.dt The Worst Boy in Town, by John Habberton--A Project Gutenberg eBook
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<s>"A NAUTICAL EXPEDITION."</s>
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THE WORST BOY IN TOWN
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BY
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<l>JOHN HABBERTON</l>
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AUTHOR OF "BARTON EXPERIMENT," "OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN,"
ETC., ETC.
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NEW YORK
<l>G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS,</l>
182 FIFTH AVENUE
1880
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<sc>Copyright by</sc>
<l>G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS,</l>
1880.
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TO VERY BAD BOYS,

AND TO THE FINE OLD FELLOWS

WHO ONCE WERE CALLED VERY BAD BOYS,

THIS BOOK IS SYMPATHETICALLY DEDICATED

BY THE AUTHOR.
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CONTENTS.
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CHAPTER      

I—#<sc>A Nautical Expedition</sc>:ch01#      

II—#<sc>A Corner in Whiskey</sc>:ch02#      

III—#<sc>Injury and Restitution</sc>:ch03#      

IV—#<sc>Sharp Axes and Sharper Wits</sc>:ch04#      

V—#<sc>Experiments in Gravitation</sc>:ch05#      

VI—#<sc>Thoughts of Reform</sc>:ch06#      

VII—#<sc>In Trouble Again</sc>:ch07#      

VIII—#<sc>Fugitives from Justice</sc>:ch08#      

IX—#<sc>The Stool of Repentance</sc>:ch09#      

X—#<sc>Young America in Politics</sc>:ch10#      

XI—#<sc>A Quiet Little Game</sc>:ch11#      

XII—#<sc>Sweet Solace</sc>:ch12#      

XIII—#<sc>The Boy Who Was Not Afraid</sc>:ch13#      

XIV—#<sc>Paying for a Spree</sc>:ch14#      

XV—#<sc>Running Away</sc>:ch15#      

XVI—#<sc>Losing a Reputation</sc>:ch16#      
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CHAPTER I. || A NAUTICAL EXPEDITION.
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"You're the worst boy in town!"

The speaker was Farmer Parkins, and
the person addressed was Jack Wittingham, only
son of the most successful physician in Doveton.
Farmer Parkins had driven to town quite early in
the morning to make some necessary purchases, and
he had been followed by his faithful yellow dog, Sam,
who had been improving the opportunity to make
some personal calls and tours of observation. One
of these last-named recreations carried him near the
back door of a butcher shop to which Jack had gone
to deliver an order for his mother. Adjacent to
the butcher's place of business was the shop of the
village tinman, and behind this were strewn sundry
kitchen utensils which had proved to be too badly
damaged to be mended. Jack had noticed the dog
when that animal first put in his appearance in
search of a scrap of meat or bone, and had thereafter
// 009.png
observed his motions with that peculiar interest
which dogs seem always to inspire in boys.
Then he happened to see a very dilapidated tea-kettle
behind the tin-shop, and when dogs and tea-kettles
become closely associated in the mind of a
boy, even if the boy himself be of excellent birth
and breeding, and quite tender-hearted beside, the
juvenile traditions of many generations have generally
the effect of causing the dog and the kettle to
enter into an entangling alliance which the animal
regards with accumulative aversion, and about
which the tea-kettle, whose expressions are ordinarily
so cheery, indulges in much unrythmical noise.
Into such a combination were Farmer Parkins' yellow
dog Sam and an old kettle forced very soon
after Jack first beheld them both, and as yellow
Sam hurried down street in an honest attempt to
rid himself of his superfluous tin-ware, and as Jack
followed him to note the results, with a view to the
more accurate affixing of tin kettles to the tails of
the dogs of the future, yellow Sam dropped exhausted
in front of his master's horses, and the dog's
master came out of a store near by, just as Jack,
with a fragment of barrel-hoop, was trying to stimulate
the animal to renewed exertion. It was then
that the farmer remarked, with admirable vigor,
// 010.png

"You're the worst boy in town!"

Jack had heard this very expression so many
times before that he was half inclined to believe it
true, yet how it could be a fact was a something
that bothered him greatly. He laughed when
Farmer Parkins said it, and he replied also, by several
facial contortions, which were as irritating as
they were hideous; he stuck his hands into his
pockets, and bravely tried an ingratiating smile or
two upon such passers by as had overheard the
farmer's remark, but as soon as he had reached an
alley down which to disappear, Jack suddenly became
a very chop-fallen, unhappy looking boy, and
he murmured to himself,

"That's what everyone says. I don't see why.
I don't swear, like Jimmy Myers, nor steal, like
Frank Balder, I don't tell lies—except when I have
to, and I go to Sunday-school every Sunday, while
there are lots of boys in town who spend the whole
of that day in fishing. I didn't mean to hurt old
Parkin's yellow dog; I only wanted to see what
he'd do. And just didn't he travel?—oh, oh! But
I don't see why I'm the worst boy in town. I declare.
If it isn't just the morning to go fishing—warm,
cloudy, worms easy to get. I wish't was
// 011.png
Saturday, so there wouldn't be any school, and I
wish school teachers knew what fun it is to go fishing;
then they'd be easier on a fellow who played
hookey, and they'd ask him where he caught them,
and how many, and how big they were, instead of
picking up their everlasting switches and making
themselves disagreeable. Perch would bite splendidly
to-day, and there are people in this town who'd
be glad to have a good mess of perch. I declare!
I've just the idea; school or no school, whipping
or no whipping, it ought to be done. I'll go right
away and see if Matt can't go with me."

Jack moved rapidly through streets which crossed
the main thoroughfare of the town; then he approached
a wood-pile where a boy of about his own
age was at work; before this boy's eyes Jack
dangled two new fish-lines and some hooks, and exclaimed—

"Come along, Matt!"

"I can't," said Matt, gazing hungrily at the new
fishing tackle, "the governor wouldn't like it at
all."

"Oh, never mind the governor," said Jack, "I'll
explain things to him when we get back."

Matt seemed to be in some doubt as to whether
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the influence of his tempter with the governor
amounted to much, for the functionary alluded to
was master Matt Bolton's own father, a gentleman
who held quite firmly to the general opinion about
Jack. Besides, Matt was vigorously attacking the
family wood-pile, his honest heart alive with a sense
of the need there was for him to do all in his power
to relieve his overworked father, and alive, too,
with the conviction that he would have to work industriously
if he would chop and split a day's supply
before school-time. Besides, a fishing excursion
implied truancy, which, in turn, implied the certainty
of a whipping in school and the probability
of punishment at home.

"Father would be very angry," said Matt, as he
sighingly withdrew his eyes from the new fishing
tackle, "and he has already enough to bother him,
without having things made worse by me."

"But Matt, he won't feel bad when he knows
what you did with the fish. We'll give them to
widow Batty. (This resolution of Jack's was newer
even than his tackle, for he had formed it while
he talked). "She's been sick, you know, and I
heard your father say the other day that she must
have a hard enough time, at best, to feed that large
family of her's."
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"But suppose we don't catch any?" suggested
Matt.

"Then you can tell him what we meant to have
done if we had caught some. Besides, we can't help
catching a lot at such a splendid fish-hole as the
mill-dam. I think it's awful that a whole family
should go hungry just because it hasn't got any
father. Didn't your governor ever read you out of
the Bible of visiting the fatherless and widows in
their affliction?—mine has."

Boys are no more likely than adults to resist Satan
when he appears as an angel of light, so Matt
speedily agreed to go as soon as he had prepared a
day's supply of firewood.

"Got another axe, and I'll help you," said Jack,
and within five minutes those two boys were
making chips fly at a rate which would have been
the wonder of a hired wood-chopper, while Matt's
mother, who happened to glance through a window
wondered why Jack's father could accuse that boy
of laziness. Then both boys carried the wood to
the kitchen door, unearthed some worms between
sundry logs at the wood-pile, and disappeared as
stealthily as if in their benevolent project they
were animated by the scriptural injunction, to not
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let the left hand know what the right hand was
doing.

Reaching the brow of a little hill upon which the
village was situated, Jack exclaimed—

"I vow, if the river hasn't overflowed its banks."

"Umph," replied Matt, "I knew that a week
ago."

"Well," said Jack, "so did I, but I forgot it.
We can get to the dam easily enough, though; it's
only half a mile across the lowlands to the river,
and there are fences all the way. Riding rail fences
is bully fun. Wait till I get my rod; I've got
two and I'll lend you one."

Jack extracted two bamboo rods from the blackberry
thicket where he habitually kept them, lest
they should occasion unpleasant questions, as they
certainly would have done had his frequent expeditions
with them begun at the house of his excellent
father. Then both boys mounted the fence, which
was of rails, and their trip to the dam was fairly
begun.

Now to travel by fence-rail is a delightful method
of passing time, as all liberally educated boys know,
if one is bound for no where in particular, but
when one is two, and both are boys, and are in
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quest of fish, and the middle of the day is approaching,
in which fish do not bite, half a mile of rail
fencing is a trip which consumes patience with
great rapidity. Had the adventurers been other
than boys, they would have turned back at once,
but when a boy gets a project clearly into his head
he never gives any one an excuse to say that the
mule is the most obstinate of all living animals.
Jack soon grew impatient of his slow progress, and
conceived a brilliant idea. Raising himself to his
feet on a rail of reasonable flatness (for a fence rail)
he steadied himself with his rod, and accomplished
with safety and celerity the trip to the angle where
the rail terminated.

"Hurrah, Matt!" he shouted, "look here!" and
he walked along another rail.

Matt saw and was glad, and following Jack's example,
he made some excellent time himself.

"We'd never have learned that trick if it hadn't
been for the overflow. How glad I am that I came,
and—Ow!" Jack's abrupt termination was due to
his own course having temporarily terminated, for
the third rail upon which he ventured, not having
been designed for the particular object which Jack
had in view, had been split triangularly, and one of
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Jack's shoes had slipped to one side, the other slipping
in an opposite direction, and the young man
came down astride the unyielding oak with a thud
whose sound was something inaudible when considered
in the light of the anguish which it caused.
No new word presented itself for use just then;
Jack continued to remark "Ow," with a variety of
long-drawn inflections, while Matt precipitately
lowered himself to a position of safety, and manifested
no inclination to go farther. After some moments
devoted strictly to facial contortion, Jack
succeeded in changing his position so that both
legs hung upon the same side of the fence, then he
examined the rail closely, as if to see if the tip
of his spine had not driven a hole through it, and
remarked,

"We'd better do this in our stockinged feet."

Matt thought so too, so both boys removed
their shoes, tying them together with the strings
upon which the fish were to be strung, and slinging
them across their shoulders. Their progress thereafter
was considerably more rapid, but a sudden
shriek and a splash of voluminous sound and displacement
announced that Matt had fallen entirely
from his rail, and when Jack came to view the
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scene, Matt was swelling the flood with his own
tears.

"I declare," exclaimed Jack, "that's too bad, old
fellow! And you had the worms in your pocket, too—I
hope the water hasn't got into the box and
drowned them so they can't wiggle when they're on
the hooks. Say, its warm; your clothes will dry
on you, before we reach the dam. Oh, I'll tell you
what,—we'll take them off and wring them out, and
go swimming at the same time."

At the prospect of an unlooked for sport, Matt
dried his tears, and a broad flat rail having been
found the boys disrobed and took whatever comfort
could be found in water eighteen inches deep with a
field of corn stubble at the bottom of it. Matt's
clothes seemed rather clammy as he again resumed
his normal position inside them, but Jack described
so delightfully the assortment of fish which he
wished to catch, that damp clothing became a mere
thing of the forgotten past. Started again, Jack
moved rapidly for some moments, but suddenly
stopped and shouted,

"Hurry up, Matt; here's the splendidest thing
that ever was!"

Matt obeyed orders, and while yet twenty rail
lengths behind he heard Jack shout,
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"Here's a bridge that floated away from one of
the little brooks; we'll just make a raft of it and
reach the dam in less than no time."

Matt eyed the bridge with manifest favor; it was
simply two logs,—mud sills—connected by three
cross-ties, upon which the planking was laid.

"Won't the current trouble us when we reach the
river road?" he asked.

"We won't go that way," said Jack. "We'll go
through the fields and then along a wood road that
goes through the timber. It's half a mile the
shorter way, besides being the safer. Come ahead;
we'll use our rods for poles to push the raft with."

"Then we've got to knock down fences," said
Matt.

"Well," said Jack, who had a conscience in hiding
somewhere about him, "we'll come back in a
few days, when the flood has gone down, and put
them up again. And we'll play the raft is a ram—a
regular Merrimac, you know,—and the fences are
an enemy's fleet, or a chain stretched across the
river. Let's back out and get a good start."

The bridge, which did not draw a foot of water,
was backed across the road, one boy stood at each
side, and at a signal from Jack it was driven against
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the fence, through which it crashed most gloriously,
sprinkling a dozen fence-rails about the surface of
the water.

"Hooray!" shouted Jack, "now for the next one! The Union forever!" and
then Jack, while <lang="fr"><i>en route</i></lang> for the next fence,
finding himself unequal to the task of extemporizing a stirring address
to his command, began to quote from "Rolla's Address to the Peruvians,"
which was considered the gem of that much used book, "The Comprehensive
School Speaker"—"My brave associates, partners of my toils, my feelings
and my fame, can Rolla's words add fresh vigor to the——"

Just then the raft struck the fence, but this latter
being of the "staked and ridered"[#] pattern, the
result was that the raft came to a sudden standstill,
and the crew were thrown flat upon it, their respective
heads hanging somewhat astern and in danger
of being water-soaked.
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A rail fence across the angles of which two rails meet in X shape,
their lowest ends driven into the grounds a little way and a rail lying
in the upper angle of the X.
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"Blazes!" exclaimed Jack wrathfully, as he endeavored
to staunch a bleeding nose, "what did a
man need to have a staked and ridered fence just
here for? Well, we'll have to push down a couple
of stakes and break our way through."

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The commanding officer's plan was speedily
acted upon, and the raft went on swimmingly
until it seemed to slide upon some obstruction,
then it came to a dead stop.

"Grounded on an old corn hill, I suppose," said
Jack. "Well, 'starn all,' as old Barnstable says in
the Fourth Reader."

But no amount of pushing availed to move the
raft, and the sudden breaking of Jack's rod gave
affairs a new and discouraging aspect.

"We can't both fish with one rod," said Jack,
after descending into and emerging from the depths
of his mind. "I'll tell you what let's do, we'll
take off our clothes, make them into a bundle,
and carry them ashore on our heads, as explorers
sometimes do when they ford rivers."

"What!" asked Matt, "and not get any fish for
poor Mrs. Batty and her children?"

"That <i>is</i> a pity," said Jack, with some signs of
embarrassment, and the gathering together of the
loose and fleeting ends of previous plans and resolutions.
"But, you see, it must be nearly eleven
o'clock; we've used up an awful lot of time, and
we've got to get ashore yet, and be back home by
the time school is out, else the folks'll know we've
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been playing hookey. I wonder if we couldn't get
the poor old woman some blackberries? It's only
June now, though, and I never saw a ripe blackberry
before the first of July. Perhaps there's
some early cherries in Milman's orchard."

With this slight salve for the consciences whose
wounds had begun to smart, the boys stripped once
more, waded ashore through a corn-field in which
the hills of sharp cut stalks seemed omnipresent,
dressed themselves, and sneaked into the Milman
orchard, where they made wry faces while discussing
the probable value to the widow Battay of the
few pale pink cherries they found. Dinner was
reached and, eaten, somehow with less appetites
than was usual after a morning spent in school, and
then the boys, each by himself, made hasty search
for whatever suitable material might be soonest
found to insert between shirts and jackets, to break
the force of what, in the memory of many old
fellows who once were school-boys, was the inevitable
penalty of truancy.
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CHAPTER II. || A CORNER IN WHISKEY.
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"You're the worst boy in town!"

For several days after their unsuccessful fishing
expedition, Jack and Matt were extremely
obedient and undemonstrative. Village
school teachers, in that country, were not unfrequently
the stout-armed sons of farmers, and
when they plied the rod, any memory of the occasion
was not likely soon to become dimmed. It
was perhaps for this reason that even when Matt
or Jack amused himself by whistling, the airs
selected were sure to have been written on minor
keys, and that both boys sought earnestly, each
by himself, for some method of setting some
positive moral success against their late failure at
benevolence.

The opportunity did not linger long. Matt was sitting
in the house one evening, wondering whether to
go to bed at once, or wrestle again with an exasperating
problem in cube root, the answer to which, as
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printed in the book, he felt thrice assured was
wrong, when a long whistle of peculiar volume and
inflection informed him that Jack was outside and
had something to communicate. Matt sprang to
his feet, for only a matter of extreme importance
would have brought Jack across town at so late an
hour. The worst boy in town was found by Matt
to be hanging across the garden gate and so powerfully
charged with virtuous indignation that he was
unable to contain it all.

"Look here, Matt," said he, "you know what an
awful thing whiskey is, don't you?"

"I should think I did," replied Matt, "Havn't I
been to every temperance meeting that's been
held?"

"So you have," said Jack, "Well what do you
think? There's Hoccamine, the corner storekeeper,
gone and bought seven barrels."

"Isn't that dreadful!" exclaimed Matt. "If he
starts a rum-shop here, it'll spoil the custom of his
store."

"He isn't going to have a bar," explained Jack,
"he's going to sell by the gallon. But what's the
difference?—rum is rum, and it does harm, no matter
in what way it is sold."
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"It's perfectly awful," said Matt.

"All right," said Jack, "Now I'll tell you what I
propose. It wasn't brought up to the store until
after dark—I suppose they were ashamed—and it
is on the sidewalk beside their store, to be put
down cellar as soon as the clerks come in the morning."
Then Jack put his lips down to Matt's ear,
and whispered, "Let's spill it for them?"

"Gracious!" whispered Matt, "how can we?"

"Easily enough," said Jack. "We'll bore a gimlet
hole in each barrel, and it'll have all night to
run. I've got a gimlet. You slip out of the house
about twelve o'clock, and so will I; we'll meet at
the church steps, and then unchain the demon only
to destroy him forever." (Jack's last clause was
quoted verbatim from a temperance address to
which he had lately listened.)

"I'm your man," said Matt.

"I knew you would be," Jack replied; I could
have done it alone, but I was sure you'd enjoy
helping, and I'm not the sort of fellow that goes
back on a friend, you know. Twelve o'clock sure,—does
your clock strike the hours?"

"Yes."

"So does ours. Can you keep awake until then?
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If you can't I'll give you half of my cloves to
eat. I've saved them the past few Sunday nights
when I havn't been sleepy in church."

Matt accepted the proffered assistance, and Jack
departed, while Matt went into the house and to
bed with the firm conviction that he was too excited
to sleep any for a week to come. It was nine
when he retired, and at the stroke of ten he had
not had occasion to touch the cloves except to
nibble the blossom end from one, just to have a
pleasant taste in his mouth. It was many hours,
apparently before the clock struck eleven; had it
not been for the loud persistent ticking Matt would
have believed the old timepiece had stopped. As
it was, he had fully made up his mind that the
striking weight had not been wound, when suddenly
the hammer rattled off eleven. Between eleven
and twelve, Matt ate all the cloves, pinched himself
nearly black and blue, pulled his hair, rubbed his
ears, and did everything else he had ever heard of
as an antidote to sleepiness. Finally he dressed
himself and descended, intending to be at the front
door when the clock should strike. As he stepped
from the last stair his foot fell upon the family
cat, who habitually reposed upon a rug lying just
// 026.png
there, and the cry which that cat uttered was more
appalling to Matt than the roar of a royal Bengal
tiger would have been. Matt's parents, however,
had clear consciences, so the agonized scream did
not seem to awaken them. Then Matt's heart beat
so violently that he began to wonder why the
sound of its throbs did not shake the house. He
tiptoed to the door, but his shoes squeaked, and
though he experimented, by setting down his feet,
heel first, by walking on the outer edge of his shoes,
and then upon the inner, the squeak continued.
Then he sat upon the floor and removed his shoes,
when, to his great relief, the clock struck twelve.
Why that clock did not rouse him with its clamor
every night and every time it struck was a great
mystery to him as he softly opened the door,
closed it, sped away in his stockinged feet, and determined
to smuggle a bit of soap out of the house
and settle with those stockings before they went to
the family washtub.

Reaching the church, Matt was sure he saw a
shadow hold up a gaunt forefinger by way of warning,
but this speedily resolved itself into Jack, who
was elevating the gimlet, and who approached and
whispered—
// 027.png

<lang="la">"In hoc signo vinces</lang>," as old Constantine says in the
"Universal School History."

Both boys hugged every fence and wall until they
reached the offending barrels; then Matt's heart
began pumping again, receiving some sympathy
from that of Jack. The last-named youth suddenly
whispered,

"Want to strike the first blow?"

"I guess not," said Matt, flattening himself as
closely as possible against the wall of the store.
"You thought of it first."

Jack knelt before one of the barrels, bored a hole
as low as possible, and a small stream of liquid and
a strong smell of whiskey appeared instantly and at
the same time. Then another hole was bored at
the top, to admit air, and the industry of the stream
increased suddenly, as Jack learned by a jet which
struck his own trowsers and made itself felt on the
skin beneath. Matt operated upon the second barrel,
Jack unlocked the demon in the third, and so
the boys proceeded alternately, until while over the
sixth barrel Matt's enthusiasm interfered with his
steadiness of hand and he broke the gimlet.

"That's too bad," whispered Jack. "I guess we'd
better leave, but old Hoccamine won't find five
// 028.png
empty barrels a very small hint to stop outraging
the sentiments of the inhabitants of this town."

Both boys made haste to depart, wasting no time
in formal adieux. As soon as they had reached the
church and cemetery, in neither of which they feared
listeners, Jack exclaimed in a low tone

"This is a proud day for Doveton, Matt; can't
you make some excuse to come up town in the
morning to hear Hoccamine swear when he learns
about it?"

"I'll ask mother if she doesn't need something
from some store," said Matt; "good night."

The boys went their separate ways, each unconsciously
carrying the smell of whiskey in the shoe
soles which had several times been wet with it, as
they moved about the sidewalk, so when Mr. and
Mrs. Bolton awoke in the morning, it was not strange
that the lady exclaimed—

"Where can that strong smell of whiskey come
from? I didn't know there was a drop in the
house."

"Nor I," said Mr. Bolton. The odor could not
be attributed to the servant, for she lived elsewhere,
and had not yet come to her daily labor. Mrs.
Bolton was not superior to the ordinary human interest
in mystery, so she continued,
// 029.png

"Where can it be? Oh, husband, it can't be that
Matt, our only darling boy, is getting into bad
ways?"

Mr. Bolton sprang from his bed and hurried to
Matt's room; there were too many other fourteen-year
old boys in Doveton who had already trifled
with liquor, and Matt's father had at once become
suspicious. But he returned in a moment saying,

"Thank God, it isn't that; the blessed scamp's
breath is as sweet as it was when he was a baby.
But what can it be?"

Mr. Bolton quickly dressed himself and went
through the house, but soon hurried back exclaiming—

"Thieves! The front door is ajar."

Both householders took part in a hasty search,
but Mrs. Bolton found her silver spoons safe though
they had been in plain view in a dining-room closet.
Mr. Bolton found no clothing missing, nor could the
subsequent search prove that anything whatever
had been taken.

"I have it!" exclaimed Mrs. Bolton suddenly.
"I heard the cat scream terribly in the night. It is
plain that the rascal stepped upon her, and then ran
away, supposing her noise would arouse the house.
What a narrow escape!"
// 030.png

Matt slept throughout the excitement like one
who has a conscience which was not only void of
offense, but had the additional peace which comes
of virtuous deeds successfully accomplished. It
was only after considerable effort, indeed, that he
could be roused at breakfast time. As for Jack,
he was up long before the lark, and on his way to
the market (which was opposite Hoccamine's store)
to purchase some scraps of meat for a mythical
dog. He meekly stood outside with his package,
for what seemed to him centuries, awaiting the
opening of Hoccamine's store. Then he hurried
home, ate the merest excuse for a breakfast, and
cooled his heels at Matt's wood-pile for at least an
hour, and when his companion finally appeared,
yawning profoundly, Jack shouted—

"Oh, Matt, 'twas worth a million dollars. Hurry
up, can't you?"

