oppose him, a salaried man, had struck him as an
unpardonable piece of impertinence for which there could be no excuse.
Spide, however, had taken the matter most philosophically. He had
recognized that he could not hope to compete with a youth who possessed
unlimited wealth, which he was willing to lay out on chewing-gum and
candy, his experience being that the sex was strictly mercenary and
incapable of a disinterested love. Of course he had much admired Miss
Poppleton; from the crown of her small dark head, with its tightly
braided “pig-tails,” down to her trim little foot he had esteemed her
as wholly adorable; but, after all, his affair of the heart had been an
affair of the winter only. With the coming of summer he had found more
serious things to think of. He was learning to swim and to chew tobacco.
The mastering of these accomplishments pretty well occupied his time.
“Say!” he repeated, “got another?”
Still Clarence blinked at the fierce sunlight which danced on the rails,
and said nothing. Spide slid skilfully down from his perch, but his
manner had undergone a change.
“Who throwed that snipe away, anyhow?” he asked, disdainfully. Clarence
turned his eyes slowly in his direction.
“Lookee here. You fellows got to keep out of these yards, or I'll tell
McClintock. First we know some of you kids will be getting run over, and
then your folks will set up a lively howl. Get on out! It ain't no place
for little boys!”
He put the cigarette between his lips and took a deep and tantalizing
pull at it. Spide kept to his own side of the ditch that ran between the
fence and the tracks.
“Huh!” with infinite scorn. “Who's a kid? You won't be happy till I come
over there and lick you!”
“First thing I know you'll be stealing scrap iron!”
“My gosh! The Huckleberry'd have to stop running if I swiped a
coupling-pin!”
Clarence had recourse to the cigarette, and again Spide was consumed
with torturing jealousies. “Where did you shoot that snipe, anyhow?” he
inquired, insultingly.
Once more Clarence allowed his glance to stray off up the tracks.
“For half a cent I'd come across and do what I say!” added Spide,
stooping down to roll up his trousers leg, and then easing an unelastic
“gallus” that cut his shoulders. This elicited a short and contemptuous
grunt from Clarence. He was well pleased with himself. He felt Spide's
envy. It was sweet and satisfying.
“Say!” with sudden animation. “You fellers will be going around on your
uppers in a day or so. I'll bet you'd give a heap to know what I know!”
“I wouldn't give a darned cent to know all you know or ever will know!”
retorted Clarence, promptly.
“Some people's easily upset here in the cupola,” tapping his brimless
covering. “I wouldn't want to give you brain-fever; I don't hate you bad
enough.”
“Well, move on. You ain't wanted around here. It may get me into trouble
if I'm seen fooling away my time on you.”
“I hope to hell it will,” remarked Branyon's boy, Augustus, with cordial
ill-will and fluent profanity. He was not a good little boy. He himself
would have been the first to spurn the idea of personal sanctity. But
he was literally bursting with the importance of the facts which he
possessed, and Clarence's indifference gave him no opening.
“What will you bet there ain't a strike?”
“I ain't betting this morning,” said Clarence, blandly. “But if there
is one we are ready for it. You bet the hands won't catch us napping.
We are ready for 'em any time and all the time.” This, delivered with a
large air, impressed Spide exceedingly.
“Have you sent for the militia a'ready?” he asked, anxiously.
“That's saying,” noting the effect of his words. “I can't go blabbing
about, telling what the road's up to, but we are awake, and the hands
will get it in the neck if they tackle the boss. He's got dam little use
for laboring men, anyhow.”
To Clarence, Oakley was the most august person he had ever known.
He religiously believed his position to be only second in point of
importance and power to that of the President of the United States.
He was wont to invest him with purely imaginary attributes, and to lie
about him at a great rate among his comrades, who were ready to credit
any report touching a man who was reputed to be able to ride on the cars
without a ticket. Human grandeur had no limits beyond this.
“There was a meeting last night. I bet you didn't know that,” said
Spide.
“I heard something of it. Was your father at the meeting, Spide?” he
asked, dropping his tone of hostility for one of gracious familiarity.
The urchin promptly crossed the ditch and stood at his side.
“Of course the old man was. You don't suppose he wouldn't be in it?”
“Oh, well, let 'em kick. You see the boss is ready for 'em,” remarked
Clarence, indifferently. He wanted to know what Spide knew, but he
didn't feel that he could afford to show any special interest. “Where
you going--swimming?” he added.
“Yep.” But Spide was not ready to drop the fascinating subject of the
strike. He wished to astonish Clarence, who was altogether too knowing.
“The meeting was in the room over Jack Britt's saloon,” he volunteered.
