I made up my mind even stronger to be a monument of behavior. Whether it was mother"s talk, or that I did really keep out of sc.r.a.pes, at least I got through the week without a thrashing.
Then come Sunday again. My Sunday-school teacher was a maiden lady by the name of Mehitabel Demilt--aunt to Thomas F., my present partner.
Miss. .h.i.tty wasn"t much to look at. Growing her nose had absorbed most of her vitality, and her years was such she could have looked on a good part of mankind right motherly, if she"d been inclined that way.
Howsomever, she wore the styles of sweet sixteen, and whenever a man come around she frisked like a clothes-horse.
But a kinder woman never lived. When with the boys she dropped her tomfoolery, too. Trouble was, them young clothes stood for all she dreamt of--give them dreams the go-by, and the race was lost for poor Miss. .h.i.tty. Feathers flyin" and ribbons streaming, she made herself believe she was still in the running; without "em, she knew only too well what it was to be a lonely, long-nosed, forsaken, homely old maid.
I don"t blame her a particle. Her finery stood to her like whisky to a busted man. Take a little wine for your stomachache, and a few clothes for your heartache.
A trifle gay for father"s crowd was Miss. .h.i.tty, but they didn"t dast to say a word. She belonged to one of our best families, and her brother-in-law, who could be as unG.o.dly a man under provocation as you ever see, held a mortgage on the church. He"d "a" dumped the outfit into the snows of winter, and never a second thought, if they didn"t treat Miss. .h.i.tty right. So they overlooked things and gave her the Bible cla.s.s to run. Mighty nice to us boys she was; she certainly was. Curious mix of part child and part horse-sense woman. The woman savvied her place all right, but the child part couldn"t stand for the pain of it.
If there was anything that made Miss. .h.i.tty warlike it was cruelty. Seems the Mrs. Jael sermon riled her plumb through. I suppose, perhaps, she didn"t understand how any woman could be so recklessly extravagant as to drive a nail through a sound man"s head, and spoil him. Miss. .h.i.tty might have spiked his coat-tails to the floor, but his head? Never. Joshing aside, she beat the tom-tom over that sermon, giving us boys a medicine talk that sticks still: how we were all fools not to make the earth as pleasant as we could, so long "s we got to live here. It seemed reasonable. I thought about it all that night, trying to find a subject to make better and happier, as Miss. .h.i.tty said.
Before I went to sleep I"d located my victim. First thing in the morning I went and told mother all about it. You know I"m medium enthusiastic over what I"m going to do, so I was laying it off to her in great shape, when I brought up short, seeing her eyes full of tears. I plumped down and hugged her.
"What"s the matter? I didn"t mean to make you cry," I says, feeling it was my luck to do the wrong thing, and not half try.
"I"m not crying, little boy," she says; "I"m only one of those ladies in the books who don"t want their true-loves to go to war." She kissed me.
We often used to play parts of those books, so I took it just as she said, thinking it astonishing how well she acted the part; not much realizing what it meant to a mother who loved her boy, and knew he meant no harm, to have him clubbed all the time. But she shook off the tears right away.
"Arise!" says she, laughing, and putting a flower in my coat. "Arise, Sir William of the Hot Heart! Go thy way and conquer."
So I giggled and looked simple, give her one of them boys" kisses that would come under the head of painful operations to anybody but a mother, and skipped, as graceful as legs four foot long would permit, to my new job.
III
SANDY GRAY
The saying, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,"
oughtn"t to be taken too literal. For instance, if Foster was sick abed, nothing could please him more than reading about how Professor So-and-so had mixed a little of this acid and a squirt of that other truck, and found out what his highly esteemed friend Herr Doctor Professor Schmittygeshucks said about the results wasn"t true at all. And such thrilling stories. Week on end you could feed Fos that and keep him happy. Now, when Fos boiled this stuff down to my understanding, I was interested, too; but, right off the bat, I shouldn"t care for it if I was sick. I"d rather hear something about the beauteous maid and her feller. Or a tune on the guitar. Or a little chin concerning the way Baldy Smith tried to play six cards in a jack-pot, and what happened to Baldy almost instantly afterward. No, sir, you can"t stick too close to doing what you"d like to have done to you, because tastes differ.