Matt quickly roused himself to consciousness
that life was real, life was earnest, and joined Jack,
who exclaimed—

"Fun? why there was oceans of it, with hundreds
of lakes and ponds thrown in. First there
came along old Burt, on his way to market, and as
soon as he saw the stuff in little puddles by the
// 031.png
curbstone, and smelt what it was, he just lay down
on his stomach and began to drink. He signed the
pledge at the last temperance meeting, too; isn't it
awful? Then Captain Sands came along, and
stopped to look, and so did Squire Jones and Joe,
the barber, and everybody that came to market saw
the crowd and went over, so I thought 'twas safe
to go over myself. All of a sudden over came
Hoccamine, who had been to market, and then—well,
you never heard such swearing at a fight.
He declared that somebody had been stealing it,
and Squire Jones told him it was a righteous
judgment on him, and then Hoccamine swore some
more and called the Squire names, and the Squire
said he'd never buy another penny's worth from a
man who had abused him in that way, and Hoccamine
told him to take his infernal pennies and
buy of—of the old fellow down below, you know,
if he chose. Then Hoccamine opened the store and
got out some pails and scoop-shovels, and tried to
save some of the liquor out of the gutter. Oh, it
was just glorious." And Jack, unable to express
his feelings in any other way, danced about madly
and jumped over several logs of wood.

Then Matt, who has listened with considerable
// 032.png
interest, yet with a pre-occupied air, told the story
of the attempted burglary, but explained away the
supposition that the thief was scared off by the
cat.

"That shows," said Jack, briskly, "how necessary
the work was that we did last night. Whiskey
made that thief, you see—I shouldn't wonder if
what you were about at the same time had something
to do with his being influenced to go away.
Don't you know how these things happen in books
sometimes? I once read—"

Jack suddenly ceased talking, but burst out
laughing, and finally dropped upon the chips and
rolled about in a perfect convulsion of laughter,
while Matt looked on in mute astonishment.

"Oh, Matt," he exclaimed finally, "don't you understand?
That smell of whiskey was on you somewhere—I
smell it now. And you were so excited
when you went in, that you forgot to latch the
door—I've done the same thing, once or twice.
Oh, oh, oh, that's too rich. I'll die if I can't tell
somebody."

Matt immediately swore his companion to strict
secresy, but later in the day, which happened to
be Saturday, he became so uncomfortable at hearing
// 033.png
his father discuss the attempted burglary with
everyone who entered the store that he confessed
the whole affair to Mr. Bolton. That gentleman
made a valiant effort at reproof, but he did not
love Hoccamine more than business rivals usually
love each other, and he was an earnest advocate of
total abstinence, so he made some excuse to get at
his account books, and for the remainder of the
day he was subject to violent fits of laughter whenever
he was not trying to truthfully modify his
story of the burglary to the many acquaintances
who came in to enquire about it.
// 034.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch03
CHAPTER III. || INJURY AND RESTITUTION.
.sp 2

Dr. Wittingham, whose only son Jack
was, sat in his office one morning compounding
a complicated and consequently a favorite
prescription of his own, and at the same time pondering
upon the equally complicated character of
his boy. The doctor had been a boy himself, a
third of a century before, and an extremely lively
one, if the traditions of his native village had been
correctly handed down, but a man's memory is not
in the habit of going backward half a lifetime, unless
in search of old sweethearts, so the doctor owned to
himself that Jack was without exception the most
mischievous boy he had ever known or heard of.

"It passes all explanation, too," said the doctor,
sitting down and watching his prescription as it filtered
slowly into a glass beneath it. "I'm a man
of good behavior if ever there was one, his mother
was a lady born and bred, he knows the Bible better
// 035.png
than our minister does, and there's nothing good but
what the boy seems to take a lively interest in. I was
going to write a book upon heredity, basing it upon
the development of that boy's character as inherited
from his parents and modified by such teachings as
I have imparted, to improve the original stock. But
bless me! I'm sometimes unable to find the original
stock at all, and as for the improvements I intend
to make in it, well, they're as invisible as the ailments
of some of my rich patients. Whatever I say
to him seems to filter through him more rapidly
than that mixture is doing through the paper, and
leaves not even a sediment behind, while whatever
he shouldn't hear seems to stick to him like an adhesive
plaster. Before he goes to school, he recites
his lessons to me in the most perfect manner; when
he comes home he brings a written complaint from
the teacher, who has found him outrageously mischievous
all day long; and when his mother takes
any of his torn jackets and trowsers in hand, she is
certain to find two or three more documents of the
same kind which Jack has kindly forgotten to deliver,
perhaps out of regard for my feelings. He
will chop wood all day Saturday for the Widow
Batty or some other needy person, until I determine
// 036.png
he's growing to be too good to live; then my own
dinner comes up underdone because he hasn't considered
that wood-chopping, like charity, should begin
at home. I've heard no complaints of him for
nearly a week; there must be a terrible shower of
them brewing somewhere."

There was a knock at the door, and the town
supervisor of roads entered.

"Ah, good morning," said the doctor, briskly.
"Who's under the weather now?"

"Wa'al," drawled the supervisor, "nobody, I
reckon 'less its you. Here's a little bill I'm sorry to
have to bring to you, but its had to be done."

The doctor took the paper from the Supervisor's
hand and read as follows:

"Dr. Andrew Wittingham to town of Doveton,
Dr. One-half cost of replacing Second Brook Bridge,
$11.62."

"What on earth does this mean?" exclaimed the
doctor after reading the bill several times.

"Bolton has paid the other half," said the supervisor;
"its for that bridge that Jack and Matt hooked,
you know, and left in the middle of Prewitt's
corn field half a mile from where it belonged."

"Hooked a bridge?" exclaimed the doctor, "I
// 037.png
don't understand. Jack never said anything to me
about it."

"Didn't he?" asked the supervisor with an ironical
grin. "Wa'al, like enough he didn't; 'twas during
the June freshet, you know, an' the boys found
it loose, an' went raftin' around on it. Like enough
they'd have fetched it back, but they rammed it
through one fence after another, an' at last they got
it aground. We tried to get it under a log wagon
an' haul it back, but 'twas no go, an' we havn't put
the hire of the wagon into the bill, for the man
wasn't to charge anything if he didn't get it through.
Shouldn't wonder, though, if Prewitt brought in a
bill for damages, he says it'll do him out of twenty
hills of corn, besides being a nuisance to plough
around. An' he and the next man are out about a
dozen fence rails each."

The doctor recognized the inevitable, yet remarked
that the price seemed a large one for a
bridge in a country where lumber was so cheap.

"Just what it cost," remarked the supervisor,
"the whole thing came to $23.25, an' in dividin' I
threw the odd cent on to Bolton, for I think the
medical profession ought to be encouraged."

The doctor paid the bill, and bade his visitor a
// 038.png
rather curt good morning. Then he went to the
door and shouted "Jack!" in tones which would
have been heard by the young man if he had been
at school, which he was not.

"Jack," said the doctor, sternly, when the youth
appeared, "I've just had to pay for a bridge which
you stole in June."

"I didn't," promptly answered the boy.

"It amounted to the same thing, in dollars and
cents, as stealing," said the doctor. "How many
hours of fun did you have that day?"

Jack thought profoundly for a minute or two, and
replied, meekly,

"About two, I suppose."

"And to pay for those I have had to lose the receipts
of about a day of hard, disgusting work. Do
you consider that the fair thing, for one who is doing
everything he can for your good?"

"No, sir," replied Jack, honestly contrite in the
presence of this new view of the case.

"Then why did you do it?"

"Because."

"Because what?"

"Because."

"Because you're an ungrateful scamp, and don't
care for anything but your own pleasure."
// 039.png

"Yes I do, father," said Jack, beginning to cry,
"I"——

"Don't make excuses, sir," interrupted the doctor;
"you shall do extra work, at whatever a laborer
would be paid, to make up the cost of that
bridge, and do it on your holidays and Saturdays,
too. Now I want you to go and burn that old
bridge, or I'll have to pay for the annoyance it will
give Prewitt."

Jack lingered for a moment, as bad boys often do
on such occasions, longing to say something which
he could not put into words, and to hear some recognition
of what he felt was good within him. Had
the doctor used a mere tithe of the patience and
love that Heaven had been compelled to display in
reforming him, he might have attached Jack to him
by that love which is the best of all educators in
things wise and thoughtful. But the doctor, like
the boy, lived first, though unconsciously, for himself,
and so with an impatient gesture he drove
Jack from the door. The boy filled a pocket with
matches and lounged off, muttering to himself,

"It'll be bully fun to burn the old bridge, anyhow,
I shouldn't wonder if it would take a couple of days,
and there'll be that much school time gone, but I
// 040.png
say—Matt ought to be made to help—oh, wouldn't
that be jolly! I'll go ask his father right away—everybody
calls him an honest man, and he oughtn't
to see me paying Matt's debts."

Jack hurried at once to Mr. Bolton's store; as he
entered, the proprietor, who was alone, picked up a
hoe-handle, and exclaimed—

"You young scoundrel, I've a good mind to break
every bone in your rascally body. Don't you ever
dare to coax my boy to go anywhere with you again,
or I'll half kill you. You're the worst boy in
town."

Rightly assuming that the opportunity for presenting
his request was not a promising one, Jack
departed at once, and hung about the schoolhouse
until the mid-morning intermission; then he seized
Matt and announced the situation, taking care to
omit mention of his interview with Bolton senior.
Matt at once volunteered assistance, and an hour
later the boys had burning upon the bridge a glorious
fire of dead boughs and broken rails. When
the boards had burned in two, the boys pried the
two logs toward each other, and thereafter they adjusted
the logs several times, getting each time some
smut upon their clothes as well as occasional burns
// 041.png
upon their hands. When at length the logs seemed
able to take care of themselves the boys strewed
some green twigs upon the ground to lie on, and as
they were stretched upon them, chatting in the desultory
manner peculiar to every one who lies down
about a fire, Jack remarked,

"Say Matt, do you know that people in this world
are awfully unfair to boys?"

"I guess I do," replied Matt, "but what made
you think of it just now?"

"Why, my govenor gave me fits this morning
about this bridge, and called me ungrateful and all
sorts of things. I s'pose he thought he told the
truth, but I know better. I'd do anything for him—I'd
die for him. Why, one day that big mulatto
Ijam, that he can never collect his bills of, came in
looking awful ugly, and blazing about being sued,
and I was sure he meant to hurt father; I just got a
hatchet and stood outside the door, ready to rush in
and tomahawk him if he did the least thing. It
made me late at school, and I got licked for that,
but I didn't care, and the teacher wrote a note home
about it and I got scolded, but I didn't tell what I'd
done."

"My father's the same way, sometimes," said
Matt.
// 042.png

"I know he is," said Jack, hastily debating (with
decision in the negative) whether he should tell of
his own morning experience with Mr. Bolton.

"Now," continued Jack, "I've got to work all my
holidays at something, I don't know what, until I
earn enough money to pay my share of that bridge—you
know the two govenors have had to settle for
a new one?"

"Mercy, no!" exclaimed Matt.

"They have, this morning," said Jack. "I
shouldn't wonder if you'd catch it when you go
home, but there's some bully mullein leaves under
the hill that you can put inside the back of your
jacket."

Matt devoted some moments of disagreeable reflection
to this topic; then his sense of companionship
came to the surface, and he said—

"I'll help you, Jack—unless father punishes me
in the same way. What do you suppose you'll have
to do?"

"I don't know yet," said Jack, "but I've got a
splendid idea. The govenor has just bought his
winter's supply of wood, as he generally does in
June, and he always has it cut while its green because
it costs only a dollar and a quarter a cord,
// 043.png
while the men charge a dollar and a half when its
seasoned. I'll ask him to let me work it out in that
way."

"Why, Jack," remonstrated Matt, "it will take
you more than half a year of holidays."

"No, it won't," said Jack, "I can chop nearly a
cord a day when I work hard. Besides, I've got an
idea worth more than my own industry. I'm going
to blow at school, and around among the boys,
about what a splendid wood-chopper I am."

"I'll say the same thing about you," said Matt.

"All right; we'll both talk of my particular
swing with the axe until the whole crowd will be
mad enough to take the conceit out of me at any
price. Then I'll offer a bet of something worth
having—a half dollar against half a dime, say—that
I can chop and split more in a single day than any
other boy in town. Lots of them will take up the
bet, we'll appoint a day, the place to be our wood,
pile, and every boy to bring his own axe. You
shall be umpire, so you won't have to do anything
but walk about and egg the others up to business."

This brilliant device took complete possession of
Matt, and as for Jack, within a week there was not
a boy in town who could pass him without making
// 044.png
a face at him, and scarcely a mother dependant
upon her own boys for fuel but had an abundant
supply without having to beg for it. Many indignant
boys offered indefinite bets in favor of their
own skill with the axe, but the sagacious Jack declined
them all on the ground that he could not
honorably bet on what he called a sure thing.
When finally he offered his own wager, it was
accepted by acclamation by nearly the whole of
his own arithmetic class, numbering twenty-nine.
The boys from the other school hoped they were
not to be excluded just because they lived in a
different part of the town, and Matt went on a
special mission to them to assure them that this
was to be, figuratively speaking, an international
contest, in which all territorial lines were to be as if
they existed not. Some other boys who never
went to school, hardened young rowdies, who, as a
rule did nothing, and accumulated a large stock of
vitality which was not always expended in proper
ways, heard of the approaching match, swore by
all sorts of persons, places and things that they
only wished they might "take a whack at that
game," and were cordially invited to participate.
Then the would-be contestants met in convention,
// 045.png
and Jack formally deposited his half dollar in the
hands of Matt, who was to be stake-holder. There
being some difficulty in deciding how the bets
against Jack were to be held, the challenger magnanimously
declined to accept any bet, if the
crowd would agree, each for himself, that the man
who cut least, and he alone, should be loser of a
half dime in case of Jack's triumph.

After a fair canvass of conflicting interests as to
date, which involved the withdrawal of several boys
who had agreed to go fishing or shooting, or berrying,
or visiting, it was decided that the ensuing
Saturday morning would be the most available
time, particularly as Jack explained that his father
who, he was sure, would stop the whole thing if he
heard of it in advance, would start before daylight
that morning to attend a consultation miles away
by rail. The idea that the proceeding would be
displeasing to any adult silenced at once the objections
of all who had preferred another date, and it
even brought back the boys who had pleaded prior
engagements.

As for Dr. Wittingham, he was completely
astounded and wonderfully pleased when Jack,
with a frank business-like air, proposed to cut the
// 046.png
ten cords of winter wood as an offset to the bridge
bill of eleven dollars and sixty-two cents. The
doctor patted Jack's head, called him a noble fellow,
gave him a stick of licorice, and promised him
a dollar for himself on the completion of the work.

"Now," said the doctor, when Jack had left his
presence, "I think I've a good hard point for that
work on heredity; Impose a rational penalty for
offense, and its manifest justice will improve both
the reasoning and moral nature of the offender."
// 047.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch04
CHAPTER IV. || SHARP AXES AND SHARPER WITS.
.sp 2

During the week preceding the great contest
with axes there was very little truancy,
fighting or bad hours to be complained of by the
parents of the boys of Doveton. The excitement
natural to an approaching struggle was sufficient
even for the nerves of the most irrepressible juvenile
natures in town. Most of the boys went into
training at their respective family wood-piles, and
those who had no uncut wood on hand resorted to
the unprecedented operation of requesting permission
to work at that of somebody else. The story
of the bet became noised abroad, beyond the limits
of the town, and several sturdy country boys having
signified their desire to earn fifty cents by a half
day's work, the crowd allowed them to enter for the
contest, for anything was more endurable than Jack
Wittingham's conceit; Jack himself welcomed them,
of course, in the most hearty manner in the world.
// 048.png
Toward the last of the week the sound of the grindstone
was heard in the land, and as several boys
had asked and received permission to use saws instead
of axes, the melodious voice of the hand saw
file arose to stimulate in nervous persons of religious
tendencies an increased appreciation of the promised
peace of Heaven. Then every carpenter who
owned a boy of wood-chopping age suddenly missed
his best oil stone, and sundry axes had their edges
dressed so keenly that no one denied their owner's
assertions that a man might shave himself with
those axes and not know but they were rabbit
paws or puff balls. The juvenile rowdies, who
treasured old copies of sporting papers, read up on
the training of prize-fighters, with the result that
they indulged in ablutions with unhabitual frequency,
and took an amount and variety of exercise
which threatened to exorcise the demon which inhabits
the juvenile loafer.

The morn of the eventful day dawned at last,
and, early as it was when Doctor Wittingham had
to start for the railway station, there was already
approaching his wood-pile fat Billy Barker, who was
so treacherous a sleeper that he had remained awake
all night so as to be on hand in time in the morning.
// 049.png
Then one of the loafers, whose family owned no timepiece,
lounged up, and made Billy very uncomfortable
with prophecies that a certain boy would hardly
escape melting on such a warm day as that particular
Saturday promised to be, and that only a
pair of leg boots could be trusted to save enough
of the remains to justify a full sized funeral. Then
one of the country boys appeared, riding bareback
upon an ancient mare, and his extreme taciturnity
became as annoying to Billy as the chaffing of the
loafer had been, while the loafer himself visibly
abated his arrogance by a degree or two. Then the
Pinkshaw twins approached, each with an axe in
one hand and a piece of bread and butter in the
other. Matt Bolton came next, quite out of breath,
for though he had half an hour to spare, a sense of
his official responsibility had somehow impelled him
to run every step of the way from his own home.
Lame Joey Wilson staggered in soon after, with his
heavy "saw horse" and saw, and close behind him
came a country boy whose family had brought him
as far as the main street in the farm wagon. Then
two loafers, successful catchers of occasional saw
logs and drift wood, lounged up from the river.
Several boys from the neighborhood known as the
// 050.png
other side of town, approached in a body, led by
big Frank Parker, who was the largest boy in school
and who it was always considered a privilege to
follow. Then as the hour for business came nearer,
boys approached from all directions so rapidly that
they could scarcely be catalogued, and when Matt
drew his sister's watch from his pocket for the
twentieth time and announced that it was ten minutes
of eight, there were present forty-three boys,
five horses (belonging to the delegation from the
country), besides three unemployed men who had
come to look on. The stalwart appearance of some
of the larger contestants terrified certain small,
weak and lazy boys into determining to throw up
the sponge in advance, but when the challenger, the
boastful Jack himself, sauntered out from the house
with an axe on his shoulder, a toothpick in his
mouth and an intolerable air of self-sufficiency in
his face, the nerves of the most timid boy grew suddenly
as fine as steel, and he determined to drop
dead on his axe rather than let that bragging Jack
crow over him any longer.

Suddenly Matt mounted the wood-pile, consulted
his sister's watch, and exclaimed—

"Only five minutes more. Now, fellows, this is
// 051.png
to be a fair fight, you know. Every man picks his
own place, carries wood to it from the pile, cuts
each stick into three equal lengths, and throws in
front of him whatever he chops. If at twelve
o'clock there's any doubt who has done most, the
biggest piles are to be laid up straight against a
stake, and carefully measured. Nobody need split
his wood. When it's time to begin, I'll holloa
'One, two, three—go!' and when twelve o'clock
comes I'll say 'One, two, three—stop!' I'll have
a pail of water and a cup here by the fence, for anyone
who wants a drink."

The boys were already carrying the four foot
sticks of wood to their chosen locations, and between
the confusion of selecting desirable places
and that occasioned by snatching from a wood-pile
which did not afford elbow-room for forty-three
boys at a time, there was considerable bad feeling
engendered, and sundry punishments with impolite
names were promised for the indefinite future.
The country boys had judiciously hugged the ends
of the wood-pile from the moment of their arrival,
which prospective advantage certain other boys attempted
to nullify by taking wood from the ends,
and there might have ensued a serious collision had
// 052.png
not Matt, who had moved the judge's stand from
the wood-pile to the fence, shouted,

"Eight o'clock. One, two, three—go!"

Thirty-nine axes came down nearly as one, and
four saws began a not discordant quartette across
the bark of sundry sticks, while the three unemployed
men thrust their hands deep into their
pockets and adjured the boys, collectively, to "go
in." A chip from fat Billy Barker's axe started to
avenge Billy upon his tormentor of an hour before,
and it struck the loafer in the back of the neck with
such force that the bad boy howled with anguish,
and volubly condemned his soul to all sorts of uncomfortable
places and conditions. The axes soon
broke the uniformity of their stroke; some flew at
the rate of nearly a blow a second, others, particularly
those of the country boys, were slow, but
oh, so regular! Still others, confined almost exclusively
to the loafers, struck the wood rapidly
and with a particularly vicious hardness which was
not without its influence upon boys of small spirit.
The peculiar ringing of an occasional "glance"
was heard, and soon a yell from Scoopy Brown,
who was a very awkward boy, called general attention
to that youth, who was sitting upon the
// 053.png
ground holding one of his feet and weeping bitterly.
A careful examination determined that his
axe had not gone deeper than the stocking, so
Scoopy dried his tears and began work again, his
spirits sharpened by many uncomplimentary remarks
by the loafers and others who had lost time
by stopping work to look at him.

Within a quarter of an hour fat Billy Barker had
visited the water-pail three times; a quarter of an
hour later he was curled up with agony beside the
fence, his only consolation consisting in making
dreadful faces at the big loafer who had proved a
tolerable prophet. At the same time two other
boys, one of whom had broken an arm within three
months, and the other being so small that he
realized the folly of contending against many large
boys, retired from the contest, and took place
among the spectators, who already consisted of
seven men, one woman (with baby) and two dogs.
Then one of the loafers declared that although he
could beat as easily as falling off a log, fifty cents
wouldn't pay for half a day of work under such a
sun. Of the spare forty who remained, nearly half
were of apoplectic hue, so that Matt the umpire,
consulting his sister's watch, felt in duty bound to
// 054.png
inform them that barely half an hour had elapsed,
and that they would never get through the morning
unless they took things easier.

As for Jack, he did splendidly. With great
sagacity he had selected the largest sticks, these requiring
less handling, and fewer delays between an
old stick and a new one, besides making a heap
look more bulky. His axe was in capital condition,
as his physique always was, his nerve was equally
good, and he had the additional incentive of wanting
to keep up the general interest, which would be
sure to flag if he were discovered to be falling behind.
The country boys led him a close race, and
compelled him to do his best, as did also two of the
loafers. At the end of the first hour, Matt the
umpire, who had attended closely to his sister's
watch for the ten minutes preceding, shouted
"Nine o'clock," and most of the country boys
stopped for a brief rest. Jack was glad to follow
their example, and at the same time one of the
loafers took a flask bottle from his pocket and
swallowed considerable whiskey. A request, proffered
by another loafer, that the bottle be passed
was met by a reply similar in tenor to that given
by the five wise virgins to their foolish companions,
// 055.png
and the apparent meanness of this proceeding made
even the weariest boy determine to at least beat
that particular loafer.

Half-past nine came, and with it a loud snap
which proved to proceed from the saw block of
lame Joey Wilson. As Joey was a very pleasant
little fellow, with a widowed mother whose lot in
life was not the easiest, another boy, who had a
saw, pressed it upon Joey, and thus honorably retired
from a contest which had kept his back aching
frightfully for nearly an hour. Then two or three
other boys honestly acknowledged themselves completely
used up, and they retired to such shade as
the fence afforded and constituted themselves an
invalid corps of observation. The loafer who had
drank the whiskey dropped suddenly, muttered
something about sunstroke, and crawled away unlamented
by any one.

