“Here, what you up to, you young heathen?” said Uncle Ike, as a pair of
small boxing gloves, about as big as goslings, struck him in the solar
plexus and all the way down his stomach, and he noticed a red streak
rushing about the room, side-stepping and clucking. “You are a nice
looking Sunday-school scholar, you are, dancing around as though you
were in the prize ring. Who taught you that foolishness, and what are
you trying to do?” and the old man cornered the red-headed boy between
the bookcase and the center-table, and took him across his knee, and
fanned his trousers with a hand as big as a canvas ham, until he said he
threw up the sponge.
“Well, I'll tell you,” said the red-headed boy, as the old man let him
up and he felt of his trousers to see if they were warm, “I am going
into the prize-fighting business, and Aunt Almira, who is studying for
the stage, is teaching me to box. Gee, but she can give you a blow with
her left across the ear that will make you think Jeffries has put on
a shirt-waist, and a turquoise ring, and she and I are going to form a
combination and make a barrel of money. Say, Aunt Almira has got so she
can kick clear up to the gas jet, and she wants to play Juliet. I am
going to play Jeffries to her Juliet.”
“Oh, you and your aunt have got things all mixed up. She does not have
to kick to play Juliet. And you can't box well enough to get into the
kindergarten class of prize fighters. What you want to fight for anyway?
Better go and study your Sunday-school lesson.”
“I don't know,” said the boy, as he tied on a boxing glove by taking
the string in his teeth, “there is more money in prize fighting than
anything, and Jeffries was a nice Sunday-school boy, and his father is a
preacher, and he said the Lord was on the side of Jim in the fight that
knocked out Fitzsimmons. Do you believe, Uncle Ike, that the Lord was in
the ring there at Coney Island, seconding Jeffries, and that the prayers
of Jeffries' preacher father had anything to do with Fitzsimmons getting
it right and left in the slats and on the jaw?”
“No! No! No!” said Uncle Ike, as he shuddered with disgust at the
thought that the good Lord should be mixed up in such things just to
make newspaper sensations. “There is not much going on that the Lord
is not an eye-witness of, but when it comes to being on one side or the
other of a prize fight He has got other business of more importance.
He watches even a sparrow's fall, but it is mighty doubtful in my mind
whether he paid any attention as to which of the two prize-fighting
brutes failed to get up in ten seconds. Boxing is all right, and I
believe in it, and want all boys to learn how to do it, in order that
they may protect themselves, or protect a weak person from assault, but
it ought to stop there. Men who fight each other for money ought to be
classed with bulldogs, wear muzzles and a dog license, and be shunned by
all decent people,” and the old man lit his pipe with deliberation and
smoked a long time in silence.
“But they make money, don't they?” said the boy, who thought that making
money was the chief end of man. “Think of making thirty thousand dollars
in one night!”
“Yes, and think of the train robbers who make a hundred thousand dollars
a night,” said the old man; “and what good did any money made by train
robbing or prize fighting ever do anybody? The men who make money that
way, blow it in for something that does them no good, and when they come
to die you have to take up a collection to bury them. Don't be a prize
fighter or a train robber if you can help it, boy, and don't ever get
the idea that the Lord is sitting up nights holding pool tickets on a
prize fight.”
“Uncle Ike, why didn't you go to the circus the other night? We had more
fun, and lemonade, and peanuts, and the clown was so funny,” said the
boy; “and they had a fight, and a circus man threw a man out of the
tent; and a woman rode on a horse with those great, wide skirts, and
rosin on her feet and everywhere, so she would stick on, and----”
“Oh, don't tell me,” said Uncle Ike, as he ran a broom straw into his
pipe stem to open up the pores; “I was brought up among circuses, and
used to sit up all night and go out on the road to meet the old wagon
show coming to town. Did you ever go away out five or six miles, in the
night, to meet a circus, and get tired, and lay down by the road and go
to sleep, and have the dew on the grass wet your bare feet and trousers
clear up to your waistband, and suddenly have the other boys wake you
up, and there was a fog so you couldn't see far, and suddenly about
daylight you hear a noise like a hog that gets frightened and says
'Woof!' and there coming out of the fog right on to you is the elephant,
looking larger than a house, and you keep still for fear of scaring him,
and he passes on and then the camels come, and the cages, and the sleepy
drivers letting the six horses go as they please, and the wagons with
the tents, and the performers sleeping on the bundles, and the band
wagon with all the musicians asleep, and the lions and tigers don't say
anything; and you never do anything except keep your eyes bulging out
till they get by, and then you realize you are six miles from home, and
you follow the procession into town, and when you get home your parents
take you across a chair and pet you with a press board for being out all
night, until you are so blistered that you cannot sit down on a seat at
the circus in the afternoon. Oh, I have been there, boy, barefooted and
bareheaded, with a hickory shirt on open clear down, and torn trousers
opened clear up. Lemonade never tastes like it does at a circus, sawdust
never smells the same anywhere else, and nothing in the whole world
smells like a circus,” and the old man's face lighted up as though the
recollection had made him young again.