The foundation on which I put my plan for increasing human happiness was the queerest little cuss you ever did see. A kid about twelve years old, who looked to be a hundred and ten even before Sammy Perkins shot his eye out and shrunk him up on one side. It was an accident, of course.
Sammy"d saved nigh a year, till he had three dollars and seventy-five cents gathered in a heap to buy a bored-out army musket. Then he invited Sandy Gray to go with him; they started to rid the country of wild critters. They walked and they walked, but Heaven mercifully preserved the rabbits. So it become time for lunch, and also Sandy was now an Injun, whilst Sammy was Iron-jawed Pete, the Nightmare of the Red Man.
Iron-jawed Pete says to Chief Sandy Eagle-bird, "Pick up chips! Make a fire!" But the haughty soul of the n.o.ble savage riz at the notion. Be darned if he"d pick up chips. "All right," says Iron-jawed Pete, "then I"ll shoot you." And, the gun not being loaded, he promptly blew Sandy full of bird-shot. I"ve heard about these wonderful destroyers--cannon a quarter of a mile long, that shoot bullets the size of hogsheads with force enough to knock a gra.s.shopper off a spear of wheat at twenty-three and one third miles; and while I"m somewhat impressed, I can"t but feel there"s nothing like the old-fashioned, reliable, unloaded gun. Who ever heard of man, woman, or child missing with a gun that wasn"t loaded? If I was a leader of a forlorn hope in particularly sad conditions, I"d say to my trusty men, "Boys, them guns ain"t loaded," and instantly close a contract at so much a ton for removing the remnants of the enemy.
It cost Sammy"s father many a dollar to square it with Gray"s folks.
They were a hard outfit, anyhow--what is called white trash down South.
The father used to get drunk, come home, break the furniture, and throw the old woman out of the house; that is, if she didn"t happen to be drunk at the time. In the last case, he come home, got the furniture broke on him, and was thrown out of the house.
It wasn"t an ideal home, like Miss Doolittle is always talking about.
The kids gave Sandy a wide berth after the shooting, but my sympathies went out to him. He was a good opening, you see. I want to state right here, though, it wasn"t all getting my name up. All my life I"ve had a womanish horror of men or animals with their gear out of order. I"d walk ten mile to dodge a cripple. And this here Sandy, with his queer little hop, and his little claw hands, and his twist to one side, and his long nose, and his little black eyes, and his black hair hanging in streaks down on his yaller and dirt-colored face, looked like nothing else on earth so much as a boiled pet crow.
When I jumped over the Grays" back fence, I see my friend Sandy playing behind the ruin they called a barn. Execution was the game he played. He had a gallows fixed up real natural. Just as I come up he was hanging a cat.
"The Lord have mercy on your soul!" squeaks Sandy, pulling the drop.
Down goes the cat, wriggling so natural she near lost a half a dozen of her lives before I recovered enough to interfere. I resisted a craving to kick Mr. Sandy over the barn, and struck in to amuse him at something else. First off, he hung back, but by and by I had him tearing around lively, because we were aboard ship with a storm coming up to port, a pirate to sta"bbud, breakers forrud, and a rocky coast aft. Anybody would step quick under them conditions. So Sandy he moseyed aloft and hollered down the pirates was gaining on us, the storm approaching fast, the breakers breaking worse than ever, and the rock-bound coast holding its own. I hastily mounted three cord wood cannon, reefed the barn door, and battened down the hatches in the chicken-coop, without a hen being the wiser.
We were in the most interesting part when an unexpected enemy arrived on the scene, in the person of Sandy"s mother, and did us in a single pa.s.s.