At the cry of "Ten o'clock!" the working force
had dwindled to twenty-seven axes and two saws.
Two boys had been legitimately summoned from
the field by their legal guardians, and at least half
a dozen others longed earnestly for a similar fate.
Jack began to be doubtful of the entire success of
his scheme, but the country boys all stuck manfully
// 056.png
to business, and at least one of them was beginning
to show signs of becoming excited. The remaining
loafers, too, hung on very well, and so did
a spare half dozen of other boys, mostly large.
The crowd was still large and industrious enough to
astonish several farmers who drove into town, and
the road became literally paved with chips. The
invalid corps increased at about the rate of four men
an hour between ten and eleven, but by this time
Jack's mind was easy, for the only danger was that
there would not be wood enough left with which
the fittest who survived could complete the half
day. Nearly all the loafers broke down, as loafers
always do during the decisive hour, and the strife
narrowed down to the country boys, one loafer, big
Frank Parker, lame Joey Wilson and Jack. Each
boy had his special adherents; the loafers cheered
their own representative with much outlandish
language, most of the men encouraged the country
boys, the delegation from the other side of town
urged big Frank Parker to "lay himself out," to
"come down lively," to "sling himself," and to do
many other things which to the youthful mind
seem best signified by idioms of great peculiarity,
but the mass of sympathy was pretty equally
// 057.png
divided between Jack and lame Joey Wilson. Eligible
sticks of wood began to be sought at the piles
of those who had abandoned the contest, and Matt
the umpire had to exert the extreme measure of his
authority to prevent the partizans of the two favorites
from rushing in and carrying wood for them.
The breaking of the axe-helve of one of the country
boys elicited a tremendous roar from the entire
assemblage, which was now upon its feet. The
lame Joey Wilson faction began to sing the chorus
"Go in lemons, if you do get squeezed," which was
known to be Joey's favorite air and the song stimulated
Joey wonderfully, noting which fact the adherents
of Jack started "John Brown's body lies
mouldering in the grave," which Jack was known to
consider the finest thing ever written. But somehow
the tune did not stimulate Jack as it was expected
to do; perhaps the words with which the
air is indissolubly associated had a depressing effect
upon him, besides, the two songs were roared
with about equal volume of sound, and as they are
written in different keys, measures, and time, the
general effect was horribly discordant and annoying
to a tired man.

At half past eleven the remaining sticks, like
// 058.png
angels' visits, became far between, and finally dwindled
to one, over which two of the country boys
fought, dropping it in their struggle, to be triumphantly
snatched and sawed by lame Joey Wilson.
Then Matt, the umpire, first ascertaining from his
sister's watch that it was not yet twelve o'clock, announced
that any man might take a stick from any
other man who had uncut sticks before him. At
thirteen minutes of twelve, five of the six country
boys were upon their last sticks and the other had
a single stick yet uncut before him, which seemed
to lie between Jack and lame Joey Wilson. Jack's
axe glanced several times and Joey got the stick,
and at precisely ten minutes before twelve Joey had
the last stick reposing in three pieces upon his pile.
The whole crowd rushed in, but Matt shouted—

"Everybody get back—quick—get back! every
man piles his own wood!"

Some little delay occasioned by the difficulty of
getting stakes against which to stake the piles
which seemed largest, was ended by an order to pile
against the fence. It was generally admitted, by
every one but the country boys, that the decision
must be between Jack and Joey, and as Jack was
quick upon his feet and Joey, an account of his
// 059.png
lame leg, was slow, the former was allowed to assist
the latter, but no one noticed that Jack took considerable
wood from the piles of the boys who had
been unsuccessful with the saw; the result was that
Joey's pile was so much the larger that no one insisted
upon a measurement, and Matt handed the
half dollar to lame Joey Wilson without a protest
from any one, though the shouts that went up
formed a conglomerate sound which was truly appalling
to any adult ear which it reached.

Then the boys separated and started homeward
with their respective axes, saws, and saw-horses.
Dr. Wittingham met several of them, as he returned
at an earlier hour than Jack had expected from his
consultation. What to make of the unusual number
of business looking boys he did not know, but
as he went around to the wood-pile to see how his
son had begun his self-imposed penalty, the truth
dawned upon him, and he exclaimed:

"I've used every evening this week upon that
chapter of heredity, and now it isn't worth the paper
it's written on!"
// 060.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch05
CHAPTER V. || EXPERIMENTS IN GRAVITATION.
.sp 2

As June disappeared in the beginning of July,
the long vacation of the Doveton schools
began, and with it began Dr. Wittingham's special
and particular annual annoyance, which consisted of
keeping Jack out of mischief. To compel the boy
to work all the while was something at which the
good doctor's heart naturally revolted, but it seemed
that when Jack was unoccupied even for half an
hour an indignant complaint by some one was absolutely
sure to follow. The doctor was not the
only man who had charge of a boy of mischieveous
tendencies, so there was considerable private jubilation
among parents when a lone foreigner strayed
into the town, announced himself as a Polish exile,
and offered to carry a class in French through the
summer vacation. The French language was not
held in intelligent esteem by all Doveton parents,
but every one of them understood the value of
// 061.png
peace of mind, so within forty-eight hours the
exile was guaranteed an eight weeks class of
twenty boys, at six dollars per boy, and was
granted the upper floor of one of the schoolhouses
free of rent.

This arrangement for the consumption of the summer
vacation did not meet Jack's views at all, and
he protested so strongly that the doctor yielded,
after exacting perfect behavior as the price of liberty.
Jack promised; he would have promised anything
rather than have spent all those delicious days
indoors. There was altogether too much out-of-doors
that demanded his attention; the blackberry
harvest in which Jack earned most of his year's
spending money, came in July; the march of civilization
was working destruction with hazel-nut
patches, so that prudent boys desired to know in
advance where not to go in the fall; it was the "off
year" for black walnuts, so it was advisable to ascertain
where were the few trees which neglected
to be in the fashion; there were several young orchards
which had bloomed for the first time, and
must be visited for sampling purposes, lest perchance
there might some very early varieties come
into bearing and be gathered before he had seen
// 062.png
them, slippery elm bark was not entirely past its
prime, several new kinds of fish-bait were to be
tested on the perch which Jack was sure dwelt in
jealous seclusion in certain deep holes in the river,
the country district was to be scoured for new litters
of puppies of desirable breed—in short Jack had so
much work laid out that the vacation promised to
be a very busy one.

But by the time the French class had been in
session a week, Jack began to feel unutterably lonesome.
Matt was in the class; so was lame Joey
Wilson, who was always a pleasant companion; the
Pinkshaw twins, who had no equal as tree-climbers,
were also there, and so was big Frank Parker, whose
superior strength and wisdom were not to be despised.
Jack gave unwonted attention to the family
garden so as to be within sound of the mid-morning
intermission, and when the teacher's bell summoned
the boys back to school again, Jack not unfrequently
sat upon the school wood-pile during the long hour
which ensued before the dismissal which brought
him and the boys together again. Then satan began
to find mischief for Jack's idle hands, and small
pebbles not unfrequently flew into the open windows
of the school-room, occasioning pleasing diversions
// 063.png
for the boys and annoyance for the teacher. Every
body knew who threw them, but when questioned
by the teacher they all, with general mental reservation,
professed utter ignorance. The exile-teacher
was not of the best temper, so he took his stand
near a window, with the text-book in one hand and
half a brick in the other, but Jack, warned by
friendly hands hanging out of the windows of the
side upon which the teacher stood, operated from
the other side and occasioned many spirited races
against time, the teacher's course being across the
schoolroom, while Jack's goal was the friendly shelter
of the schoolhouse porch. But even this diversion
grew tiresome, and Jack, from pure loneliness,
finally came to sneaking up the stairway, sitting on
the floor of the hall, and listening by the hour to
what to him seemed the idiotic jabber of his late
schoolmates.

Then listening itself grew tiresome; besides, the
position was uncomfortable, so one day Jack climbed
up the little hatchway which led to the cockpit and
belfry, laid a board across several beams, stretched
himself upon it, and listened at ease, for there were
sundry cracks in the ceiling. Jack was not long in
discovering that one of these cracks, in its meanderings,
// 064.png
passed directly over the teacher's chair, and
that sundry small fragments of plaster could be
scratched from its sides and dropped upon the exile's
head.

This discovery aroused the inventive spirit which
seems dormant in the mind of every American,
waiting only for appropriate occasion to call it forth,
Jack carefully marked that portion of the crack
which directly overhung the teacher's head. He
remained where he was until school was dismissed;
then he cautiously picked at the side of the crack,
between two laths, until it was wide enough to admit
a grain of corn dropped edgewise; then he went
below, dusted away the fallen plaster with his hat,
and went home through the unlocked door with a
feeling that the next morning was at least six weeks
away.

But the next morning came, according to all correct
timepieces, at the proper hour, and the French
class had got fairly under way upon some of the exasperating
paradigms of an irregular verb, when
suddenly a grain of corn fell upon the bald head of
the exile. Fat Billy Barker, who was abler at staring
than studying, happened to see the falling body,
and as the startled teacher arose from his chair,
// 065.png
Billy began to laugh. The teacher immediately
marked him as the offender, dashed at him and gave
him several hard blows with a switch, after which
Billy put his head down upon his desk, wept, and
declined to make a statement. But the teacher had
hardly reseated himself when another missile of the
same sort had struck him; Billy's head and hands
being still down, the teacher exclaimed,

"Oh, Barkare, zen it was not you; I vill apologize,
Barkare,—I have mooch sorrow. Vatever boy
it vas should be whipped by Barkare!"

Again the recitation began and another grain of
corn fell, this time in full view of the entire school.
A general titter resulted, and this so enraged the
teacher that he strolled rapidly down the aisles, displaying
two rows of terribly white teeth, and shaking
his ruler at nearly every boy individually. This
operation had a very sobering effect, and even Jack
was so appalled by the noise of the teacher's footfalls
that he remained quiet nearly an hour. Finally
he dropped two grains in quick succession, and the
boys, who had been feverishly awaiting something
new, laughed aloud with one accord. The teacher
sprang to his feet, seized both ruler and switch, and
roared.
// 066.png

"Now, who did it? Barkare, you vill tell me, an'
let me avenge ze vipping you did haf?"

Billy gulped down the truth and declared he did
not know.

"Vilson," shouted the teacher, "you is ze good
boy of ze school; you will tell me, I know, Vilson?"

But Joey, looking as innocent as if he were saying
his prayers, shook his head negatively.

"Mistare Frank Parkare," continued the teacher,
"you haf nearly ze years of a man, and cannot enchoy
to see ze destruction of discipline. Who vas
it that throw ze corn-grain."

And big Frank Parker unblushingly and solemnly
said that he did not know.

"Efferybody tell me," exclaimed the teacher, resuming
his chair with dignity, "or ze class will stay
in ze room till it starve to death. How like you zat,
mes garçons, eh?"

The boys did not seem particularly to enjoy the
prospect, and Jack himself sobered somewhat at the
thought of inflicting such a penalty upon his friends.
But just there he conceived a new idea, and emerging
quietly from his hiding place, he ran home, obtained
a vial from his father's office, filled it with
// 067.png
water, and hurried back. He was anxious to see
as well as to hear the result of his impending operation,
so he removed his board, lay along one of the
beams, steadying himself by his left hand, and held
the mouth of the vial over the teacher's head.
Lame Joey Wilson was just translating fragmentarily,
as follows:

<lang="fr">"Avez-vous-le-chien-rouge-du-charpentier-avec—"</lang>

What the carpenter-owner of the dog really had,
remained unexplained during the remainder of the
session. Jack had intended to let but a single drop
of water fall, and he could generally trust his hand
at such work, for his father sometimes allowed him
to assist in compounding prescriptions. But on this
particular occasion anticipation proved too much
for reality, for Jack laughed to himself so violently
over the fun about to ensue that his hand shook, a
stream of water poured through the hole, and
trickled all over the teacher's chair. And, worse
still, Jack discovered that a two-inch beam is not a
safe place of repose for the human frame in moments
of profound agitation, for he lost his balance, tried
to save it with one elbow and one foot, which between
them dislodged great masses of plaster from
the laths and dropped it upon the teacher's desk.
// 068.png

// 069.png
.if h
.il fn=p061.jpg w=500px
.ca <s>EXPERIMENT IN GRAVITATION.</s>
.if-
.if t
.sp 2 
Illustration: EXPERIMENT IN GRAVITATION.
.sp 2
.if-

// 070.png
Even then the truth might not have been suspected,
had not Jack, frightened at the mischief he had
caused, lost all self-control and tumbled off the
beam and upon the laths. Crack! Crack! went
several laths, a violent commotion was heard upon
the remainder, and, as the school started to its feet
and the teacher dropped back in terror, a boy's foot
and a section of trowser-leg appeared for an instant
through a hole in the ceiling, only to be instantly
withdrawn.

"Ah!" snarled the exile, seizing his half brick
and ruler, and starting for the hall, "I haf ze villain!"
The entire class followed, in time to hear
a rustling sound and to see the teacher's half brick
go up the hatchway, through which the bell rope
was being rapidly drawn.

The teacher danced frantically about and shouted,

"Somebody go for the police—ze constable, what
you call him! I would gif five dollare if I had my
pistol viz me here. Somebody bring one little laddare—zen
I go up ze hole an' drag down ze diable.
I show you vat I do, you bring me ze laddare!"

Nobody stirred; every one preferred to remain as
spectator. Suddenly the teacher's half brick descended,
followed by a nail keg, a dusty roll of discarded
maps, and a piece of board.
// 071.png

"It is one <lang="fr"><i>attaque de force</i></lang>!" exclaimed the
teacher, retiring precipitately upon the feet of lame Joey Wilson, who
had squeezed well to the front. "Ze rascal shall go to ze prison. Will
nobody go for ze constable? Zen I will give ze alarm from out ze
window."

The exile put his head out the window, just in
time to see Jack, who had thrown the bell rope over
the front of the building, sliding down the same, and
making dreadful faces because of the pain which
friction occasioned in his hands and legs. With a
fiendish yell the teacher threw the ruler, which
missed Jack. Just as the young man felt that the
rope was no longer between his knees yet the
ground not invitingly near, the teacher reappeared
with an inkstand which he threw with such excellent
aim that it struck Jack in the side. The
boy immediately loosened his hold and dropped
about fifteen feet, striking upon his side. In an
instant he was upon his feet and hurrying homeward
without as much hilarity as might have been
expected, for in falling he had broken his left
arm.
// 072.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch06
CHAPTER VI. 
.sp 2
.fs 85%
.in 4
.nf
"When the devil was sick
  The devil a saint would be."
.nf-
.in 0
.fs 100%
The only consolation that Master Jack could
conjure up, as he carried his broken arm
home, was that his father would undoubtedly consider
the disaster a sufficient punishment for the
offense. Jack could not at first imagine why his
arm should indulge in such sudden and terrible
twinges and object so nervously to being rubbed or
held. The pain which it experienced from the shaking
consequent upon running caused Jack to subside
into a walk as soon as he had assured himself
that he was not followed; even then the pain gave
no indication of subsiding. Suddenly the truth
dawned upon the boy's mind, and between the
shock occasioned by the discovery and the sense of
at least a month of vacation to be utterly lost,
Jack became so weak and faint that when he at
last reached home he dropped upon the office step
and his head fell heavily against the door. The
// 073.png
doctor, who fortunately was at home, opened hastily
and exclaimed,

"Well, what's the latest?"

"Oh, father," gasped Jack, "I've tumbled, and
I'm afraid my arm is broken."

The doctor helped the boy into a chair, eliciting
a howl as he did so. A short examination of the
arm caused additional howling, and during the
quarter hour consumed by the operation of setting,
Jack abandoned all preconceived ideas of the nature
of fun. Finally, when the doctor carefully removed
his clothing, put him into bed, and told him he
would have to lie there for at least a fortnight,
Jack dragged the pillow up to his face with his unhurt
arm, and moistened it most uncomfortably with
tears. Half an hour later, when his father had
broken the news to his mother, who had nerves, and
the lady came up to see him, she found him sobbing
violently.

"Jack, Jack," she exclaimed, "this will never do.
There is always a fever with arms broken above the
elbow, and if you excite yourself it will come on
too soon, and it may destroy your reason."

"I wish it would," sobbed Jack, "I'd a great deal
rather be crazy than lie here in my senses all through
// 074.png
this jolly, awful month. I can't pick a blackberry,
and I can't have any money for Christmas, and I
know Frank Parker guesses one of the new baits I
was going to try on the perch, and it'll be just like
him to go and catch every one of them. It's just
horrid."

"Jack!" remonstrated Mrs. Wittingham, "can't
you think how horrid it is for you to go and break
your arm, and make more work for every body in
the house?"

"Yes," said Jack, "but you don't think that makes
me feel any better, do you?"

"Then," said Mrs. Wittingham, "you should take
your suffering as a judgment from the Lord."

"He might have put it off until after vacation,
anyhow," exclaimed the bad boy, at which Mrs.
Wittingham clapped her fingers to her ears and fled,
and informed her husband in almost the same
breath, that the dreadful boy deserved a sound
whipping even now, and that nothing but the grace
of God could ever make Jack what he should be.

But after Jack had recovered from his rage, and
had been surprised into taking a short nap, he began
to view the situation in about the light which
his mother would have liked him to use. It certainly
// 075.png
had been great fun to tease that French
teacher—the thought of it provoked even now a
merry chuckle which a twinge of the arm suddenly
discouraged—but it was equally certain that the
teacher himself did not seem to enjoy it. As for
sliding down a bell rope, no boy had ever done it
before, to Jack's knowledge, but oh, how his hands
were smarting! The more he thought of them the
worse they burned; he must have something cooling
put upon them, even if he had to confess how
he came by them. Some one would be sure to tell
his father of his exploits at the schoolhouse, so
why shouldn't he confess in advance and get the
credit for it?

May be the broken arm was a judgment upon him,
as his mother suggested. Well, he would admit
that he deserved it, though he still doubted the necessity
for its infliction at this particular season of
the year. He would do his best to learn by it, anyhow—he
certainly was going to have time enough
in which he could do nothing else. So Jack confessed,
and had his hands treated to a cooling lotion.
The doctor, having previously heard the story from
the vivacious tongue of the outraged exile himself,
and having spent a delightful hour, partly retrospective,
// 076.png
in laughing over the latest capers of his son,
was in a position to listen with judicial gravity and
to express his horror at frequent intervals and in fitting
terms. Then Jack listened to a long and solemn
lecture which was more wordy than pithy, and
was told that he must avoid even exciting subjects
of thought for a fortnight to come.

"Mayn't Matt come to see me?" asked Jack in
faltering tones.

"Only for two or three minutes at a time," said
the doctor; "even conversation will excite you."

"I want to talk to him," said Jack.

"Why can't you talk to your mother and me?"
asked the doctor.

It is beyond all things astonishing what silly
questions may be asked by sensible men when they
have forgotten their own boyhood days, and it is
not surprising that Jack could not easily frame an
answer to the doctor's question.

"Did Matt ever feed or clothe you?" asked the
doctor.

Jack admitted, with some trifling modifications of
the first condition, that Matt had not.

"Did he ever give you a home, or take care of
you when you were sick, or pay your school bills?"
// 077.png

Jack shook his head.

"Then why can't you care so much for your
mother and me as you do for him?" continued the
doctor.

Jack was silent.

"It's because you're an ungrateful young scamp,"
exclaimed the doctor with considerable temper, as
he arose and left the room.

"Father," shouted Jack, "it isn't! Please come
back?"

The doctor, considerably startled by such an exhibition
of feeling, hastily returned.

"Father," said Jack, turning his head in spite of
considerable pain which the motion inflicted upon
his arm, "it's because—because Matt's a boy."

"Umph!" exclaimed the doctor, "that is a reason—a
wonderful reason. I should think you would
want to have it patented, or copyrighted, or something."

The doctor retired, pondering upon human depravity
as exemplified by ingratitude, and Jack,
having plenty of time, began to devise some way of
shaming his father out of so unjust an idea as that
his boy was ungrateful. When he became a man
and a steamboat captain he would bring all the doctor's
// 078.png
medicines free of charge—perhaps that
wouldn't heap coals of fire upon the old gentleman's
head—oh, no! Indeed, he was not sure but he
might one day become a missionary—missionaries
must have jolly times on tropical islands where they
can always go about in their shirt sleeves, have for
nothing all the bananas they can eat, and shoot
lions, and birds of paradise, and things, right from
their own doors. Perhaps when he sent his father
a tiger-skin rug, and his mother a whole lot of ostrich
plumes, and a monkey, and some cunning heathen
gods to put on her parlor mantel, his father would
talk about ingratitude then, but Jack rather guessed
not! Then when his mother came in with a plate
of water-toast, Jack surprised her by remarking.

"Mother, when marble time comes, I'll give you
all the buttons I win."

"What do you mean, Jack?" said the lady.

"Why, we play marbles for buttons sometimes,
and there's only two or three boys in town that can
beat me, and I never play with them."

"Where do they get the buttons to bet?" asked
Mrs. Wittingham, "and," she continued, a dire suspicion
coming suddenly to mind, "where do <i>you</i> get
them?"
// 079.png

"I—I don't know," said Jack feebly, at which
answer his mother sniffed alarmingly, and left Jack
to feel that grown folks were most shamefully
suspicious, and that they couldn't appreciate gratitude
when it was offered them.

Two or three days later the fever set in, and
Jack dreamed for days of Polar explorations, where
he could go swimming in cooling seas and sun himself
dry on iridescent icebergs. He planned a
wonderful voyage of discovery to the North Pole,
and it was of inestimable comfort to him to report
progress to Matt, in the five minutes which that
youth was allowed daily at the sufferer's bedside.
The tenor of his thoughts was daily interrupted by
his mother, who considered the occasion demanded
Bible reading instead of personal sympathy for the
youth, who could not leave his bed to attend family
prayers, and she so frequently selected passages
descriptive of a locality the temperature of which
is the reverse of polar, that Jack had to do a great
deal of mental rambling to get his thoughts in
proper trim again.

At last the fever subsided leaving Jack extremely
weak in body, but of a temper simply angelic. He
prefaced every request with "please," he never forgot
// 080.png
to say "thank you," and he sang little hymns
softly to himself. Mrs. Wittingham was delighted
beyond measure, and when she suggested that the
minister might like to call, and Jack replied that it
would be very nice to have a chat with that gentleman,
the lady became considerably alarmed on the
subject of the boy's recovery. Mr. Daybright, the
minister, was really a very pleasant man, as Jack
discovered, now that he had time to "take his
measure," as he himself expressed it, and after Mr.
Daybright had talked with him for half an hour, and
prayed with him, and departed, Jack did not know
but he might finally conclude to be a minister himself,
and have cake and cider offered him in the
middle of the afternoon when he called upon boys
with broken arms.

Then Jack's Sunday-school teacher called, and
suggested that the class should come in a body, on
the following Sunday, and Jack accepted the suggestion
with fervor, and the class came, and stood
decorously in a row, and sang several hymns, and
looked as sober as if fish-lines and peg-tops and balls
and birds' nests and orchards and crooked pins and
truancy did not exist anywhere nearer than the
planet Neptune. Then the teacher gave Jack a
// 081.png
book from the Sunday-school library, which book he
had selected with Jack's particular condition of
mind in view, and although it proved to be the
story of a dreadfully priggish but very pious little
London footman, whose nature, tastes, temptations
and general environment were utterly unlike Jack's,
the boy labored manfully through it, and endeavored
to persuade himself that he enjoyed it.

In fact, so thorough an overhauling did Jack's
conscience receive that he even felt himself called
upon to confess to the doctor his affair with Hoccamine's
whiskey, but although the doctor had
heard the story a month before from the lips of
Matt's father, he had not yet reached that mental
balance which would enable him to reprove the boy
and still leave him impressed with a sense of the
vileness of the rum traffic, so the doctor said only
"Well," in a very grave way, and made an excuse
to leave the sick chamber.

A few days later Jack was allowed to sit under
the great trees in front of the house, and as he was
positively forbidden to leave the grounds, to run, or
to make any exertion which might disturb the arm,
which he carried in a sling, he fell to noting the
habits of birds with their young, until he became so
// 082.png
affected that he silently vowed never to rob a nest
again. He found in the flowers and the shrubbery
many a charm which he had never suspected when
weeding them; he contemplated cloud pictures until
an overwhelming sense of the beautiful compelled
him to decide upon an artistic career, and he
watched every motion of whatever laborer happened
to be in sight until he determined that he never
again would throw a chip or anything else at a laboring
man, no matter how funny he might look
or how fluently he could swear when he espied his
tormentor.