“I suppose you think we didn't know that up at the office. We got our
spies out. There ain't nothing the hands can do we ain't on to.”
Spide wrote his initials in the soft bank of the ditch with his big toe,
while he meditated on what he could tell next.
“Well, sir, you'd 'a' been surprised if you'd 'a' been there.”
“Was you there, Spide?”
“Yep.”
“Oh, come off; you can't stuff me.”
“I was, too, there. The old lady sent me down to fetch pap home. She was
afraid he'd get full. Joe Stokes was there, and Lou Bentick, and a whole
slew of others, and Griff Ryder.”
Clarence gasped with astonishment. “Why, he ain't one of the hands.”
“Well, he's on their side.”
“What you giving us?”
“Say, they are going to make a stiff kick on old man Oakley working in
the shops. They got it in for him good and strong.” He paused to weigh
the effect of this, and then went on rapidly: “He's done something.
Ryder knows about it. He told my old man and Joe Stokes. They say he's
got to get out. What's a convicted criminal, anyhow?”
“What do you want to know that for, Spide?” questioned the artful
Clarence, with great presence of mind.
“Well, that's what old man Oakley is. I heard Ryder say so myself, and
pap and Joe Stokes just kicked themselves because they hadn't noticed it
before, I suppose. My! but they were hot! Say, you'll see fun to-morrow.
I shouldn't be surprised if they sent you all a-kiting.”
Clarence was swelling with the desire to tell Oakley what he had heard.
He took the part of a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
“Have one?” he said.
Spide promptly availed himself of his companion's liberality.
“Well, so long,” the latter added. “I got to get back,” and a moment
later he might have been seen making his way cautiously in the direction
of the office, while Spide, his battered hat under his arm, and the
cigarette clutched in one hand, was skipping gayly across the cornfield
towards the creek followed by Pink. He was bound for the “Slidy,” a
swimming-hole his mother had charged him on no account to visit. Under
these peculiar circumstances it was quite impossible for him to consider
any other spot. Nowhere else was the shade so cool and dense, nowhere
else did the wild mint scent the summer air with such seductive odors,
and nowhere else were such social advantages to be found.
There were always big boys hanging about the “Slidy” who played cards
and fished and loafed, but mostly loafed, because it was the easiest,
and here Mr. Tink Brown, Jeffy's logical successor and unofficial heir
apparent, held court from the first of June to the last of August. The
charm of his society no respectable small boy was able to withstand. His
glittering indecencies made him a sort of hero, and his splendid lawless
state was counted worthy of emulation.
But Spide discovered that the way of the transgressor is sometimes as
hard as the moralists would have us believe.
It was the beginning of the season, and a group of boys, in easy
undress, were clustered on the bank above the swimming-hole. They were
“going in” as soon as an important question should be decided.
The farmer whose fields skirted Billup's Fork at this point usually
filled in the “Slidy” every spring with bits of rusty barb-wire
and osage-orange cuttings. The youth of Antioch who were prejudiced
maintained that he did it to be mean, but the real reason was that he
wished to discourage the swimmers, who tramped his crops and stole his
great yellow pumpkins to play with in the water.
The time-honored method of determining the condition of the hole was
beautifully simple. It was to catch a small boy and throw him in, and
until this rite was performed the big boys used the place but gingerly.
Mr. Brown and his friends were waiting for this small boy to happen
along, when the unsuspecting Spide ran down the bank. He was promptly
seized by the mighty Tink.
“Been in yet, Spide?” asked his captor, genially.
“Nope.”
“Then this is your chance.” Whereat Spide began to cry. He didn't
want to go in. All at once he remembered he had promised his mother he
wouldn't and that his father had promised him a licking if he did--two
excellent reasons why he should stay out--but Tink only pushed him
towards the water's edge.
“You're hurting me! Lemme alone, you big loafer! Lemme go, or I'll
tell the old man on you!” and he scratched and clawed, but Tink merely
laughed, and the other boys advised him to “chuck the little shaver in.”
“Lemme take off my shirt and pants! Lemme take off my pants--just my
pants, Tink!” he entreated.
But he was raised on high and hurled out into the stream where the
sunlight flashed among the shadows cast by the willows. His hat went one
way and his cigarette another. Pink was considerately tossed after him,
and all his earthly possessions were afloat.
There was a splash, and he disappeared from sight to reappear a second
later, with streaming hair and dripping face.
“How is it?” chorussed the big boys, who were already pulling off their
clothes, as they saw that neither barb-wire nor osage-orange brush
festooned the swimmer.
“Bully!” ecstatically, and he dived dexterously into the crown of his
upturned hat, which a puff of wind had sent dancing gayly down-stream.