“Did you ever see a fight at a circus, Uncle Ike?” asked the red-headed
boy, who seemed to have been more impressed with the fight he had seen
than with the performance.
“See a circus fight?” said Uncle Ike. “Gosh, I was right in the midst of
a circus fight, where several people were killed, and the whole town was
a hospital for a month. See that scar on top of my head,” and the old
man pointed with pride to a place on his head that looked as though a
mule had kicked him. “I was a deputy constable the day Levi J. North's
old circus, menagerie and troupe of Indians showed in the old town where
I lived.”
[Ilustration: I grabbed a circus man by the arm 047]
“Some country boys got in a muss with a side-show barker and they got to
fighting, and some Irish railroad graders heard the row, and they rushed
in with spades and picks' and clubs, and some gentleman said, 'Hey,
Rheube,' and the circus men came rushing out, and I came up with a tin
star, and said, 'In the name of the state I command the peace,' and I
grabbed a circus man by the arm, and an Irishman named Gibbons said, 'to
hell wid 'em,' and then a box car or something struck me on the head,
and I laid down, and three hundred circus men and about the same number
of countrymen and railroad hands walked on me, and they fought for an
hour, and when the people got me home and I woke up the circus had been
gone a week, and they had buried those who died, and a whole lot were in
jail, and my head didn't get down so I could get my hat on before late
in the fall.”
“I grabbed a circus man by the arm.”
“Did you resign as constable?” asked the redheaded boy, and he looked at
Uncle Ike with awe, as he would at a hero of a hundred battles.
“Did I? That's the first thing I did when I came to, and I have never
looked at a tin star on a deputy since without a shudder, and I have
never let an admiring public force any office on to me to this day. One
day in a public office was enough for your Uncle Ike, but I would like
to go to a circus once more and listen to those old jokes of the clown,
which were so old that we boys knew them by heart sixty years ago,” and
Uncle Ike lighted his pipe again, and tried to laugh at one of the old
jokes.
“Uncle Ike, I've got a scheme to get rich, and I will take you into
partnership with me,” said the redheaded boy, as Uncle Ike began to cool
off from his circus story. “You go in with me and furnish the money, and
I will buy a lot of hens, and fix up the back yard with lath, and just
let the hens lay eggs and raise chickens, and we will sell them. I have
figured it all up, and by starting with ten hens and two roosters, and
let them go ahead and attend to business, in twenty years we would have
seventeen million nine hundred and sixty-one fowls, which at 10 cents a
pound about Thanksgiving time would amount to----”
“There, there, come off,” said Uncle Ike, as he lit up the old pipe
again, and got his thinker a'thinking. “I know what you want. You want
to get me in on the ground floor, I have been in more things on the
ground floor than anybody, but there was always another fellow in the
cellar. You are figuring hens the way you do compound interest, but
you are away off. Life is too short to wait for compound interest on a
dollar to make a fellow rich, and cutting coupons off a hen is just the
same. I started a hen ranch fifty years ago, on the same theory, and
went broke. There is no way to make money on hens except to turn them
loose on a farm, and have a woman with an apron over her head hunt eggs,
and sell them as quick as they are laid, before a hen has a chance to
get the fever to set. You open a hen ranch in the back yard, and your
hens will lay like thunder, when eggs are four cents a dozen, but when
eggs are two shillings a dozen you might take a hen by the neck and
shake her and you couldn't get an egg. When eggs are high, hens just
wander around as though they did not care whether school kept or not,
and they kick up a dust and lallygag, and get some disease, and eat
all the stuff you can buy for them, and they will make such a noise the
neighbors will set dogs on them, and the roosters will get on strike and
send walking delegates around to keep hens from laying, and then when
eggs get so cheap they are not good enough to throw at jay actors, the
whole poultry yard will begin to work overtime, and you have eggs to
spare. If the hens increased as you predict in your prospectus to me,
it would take all the money in town to buy food for them, and if you
attempted to realize on your hens to keep from bankruptcy, everybody
would quit eating chicken and go to eating mutton, and there you are.
I decline to invest in a hen ranch right here now, and if you try to
inveigle me into it I shall have you arrested as a gold-brick swindler,”
and Uncle Ike patted the red-headed boy on the shoulder and ran a great
hard thumb into his ribs.