Finally, to the delight of his parents and many
other people who were responsible for boys, but to
the general depression of the boys themselves, it
became known that Jack had signified his intention
of joining the church. Mr. Daybright admitted
that in years Jack was rather young to take such a
step, but, on the other hand, he had a far abler
mind, and—even although he was called the worst
boy in town—a cleaner record than half the adults
who came into the fold. Mr. Daybright had explained
to him, as men often will to boys other than
their own, that boys need not stop being boys and
being happy just because they become good, so
// 083.png
there was considerable disappointment experienced
by such youths as shrewdly imagined that Jack's
change of heart would result in his large and varied
assortment of knives, lines, marbles, skates, etc.,
being thrown upon the market at reduced prices.
Jack explained, with considerable vigor, that because
he was going to give up mischief it did not
necessarily follow that he should become a muff, or
a soft head, or a twiddler, or an apron string, or a
foo-foo, or a stick-in-the-mud, or a dummy, or any
other of a dozen or two unpopular varieties of boy
which he mentioned, but that he proposed to "keep
his shirt on," remain "forked end down," retain
possession of his eye-teeth, and have as good a time
as anybody else could who didn't have to suffer for
it afterward. And the unregenerate boys went
away slowly and without the great possessions which
they had expected to carry with them, while one of
them who was generous as well as shrewd was heard
to say that bully old Jack Wittingham wasn't going
to flunk out after all, and that a fellow could do
many a worse thing than to join the church.
// 084.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch07
CHAPTER VII.
.sp 2
.fs 85%
.in 4
.nf
    "When the devil was well,
      The devil a saint was he."
.nf-
.in 0
.fs 100%
Jack sat, one evening, on a horse-block just outside
the front gate, contemplating the evening
star and such of its companions as were putting in
their respective appearances. He was attired rather
more carefully than was considered necessary for a
Doveton boy on any day but Sunday, and his countenance
was in keeping with his garb; while his hair
was brushed to a degree of smoothness almost
dandyish. Suddenly one-half of the Pinkshaw twins
approached and asked Jack if he didn't feel like
going that night to a meeting to be held by the
German Methodists, who were holding a series of
week-day evening services.

"I can't," said Jack. "We're expecting—expecting
a visitor, and I must stay home to meet him."

"That's too bad," said the half of the Pinkshaw
twins, scraping the dust into a heap with his bare
feet, "for they've got old Vater Offenstein, all the
// 085.png
way from New Munich, to do the exhorting, and
they expect a great time."

"They are real good people, those German Methodists
are," said Jack, "but you'll have to excuse
me to-night. Get some other fellow to go with
you."

"I can't," explained young Pinkshaw. "Nearly
all the boys are going to a party at Billy Barker's
sister's, but Billy and I don't speak since he traded
me a dog that was given to fits, so I'm not going."

Jack sympathized with the Pinkshaw twin in his
loneliness; besides, he did not know but some feeling
stronger than mere curiosity was drawing the boy
toward the church; certainly he, Jack, would never
have divulged a religious feeling in any but a roundabout
way. The church was but a five minutes'
walk, and he could excuse himself and come away
after the Pinkshaw twin became fairly interested.
So he accompanied the boy, their direction being
toward the sound of some very spirited singing,
which could be distinctly heard above all other
evening sounds. Arrived at the little church, Jack
found that his companion would not have lacked
congenial society even had he come alone, for in
the back seats were already congregated several
// 086.png
boys of respectable parentage, and a loafer or two
besides, as well as half a dozen adults who frequently
occupied back seats in churches. Jack
would have retired at once, but the famous Vater
Offenstein had just ascended the pulpit, removed
his coat, laid it across the desk and opened the
Bible, and Jack, who was just then full of sympathy
with all believers of the Word, was anxious to observe
the old man's method.

The service began with an earnest prayer, to
which responses were offered from most of the
benches near the altar. Then a rich old German
choral was finely rendered, after which Vater Offenstein
proceeded to business. Jack understood a
little of the exhortation, having studied German,
and he ventured a silent prayer that its whole
meaning might be taken in by Sam Mugley, the
sadler shop apprentice, who understood German
and all the ways of the evil one beside. The discourse
was apparently a powerful one, for "Amen!"
"Gott macht es!" "Liebes Herr und Heiland!"
and various other responses escaped frequently from
the faithful. Old Nokkerman, man-of-all-work at
Matt Bolton's father's store, seemed particularly
excited; he waved to and fro on his seat, his shock
// 087.png
of long uncombed hair with a bald spot in its centre
making him particularly noticeable. The old
man's cranium did not, however, attract attention
only from admirers of the picturesque, for suddenly
a small but rapid ball of soft-chewed paper
made a fair bull's eye on the circle of bare scalp,
and flattened itself over considerable space. Old
Nokkerman turned speedily to perceive only several
rows of solemn-faced unregenerates, Jack's
eye being the only one he could catch, so he shook
his fist warningly at the general line of occupants
of the back seats, and then resumed his blissful
manifestations as quickly as if the religious ecstacy
were a mere habit which could be assumed or laid
aside at will. A hurried interchange of views took
place in a whisper on the furthest seat back, with
the result that Sam Mugley, the sadler shop apprentice,
slyly drew a small tin putty-blower from
an inner breast pocket, and aimed a ball of putty at
old Nokkerman's cranial target. The shot missed
its mark, being low and to one side, and struck
Fritz Shantz a smart blow in the back of his neck.
As Shantz was a butcher as well as a devout Methodist,
he rose instantly with blood in his eye, and
started for the back of the church, his mien being
// 088.png
so terrible that one of the more cautious of the
loafers hurried out of church and took to his heels,
thus diverting suspicion from the guilty person, and
laying up for himself a day of wrath which Shantz
determined should not be long postponed.

Jack was really in sympathy with the worshippers,
and was also indignant, with them, at the godless
disturbers of the excellent tone of the meeting,
but it was out of the power of any healthy boy with
a keen sense of the ridiculous to avoid a little
laughter at the peculiar ways of old Nokkerman
and the butcher under their annoyances. And a
little laughter in a boy of fourteen is quite likely
to be something like the beginning of strife; it led
to more and yet more, until Jack was too full to
restrain his merriment, and it bubbled out of his
eyes and all over his face. The brethren knew by
experience that when disturbances began so early
in the evening, the occasion demanded sharp eyes
and prompt action, so several of the occupants of
the "Amen" seats kept a pretty steady sidelong
glance at the back benches, while one brother
walked quietly out of church and notified a constable
that trouble was expected.

Meanwhile, Vater Offenstein continued his exhortations,
// 089.png
alternating between heavenly love and
the brimstone of the unpopular extreme of the debatable
land, and the excitable among the brethren
and sisters responded more and more fervently, and
Gottlieb Wiffterschneck sprang to his feet and
jumped up and down shouting, "Ach, Herr Jesu!"
when the horse doctor's boy, who had been biding
his time outside the church just under one of the
windows, carefully trained a huge syringe to bear
upon the altar, and deluged Vater Offenstein's face
with water, which, like the precious oil upon the
head of Aaron, ran down upon his beard and garments,
and shed considerable upon the Holy Book
beside. This was too much for even good Vater
Offenstein, so instead of repeating the sublime
prayer of the dying Stephen he picked up a small
wooden bench upon which short preachers usually
knelt in the pulpit, and hurled it at the window,
missing the open space and sending it through two
panes of glass and the intervening sash. This provoked
a laugh even from one or two of the faithful,
so the occupants of the back benches released
themselves from all restraint, and laughed aloud in
a most unseemly manner, while Vater Offenstein
wiped his face and hair with his coat, and quoted
// 090.png
appropriate passages of Scripture most dreadfully
between his teeth, translating some of them into
English for the benefit of the race from which
alone the annoyances of the brethren proceeded.
A general quiet being thereby induced, the exhortation
was resumed for a short time, and ended in
an invitation to the penitent to go forward to the
altar and be prayed for.

While the brethren sang a hymn, several sinners
passed up the narrow aisle and Jack turned his
head with the hope that he might see Sam Mugley,
the saddler shop apprentice, join the band, but the
wicked Sam was just in the act of blowing a second
putty-ball, and Jack's head coming suddenly in
range as it turned, the ball struck Jack fairly in one
eye, causing the boy to emit a howl of anguish. In
an instant Shantz the butcher had collared Jack
and shaken him soundly, exclaiming,

"Dat iss vat a gute Amerigan boy iss, iss it?"

"Somebody hit me in the eye with something,"
screamed Jack, "and it hurts awfully. <i>Oh!</i>"

"Den dat iss too bad," said Shantz. "Dell me
who it vass and I will break effery bone in hiss
body."

But Jack could not tell, and several sympathizing
// 091.png
brethren gathered about him and suggested that he
should take a seat farther forward, and be where
the bad boys could not annoy him. Although this
suggestion, thanks to the mysterious ways of the
unfathomable German mind, was equivalent to asking
him to put himself more directly under fire,
Jack gladly availed himself of it, so as to remove
himself from an environment which was full of
cause for suspicion.

By this time the assemblage was on its knees,
listening to a prayer by Petrus von Schlenker.
Petrus' prayer was very earnest, but it was also
long; it was delivered with such rapidity that Jack
could not understand a word of it, so the exercise
became rather monotonous to him, and he opened
his eyes and looked about. Under the single slat
which formed the back of the bench, and directly
in front of him, Jack beheld the broad and well-patched
trowsers-seat of Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel,
and Satan, who long ago became noted for putting
in an appearance when the Sons of God were in
council (See Job, Chap. I), suggested to Jack that
through such a mass of patches a bent pin might
work its way for quite a distance without doing any
serious damage to the wearer. Jack broke an anticipatory
// 092.png
laugh square in two, and closed his eyes
in prayer to be delivered from temptation, but
when he opened his eyes again there were the
patches, apparently a little more inviting than before.
Jack did not exactly wish that some good
brother on the bench behind Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel
would think to crook a pin and place it on
Nuderkopf's bench just as the latter arose to take
his seat, but he wished, in case anyone <i>should</i> be
prompted to do such a thing, that he, Jack, might
have his head turned just then so as to observe the
result of the operation. And still Petrus von
Schlenker's prayer went on, and Jack's eyes remained
open, and the boy was glad that he did not
occupy the seat behind Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel, lest
he might be tempted. Suddenly there came to
Jack something which would have been called an
inspiration had its tendency been different. He remembered
that he had a pin in the lapel of his own
jacket, and it occurred to him that this pin might
be bent so as to have a reliable base, and the point
might be inserted in the seat of Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel's
trowsers, where it would be in position to
attend to business as soon as the worshippers resumed
a sitting posture. Jack promptly whispered
// 093.png
to himself "Get thee behind me, Satan," suiting
the action to the word by removing the pin from
the coat and dropping it on the floor. But there
it was more tempting than it had been before; it
lay there, bright, thick and strong, demanding that
Jack should look at it. It was no common, soft pin,
to collapse at the first sign of pressure, but tough
enough to serve as a nail, if occasion required.
Jack was really curious to know if so unprecedented
an application of a pin could be successful,
because, if he became a preacher, as he instantly
resolved he would, he might some time preach in
German in that very church, and then if such a
trick were served upon any one, he would be able
to detect the guilty person. Besides, the patch
seemed to repose upon other patches, and probably
the pin point could not more than pierce the cloth
itself, where it would be when Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel
knelt at the next prayer, and it would demonstrate
what would be the effect of a similar operation
upon a thinner pair of trowsers.

Jack picked up the pin and bent it with the greatest
care, though it would have seemed to an exact
scientist that the upright portion was unnecessarily
long for a purpose merely experimental. He inserted
// 094.png
it with the greatest nicety between the coarse
threads of the homespun patch, and though he admitted
that Petrus von Schlenker was considered a
very good man, he determined that his prayer was
too long to be efficacious. Suddenly the voluble
Petrus said "Amen," the audience arose, Jack's
heart bounced into his mouth, Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel
began to sit down, the brethren started the
noble choral beginning
.fs 85%
.in 4
.nf
"<lang="de">Groser Gott wir loben dich;
 Herr, wir preisen deiner stärke</lang>,"
.nf-
.fs 100%
.in 0
.ti 0
when suddenly Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel emitted a
most appalling yell, and followed it up with so many
others of a similar character, that the song sank to a
faltering termination, and the singers crowded
around their disturber, scarcely knowing whether to
attribute the disturbance to pain or to grace. Several
minutes elapsed before Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel
sought the cause of his agony, but when at length
he extracted the pin from the seat of his trowsers
and held it aloft in explanation, no one failed to
comprehend the cause of his agitation. Then astonishment
gave place to mystery, for it passed conjecture
how the pin could even have got upon the bench,
with several reliable brethren just behind Nuderkopf
// 095.png
and one at either side of him. During the general
arising, Jack considered it safer to start homeward
to see the company that had been expected early in
the evening, but he lingered outside the window
just a moment, to see the excitement subside, and
great was his mirth as he beheld the wondering faces
of the honest Germans. Here he was joined by the
Pinkshaw twin and two or three other boys, but just
then Vater Offenstein reminded the congregation
that time was rapidly bearing them on to eternity,
so the brethren resumed their seats, and Jack was
going to start for home when the Pinkshaw twin
asked, perhaps forgetting Jack's new professions,

"What next?"

Lazy George Crayton remarked that he had
brought some torpedoes which he had saved over
from the fourth of July, but none of them had exploded
when he threw them, perhaps because in the
church he could not get good elbow-room when he
threw.

Jack had determined not to make any more trouble,
but if there was anything which he despised
above all others, it was a person who could never
think of but one way to do a thing. So he reproached
George Crayton with being a dunderhead,
// 096.png
and George replied that if somebody was smarter
than somebody else, perhaps somebody would have
the kindness to show how. So Jack thought carefully
for a moment or two, and then asked if anyone
had an old letter in his pocket. Nobody answered
in the affirmative, but as Jack said that any stout
sheet of paper a foot long would do, a boy who lived
near by sped homeward, and soon returned with a
sheet of foolscap. Jack rolled this into a tube, put
several torpedoes into it, put his lips to one end by
way of illustration, and remarked

"There!"

"I'll bet you can't blow them hard enough to
snap," whispered the lazy George in reply.

Such an aspersion of the power of his lungs was
too much for Jack's principles, so he peered cautiously
about the church for an appropriate mark.
Vater Offenstein was the most prominent and
tempting one in sight, but him Jack regarded almost
as the Lord's anointed. On either side of the pulpit,
however, were large oil lamps, and inviting
attention to the one which was nearest, Jack took
deliberate aim and blew a mighty blast. He missed
the lamp, but the wall behind the pulpit was hard
enough to stop any small projectile, and against
// 097.png
this the torpedoes crashed almost as a single one,
and caused Vater Offenstein to jump nearly across
the pulpit. Half a dozen of the faithful hurried out
of doors, and after them, to see the fun, dashed all
the occupants of the back seats, while from some
unknown hiding place sprang the constable. Away
flew the boys, all in the same direction, and after
them went the constable, the brethren and the
whole body of the scoffers. Jack and the Pinkshaw
twin easily got away from their pursuers and found
friendly cover in the darkness, but a confused sound
of harsh voices, dominated by a loud wail, indicated
that lazy George Crayton had been caught.

"Oh, oh, oh," exclaimed Jack in a hoarse whisper,
"isn't it too dreadful?"

"Never mind," said the Pinkshaw twin, reassuringly,
"they haven't got <i>us</i>."

"They <i>will</i> get us, though," said Jack. "That
George Crayton will tell on us—he's an awful coward
when he gets cornered. What shall I do?"

"Lick him," suggested the Pinkshaw twin; "lick
him until he'll be afraid to say his soul's his own the
next time he gets into a scrape."

"That isn't it," said Jack. "The thing will get
all over town, and all this time I ought to have been
// 098.png
at home to see Mr. Daybright, who was to come to
our house to-night for the express purpose of examining
me on my evidences!"

The Pinkshaw twin had nothing to say in reply
to this information, and Jack sneaked home and
hung about the doorway until he assured himself
that Mr. Daybright had gone; then he made some
lame excuse for his absence and retired to a very
uneasy pillow.
// 099.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch08
CHAPTER VIII. || FUGITIVES FROM JUSTICE.
.sp 2

On the next morning there was a marked scarcity
of boys in places where, at ordinary
times, boys most did congregate. The scamps who
had scrambled about the edge of sacrilege on the
preceding night, kept themselves carefully secluded
from the general gaze, while other mischievous boys,
having learned by sad experience that suspicion, like
lightning, is much given to striking at objects that
do not merit any such attention, devoted themselves
industriously to home affairs, or went upon
solitary journeys into the suburbs.

And these precautionary measures proved to be
not without sense, for at a tolerably early hour the
Post Office, which was also the office of the most
popular of the two local justices of the peace, was
approached by a strong delegation from the outraged
Society of German Methodists. First came
the renowned Vater Offenstein, supported by the
// 100.png
Reverend Schnabel Mauterbach, pastor of the
church. Vater Offenstein had not been able to
keep his hair and clothing wet during the hot August
night, but the water thrown from the syringe
had not been very clean, so there were great stains
upon the cotton shirt which its wearer would swear
had been put on clean on the day of the service. The
pastor bore the soiled and still damp copy of the
Holy Book. Then came old Nokkerman, his hair carefully
combed and soaped down, so that the justice
might plainly see the bald spot which had been used
as a target. Beside old Nokkerman walked Shantz
the butcher, with his coat off, so that he might display
the great red spot where the putty-ball had
struck him. After them walked Petrus von Schlenker,
to offer an affidavit that he had prayed during
the service, though anyone who knew the gifts of
the tongue of Petrus would have accepted a mere
statement on that point as conclusive. Beside Petrus
waddled Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel, jealously guarding
in an empty paint can the bent pin which had caused
him to disturb the meeting; he also bore, in their
normal position, the well-patched trowsers through
which the point of the pin had found its way.

Then came the sexton of the church, carrying
// 101.png
under one arm the bench which Vater Offenstein
had hurled at Satan's representative; in another
hand he carried the broken glass and sash wrapped
in two thicknesses of newspaper, and in his pocket
was a match-box containing the papers and such
other fragments as could be collected of the offending
torpedoes. A number of witnesses followed,
so that the postmaster-justice's little office
was completely filled. Then the pastor announced
that the party had called to make and substantiate
a complaint, and various statements were volunteered
before the justice could impress the assemblage
with the necessity for administering oaths.
Vater Offenstein, immediately upon being sworn,
opened his coat, displayed his soiled shirt, and impressively
held the Good Book aloft, opened at its
stained, wet pages. Shantz the butcher delivered
his own sworn statement with his face to the wall,
the impressiveness of the proceeding being somewhat
abated by his completely covering with his
immense forefinger the red spot on the back of his
neck; old Nokkerman bent nearly double so as to
display his baldness as he talked; Petrus von
Schlenker talked volubly to no purpose until cut
short by the justice, and Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel,
// 102.png
trying at the same time to hold aloft the torturing
pin, look the justice impressively in the eye, and
yet display the seat of offending beneath his upraised
coat-tail, presented a figure which utterly destroyed
judicial gravity. Then the sexton laid
upon the table the little bench which Vater Offenstein
had cast from the pulpit, and carefully unrolled
the broken glass and sash, and brought up
from the depth of his pocket the little but positive
proof in the shape of fragments of torpedoes.
Then the constable brought in lazy George Crayton,
who had spent the night in the town jail, and
who looked as pallid and guilty as if he had to
answer for the crime of murdering a whole family.

George did not waive an examination; on the
contrary, he had such a passion for confession that
he included, in his list of accomplices, the name of
every boy in town against whom he had any grudge
whatever, and it was not until after the examination
that it occurred to him that he personally had done
nothing whatever to disturb the meeting. Then
George's father gave bonds that his son should keep
the peace, after which he led the youth home to the
pain which follows discipline. Shantz the butcher
// 103.png
turned up his shirt collar, the pastor and Vater
Offenstein departed with the sacred Book, the sexton
carried the pulpit bench back to its legitimate
position. Old Nokkerman tried to scratch his head,
but discovered, as his fingers slid impotently over
the soaped locks, that the ends of justice are sometimes
attained only through extra annoyance to the
offended; Petrus von Schlenker, who had been
slowly realizing that he had sustained no personal
grievance, made the best of his time by engaging
the justice on local politics; Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel
carefully secured the offending pin, and the constable
went in search of the yet unapprehended
offenders.

Meanwhile, the innocent half of the Pinkshaw
twins, who had been listening outside the window,
had heard the list of the offenders pronounced by
the justice as he wrote the warrant, and discovered
to his horror that his own name was included therein,
the informer having been uncertain as to which
Pinkshaw twin was present. An inborn sense of
equity suggested to him the application of the principle
of an alibi, but later he realized that to be
innocent yet suspected, would justify him in escaping
the hated French class, and yet save him from the
// 104.png
ordinary penalty of truancy. Away he sped to
notify the whole list, and within half an hour nearly
all the boys whose names were upon the warrant
were informed of their legal status, while the constable,
who fully realized how much work was before
him, had barely finished strengthening himself at
Gripp's rum-shop.

The first man notified was Jack, and as that
youth had an utter abhorrence of loneliness he suggested
to the Pinkshaw twin that he should name
the Dead House blackberry patch as a safe place of
rendezvous, inasmuch as nobody would be likely to
go there, the blackberry season being over, there
being no contagious disease raging in town, and the
house being off the road to any where. He also
suggested that the boys should bring with them
whatever provisions they could lay hands upon.
Then Jack, with his heart in his stockings, and his
eyes feeling ready to overflow, made haste to collect
a hatchet, a box of matches, his fishing tackle
and whatever else he could think of, in his haste, as
likely to mitigate the privations of exile. Great as
his haste was, he found time to hide in the corncrib
for a moment or two, kneel devoutly, and inform
the Lord that he hadn't meant to do anything
// 105.png
wrong, and that he hoped when next there was a
scrape impending, the Lord would send an angel
to forcibly drive Jack from the scene of action.
More mature sinners, as they smile pityingly at
this style of repentance, would do well to examine
their own business consciences, and restrain their
smiles until they ascertain whether they have not
themselves indulged in many a similar <i>ex post facto</i>
operation.

Arrived at the Dead House blackberry patch,
Jack found quite an assortment of solemn-faced
boys under the shady side of the high board fence.
All of the guilty parties were there, except Sam
Mugley, the saddler shop apprentice, whose employer
had agreed to surrender the boy when necessary;
there were also present many boys who preferred
to flee the evils which they knew—to wit,
French paradigms—than endure those they knew
not of. Several boys immediately demanded of
Jack what was to be done, and while the interrogated
youth retired within himself to devise a plan
of action, Ben Bagger, who read all the popular
literature for boys, suggested that they should organize
under the title of "The Bloody Land Pirates,"
and prey upon the society which had unjustly
// 106.png
cast them out, but this suggestion was
severely damaged by Jack, who said that the duty
of the hour was to see that things were made no
worse. Then Jack decreed that the party should
retain its present quarters, separating if it chose, at
nightfall, to slumber in neighboring barns, fishing at
dawn and after sunset, and diverting itself by whatever
means were available, until a general amnesty
could be procured.

For an hour or two the group amused itself with
conversation, the guilty Pinkshaw twin causing considerable
merriment by a recital of the experiences
of the righteous Germans on the preceding night.
Jack endeavored to withdraw himself from the
Pinkshaw twin's audience, but who does not enjoy
retrospects of affairs which in themselves were enjoyable?
So he lingered, afar off, yet within sound
of the Pinkshaw twin's voice until that youth alluded
to Jack having taken a seat among the pious,
and then Jack, like the cowardly apostle Peter, began
to curse and to swear. The ways of Peter
came to his mind, both reproachingly and in comfort,
for he remembered that Peter had behaved
valiantly after discovering what a blatant, white-livered
sort of a fellow he was, and Jack, to stifle
// 107.png
his conscience, was willing for the moment to
believe that if he himself swore, lied and put in a
general denial, the evil might be excusable for the
sake of the good it might bring. In this respect he
so much resembled many an unscrupulous wire-puller
in church affairs that no theological partizan
can fail to sympathize with him.