She saw him up in the tree; she give me one glare and begun to talk.
I climbed the fence and went home. All the way back I felt this was a wicked and ungrateful world. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. I wanted to get to my own room without mother"s seeing me, but she came to the head of the stair when I was half up. "Well, son," she says, smiling so it didn"t seem quite such a desert, "how did you make out with the little Gray boy?"
"Oh, not anything special," says I, airily, hoping to pa.s.s by.
"Come in and tell me," she says. So I went in, hedging at first, but limbering up when she stroked my hair. Finally my wrongs come out hot and fast. I told about his hanging the cat, and made it as bad as I could. I enlarged upon the care and pains I spent in leading him into better ways.
"And, then," says I, "just as we were having a good time, that mother of his comes out. And what do you suppose she says?"
Mother rubbed her hand over her mouth, swallowed once or twice, and managed to look as serious as anything. "I can"t imagine," she answers; "you tell me."
I shook my finger. "Can I say exactly what that woman said?"
"Yes."
"Well," says I, imitating Mrs. Gray, voice and all--voice like a horse-fiddle, head stuck front, and elbows wide apart--"well," I says, "she looked up the tree and saw Sandy. "Sandy Gra-a-y!" she hollers; "Sandy Gray! You one-eyed, warp-sided, nateral-born fool! What you mean, playing with that Bill Saunders? You come in this house quick, afore you git you" other gol-d.a.m.n eye knocked out!""
Mother dropped her sewing and had a fit on the spot. That made me mad for a minute. Then I laughed, too.
"Don"t give up, Will," says mother. "It takes time to learn to do the right thing. You kiss your mother and forget all about it--you didn"t want Mrs. Gray to pay you for amusing Sandy, anyway, did you?"
"Of course not," I replies. "But she needn"t of.... Darn him, he was hanging a cat!"
Mother went off the handle again.
"Perhaps you _like_ people who hang cats?" I says, very scornful, the sore spot hurting again.
"Now, Will, don"t be silly!" says mother. "Try again; think how funny it would have seemed to you, if it had happened to any one else."
"That"s so," I admits, my red hair smoothing down. "Well, I"ll try again; but no more Sandy Grays."
IV
THE FIGHT
The next day my friend Mrs. Gray waylaid father, and told him fervently she didn"t want me teachin" her Sandy none of my fool tricks.
And the old gentleman read me the riot act trimmed me to a peak, by word of mouth. There"s where me and righteous conduct near parted company.
I"m afraid I sa.s.sed the old man a little. I was awful sore, you know.
Anyway, it wound up unpleasant. Father wouldn"t listen to my side, as usual, and I"ll leave it to any man that"s tried to do the right thing and had it explode with him to realize how I felt. Boys have feelings.
There"s lots of folk don"t believe it, but I"ve studied boys to a certain extent, and I"m willing to bet small sums they"re almost like persons in that respect.
I got ugly under the pressure. Then I beat the head near off Anker"s slimy little whelp, as the only relief in sight. That was dead wrong. He was "way smaller "n me, and hadn"t done nothing at the time to deserve it. I went on father"s principle that although no immediate cause was visible, yet there was plenty in the past and future to lick him for, so I lammed his both eyes black, bunged up his nose, and sent him hollering home. He met our schoolteacher on the way. Mr. Judson and I come together fairly regular, yet we liked each other. He was a square man, Samuel Judson, and he knew kids from thirty years" experience. He never made but one mistake with me, and he come out and begged my pardon before the whole school for that. Father sneered at his doing it--saying a teacher ought to uphold discipline, and to beg a boy"s pardon was just inviting all kinds of skulduggery. Howsomever, Sammy Judson won me by that play. When he put the gad on me it was with the best of feelings on both sides. I can see the old lad now, smiling a thin little smile, sort of sourcastic, yet real kind underneath, whilst he twiddled the switch in his hands.