After the story of the German Methodist meeting
had concluded, conversation languished, and
several boys complained of hunger. Jack took
charge of the commissariat and having carefully
garnered all the provisions that had been brought,
he suggested to those who were guiltless (except of
truancy) that if they would go boldly to the justice,
claim to have been at Billy Barker's sister's party at
the time of the outrage, and offer Billy, his sister
and his mother in evidence, they would, without
doubt, be cleared. When these boys had reluctantly
departed, the assemblage was reduced to five
boys, three of whom had done nothing worse than
laugh at the capers which had been played upon the
faithful, Jack and the Pinkshaw twin, who pleaded
guilty of having thrown the spitball at old Nokkerman's
bare scalp, constituting the remainder.

How these were to pass the time until night was
// 108.png
a serious problem, when one of the innocent, who
was also a loafer, produced a grimy pack of cards,
and therewith he soon won all the fractional currency
in possession of his companions; then he departed,
having doubly avenged himself upon fate by
dining heartily upon the stores of the exiles. Of
the quartette which remained, Jack was outwardly
the most cheerful and careless, but inwardly—well,
he could not help thinking of the Spartan boy who
allowed a fox to prey upon his vitals while he was
denying any knowledge even of the existence of a
fox anywhere nearer than the Apennines. Ruling
in hell might have its social advantages over serving
in heaven, but in whatever location a man may
be, there will the appropriate mental temperature
be also. Jack's remorse was genuine and terrible,
and he admitted to himself that he would gladly
make any reparation, endure any obloquy, suffer any
punishment, in fact, go through anything that could
be devised—except being caught by the constable.

When supper time came and went, it was discovered
that the larder would be empty in the
morning, but fortunately Matt appeared, coming at
night, like Nicodemus, for fear of the authorities,
// 109.png
and brought with him a whole loaf of bread and fifty
or sixty cubic inches of boiled ham. But the boys
slept out of doors that night, and awoke with such
appetites that the bread and ham disappeared and
they were still hungry. Then they stole many ears
of scarcely ripe green corn, which they roasted and
ate for dinner without successfully filling their respective
aching voids. A raid was made upon a
patch of early potatoes, but these did not roast satisfactorily,
as any of the boys might have known
had they ever tried an early potato before. The
final result was that the boys slept supperless, and
were at the mill-dam before daylight, where they
were successful in demonstrating to certain occupants
of the water that catching the early worm is
not an unmixed blessing. But even fish, broiled on
sticks or fried on a heated plowshare which somebody
had stolen, are not particularly palatable
when eaten without salt or bread. So the party
finally sneaked toward town with hungry faces, vigilant
eyes, and waistbands which would lap past
their accustomed meeting place, and fasten, without
extra tugging, at the first suspender button.

Meanwhile, the constable had been prowling industriously
about the town, stimulated beyond
// 110.png
average official enthusiasm by the offer of a ten-dollar
bill from the German Methodist treasury, for
the apprehension of all the culprits. He had examined
the innocent boys with the result of determining
that the juvenile mind is deceitful above all
things and desperately wicked. He had been to
the mill-dam only to discover traces of early work
by workers who, like the Arabs, had "silently stolen
away;" he had watched under the windows of him
.fs 85%
.in 4
.nf 
"——Who returneth,
 Whose chamber lamp burneth
    No more,——"
.nf-
.in 0
.fs 100%
He had examined the cock-loft of the school, ridden
along the river bank, sneaked beside the fences of
popular orchards, and lain in ambush near brushheaps
where laying hens most did congregate. He
had even tracked, to unprofitable localities, various
boys whom he suspected of conveying aid and
comfort to the enemy, and all he could show for
his pains was a badly sunburned nose, and a pair of
boots considerably damaged by brush-wood and
concealed stumps.

At noon, on the third day, he was completely
exhausted, and determined that if ever a good
// 111.png
watermelon could supply a pleasing finale to a
noon-day meal, it was then. So he walked out to
his own melon-patch, chuckling, as he went, over
the strict seclusion of the same, for it occupied the
centre of a hollow square, the sides of which consisted
of dense rows of tall corn. As he approached
this from his own back door, he perceived
how vain is the cunning of man when confronted
by the intuition of the bad boy; for there—at
ease, and enjoying the particularly large
melon which he had been reserving against a day
when upon his wife might accidentally be inflicted
a deluge of company—sat the boys for whom he
had been looking.
.if h
.il fn=p103.jpg w=500px
.ca <s>THE STRONG ARM OF THE LAW.</s>
.if-
.if t
.sp 2 
Illustration: THE STRONG ARM OF THE LAW.
.sp 2
.if-

The constable roared "Halt!" but with no more
success than if he were an army officer in the midst
of a panic, for the boys separated in the corn rows,
and the official was undecided as to which to follow.
So, indulging to an injudicious extent in that
profanity which so naturally attends indecision and
failure, he strove gloomily to the foot of his garden
to discover, to his great delight, that Jack had
stumbled, fallen and knocked all the breath out of
his body without seeming able to regain enough for
practical purposes. In an instant Jack was in the
// 112.png
// 113.png
// 114.png
official's arms, and though he bit, scratched, kicked
and begged, he was speedily invested in a pair of
handcuffs in the constable's dining-room, and afterward
led slowly through the main street to the
town jail.
// 115.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch09
CHAPTER IX. || THE STOOL OF REPENTANCE.
.sp 2

It was customary in Doveton to put sober offenders
against the peace in the second floor
rooms of the jail, for these, though not containing
everything that a fastidious taste might desire,
were well lighted and ventilated. But as the constable
led Jack to jail, he thought upon his own
despoiled melon patch, so he decided to put the
young man into the dungeon which was reserved
for the most depraved disturbers and desperate
villains. As Jack was pushed into this receptacle
he noticed, with a sinking of the heart, that the
door was a foot thick, built of most chilling oak-tree
hearts, and strapped with huge bars of iron.
Not that he had contemplated escape; he was
just then too feeble of soul to contemplate anything
but his own iniquity; but he had the natural,
healthful objection to restraint, and when restraint
can be measured by the cubic foot it is depressing
// 116.png
almost to idiocy. Then the constable shot four
massive bolts, each one of which seemed to give
Jack's heart a mighty thump as it grated and
groaned into its proper place. Jack turned to look
at the window. It was of rough glass, so that a
prisoner could not look out; it was only six
inches high, though its length was about two feet,
and it was crossed both inside and outside by stout
bars of iron let into the stone. The furniture,
when Jack's eyes became sufficiently accustomed to
the dim light to see it all, consisted of a dingy cot
of canvas and a broken pitcher containing the
water left by the cell's last occupant, who had gone
to the state prison two months before for passing
counterfeit money. The only decorations were
some cobwebs, which in tone harmonized with the
general effect of the interior, and an engraving,
upon the stone of the lightest side of the cell, of a
frightful looking being with horns, hoof and barbed
tail, having beneath it the inscription, "ThE
DEViL Taik Evry boDDy." The odor of the
apartment was undesirable.

By the time Jack had learned this much, he
threw himself upon the canvas cot, careless of what
else there might be to observe, and sobbed violently.
// 117.png
This, then, was the end of the boy who
had been so good for a month, who was going to
join the church and be useful in persuading other
boys out of bad courses, and be a missionary, perhaps,
and a minister at the very least! Everybody
now would think him a hypocrite; he would probably
be sent to the penitentiary for a year or
two, for now that the proper occasion for recalling
the fact had passed, he remembered to have
heard that disturbing religious assemblages was a
great crime in the eyes of the law. Perhaps they
would send him to the reform school, which
would be a thousand times worse than the penitentiary,
for the word "reform" suggested as
dreadful possibilities to Jack as it ever did to a self-made
politician. When he came out again what
would happen to him? He had never seen any
persons but loafers pay any attention to discharged
prisoners who made Doveton their abiding
place. Nobody would let their boys play with him
then—if, indeed, by that time he had enough youth
and spirits left to want to play; he would have to
sit on the back seats in church among the sad-eyed,
uninteresting reprobates who now sat there, instead
of among the neatly dressed boys who sat under
the eyes of their parents and the preacher.
// 118.png

Then Jack thought of the hereafter, in the literal,
material manner, which was the natural result
of the religious teachings he had received. If
angels knew everything and went wherever they
pleased, and if his deceased brothers and sisters
became angels just after they died—they had been
angelic while they lived—how must they feel to
see their well-born, carefully taught brother in so
dreadful a place as a common prison? As Jack
thought of it he wished the prison bed had a cover
under which he could hide; but as it had not, he
squeezed his face and flattened his nose upon the
rough, dirty canvas. The thought of his parents
recalled the wish, frequently felt by Jack, that
somebody would understand him, know how earnestly
he longed to be good—some one to whom
he could tell some of the splendid thoughts he
sometimes had—thoughts which would simply astonish
his parents out of their senses, if he could
feel free to tell them. Why didn't people give him
credit for what was in him, instead of eternally
finding fault with him for what came out of him?
Was he a jug that he should be judged in such a
manner? Looking the matter squarely in the face,
however, how was any one to know what was inside
of him except by what proceeded from him?
// 119.png

This train of reasoning was promptly dismissed
as unpleasant in the extreme, and Jack began to
search his pockets for something that might assist
him in consuming time more endurably, when some
one at the grating in the door startled him by exclaiming:

"Well, young man!"

Jack recognized the voice of his father, and his
heart went down, down, down, apparently through
the floor, and all the way into the depths of the middle
of the western half of the Pacific Ocean, which,
by careful investigation, Jack had determined was the
geographical antipode of Doveton. Then the door
opened, and Jack's father entered, and, oh, horror
of horrors! he brought with him Mr. Daybright, the
minister. Jack sat upon the side of the cot and
nervelessly dropped his face into his hands and his
elbows upon his knees.

"Well, young man," resumed the doctor, "what
have you got to say for yourself?"

Jack preserved utter silence, but determined that
he never before heard so exasperating a question.

"My poor boy," said Mr. Daybright, sitting down
beside Jack and putting his arm around him, "Satan
// 120.png
has indeed been making a mighty fight to secure
your immortal part."

"I think so too," sobbed Jack, glad of a chance
to lay the blame of his mischievousness upon somebody
else, and determining that if he ever <i>did</i> become
a minister, he would make things lively for
Matt Bolton's father, who denied the existence of a
personal devil.

"So think I," remarked the doctor, "and a very
successful job Satan has made of it. I wish he
would give me a few lessons in the art of getting
hold of boys."

The minister thought to himself that it was not
necessary for the doctor to go so far for information
when he could have obtained it from present
company, but as the doctor paid a large pew rent in
Mr. Daybright's church, that divine thought it inadvisable
to offend a person upon whom a portion
of his own salary depended. But he could safely
say what he chose to Jack, so he said:

"Rouse yourself, my dear young friend; you
still live and move and have your being, and
.fs 85%
.in 4
.nf b
    'While the lamp holds out to burn
     The vilest sinner may return,'
.nf-
.fs 100%
.in 0
.ti 0
you know. Why not, in this unsavory place, eschew
finally and forever all bad associations?"
// 121.png

"I will—oh, I will!" cried Jack.

"I've heard something of the sort before," remarked
the doctor. "I've heard it from this young
scamp himself, and, Mr. Daybright, you and I have
often heard it from men who thought they were
upon their death-beds."

"Blessed be death-beds, then," fervently exclaimed
the minister. "Jack, why don't you determine
to say, hereafter and always, 'Get thee behind
me, Satan!' when wrong impulses make themselves
known in your mind?"

"I have done it," said Jack, recalling his experience
with the pin in the German Methodist meeting,
"but it don't take him long to get around in
front of me again."

The doctor hid an unseemly giggle in his handkerchief,
and the minister himself was temporarily
silenced; then the doctor managed to straighten
out his voice, as he said:

"Listen to me, my boy. I can take you out of
this vile hole, but only by subscribing a hundred
dollars to the debt of the German Methodist church,
repairing their broken window, giving them a new
Bible, changing my custom from the market to
Shantz the butcher, who doesn't sell the best of
// 122.png
meat but does charge the highest prices, asking Bolton
to raise the salary of old Nokkerman, reducing
the amount of my bill to Petrus von Schlenker"—

"I didn't do anything to any of these people,"
interrupted Jack.

"Whether you did or not," said the doctor,
"doesn't affect the case. You did something, whatever
it was, to disturb that meeting; those men
were all there, they are all among the complainants,
and must be satisfied in order to persuade them to
withdraw their complaint."

"Didn't—didn't Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel want
anything?" asked Jack falteringly.

"Oh!" exclaimed the doctor, "it <i>was</i> you who
made him sit upon that crooked pin, was it? How
did you do it?"

Jack, finding himself trapped by his own words,
meekly explained the operation which led to Nuderkopf's
spasmodic loquacity, both visitors holding
their mouths as he did so. Then the doctor resumed
the disturbed line of the conversation by
asking:

"What do you propose to do?"

"Oh!" said Jack, raising his head, "I'll be a minister,
and preach to bad boys all my life, if you will
// 123.png
only get me out of here, and send me off to some
seminary where nobody knows me."

"Umph!" grunted the doctor. "And what sort
of a living do you suppose you'll earn in that business?"

"'Quench not the Spirit,'" quoted the minister,
and the doctor inwardly acknowledged the justice
of the rebuke, though he hypocritically remarked
that he had spoken thus only to test Jack's sincerity.

"Will you let other boys alone—keep away from
them entirely?" asked the doctor.

This was severer than Jack had anticipated, even
when in the depths of contrition and apprehension,
so he dropped his head again, and realized anew
what a dreadful thing sin was when one came to
look it fairly in the face.

"Do you hear me?" asked the doctor.

"All but Matt, father," said Jack. "He never
does anything wrong, unless I put him up to it, and
I'll promise never to tell him any good thing again,
if you'll let me go with him."

"Good thing!" ejaculated the doctor. "What
sort of repentance do you call that, dominie,
when outrageous capers are characterized as good
things?"
// 124.png

The minister shook his head gravely, and answered:

"My dear young friend, you must realize that
what you call good things are really bad things.
Until you fully understand this, there is nothing
to prevent your getting into just such trouble
again."

"Then I'll call everything bad," said Jack; "blackberrying,
fishing, answers to hard sums,——"

"Gently, boy," said the minister. "None of
these things do harm to any one."

"I supposed they did," cried Jack, "for I like
them all, and it seems as if whatever I like is bad."

"Not at all," said the minister, while the doctor
hastily drew forth his notebook and made the
following note for the great work on heredity:
"When a person is suffering, he is liable to believe
that things have always been as they are at that
particular moment; hence the unhealthy poems,
novels and dramas which certain disordered minds
spring upon the public." Then the doctor replaced
his notebook, contemplated the weeping boy for a
moment or two, sat down beside him, put his arms
around him, and exclaimed:

"My darling boy, I love you better than I love
// 125.png
my life." The doctor lied terribly, as most busy
people do who affirm strong, unselfish sentiments,
but Jack was not in a condition just then to question
the character of any one who cared to befriend
him, so he hid his face in his father's breast and
cried as if he could not stop. He even threw his
own arms about the doctor with a mighty grip, considering
how young the boy was.

"Think of your mother, too," pleaded the doctor.
"She has suffered more for you than you ever can
for yourself, and she is dreadfully feeble and nervous;
<i>do</i> try to lighten the load which at best must
be very heavy to her."

"I will," said Jack; "indeed I will. I'll darn all
my own stockings."

"And," said the minister, who wished all things
done decently and in order as established by Providence,
"pray daily for grace to overcome every sin."

"I always do," said Jack, "but it don't always
work."

"It never will," said the minster, "if you don't
act as if your prayer was in earnest. No amount
of praying will keep you out of a mud-puddle if you
persist in wanting to go into it."

"Well, come along," remarked the doctor, who
// 126.png
had consulted his watch, and remembered a patient
who expected a call just then. The door opened,
and the trio stepped into the hall; just then there
came along a zephyr which had passed a kitchen
where onions were being boiled, but for all that,
Jack thought it the most delicious breeze that ever
blew. The constable, who stood outside the door
gave Jack a most discomposing scowl which was not
entirely disconnected with remembrances of water
melons; but Jack, instead of repaying the scowl in
kind, which he could have done with entire success
from his own incomparable collection of faces, inwardly
determined that at some appropriate time
he would privately apologize to the official and repay
his water melon in kind. As his father and the
minister turned toward the main street, Jack exhibited strong
manifestations of reluctance, so both gentlemen concluded it would be
only merciful to lead the boy homeward through less frequented streets.
But it seemed to Jack as if the whole town had known of his impending
release, and were lying in wait to look at him. Shantz the butcher drove
by and glared at him; old Nokkerman, <lang="fr"><i>en route</i></lang>
for supper, looked upon him reproachfully; Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel, who
was mixing mortar in front of a
// 127.png
new building, contemplated him with the stony
stare which is not peculiar to cockneys only, and
Matt himself went by without bestowing even a
friendly wink upon him.

Worst of all, as the trio passed Billy Barker's
house, the nice little sister of Billy happened to
step outside the door. Jack dropped his eyes ever
so far, but he could not resist looking out of their
extreme corners to see what she might think of him.
The face which he saw contained considerable wonder,
but it also expressed a sorrow which was unmixed
with reprobation, and by the time that Jack
reached home he was brimful of a feeling to which
he had hitherto been an utter stranger. It was not
love, as that sentiment is conventionally defined, for
it was entirely devoid of passion and selfishness, but
it is not surprising that Jack, having never heard
love talked of but in one way—to wit, a strong regard
for one person by another person of the opposite
sex—should go home with the firm conviction
that he was oceans deep in love with nice little
Mattie Barker. To get a kind look from a person
of whom you have never heard anything bad, a person
who never scolded you, nor meddled with any
of your affairs, and in whose face you can see no
// 128.png
evidence of guile, will doubtless cause <i>you</i>, adult
reader, to contemplate such person with earnest regard,
and if you are a man and the person alluded
to is of the other sex, you will hardly be able, even
in the light of your past experience among humanity,
to imagine any reason why she may not be
an angel in human form.
// 129.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch10
CHAPTER X. || YOUNG AMERICA IN POLITICS.
.sp 2

For a month Jack labored manfully to keep his
pledge to eschew the society of boys, and a
very miserable month it was. He at first determined
to not even answer any boy who spoke to him, but
this led to his being called "Proudy," and "Codfish,"
and "Bloated Aristocrat." All this was very
galling to a youth who considered himself as pre-eminently
a man of the people. Then, one day, as
he was hoeing potatoes in the family garden, half a
dozen boys leaned on the fence for an hour, and
shouted themselves hoarse by exclaiming in concert,
"Tombstone!" To hold one's tongue, as
Jack did throughout the infliction, is to prove one's
self a possessor of a high degree of self-control.
When, however, the half dozen boys grew angry at
their inability to elicit any response, and began to
throw stones at the young gardener, Jack's endurance
escaped him suddenly and he dashed at
// 130.png
the fence, hoe in hand. All the boys fled except
one who, being a rowdy, had hugged one of the
palings in the affectionate manner peculiar to
rowdies, and had unconsciously established an entangling
alliance between the paling and a hole in
his shirt. Him, Jack pounded over the head with
the hoe handle until utter breathlessness compelled
the operator to discontinue his labors; then Jack
cut him loose with his pocket-knife and sent him
away after an interchange of terrible threats had
been effected. As the rowdy's skull had a roof of
wondrous thickness, he sustained no injury in his
mental parts, so he changed his base only to a
point from which he could watch Jack's going in
and coming out.

An hour later, as Jack was going to the store,
with two empty jugs to be filled, respectively, with
vinegar and molasses, the rowdy sprang at him
from a sheltering fence corner. Jack shouted
"Foul!" but the rowdy was not particular to
regard the rules of the ring just then, so he stuck
one dirty finger in Jack's mouth so as to obtain a
secure grip, and then with amazing celerity, invested
Jack with a bloody nose and a black eye.
Jack was not going to abandon the family property,
// 131.png
even in a fight, so he retained tight hold of the
jugs, raised his hands alternately and smote his antagonist,
first with one jug and then with the other.
Then the rowdy made haste to cry "Foul!" but
Jack, merely remarking, "What's sauce for the
goose—" allowed the rowdy to complete the quotation
for himself, striking him meanwhile wherever
an unprotected point presented itself. A final blow
in the pit of the stomach caused the rowdy to curl
up on the lap of mother earth, and then Jack discovered,
for the first time, that all that remained of
the jugs were their respective handles, and that the
rowdy was bleeding profusely in several places.

Jack had never before seen a more dangerous
wound than a cut finger, and even of these he had
seen but one at a time, so he greatly feared that
the rowdy would bleed to death. What to do, he
did not know; he recalled the little affair of Moses
with the Egyptian taskmaster, and determined that
flight was the dictate of prudence, but as for burying
his victim in the sand, there was no sand nearer
than the river bank, a mile away, and the dirt
under the rowdy was a hard-beaten footpath.
Away flew Jack toward home and into his father's
office, where he exclaimed:
// 132.png

"Father, there's a rowdy dying out on the path
to the store."

"Heaven be praised!" said the doctor; "that'll
lessen the state prison expenses a few dollars."

"He's bleeding to death," explained Jack.

"Oh," said the doctor arising and snatching a
case of instruments, "that's a different thing;
it now becomes an opportunity for experimental
surgery."

"It was I that killed him," continued Jack, in
a very thin voice.

"Eh?" exclaimed the doctor, dropping his instruments.
"Then you'd better get out as fast as
you can, and not let me know where you are until
you have to. Don't <i>ever</i> do it—I don't want even
to see you again—I wash my hands of you forever."

"Father!" screamed Jack in utter agony, while
gallows trees sprung up before his eyes in every direction,
"let me tell you how it was." And Jack
hastily detailed his experiences of the morning, concluding
with:

"It was all because I was trying so hard to mind
you, and not have anything to do with boys."

The doctor threw his arms around the youth, and
exclaimed:
// 133.png

"You're a darling, noble, splendid boy, but there
is no knowing how a jury may look at the case,
when your previous reputation is considered. Get
ready to hide."

Jack hurried up to his room for what seemed to
him necessities, but he had time to reflect upon his
varied experiences to do right, with their lamentable
results, and to wonder if it were not really true,
as was implied by some novels he had been unfortunate
enough to read, that fate occasionally forbade
some people to do right successfully. Of one
thing he was very sure; come what would, he never
could ask nice little Mattie Baker to become the
wife of a murderer. Then he tiptoed feebly, after
one or two ineffectual efforts, to his father's room,
which overlooked the scene of the battle; it might
be that the doctor had reached the wounded boy in
time to staunch the flow of blood before it was
eternally too late. From the window, Jack, with
great astonishment and not entirely without disgust,
beheld the rowdy sauntering away with his hands
in his pockets, while beside him walked the doctor,
violently shaking his fist and head at the beaten
man, and filling the air with threats which a breeze
wafted back to Jack.
// 134.png

The surprise was too much for Jack's nerves; he
dropped upon his father's bed and doubted whether
he ever would regain his breath again; then he bemoaned
the loss of the vagabond life which had
been just within his grasp, and which is the ideal of
every boy at a certain period of his life. From this
he was recovered by the thought that, after all, nice
little Mattie Barker was not to be entirely a memory
of the past. His eye and nose finally obtruded
themselves upon his attention, and very unsightly
objects they were in a mirror; he hoped nice little
Mattie Barker would not see him until his face regained
its natural appearance; and he would certainly
take care never to have himself so disfigured
again.

Then his father returned, hastily searched the
house for Jack, caught him in his arms, and actually
cried over him, upon which the boy felt himself a
hero indeed. But when his father assured him that
his latest exploit would have a wonderful effect in
keeping boys away from him, Jack did not seem so
elated as the doctor would have had him; he looked
so solemn that the doctor asked what the matter
was, and Jack burst out crying, and answered:

"I'm so dreadfully lonely all the time."
// 135.png

The doctor started to ask if either he or his wife
were not always at home, but recalling the drift of
a previous conversation on the same topic, he grew
suddenly very cool and undemonstrative and removed
himself, whereupon Jack, who read the human
face as correctly as boys usually do, waxed
angry, and lost sight of all his principles, as every
one does in anger, and determined that if he could
not have fun with the boys he would have it without
them, and have all he wanted, too.

He did not lose much time in discovering a way
of amusing himself. August had worked through
into September, and though the public was to have
no opportunity of disarranging national affairs at
the ballot-box that autumn, a gubernatorial campaign
had opened most vigorously in the State of
which Doveton considered itself the mainstay.
The rival candidates were Baggs and Puttytop, and
though both were men of fair intellect and reputation,
as politicians go, and the adult mind could
find but little reason to distinguish between them,
the boys of Doveton, who never for a moment
doubted that they were in perfect sympathy with
the inner sense of statesmanship, and knew the
constitutional rights and special needs of Doveton
// 136.png
beside, were, to a man, for Baggs. Jack had gained
this precious bit of information from Matt, so he
promptly ranged himself, mentally, with his natural
allies, and sought for means to discourage the
Puttytop adherents, who stupidly saw not though
they had eyes, and heard not though they had
ears.

Just then an announcement was made that the
famous General Twitchwire, who was stumping the
state for Puttytop, would address the sovereign
voters of Doveton in the main room of the county
court house, on the evening of the second Wednesday
in September, the regular fall session of
the county court having begun on the morning of
the same day, and the town being full of countrymen
who had legal grievances of their own, or of
some one else, to look to.

Now the county court house was a new building
which the demon of improvement had lately
caused to be erected, and as the appropriations had
been exhausted in the manner not unknown to political
managers elsewhere, the main room was the
only one which had been completed. Pipes had
been laid for gas, one of them terminating in the
ceiling in the centre of the room, but for evening
// 137.png
meetings it was, at present, necessary to light lamps
or candles. So, early in the afternoon preceding
the Puttytop meeting, Jack secreted himself in an
upper room of the court house, with a monkey-wrench,
a gunmaker's saw, and a yard of rubber
tubing in his shirt bosom. He dragged a step ladder
down into the main room, and standing upon
this he wrenched from its place the cap upon the
pipe from which the central chandelier was one day
to hang. Then he returned to the room above, sawed
in two the pipe which was to feed the chandelier,
stretched an end of his rubber tube over the lower
portion of severed pipe, and yelled through it to
test the apparatus. He heard his cry repeated in
the lower room so distinctly that his only fear was
that somebody outside might hear it. Then he sat
upon the floor, munched crackers, wished that he
had a drink of water, and waited.

Evening came at last, and from the edges of the
window casings, Jack saw the adherents of Puttytop
coming from various directions. From the
neighborhood of the hotel came the noise of the
Doveton Brass Band playing "Hail to the Chief;"
this indicated that the famous General Twitchwire
was to be escorted in style to the court house,
// 138.png
and Jack lamented that he could not be outside,
behind some good board fence, to throw stones at
the band, but he recalled the line,
.fs 85%
.ce
    "They also serve who stand and wait,"
.fs 100%
.ti 0
from the Sixth Reader, and was nobly sustained
thereby. Then the sound of the music came
nearer, the band playing
.fs 85%
.ce
"The Campbells are coming,"
.fs 100%
.ti 0
and then Jack saw a transparency, and yet another,
and it required every word of his comforting line
to support him in his privation. A tremendous
hubbub in the room below came up through the
gas pipe and rubber tube, and Jack applied his
ear to the latter to hear what General Twitchwire
might endeavor to delude his hearers into
believing.

The address began on time, and General Twitchwire
had just informed his audience that if through
supineness and lack of concerted action the gubernatorial
chair became occupied, he would not say
filled, by a person with the deficient mental acumen
and erroneous views which characterized the person
who was the standard-bearer of the party opposed
to good government, the consequence could not fail
// 139.png
to be most disastrous—when a distant yet loud voice
was heard to exclaim,—

"You don't say!"

The speaker glared angrily about, and the chairman
of the meeting, who had taken the precaution
to arrange that admission should be only by tickets
of a peculiar color, wondered whether counterfeit
tickets had been imposed upon the doorkeeper.
The general resumed the thread of his discourse,
and had just pronounced a glowing eulogium upon
Puttytop, when a voice exclaimed:

"Hang Puttytop! Give us a man!"

Then the sheriff and two constables, all of whom
were Puttytop men, began suspiciously to scan the
audience. But not a Baggs adherent could they
see, except Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel, to whom it
was well known that a frequenter of Gripp's rum-shop
had sold a ticket for ten cents, the inducement
offered being that the meeting would close with a
lottery, in which every ticket holder would be entitled
to a prize of some sort. But Nuderkopf,
judging by his snores, was slumbering soundly; besides,
the disturbing voice used a better English
accent than Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel could ever be
suspected of acquiring.
// 140.png

Several other remarks of the speaker were greeted
with derisive yells through Jack's speaking tube,
and the famous General Twitchwire took occasion
to remark, with a great display of offended dignity,
that if the authorities could not suppress such disturbers
it was pretty certain that the party in Doveton
was upon its last legs.

"Gott macht es!" (God grant!) shouted Jack
down the pipe.

This seemed to offer a clue to the offender. The
language was certainly Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel's,
and he was positively the only Baggs man present,
so the sheriff and the two constables dashed at him
and rudely aroused him. It was the only evening
meeting, except some of a religious character, which
Nuderkopf had attended during his residence in
Doveton; he had frequently to be aroused in
church; he was very religious and musically inclined;
the force of association caused him to imagine
he was in church; the silence to indicate a
temporary and dangerous stagnation of religious
service, so he cleared his throat and successfully
launched the first line of a devotional song before
he opened his eyes, when a rude hand was clapped
over his mouth and another was applied with great
// 141.png
force to the side of his head, and then he was
pulled at and dragged, and finally lifted over the
back of his seat, which happened to be the last
bench of the jury box, and was dropped out of
the window, landing on the sidewalk three feet below,
in a state of confusion which bordered upon
imbecility.

This was too much for such of Nuderkopf's religious
associates as were there present, even although
they were Puttytop men, so they arose to
points of order, several of them speaking at a time,
and they were rebuked by the chair, and hooted at
by the rowdies, who always infested political meetings;
and one excitable German cast an opprobrious
epithet at a conspicuous rowdy, and the rowdy retorted
by snatching a transparency from a bearer
and throwing it lancewise at the German, and the
cloth caught fire, and a general yell ensued, and
everybody looked out for number one, with the
result of making number two of everybody else,
and the famous General Twitchwire stepped suddenly
to a window and jumped out, and the sheriff
and the two constables bawled "order" until they
were themselves their only auditors, and a body of
quiet but observant Baggs men in the window of a
// 142.png
house directly opposite, agreed with each other that
the Puttytop ticket didn't seem to be looking up so
very much, after all.
// 143.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch11
CHAPTER XI. || A QUIET LITTLE GAME.
.sp 2

When Jack finally left his hiding place in the
court room, it was with a pretty distinct
conviction that no one would ever discover his
secret, and that the evil of this life seemed as ruthless
in its pursuit of Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel as in
his own case. Then there slowly developed within
him the thought that Nuderkopf, who had been the
principal sufferer by the trick of the speaking-tube,
was not even a member of the despised Puttytop
faction; so Jack, like many another mischief-maker
who injures some one of whom he had never thought
while planning his departures from rectitude, sought
refuge from his conscience by plunging into gloomy
reverie upon the fateful lack of sequence in earthly
affairs.

Not the least of his troubles was the fact that,
whereas in other days he might have called all the
boys in town together and told them the story of
// 144.png
his effort to purify the State government, and delighted
his soul over their enjoyment of it, he could
now tell it only to Matt, who, while a very true
friend, had not as keen a sense of the ludicrous as
Jack could have desired. Still, one hearer would
be better than none, and Jack wondered whether it
might not yet be early enough for him to hurry
to Matt's house and impart the delicious story,
when suddenly, to his great delight, he met Matt
himself.

"Where have you been?" asked Matt, "I've been
over by your house whistling for you for the past
hour. And the loveliest thing—oh, my! Will
Pinkshaw has learned a new game of cards—poker,
they call it, and it's splendid. Gamblers play
it for money, but it's just as much fun to bet buttons,
or beans, or corn-grains, or anything. Will
and I have been playing it in the moonlight, by
your side fence, ever since dark, and we must have
played a hundred games."

"It isn't too late for me to learn, is it?" said Jack.
"The moon will shine all night."

"Oh, somebody might come along," protested
Matt. "The constables prowl around after ten
o'clock, you know."
// 145.png

"Then let's go into the stable and get on the hay
under the big window," said Jack. "The moon
shines in there—nice soft seat, out of sight—everything."

"But we haven't any cards," said Matt.

"Then borrow Will Pinkshaw's," said Jack.
"You bring 'em up to the stable—you know the
way—and I'll have a handful of corn ready, and
we'll have a jolly quiet game for a little while."

Matt was nothing loth to act upon this suggestion, for new games with
cards—or anything else—have a way of utterly enthralling the juvenile
mind. Within ten minutes he was back with the cards, but their owner had
refused to loan the precious pasteboards unless they were accompanied by
himself, and Jack experienced a great though secret joy that without his
own direct agency he was brought into company with a boy other than
Matt, and at a place somewhat different from the Sunday-school where
alone he had fraternized with boys during the month. The
<lang="la"><i>modus operandi</i></lang> of the game was speedily made
known to Jack, the corn was scrupulously divided into three equal
portions, and the play began. Jack had not read Hoyle, so perhaps it was
the devil, who is said to be particularly
// 146.png
encouraging to green players, that decided
nearly every game in Jack's favor. Matt was soon
"busted," and meekly borrowed twenty grains of
corn from the winner, but the Pinkshaw twin, who
had bet no more carefully than Matt, remained
financially equal to his engagements.

Jack began to wonder whether the Pinkshaw
twin might not have sold his soul to the devil, like
some gambler he had read of whose money was
magically reproduced as fast as he lost it. The
thought caused him to fix his eye upon the Pinkshaw
twin as if he had been fascinated by him, and
soon he discovered that the arch-adversary of souls
operated from the heart of the owner of the unfailing
pile, for the Pinkshaw twin, who had been pre-informed
of the currency to be used, was seen to
slyly take some corn from his pocket and lay it
upon his pile.

In an instant a sharp quarrel ensued, the Pinkshaw
twin lying most industriously and displaying
an empty pocket in evidence, but a careful examination
of Jack's winnings showed that many grains
of sweet corn were among them, whereas there was
no such grain in the bin from which Jack had supplied
the general exchequer. So the Pinkshaw
// 147.png
twin sullenly confessed, and pleaded that playing
for corn-grains was no fun, anyhow, for a fellow
couldn't do anything with them after he had won
them; he therefore proposed that the party should
play for buttons.

"Where will we get them?" asked Matt.

"Cut off the suspender buttons on our trowsers,"
suggested the Pinkshaw twin. "Neither of you
fellows wear galluses, do you?"

The suggestion was acted upon, and the volume
of currency being somewhat limited, the betting
proceeded quite cautiously. But luck was still
against the Pinkshaw twin, so, desperately remarking
that his jacket was an old one, he removed the
buttons from that garment also. And still he lost,
so he attacked his shirt front, although Matt suggested
that shirt buttons were hardly big enough to
bet with. These same went the way of the others,
and then the Pinkshaw twin, realizing that no one
would see him on his way home, denuded his
trowsers of all the remaining buttons, and tied a
string around his waist to hold the garments up.
Losing these, he pledged his pocket knife to Jack
for ten buttons, with the privilege of redemption
within twenty-four hours. Then, when he wanted
// 148.png
to "raise" handsomely on "two pair," he had
nothing to do it with, Jack declining to lend anything
whatever on the miserable security of a dirty
handkerchief, so he offered to bet his pack of cards
as fifty buttons, and Jack agreed, and calmly displayed
"three of a kind" and the Pinkshaw twin
was a ruined gamester.

The Pinkshaw twin had been accumulating a
large stock of bad temper, however, as the game
progressed, and of this he partially divested himself,
as the party arose, by striking Jack a heavy
blow between the eyes. Over went Jack, backward,
upon some hay which inclined downward;
away he rolled, until stopped by bringing up suddenly
against the shelving roof; there he found
himself upon one of those unreasonable hens who
persist in stealing a nest late in the season, and
"setting" thereupon with maternal instincts, the
end of which is never calculated in advance. The
hen naturally protested, in the loud manner which
is said to be an attribute of her sex in general, and
as Jack was slow in changing his position, she continued
to protest, and then Jack heard the house
door open and his father hurry down the back
steps, probably in search of chicken thieves, the
which abounded in Doveton.
// 149.png

"The other window!" whispered Jack hurriedly.
All three of the boys scrambled to it, and jumped
out, the Pinkshaw twin becoming somewhat involved
with his trowsers, the string securing them
having broken. He soon scampered off, however,
holding his clothing together as he ran; Matt's retreating
footsteps were already inaudible, while
Jack, hurrying around to the front gate and tiptoeing
up the back stair and through the open door,
was in his room and in bed before he realized that
his jacket, upon which he had been sitting, had been
left behind. Just then the clock struck two, but
Jack determined promptly that the old timepiece
must be out of order, as it frequently was.

He had the cards, though, and they were irrevocably
his, and to be one of the only two or three
boys in town who possessed property the sale of
which was prohibited by law, was glory enough to
have acquired in one night, even at the expense of
a blow in the face. With their possession, however,
he had also acquired responsibility: his
mother might be suddenly moved to "look over"
his clothing before breakfast, as she frequently did
when intent upon repairs; or the doctor might search
his pockets, as he occasionally had done, in search
// 150.png
of something that would explain the extreme quiet
which, once in a while, characterized Jack. So the
boy got out of bed, and put the cards and the Pinkshaw
twin's knife into one of his stockings, and hid
them under his pillow.

Jack listened for his father's return until he was
drowsy and he finally went to sleep and fell instantly
into a dream of hearing a great army, with confused
trampling, pass by him on some road in which
he could not view them, and then that the army engaged
in battle with some other army, shouting and
screaming fitfully, and firing great guns spasmodically,
and then there was a terrific crash, and a general
roar, and the armies and the dream sank into
nothingness, and Jack knew nothing more until
aroused by the breakfast bell. He was very drowsy
as he arose, but he remembered that it was the
morning for the regular semi-weekly change of
stockings, so he clothed himself and descended to
breakfast to find his father very silent and his
mother overflowing with the sad fact that during
the night the stable had burned to the ground and
the doctor had barely saved his horse, carriage and
harness.

Jack was greatly affected by the information, and
// 151.png
recurred to his wonder whether the devil in person
might not have been helping the Pinkshaw twin
after all. Certainly, they, the players, had struck no
light. After a slight breakfast Jack hurried out to
view the remains, but the doctor was on the ground
before him, and was holding up a partly burned
jacket, which he was inspecting with great care.

"Jack!" exclaimed the doctor.

"Sir?" answered Jack, most courteously.

"I threw this out of the window last night, having
found it on the hay, just where the fire began.
There are charred matches in the pockets. How
did that jacket get there?"

"I left it there yesterday," said Jack. "I was up
there yesterday, lying about, and it was so warm
that I took off my jacket."

"And sat on it, I suppose, and wriggled around
on it and ignited the matches, and burned down my
stable. Couldn't you have set fire to the house,
too, while you were about it, so as to have ruined
me completely?"

Jack rightly considered this a very cruel speech,
but he hung his head.

Among the many bystanders, attracted by a
rarity such a fire generally is in a village, was the
// 152.png
gunsmith, and as he gazed upon the many bits of
portable property which had been thrown from the
burning stable, his eye fell upon something familiar,
and he picked up the saw which Jack had used on
the court-house gas pipe; examining it hastily,
he exclaimed:

"Why, here is my own saw, which I had such a
long hunt for yesterday afternoon."

"I just borrowed it while you were out," explained
Jack. "I was going to bring it back this
morning and tell you about it."

"What did you want of such a tool?" demanded
the doctor.

"I wanted to saw a piece of iron," said Jack,
with downcast eyes.

"Who's been cutting the hose of my carriage
sprinkler?" asked the doctor, suddenly espying the
yard of rubber pipe, which Jack had fondly supposed
would never be missed from the long coil
from which he had cut it.

While Jack was casting about in his mind for
some plausible excuse, he heard, to his unspeakable
relief, his mother shouting from the back door:

"Doctor, doctor, come here right away! Don't
wait a single minute."
// 153.png

The doctor obeyed the summons, and Jack was
consoling himself with the thought that the
monkey wrench, which belonged to the stable,
could not tell tales about him, and the hen, if still
alive, could not talk English, when the doctor's
well-known voice struck terror to his soul by exclaiming
loudly:

"Jack, come here!"

Jack went into the house, and was confronted by
the father of the Pinkshaw twins, who had brought
a buttonless coat and a pair of trousers as evidence
of the truth of his boy's statement that Jack had
fought with him, knocked him down, and cut the
buttons from his clothes out of simple malice. (It
may be remarked, in passing, that the Pinkshaw
twin had shrewdly determined that Jack would
rather be unjustly punished on such a charge than
confess the truth.)

"You needn't deny it," said Mr. Pinkshaw; "my
boys always tell the truth." (N. B. Everybody's
boys do.) "I'll warrant you have the buttons in
your pocket now, saving them up until next marble
time, when you'll play them away."

"Jack," said the doctor, "empty your pockets."

Jack had not the strength to resist or devise any
// 154.png
way of reducing, without exposure, the protrusion
of that one of his pockets which held the buttons.
How he wished that the lately despised shirt buttons,
so small, so insignificant, had constituted the
whole body of the previous evening's currency, instead
of its being inflated by the huge papier-mache
sailor buttons from the Pinkshaw twin's
jacket.

The doctor came rudely to his assistance, however,
and soon the floor was covered with buttons,
to the identity of most of which Mr. Pinkshaw
could swear.

"My boy says Jack stole his knife, too," said Mr.
Pinkshaw.

"I didn't!" vehemently protested Jack, and a
close search failed to prove that Jack spoke untruly.
Just then the Wittingham servant came to
the door, holding aloft in one hand a stocking and
in the other a dirty pack of cards and the knife,
exclaiming:

"The loike av this was undher masther Jack's
pillow, ma'am."

"That's my boy's knife!" exclaimed Mr. Pinkshaw.

"Are the cards his, too?" asked the doctor. "I
hope so, for the sake of Jack's back."
// 155.png

"They <i>were</i> his," said Jack, determining that all
hope for concealment was past. "I won them
from him at poker, and won the knife and the buttons
too."

"It's a lie!" shouted Mr. Pinkshaw. "My boys
have their faults, but they never gamble."

"Ask Matt Bolton, if you don't believe me,"
said Jack.

The doctor looked as fixedly at Jack as if he were
trying to discern rudimentary horns, hoofs and tail.
Then he arose suddenly, seized Jack, thrust him
into his room, muttered something about bread and
water for a week; then the old man fell upon his
knees, and besought the Lord for guidance as earnestly
as many another person has done after neglecting
to use any of his heaven-given sense and
opportunity for the control of lively children.

As for Jack, he sat moodily down upon a chair,
and formed at least one resolution, to which he
had long been urged: If he ever gained his liberty
again, he would never, never, never, on clean stocking
day, leave his dirty stockings lying about for
some one else to pick up.

And on the evening of that day the doctor pored
over the skeleton of his intended book on heredity,
// 156.png
but the best he could do was to devise a chapter
head, and even this was quoted from another book
containing some excellent hints upon heredity:
.fs 85%
.ce
"When the unclean spirit leaveth a man," etc.
.fs 100%
// 157.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch12
CHAPTER XII. || SWEET SOLACE.
.sp 2

Jack was willing to live on bread and water for
a week; he would have acknowledged the justice
of any penalty short of death, for the burning
of the stable would not appear to him other than a
dreadful calamity for which he was primarily responsible.
He did not mean anything wrong, to be sure,
when he designated the stable as the place for the
game, but it began to seem to him that what one
meant or did not mean was of very little consequence
when he made any departures from the
beaten path of rectitude. He had not put matches in
his pocket for the sake of burning the stable; he had
meant nothing wrong by sitting on his jacket that
night—he had only done so that he might be cooler,
and that it might prevent the sharp stalks of hay
from protruding so successfully through his thin
trowsers. He could not foresee that the Pinkshaw
twin—hang him!—would get angry, and stamp over
// 158.png
that coat as he struck the winner—for that was undoubtedly
the time, when, under the crunching of
the Pinkshaw shoe-heel, the matches were ignited.
Why couldn't the old jacket have burned up, instead
of remaining to tell tales? What could have
brought the gunmaker, usually so industrious, to
view so uninteresting an object as a burned stable,
and how came he to walk just where he could
espy his own saw? Why should the doctor have
assumed, at sight, that the yard of hose had been
cut from his own carriage sprinkler? And why had
the whole affair happened on the evening preceding
clean stocking day?

"Morality is the order of things." Jack may
never have heard this saying, but he became slowly
of an opinion which embodied the same idea, and
he determined upon a reformation which should
leave nothing to be desired in point of thoroughness.
He would not say anything about it to
his father and mother, but he would let the
truth burst upon them of its own irresistible force
some day. He had his doubts as to whether an announcement
of his resolution would have any particular
effect any way, for his parents had heard
something of the sort before, without beholding any
// 159.png
particular fruition thereof. He would give up every
single pleasure which could not be justified by the
Bible itself. His issue of veracity with the Pinkshaw
twin came to his mind, with the suggestion
that the only boyish method of settling such affairs
was hardly consistent with the nature of his good
resolutions. Still, had not Ananias and Sapphira
been struck dead for lying?—surely to give the
Pinkshaw twin a sound drubbing would not only be
excusable but necessary, as a matter of moral duty.
Had not Mr. Daybright himself preached a sermon
to prove that every man was, morally, his brother's
keeper, and was not lying positively forbidden
by one of the Ten Commandments?

As for the stable, Jack determined that the
first thousand dollars he earned when he became
a man should be given to his father to compensate
for the loss of the building and its contents. The
building cost but little more than half that sum,
but the interest which would accumulate in six or
seven years would bring the loss up to the amount
determined upon, and Jack was determined to be
honest to the last penny. And if the Pinkshaw
twin was any sort of a fellow when he became a
man—though from present appearances this seemed
// 160.png
improbable—he would see the justice of providing
the money himself, for he had had no moral right
to get angry at the result of fair play, particularly
after having been himself detected in the act of
cheating. Jack determined to reason calmly with
the Pinkshaw twin on this subject—after the other
settlement had been made, of course.

Then Jack began to realize that he had eaten a
very light breakfast, and that the smell of boiling
and roasting and baking which was wafted up from
the kitchen was particularly tantalizing to a fellow
who had to dine on plain bread. But even this serious
thought was overborne by a graver one which
came suddenly to his mind: could nice little Mattie
Barker ever bring herself to love a gambler who had
burned down a stable—his own father's stable, too?
This was too great an agony to be endured—he
could give up his darling sins, but nice little Mattie
Barker was a darling of a different kind. Something
ought to be done, and that very promptly, to
disabuse Mattie's mind of the erroneous reports
which would be sure to reach the young lady's ears,
but what could it be? He might write to her the
plain, unvarnished tale of the affair, but that would
have to admit that he had gambled, and which
// 161.png
would Mattie be likely to dislike most—a possible
incendiary or a confessed gambler?

Suddenly, to Jack's great relief, there entered
Matt, whom Mr. Wittingham had failed to realize
had been a participator in the irregularities which
led to the destruction of the barn. To him Jack
explained the situation regarding the stable, and a
right doleful time the two boys had together until
Jack remembered that he had not yet informed his
bosom-friend of the affair with the political meeting.
Jack endeavored to recount the incidents
thereof in the light of his new resolutions, but
Matt's hilarity became speedily contagious, and
within a scant ten minutes Jack detected himself,
to his great horror, in the act of framing a revised
and enlarged order of disturbances for the next great
Puttytop meeting, which would take place in about
a fortnight, and was arranging that Matt, whom he
had half an hour before vowed to lead into right
ways, should blow torpedoes at the speaker through
the open windows from a long tube which Jack
would have made for the purpose.

Then nice little Mattie Barker came to mind during
a lull in the conversation, love being merely
secondary to action, as it is in most other restless
// 162.png
natures, and Jack, not without some confusion and
halting of speech, informed Matt that he was in
love.

"Why, are you sure?" asked Matt.

"It's a dead sure thing," declared Jack.

"Dear me!" ejaculated Matt.

"Dear Mattie Barker!" exclaimed Jack, and instantly
his countenance ran through the whole chromatic
scale of facial expression, and then dropped
low, perhaps to rest from its sudden exertion.

"That's who, is it?" said Matt.

"Yes," said Jack. "I didn't mean to tell you,
Matt, but it came out all of a sudden. I meant to
ask you, though, to go and explain things to her,
so she shouldn't have to think any worse of me than
she needs to."

"All right," said the literal Matt, "but I couldn't
very well have told her if I hadn't known who she
was, you see."

"Yes, that's true," admitted Jack.

"Well, I guess I had better do it at once, for I
saw her sitting on the back piazza, peeling peaches,
as I came along, and there's no time like the present,
you know."

Jack acknowledged to himself the general application
// 163.png
of Matt's plea for promptness, but he somehow
wished that the explanation might be deferred,
for he was doubtful as to what message to
send, so he asked:

"What will you tell her, Matt?"

"Oh, I'll say you didn't set the barn afire," said
Matt, "and that your worst present fear is that she
may believe you did."

"That's pretty good," said Jack, beginning to
walk up and down the room, "and it's delicate,
too; you can tell her I haven't sent that message
to any other girl in town, and that I'd rather die
than do it. Go ahead."

But Matt could not think of anything else to say,
and Jack himself thought of something, but made
several ineffectual attempts to give voice to it.
At length he assumed a heroic attitude and said:

"Tell her that in my rigorous confinement my
sole comfort is taken from thoughts of her."

"Golly!" exclaimed Matt; "that sounds just
like a book! It's just stunning. I'll write that
down and commit it to memory on the way, for it's
too good to spoil."

Matt pencilled the sentence on the back of a bill
which he had been sent to pay, and over Matt's
// 164.png
shoulder Jack read the words several times, with
a comfort which gradually grew into pride. Then
he said:

"I wish I had something to send her as a proof
of my—regard. Do you suppose she ever plays
marbles nowadays—I've got a gorgeous glass alley
that I could send her."

"I don't know about that," said Matt, thinking
profoundly, "but I guess it would be all right, for
she can trade it to her brother Billy for his sleigh-line
to make a skipping-rope of—I'll just suggest
that to her."

"Good," said Jack. "You are a true friend,
Matt. When do you suppose you could come
back and report? I can't wait till to-morrow morning,
but mother won't let you come in a second
time to-day, I'm afraid."

"I'll come under the window and whistle,"
said Matt, "and you can put your head out and I'll
whisper up."

"All right," said Jack, "and you'll hurry, won't
you?"

Matt promised haste and departed just in time,
for Jack's father came in to say that now that Matt
had become a gambler, his visits would have to be
// 165.png
discontinued. Then Jack felt desolate indeed, and
he cried, and began to make a series of promises, but
he was cut short with the remark:

"I've heard a great deal from a promising boy;
I think I'd enjoy a performing one, as a change."

Jack had thought some of developing to his
father his great plan of restitution for the burned
stable. But now he determined most resolutely to
remand this great deed to the limbo of surprises,
although six or seven years would be a great while
to defer the enjoyment of observing the effect upon
the doctor of the intended operation.

Then Jack's mother came in, bearing a tray containing
several slices of bread and a glass of water,
and she held the tray before her, exclaiming:

"Behold the wages of iniquity, my son."

Jack beheld, with a hungry glance, and determined
that iniquity, besides being unpleasant, was
paid for in currency of but slight intrinsic value.
He recalled, somewhat to his confusion, the passage
of Scripture which asserts that the wicked
"have more than heart can wish," and he wondered
if his spare repast might not be an indication
that he was not so very wicked after all.

"Jack," said Mrs. Wittingham, "you are killing
// 166.png
me by inches. I've reached an age when I
am easily affected by anything unusual, whether
it is good or bad, and everything I hear about
you upsets me."

"Nobody ever says anything about the good
things I do, mother," complained Jack.

Mrs. Wittingham remembered to have had some
such thought at certain times in her own life, when
her good deeds were regarded as actual matters of
course, whereas her petty imperfections had been
causes of complaint and unkindness. But to admit
such a thing would be to give the boy sympathy,
and should wrong-doers have the consolation which
sympathy would afford? So Mrs. Wittingham lost
an opportunity of at least narrowing the gulf between
her only child and herself, and continued:

"Oh, dear!—I would give anything if I could understand
you. I never did any of the dreadful
things you do."

"You were a girl," explained Jack.

"My brothers never did such things, either," said
Mrs. Wittingham.

"I guess they didn't run and tell you every time
they did anything," the boy suggested.

"They had nothing to tell," said Mrs. Wittingham.
// 167.png
And she told the truth; her brothers had lacked
the vitality necessary to persistent mischief-making
and had always been considered good boys, though
their manliness after they reached adult years was
strictly of a negative nature, and they had invariably
failed in business and everything else they undertook,
barring the one who had used slyness as a
substitute for strength, and decamped for parts unknown
with the funds of a corporation of which he
had been cashier. But Jack could devise no retort
to his mother's last remark, so he moodily took a
slice of bread, and the lady departed, contemplating
her son with a look far more loving than she ever
indulged in when the boy's eyes were upon her.

Jack ate his dinner with considerable gusto, complaining
to himself only of insufficient quality. As
he lifted the last slice from the plate he discovered
a bit of paper under it, upon which was pencilled
the Scriptural saying, "The wicked shall not live
out half their days," and Jack considered this line
the most unsatisfactory dessert that had ever been
placed before him. He admitted the truth of all
Scripture, however, and he meekly hoped that he
might live long enough to earn money to make the
payment for that burned stable—this he could
// 168.png
surely do, if the wicked were allowed a full half of
three score and ten years.

A sudden whistle under the window banished
every thought, pleasant and unpleasant, except of
nice little Mattie Barker, and though from where
Jack sat to the window measured only three or four
steps of distance, Jack felt that he consumed at
least an hour in traversing it. Finally he looked
down, and Matt looked up and whispered:

"It's all right."

"Glory!" whispered Jack.

"The glass alley went right to the spot," continued
Matt, "for she said she'd wanted that sleigh-line
for months, but Billy had been too stingy for
anything."

"What did she say—about me, I mean," whispered
Jack.

"Oh, nothing much," said Matt, "that is—well,
she said it was too bad that you couldn't get out, and
that you should have to suffer for somebody else's
meanness, but she hoped you'd never gamble again."

"I won't," said Jack: "I'll swear it on my Testament,
right away." And Jack's head was withdrawn
for a moment, and then reappeared, its owner remarking:
// 169.png

"There—that thing is fixed."

"And she sent you a posy—I've got it in my hat.
How will I get it up to you?"

"I'll let a fish line down," whispered Jack, and
hastily suited the action to the word. "Put it on
the upper hook," Jack continued, "that's a new
one, and no fish has ever mussed it any."

The precious token of regard was hauled up, and
Jack kissed it, modestly retiring his head as he did
so. Then he looked from the window again, with
an extremely radiant face, and whispered:

"Oh, Matt, I never was so happy in all my life!"

"Not even when you'd got up to a woodpecker's
nest?" asked Matt.

"No," said Jack, "nor when I caught that big
salmon last year, either."

"Is that so?" asked Matt, reflectively. "Then I
guess it's time for me to be thinking about getting
in love. And I know it's dinner time. Good-bye."

Matt departed, and for the first time in his life,
Jack did not regret the absence of his favorite companion.
Fortunately he had not drunk the water
from his goblet, so he placed the flowers therein,
and he looked at them, collectively and individually,
and he took them out again and kissed their
// 170.png
stems, because those were what nice little Mattie
Barker's fingers had touched when she plucked
them, and he skipped six or seven years as if they
were mere syllogisms and he a politician, and his
fancy invested him with a moustache and nice little
Mattie Barker in a dress which touched the ground,
and they were living in a beautiful house overlooking
the river, with the finest of fishing rods and
double-barrelled guns on racks in the parlor, and a
beautiful easy chair which should be Matt's very
own, and a span of crack horses, which he would
sometimes lend his father, and things, and things,
and things.
// 171.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch13
CHAPTER XIII. || THE BOY WHO WAS NOT AFRAID.
.sp 2

When Jack emerged from his enforced retirement
of the week, it was with an aristocratic
complexion, a fine sense of rectitude, and a
powerful conviction that in spite of his unsavory
reputation having had additional light cast upon it
by the burning stable, there still was something
worth living for, and that the something aforesaid
was nice little Mattie Barker. The bouquet she
had sent him had been carefully preserved throughout
the week, though it had not always been easy
to secrete it on the approach of his mother and
father. Why he should have hidden it from them
he could not have told, for they would have assumed
that he had culled it himself, and they were
more than glad on account of the new regard for
flowers he had shown since his sickness; but it
made Jack feel very manly to hide that bouquet, to
imagine that it would be removed if discovered,
// 172.png
and to think of the desperate deeds he would do
rather than have it torn from him.

In spite of love, however, the boy felt somewhat
as a discharged criminal is supposed to feel. He
did not know where to go, or what to do. The
prohibition of the society of other boys had been
strengthened by new and stringent clauses. Jack
could not very well seek out girls to play with, unless
he chose to run the risk of being laughed at,
and being suspected of fickleness by nice little
Mattie Barker. His recent conversations with his
mother had not been of a variety of which he
wanted more, his father was pleasant enough of
speech—when not pre-occupied—but he would persist
in affixing a moral or a warning to every sentence
he spoke, and though Jack felt sure that no
person living had a higher regard for moral applications
than himself, he did not care to have them
in everything. His father liked butter, as was
proper enough, but did he mix it with everything
he put in his mouth—cake, coffee, fruit, etc.? Jack
rather thought not.

Perhaps the doctor had never heard of the pope's
bull against the comet and its impotence, or he
might have evolved a moral application for his own
// 173.png
use, in the matter of prohibiting Jack from associating
with other boys. No matter how earnestly
the world, in the time of the pope alluded to, expressed
its objections to associating with comets,
the comet came right along as straight as a due
deference to solar control would allow. And the
order of seclusion imposed upon Jack did not make
him any the less yearned after by his late playmates.
It began to be noticed, by boys of observing
habits, that the youth of Doveton were falling
into ruts, and showing no inclination to depart from
them; that there was nothing particular to do; that
the procession of games, each according to its
season, was lapsing into irregularity; that nobody
got up anything new, and the only plausible reason
seemed to be the absence of Jack. In a general
convention of boys it was agreed, with but two dissenting
voices—those of the jugged loafer and the
buttonless Pinkshaw twin—that what society needed
was to have Jack resume his place in it, and the
two dissenters were informed that if they didn't
make the vote unanimous they would find it advisable
to move to the next town.

Then it was informally resolved that Jack's father
was an old hog, and a protest from lame Joey Wilson,
// 174.png
who declared that during his own illness, which
had made him lame, the doctor had been just lovely
to him, only made it more inexcusable that the
doctor should not be better to Jack. To such a
pitch of indignation did the feeling against the
doctor arise, that after the nine o'clock evening bell
broke up the convention, the braver and more close-tongued
boys expressed their disapprobation of the
doctor's course by building a rail fence, some forty
lengths long, around the doctor's front gate, carrying
the rails from a pasture a square away. To remove
this fence, and replace the rails in their rightful
positions, required all of Jack's time during the
following week, noting which fact the boys doubted
whether their operation against the doctor had
been a positive success, while Jack himself perceived,
as he perspired, that even sympathy has its
penalties.

But he adhered manfully to his good resolutions.
As the time for the next Puttytop demonstration
approached, he determined that he would leave all
his delightful devices to the friend who suggested
them to him, while to Matt, who one day sneaked
to the fence and asked when that new torpedo
blower could be had, Jack tragically exclaimed,
// 175.png
"Get thee behind me, Satan." To be sure, he said
it before he had taken time to ponder upon the
advisability of saying it, and the instant it escaped
his lips he wished he had only thought it instead of
uttering it; but none of this reconsideration had
any effect upon Matt, for on receipt of the unexpected
reply, he had bestowed just one frightened
look upon Jack and then taken to his heels, and
remained invisible to Jack through all subsequent
days until he received an apologetic note, after
which confidence was restored by supplementary
proceedings at the front gate.

The great Puttytop demonstration was effected
without disturbance, but there were some signs of
despondency manifested by those interested in the
local ticket, which Puttytop helped and was helped
by, for the Germans, incensed by the treatment
which Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel had received, made
their grievance an affair of nationality, and went
over bodily to the Baggs faction. As the few last
days of the campaign approached, Jack's patriotic
spirit began to chafe at inaction, and he finally became
excited to the pitch of asking his father
whether he might not take part in the great and
final Baggs torchlight procession. The doctor was
// 176.png
astonished by the temerity of this request, but he
was himself a Baggs man, Doveton was too far
from any great city for politics to have become exclusively
rowdyish, the marshals of the procession
were nearly all church members, Jack had been
quiet for a long time, so the doctor gave his assent,
taking the precaution, however, to make a personal
appeal to each marshal to keep an eye on the boy.

Jack was overjoyed, and proceeded at once to
make a transparency and covered it with stirring
mottoes. Then he made another, a very fine one
it was, too, which he embellished with the inscription,
"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again," and
this he presented to Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel. But
Nuderkopf intimated that he had had enough of politics
to last him until the next campaign, so he used
the sympathetic transparency to shield a plant of
late tomatoes from the frost, and when Jack learned
this he confided to Matt that he washed his hands
of that ungrateful Dutchman, then and forever.

Somehow Jack had frequent and imperative
needs to consult other boys before the night of
the procession, but each time he asked the permission
of his father, and made known the subjects of
the conversation desired, until the doctor began to
// 177.png
believe that Jack was really trying to do right. As
for the subjects of consultation with the boys, they
ranged all the way from lights for transparencies to
the particular style and succession of hoots to be
uttered on passing Puttytop headquarters. Upon
this last-named affair Jack bestowed a great deal
of time, and, finally, having gone to Matt's for
something, and found nearly all the boys in the
Bolton barn, he conducted a rehearsal with such
success that within five seconds after the first note
had sounded, the Bolton horse had started back in
wild affright, snapped his halter-strap, and bumped
the side of the barn behind him so forcibly that he
was stiff for a month afterward.

When the procession finally formed, Jack's transparency
was the observed of all observers. On one
side he had acknowledged his youth, but warned the
opposition against despising it by the inscription,
"Little, but Oh, My!" On the second face of the
transparency, Mephistopheles, all in red, laid a gaunt
hand, black, upon an ungainly individual in blue.
Lest the meaning of this painting might seem
doubtful to the general gaze, the name of Mr. Puttytop
appeared under the blue personage. A third
side was ornamented with the portrait of the opposition
// 178.png
candidate, and it must have been a good
one, for Jack had cut it from a Puttytop poster
which had been tacked to his father's new stable.
In this picture the adapter proved himself to be
not without genius, for over the whole of that
portion of the candidate's cranium which had been
devoted to hair, Jack had affixed real putty, fastening
it in place with pins, their heads enlarged with
red sealing wax and their points bent inside the
canvas. The effect of this work of art, when it
came under a light from the outside, was that of a
bald-headed man, upon whose scalp a bad case of
smallpox had concentrated its energies. On the
fourth and last side there was a palpable allusion to
the bibulous habits of which Puttytop had been
accused by the managers of the Baggs faction, for
the ornament was a sketch of a declivity, beginning
at an upper corner and drooping downward
almost to the opposite corner; on the top of this
began a series of red spots which increased in size,
number, and intensity of tint until they culminated
in the general deep red at the base; under all this
was the inscription, "His Nose."

Many were the stones and imprecations hurled at this <lang="fr"><i>chef
d'œuvre</i></lang> as the procession moved through
//179.png
the streets, and all of Jack's strength of mind and body was required to
enable the young man to manage his temper and hold his transparency
upright. It would hardly be safe to say that the doctor, who viewed the
procession from a corner, entirely approved of his son's taste, but the
boy's upright bearing pleased the old gentleman, and as one of the
marshals, who was also Jack's Sunday-school teacher, rode very close
behind Jack, the doctor went home feeling that his boy was in safe hands.

But the final disposing of the procession did not conclude
Jack's patriotic duties. A large paper
balloon, inscribed "Baggs Forever, One and Inseparable,"
was to be sent up by the boys. This was
to be placed in the heavens by means of heated air,
to be provided by a burning sponge saturated with
alcohol, and hanging on a wire which was stretched
across the open mouth of the balloon. The boy
who had been charged with procuring the alcohol
had dishonestly spent the money for powder and
shot with which to go hunting, but he had made
good the deficiency by stealing his mother's bottle
of cooking brandy. It burned to a charm,
the balloon soared gracefully aloft amid a loud
chorus of "Ah!" and then the boy who held
// 180.png
the bottle and who knew the liquor by its smell,
remarked that it was a pity not to put the remaining
contents where they would do the most good.
The motion was seconded by one or two bad
boys who were not unacquainted with liquor, and
the bottle was passed from mouth to mouth, Jack
being the fourth who received it.

"I don't drink," said he, holding the bottle
and wondering whether it would be best to empty
it on the ground.

"You're afraid to," said one of the drinkers, to
whom Jack had been held up, to the extreme
pitch of exasperation, as a good temperance boy.

"Of course he's afraid," said another bad boy.

The mere smell of the brandy made Jack shudder,
but this was as nothing to the trembling
caused by the charge of fear. Afraid? well, he
<i>was</i> afraid—of being laughed at, so he placed
the bottle to his lips. He did not know anything
about the quantity to drink, except that when he
drank water out of a bottle as he frequently did
when out after berries in summer, he usually
took about a dozen swallows, so he swallowed
industriously until one of the bad boys who had
not drunk complained that none was being left
// 181.png
for the others. Then it seemed to him that he
had been swallowing the whole of a great conflagration,
and that he would cough himself to death, if,
indeed, he did not die of the uncontrollable trembling
that agitated his frame.

During the long-drawn moment in which this new
misery was being experienced by Jack, most of the
remaining boys had been vociferating discordantly
about something, and when Jack regained some
little control over himself he saw that the balloon
was the cause of their agitation; it had lost its
balance, perhaps from too much of the brandy getting
to its head, and in turning sideways it had
caught fire and begun to fall. It caused a beautiful
though dissolving view, and soon there was nothing
remaining but the sponge, which was coming down
as brightly and apparently as swiftly as a meteor.
Everybody ran to see where it fell, and although
the sponge was making considerably the best time,
it had by far the greater distance to travel, so the
boys had nearly reached it when it tumbled into
the well-stocked pig pen of Shantz, the butcher,
where it was received with all the hubbub which
the appearance of so unusual a visitor could warrant.
The spectacle of a brightly-blazing sponge in a small
// 182.png
enclosure, with a dozen hogs squealing at it, was
one which commended itself to the boys by its
utter novelty, but when the proprietor of the establishment
opened his own back door, and descended
the yard with a club, the scene became suddenly
devoid of interest, and the place which knew the
boys but now, knew them no more that evening.
The boys afterward agreed, while talking the matter
over, that any sensible man would first have cast the
dangerous visitor from the pen. But Shantz had seen
so much of juvenile mischief that whenever he saw a
boy near the scene of any irregularity, he thought
more of preventing future trouble than of curing
that which existed, so he left the pigs to take care
of the sponge, and gave chase to the boys.

Jack did his best to keep up with his companions,
but he had never in his life suspected our quiet old
globe of such unstable ways as she indulged in
during that short run. The world tipped to one
side until Jack was certain that he would roll over
to his left in a moment and slide straight down hill
to the Atlantic Ocean, which was five hundred miles
away. Then the world tipped the other way, and
Jack felt himself going, going, going, until he felt
sure that in a minute or two he would be caught
// 183.png
and impaled on some lofty peak of the Rocky
Mountains, more than a thousand miles to the right.
Then all the stars of heaven forsook their orbits
and dashed about each other in a manner which
made Jack too giddy to look at them, so he looked
straight before him at the steeple of the Presbyterian
Church, just in time to see it dissolve itself
into two steeples, which trembled awhile and then
indulged in a mad strife to see which should overtop
the other. The antics which Hoccamine's store
indulged in were very dangerous to a brick structure
which had been erected by contract, as that
had. Then Jack seemed to be treading on air, a
league at a step, yet unable to approach any nearer
to his companions.

Suddenly his collar tightened, though he could
not imagine why; then the judgment-day seemed
surely to come, for stars and steeples and stores all
mixed themselves in utter confusion, and Jack fell
backward some thousands of miles, apparently, and
the last sensation he experienced was of seeing a
giant about a mile high, but of a face, form and
voice identical with those of Shantz the butcher,
and the giant raised a club, which was certainly
the trunk of the largest of the California big trees,
and——
// 184.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch14
CHAPTER XIV. || PAYING FOR A SPREE.
.sp 2

When next Jack became conscious of his
own existence, it was with a conviction
that the giant who looked like Shantz the butcher
had set his feet against a mountain or something,
and was bracing himself with all his force against
the top of Jack's head. Then he felt assured that
the giant had taken out Jack's eyes, filling the cavities
with two enormous leaden balls, and that the
giant had filled his mouth with wool, and put ice
under his back, having first run an unyielding iron
rod all the way through his spinal column, and that
the giant had bound his knees and elbows in splints
so that neither could be bent, and then had fiendishly
set a great fire blazing in front of his face.
After what seemed hours of dumb terror, Jack succeeded
in parting his eyelids, and the leaden balls
within them answered the natural purpose of eyes
pretty well, for he saw that he was lying on the
// 185.png
ground, with the sun, already several hours high,
shining right in his face, and that he was quite close
to a fence, and out of the way of any of the beaten
paths of the town.

Then he found he could move one of his arms
from the shoulder, and then, after considerable effort,
he could bend his elbow, and he felt the other
elbow and assured himself that it was not bound
after all. Then he managed to raise himself by one
arm, though the iron rod in his spine was not as
elastic as he could have wished, and a cautious look
upward and a painful twisting of his neck showed
that the giant was no longer pressing on the top of
his head, though the sense of compression still remained.
This soon gave way to a sensation of
lightness, and Jack fell backward; though he managed
to turn upon his side a moment or two after.

Some misty moments were consumed in attempts
to determine who he was and how he had come to
be in that particular place, the final result being
that Jack became convinced that he had been
drunk. The mere recalling of his last experiences
of the previous night made him so lightheaded that
he clutched frantically at a tuft of grass to keep
himself from tumbling upward. Then he realized
// 186.png
that he had never before in his life been so terribly
thirsty, so he entered the side gate of the garden
near which he had been lying, and drank freely from
the well-pail. Even this exertion left him so shaky
that he had barely strength enough to get outside
the garden before he dropped. Then he curled up
outside the fence, shaded his eyes with one hand,
and determined that the sun had never before been
so bright.

Then he set himself to thinking. His father and
nice little Mattie Barker came into his mind, arm
in arm as it were, but the latter soon drove out
the former, with the result of making the young
man more miserable than he had ever been under
the oppressive terrors of parental wrath. He had
barely escaped losing her by being suspected of incendiarism
and being a confessed gambler, but what
were these to a genuine, positive case of drunkenness?
No one had seen him in his present condition—at
least, it was safe to assume that no one
had, for to see a drunken person in Doveton was to
talk about him, with the result of soon having a
crowd of lookers-on. He had not meant to get
drunk, but, honestly, had he ever deliberately intended
to do any of the dreadful deeds of which he
// 187.png
had been guilty! Once, while lounging in a courtroom,
and in the cessation of putty-blowing which
he had thought wise while the sheriff's eye seemed
upon him, he heard a lawyer inform a jury that the
law always considered the intention of the wrong-doer,
and now Jack wished that his adored might
have heard that address. He wondered if Matt
could be trusted to carry her a message about something
else, and then lead conversation deftly toward
the unintentional wrong-doers of the world, and impress
upon little Mattie the fact of which he had
been informed in court. But, no, Matt was such a
literal fellow.

Meanwhile, there had been an unusual commotion
in the Wittingham household. Jack not having responded
to the breakfast bell, the servant was sent
to awaken him, but she returned with the information
that he was not in his bed, nor had he been
there during the night, for the coverlid and pillows
were as smooth as if untouched. Then the doctor
growled and Mrs. Wittingham fretted; and the doctor
said he supposed the young scamp had gone
home with Matt, and Mrs. Wittingham hoped the
boy had not gone to the river and got drowned in
the dark; and the doctor said he did not see why
// 188.png
women always imagined improbable things as soon
as anything happened that was out of the usual
order, and Mrs. Wittingham said she could not understand
why men always would be unsympathetic
just when there were aching hearts that longed for
tenderness; and the doctor called himself a brute,
upon which Mrs. Wittingham disposed of a tear or
two which had come unbidden, and the doctor declared
that the skin of the young reprobate should
pay for those tears. But the cuticle alluded to did
not appear, either with or without its natural occupant,
nor could a search of the stable throw any
light upon the mystery.

Then the doctor drove to Matt's, and discovered
that the boy was not there, and he stopped at the
jail, ostensibly to ask about the keeper's baby, but
really to give the official a chance to say something,
if Jack had got into trouble and his old quarters
again. But still he remained uninformed, so he began
to interview such boys as were visible; these
knew nothing, as boys always do when questioned
about one of their own number who seems to be
wanted by his right guardians. No one had seen
him since the balloon caught fire, though they
quieted one very unscientific fear of the doctor's by
// 189.png
declaring positively that he had not gone heavenward
with the balloon itself.

Suddenly the doctor was accosted by Shantz the
butcher, who was driving by, and who said:

"Doctor, you know dot bad boy dot you got?"

The doctor admitted that he did.

"Vell, den," said Shantz; "yust you hear vat I
say—better it is dot you do it. You not keep dot
boy some oder blace, den I kick him some oder
blace, py shimminy cracious! Dat's yust vat it is,
I dell you."

"What had he done to you?" asked the doctor.

"Vat he has done?" echoed Shantz. "Vell, vat
he didn't mebbe come pooty nigh a dooin', dot ding
is mighty bad, now I dell you. He drew a pig
sponge full of fire at my hogs. You dink I vant
to sell roast hogs? No, sir! an' ven I do, I puts
'em over de fire—I not put de fire right ofer de
hogs, an' den git yust lots of boys to come an'
laugh vile de pigs is squeaking, cause I reckon dey
don't like to be roasted midout being killed before
dot."

"Why didn't you thrash him, if you caught him
at such a trick?" asked the doctor.

"Vy didn't I?" asked Shantz. "Vell, I yust did,
// 190.png
but 'twasn't no goot; he vouldn't holler, but yust
tumbled on de ground an' vas vorse as a whole
dressed pig to pick up again."

A few questions as to time and place followed,
and the doctor drove hurriedly off, vowing to himself
that if Shantz had really injured the boy, the
burly German should have a large account to settle.
To tell a man to punish Jack was one thing—to
find that the man had taken the doctor at his word,
and in advance, too, was quite another. The doctor
drove toward Shantz's house, looking carefully
about him and asking questions of every one he
met, so it came to pass that just as Jack was wondering
how to get home and explain his absence
without telling the whole truth, he heard his
father's voice, startingly near at hand, shouting:

"Jack, did he hurt you much?"

"Sir?" answered the miserable boy. Then Jack
recalled the likeness of the giant of the previous
night, so he feebly said, questioningly, "Shantz?"

"Yes—the villain!" exclaimed the doctor. "My
poor boy, come here, and let me see what he did to
you. It was bad enough for you to throw a burning
sponge into his pig-pen, but——"
// 191.png

"I didn't, father," said Jack. "The sponge fell
from the balloon." And Jack told in detail the
story of the ascension and untimely end of the balloon,
though his recital was so fragmentary and delivered
with so much shading of the eyes and rubbing
of the head that the doctor grew seriously
alarmed for the boy's reason. It took him but a
second or two to dismount from his carriage and lay
his hand on Jack's head, yet even in this short time
his conscience pricked him sorely for his many sins
of omission concerning his only son, and he formed
enough of good resolutions to pave at least a mile
of the infernal pathway.

"Let me see your eyes," said the doctor.

Jack lifted them, heavy and bloodshot.

"No concussion of the brain, thank the Lord,"
said the doctor. "Now show me your tongue."

Jack opened his mouth, and that very instant
the doctor sniffed the air suspiciously; then with
both hands he held the boy at arms' length and exclaimed:

"You've been drinking, young man."

Jack looked up guiltily for just a second, and then
dropped his eyes.

"Go home this instant!" said the doctor; "take
// 192.png
off your clothes and go to bed, and stay there until
I come. I never gave you a bit of sympathy without
finding that I'd wasted it. Go along—quick!"

As the doctor spoke, he reached for his carriage-whip,
so Jack moved off much faster than a moment
or two before he would have thought possible under
the existing physical circumstances. When the
doctor had turned his carriage and moved off to
visit some patients whom he had been neglecting
all the morning, Jack's fears were sufficiently allayed
to justify his thinking about the weather, for it
seemed to him that the sun had never shone so hotly
even in midsummer. Then he wondered what his
father would do to him. He had been punished
with great severity many a time, though his faults
had never before been so grievous as this present
one; the mere thought of being punished at all was
more than in his present physical and mental condition
he could bear.

Suddenly an old thought occurred to him: he
would run away. He had many a time determined
to do so, but on such occasions the weather was too
cold, or too hot, or he had an uncompleted trade on
hand, or he was penniless, or something. Now,
however, the expected punishment overbalanced
// 193.png
every lesser fear. Perhaps he would starve, but he
would not be so dreadfully sorry if he did; he
would escape the scoldings and punishments that
he knew of, while that which might come after death
would at least have the alleviating quality of novelty.
But there was little likelihood of his starving;
runaway boys in books and story papers never
did anything of the kind—they always fell upon
streaks of luck, and finally married heiresses. Jack
did not care to marry an heiress; nice little Mattie
Barker was rich enough for him, but alas! she
would have to remain a sweetly mournful memory.
He would at least strive to obtain her sympathy;
he would write her a touching, a tenderly-worded
farewell, and then, as he came into his fortune in
other lands, he would write her respectful anonymous
letters—perhaps, even, he might write her in
verse, though about that he could not speak with
certainty at present. One thing he knew—he did
wish his head would stop aching so dreadfully.

Arrived at home, he went softly to his own
room, bolted the door, and sat down to write. He
wrote and tore at least a dozen letters before he
could pen one which seemed to suit him; this,
when completed, read as follows:
// 194.png
.fs 80%
.in 0
"Miss Mattie Barker:
.in 4
Dear Madam,
.in 8
Farewell forever.
.in 16
<sc>Jack Wittingham.</sc>"
.in 0
.fs 100%
It then seemed to him that his father deserved
a parting word, so he wrote:
.fs 80%
.in 4
"Dear Father:
.ti 8
You want me to be good, and so
do I, but circumstances over which I seem to
have no control, prevent the consummation of my
earnest desire and intention.[#] When I come back,
I shall be a man, and rich enough to comfort you
in your declining years, and mother too.
.in 12
Your affectionate son,
.in 16
<sc>Jack</sc>."
.in 0
.fs 100%
.fs 80%
.fn #
Jack had found this sentence in a note from one of his father's
unfortunate debtors, and he had been carefully saving it for years
until a proper opportunity for using it should occur.
.fn-
.fs 100%
.sp 2
This letter had been begun at the top of the
page, with the intention that it should cover the
entire front, but as it was, there was a considerable
blank space at the bottom. So Jack labored hard
to devise a postscript, but his head was not equal
to much composition. Suddenly his fond resolution
// 195.png
came to mind; it was to have been a dead
secret, but now it seemed only just that his father
should have something to break the shock of his
son's departure—something particularly comforting
and uplifting. So he wrote:
.fs 80%
"P. S. The first thousand dollars I earn, I'm
going to send to you, to pay for the stable that
burned down on account of the matches in my
jacket pocket getting scrunched under Bob Pinkshaw's
foot."
.fs 100%
This postscript gave Jack a great deal of comfort
as he looked at it, but he doubted whether it
was the part of prudence to linger over it. So he
sealed and addressed both letters, and put his father's
on the mantle in the doctor's room, just under
the hook where the doctor's watch was always hung
at night; the other letter he determined to mail
at the first post-town he reached in his wanderings.

Then he got a little hand-valise of his father's,
having failed to find a pocket-handkerchief large
enough to hold the traveling outfit which he considered
necessary. He packed all his fishing tackle,
a red shirt, a pair of swimming tights, the box containing
the remains of nice little Mattie Barker's
// 196.png
bouquet, some underclothing, his Sunday suit, and
his whole assortment of old felt hats. He looked
around the room lest he might have forgotten
something, and beheld the little Bible which his
mother had given him on his tenth birthday. He
had not read a word from it for a month, but then
runaway boys always carried their mother's Bibles,
or Testaments, he was not sure which—and they
beat everything for turning off murderous bullets
or the daggers of assassins. Then he remembered
how his mother had looked at him and kissed him
when she gave him that Bible, and he wished that
she had always looked so, and he nearly cried
without knowing why, and he longed to go find
his mother and give her a great hug and kiss, but
it would be just like her to ask awkward questions
if he did. He would have a last look at her, anyhow,
come what might, so he tiptoed to the sitting-room,
and there she sat darning one of Jack's
stockings, with a lot of others before her, and she
was looking very tired and seemed to have been
crying.

"She won't have to darn stockings any more,"
said Jack to himself, "and that'll be a comfort."
Then he slipped out of the back door, through the
// 197.png
garden, behind the blackberry rows, into the
meadow, and so down to a wild little gully which
would lead him out of town unseen by any one.
// 198.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch15
CHAPTER XV. || RUNNING AWAY.
.sp 2

Jack's first care was to get out of town; once
out of sight of any house, however, he began
to wonder seriously what course he should take.
The terrible thirst with which he was consuming
suggested that he should keep close to the river,
the water of which, now that October had come,
was quite cool. There was a scarcity of houses
along the river bank, and Jack had entirely forgotten
to bring any food with him; still, if he developed
no more appetite than he had at present,
he would want nothing to eat for days. Besides,
the river bank was well wooded for miles, and
though the trees had begun to shed their leaves,
there was still foliage enough to secrete a boy from
anyone who might be impertinently curious. Still
better, the dry leaves would make a delightful
couch, and Jack began to think that the sooner he
tried them the more comfortable he would be, for
// 199.png
his head persisted in aching, and his legs were very
weak. So within two miles of town, he halted,
scraped a great many leaves against a fallen tree, as
he had heard was the habit of hunters and trappers,
and stretched himself upon them. The air was
balmy, the shade was most grateful, so Jack soon
dropped into a slumber.

When he awoke, it was quite dark, and he found
himself unaccountably chilly. Fortunately he had
brought matches, so he managed to make a fire of
leaves and dead sticks, and the blaze was very
cheering. But, somehow, he could find no side of
that fire at which he could stand without having
the wind blow smoke into his eyes, and his brandy-swollen
optics were not in a condition to endure
smoke with equanimity, even for the sake of belonging
to a runaway who was going to enable them to
see all the wonders of distant lands. Finally, Jack
scraped the fire toward his bed, and by lying on
the latter he avoided the smoke and obtained his
first tuition in positive woodcraft. Piling on additional
wood, he soon had a very bright fire, in front
of which he again dropped asleep, but the fire
crawled from leaf to leaf until it reached his bed,
and he awoke to find himself half smothered, and
// 200.png
// 201.png
// 202.png
his clothing charred in several places. His tours
for fuel began to extend farther than the light of
his fire, so that he had to feel about very carefully
for wood, and the rustle in which the dead boughs
indulged as he dragged them from beneath the
leaves suggested snakes, of which Jack stood in
deadly terror. The obduracy of several small dead
trees provoked him beyond the limits of his small
store of patience, the smokiness of old and rotten
boughs did not tend to peace of body and mind, so
Jack began to swear and then to cry. Both of these
exercises made him feel better in some way, however,
and he at last succeeded in making a very
large fire.
.if h
.il fn=p188.jpg w=500px
.ca 
<s>JACK IN CAMP.</s>
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2 
Illustration: JACK IN CAMP.
.sp 2
.if-

But he realized, for the first time in his life, that
the blood of a man recovering from intoxication,
acts as if it had been passed through a refrigerator.
He revolved before that fire as if he had been upon
a turnspit, but cold chills would creep down his
back while his front was roasting. He wished that
somebody had accompanied him, so that he would
not be so dreadfully lonesome, and the remarks of
a distant owl, who exclaimed "Hoo—hoo—hoo—hoo—are
you?" in endless iteration, did not at all
satisfy his longing for human society. There was
// 203.png
at least one comfort to be anticipated,—the morning
could not be far distant.

As Nature slowly cleared his head, Jack began to
weave plans for the future. Whether to go east or
west, he could not for a long time decide. The
two countries were about equi-distant, and each had
its advantages, but the tendency of story papers for
boys preponderated strongly in favor of the latter;
besides, the names of certain western localities
were particularly enticing, so he decided to go
west. He wished he had a revolver, but if he could
beg or work his way west on the trains, as runaway
boys always did in stories, he might have money
enough left to buy a second-hand pistol. Besides,
he could sell his personal effects—all but his fishing tackle
and his Bible and nice little Mattie Barker's
bouquet; as for the Bible, he must have a
breast pocket made for that at once. If the morning
would only come!

Suddenly he heard a familiar bell; ha!—a fire
had broken out in Doveton, and he was not there to
see it. Well, he deserved some punishment for his
wrong-doings, and he felt that this would be a sufficient
one, for a fire was a rarity at Doveton, and
he was therefore losing a great deal. The peal ran
// 204.png
on, but stopped at the ninth stroke. What? Could
it be but nine o'clock? The night seemed to grow
darker and colder all in an instant, as Jack realized
that he must have fallen asleep about noon and was
to be alone in the woods all night.

Then the wind awoke, and made the most dismal
of noises in the trees overhead, and it blew harder
and harder, and once in a while it disturbed a bird
who protested shrilly and with a suddenness that sent
Jack's heart into his mouth. The wind stirred the
leaves, and Jack recalled, with violent agitation, the
fact that a panther had been seen in those very
woods a few years before. He had heard that such
animals were attracted by bright lights, so the reflection
of fire on dewy leaves a little way off took,
to Jack's eyes, the shape of the glaring eyes of a
wild animal. He hastily separated the sticks on his
fire, and beat down the coals, looking behind him
several times a minute as he did so, for fear the animal
might spring suddenly upon him. Would a
mother's Bible arrest the jaws of a panther, he wondered,
and if so, to what part of his person would it
be advisable to tie the Holy Book?

Then the velocity of the wind increased, and,
soon a drop of water struck Jack in the face. It
// 205.png
must have been dew, shaken from the trees overhead?
But no; another drop came, and then another,
and then several at a time, and then too many
to count. It was raining! Jack began to cry in
good earnest, but something must be done, so he
began to strip bark from the dead tree against
which he had lain. It came off in very small pieces
at first, but by careful handling, Jack managed to
get several strips long enough to reach from the
ground to the log as he lay under them. But even
then things did not work as they should. Between
each two pieces there was an aperture, so in a few
moments the rain had marked out at least four vertical
sections of Jack's clothing and made itself felt
on his skin. A slight drawing up of the knees displaced
one piece of bark, and the cautious twisting
necessitated by the replacing of this piece, disarranged
two others.

And this was the sort of thing which he would
probably have to endure all night! Jack cried and
shivered, and shivered and cried, until his coat
sleeve was wet with tears, and his remaining garments
were soaked with the rain which the continual
displacement of the bark admitted. He
thought of other lone wanderers—Robinson Crusoe,
// 206.png
Reuben Davidger, the Prodigal Son, but all of these
had lucky things happen to them. Even the last-named
personage had something to eat, such as it
was, while Jack now felt as he imagined Esau did
when he traded off his birthright for a mess of pottage.
He would certainly starve before daylight,
in spite of the money he had to buy food with.

Meanwhile his parents were as miserable as himself.
The doctor spent the morning, between professional
visits, in devising some new and effective
punishment for the boy. But when he found Jack's
room empty, and was unable to learn that the boy
had been home at all, he forgot all about punishment,
and started on horseback in search, with the
fear that Jack's unsteady legs and light head had
got him into trouble. He searched fence corners,
wood-piles and barn-yards between his house and the
place from which Jack had started, and he questioned,
without success, everyone he met. Returning
in real agitation through a fear that the boy might
have fallen into a well in search of the water for
which he must be constantly longing, the doctor retired
to his own room for special prayer and supplication,
when he found Jack's letter. With this he
hurried to his wife, and so frightened the lady that
// 207.png
the doctor attempted at first to make light of the
whole matter, but his fears and his apprehensions
were too much for him, so he sank listlessly into a
chair and covered his eyes, while Mrs. Wittingham
cried, and wrung her hands, and asked what was to
be done.

"I don't know," said the doctor. "I know what
should have been done long ago—I always do, after
trouble has come, and it's too late to remedy it. We
should have made ourselves more companionable to
Jack, but instead of that, we've only tried to make
him a person like ourselves. We're so bound up in
our own round of daily affairs that we've never paid
much attention to him except when he has got himself
into mischief."

"I'm sure I've always seen that he had food and
clothing, and you have sent him to school, and given
him everything he's asked for that was within
reason."

"Within <i>our</i> reason, yes," said the doctor, "but
I remember to have had tastes different from my
parents, when I was a boy, and they were not at all
bad, either."

"I've prayed for him, heaven knows how earnestly,"
said Mrs. Wittingham.
// 208.png

"So have I," said the doctor, "but I don't cure
my patients by prayer. And my own boy, my only
son, who has more good qualities than all my patients
put together, I've never paid special attention
to, except when his ways were irregular. And I am
the man whose address—'An Ounce of Prevention
is worth a Pound of Cure,'—made me such a
name when I read it before the State Medical Association!
Oh, consistency!"

"But what are you going to do, doctor?" asked
Mrs. Wittingham. "There's no knowing where he
may be, or what he will do—perhaps we'll hear of
him in some penitentiary."

"Or in Congress," said the doctor. "He'll be a
smart enough rascal to get there, with that busy
brain and smart tongue of his."

"But you must do something, doctor," pleaded
Mrs. Wittingham.

"I'll tell you what I'll do first," said the doctor
springing from his chair; "I'll go and burn up that
infernal book on heredity; a man who can't understand
his own flesh and blood, isn't fit to write
about those of the rest of the race. Then I'll hire
both constables to track him, first swearing them
to secrecy. I guess I won't burn the book, though—I'll 
// 209.png
learn enough by this experience to tell the
truth instead of running a lot of theories on the
public."

The constables were on the road in an hour, and
the doctor, pleading a sudden call out of town,
turned over his patients to the least disagreeable
of his rivals, and took the road himself. But no
one seemed to have seen Jack. Matt knew nothing
about him, and the doctor reached home at midnight
looking as many years older as he certainly
was, wiser and sadder.

All night long Jack's parents lay awake in each
other's arms, crying, praying, reproaching themselves
and excusing each other, and forming self-denying
resolutions for the future in which they
hoped to have their boy again. With each gust
of wind, Mrs. Wittingham shuddered and suggested
dreadful possibilities, and the doctor comforted his
wife while he kept to himself suggestions equally
dreadful. The rain sat the doctor to fearing dangerous
sickness to the boy who was in such unfit
condition to breast a storm. When <i>he</i> was a
scrapegrace boy himself, and away from home, he
had always sense enough to go into a barn when it
rained, but he never thought to attribute this
// 210.png
much of wisdom to Jack, for his thoughts kept recurring
to the boy's earlier days, when Jack was a
sturdy, merry, helpless baby, and his parents had
planned such a delightful future for the jolly little
rogue.

A swing of the gate leading to the barn-yard
brought the doctor to his feet, and hurried him out
into the storm with bare head and feet, but alas,
it was only the wind. A muffled step on the back
piazza called him again from his bed, but he found
only the family cat. He grew too weak to try to
silence his wife's fears, too weak to think, too
weak to examine his own apprehensions, too weak
to do anything but pray and promise. At early
dawn he dressed himself and hurried out to feed his
horse, so that the animal might be ready for an
early start. He gave the pony an extra measure of
corn, and climbed into the hay-loft to push down
some hay. An old hat of Jack's lay upon the hay
a little way off, and the doctor snatched it and
kissed it passionately, his eyes filling with tears as
he did so. Then, as he wiped his eyes, he saw
something else that reminded him of his boy,
though he scarcely knew why. He stopped to
pick it up, and a loud yell resulted, for the dingy
// 211.png
object was Jack's hair, the owner of which had
burrowed the remainder of himself deep in the
warm hay. Tears, fears, prayers, good resolutions
and all other products of night and penitence escaped
the doctor as if they were dreams, and he
exclaimed:

"Well, sir?"

"Oh, father!" said Jack.

"Is this as far as you've been?" demanded the
parent, indignant about what seemed to him sympathy
obtained under false pretences.

"Oh, no," said Jack, "I've had an awful time.
You may punish me all you want to, but you can
never make me suffer as I've done to-night." And
Jack cried as if his heart would break.

"Your poor mother," said the doctor, "has been
nearly crazy."

"Let me see her!" said Jack. "Just let me see
her once more." And in a moment Jack had
jumped from the hay-loft window and was limping
toward the house.

The doctor, recalling with some shame his good
resolutions, followed with all possible haste, though
by the conventional means of exit, and when he
entered the house, he beheld the runaway hugging
and kissing his mother in most frantic fashion.
// 212.png
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch16
CHAPTER XVI. || LOSING A REPUTATION.
.sp 2

Jack was so overjoyed at getting home again
that his plain little room seemed a palatial
residence when he entered it. As long sections of
bare skin were visible through his dried but burned
clothing, and as the latter was also well sprinkled
with hay-seed, he made haste to change his apparel.
He really hoped his father would whip him, he had
been so bad, and lest the punishment should not be
as heavy as he deserved he put on very thin clothing,
and neglected to put anything between jacket
and skin to temper the blows. If his father did not
punish him, he would punish himself; he would go
without pie and cake for a year, or he would commit
to memory a chapter of the Bible every day.
Of course nobody in the village would speak to him
now, but he didn't care, if only he could remain at
home, never to go away, not even when he became
a man.
// 213.png

Suddenly, as he emptied the remaining pockets
of his burned clothes, he found the letter which he
had intended to mail to his sweetheart from some
convenient post-office. At sight of this his heart
gave a mighty bound, and he retracted his resolution
to remain at home all his life, unless, indeed,
his mother might be brought to fully approve the
choice of his heart. He would lose no time in consulting
both his parents about this affair of the
affections, and he counted it as a sin that he had
not done so long before. What very different
people from what he had supposed them to be,
that night had taught him his father and mother
were!

The expected punishment not manifesting itself,
Jack ventured out of his room and stood upon the
back piazza to look at the garden, which suddenly
appeared to him to be the finest garden that the
world ever knew—the garden of Eden excepted,
perhaps.

From here he listened to the breakfast bell, and
wondered if any bread and water would be sent to
him; if not, he would at least have the consolation
of knowing that he didn't deserve any. But suddenly
his father shouted that his breakfast would
// 214.png
be cold if he didn't eat it soon, so Jack descended,
in a maze, to the nicest breakfast he had ever
seen, and oh! wonder of wonders, his father gave
him a cup of coffee, a luxury which he had been
taught to forego, because the doctor thought it
very injurious to growing boys with large heads.
Jack occasionally stole a loving look at both parents,
but it pained him greatly to discover for the
first time, that his father looked as if he was going
to be an old man, and he was confused by seeing
his mother's eyes fill with tears at short intervals.

When breakfast was over, the doctor went into
his office without saying a word to Jack, and Mrs.
Wittingham, first kissing her boy, went to her
household affairs, and Jack felt very uncomfortable.
He was too full to be silent, but it was not the sort
of fullness, so often experienced, that could be relieved
by whistling, or singing, or dancing, or teasing
the family cat. He was absolutely longing to
pay the penalty of his misdeeds, and he was determined
not to be the cause of any delay, so he followed
his father into the office—a thing he had
never done before in his life in the face of impending
conflict. The doctor was surprised beyond
// 215.png
measure by this unexpected demonstration, and his
astonishment increased as Jack, after lounging
about uncomfortably for a few moments, suddenly
exclaimed:

"Father, I want to be punished."

"Bless me!" exclaimed the doctor, turning so
suddenly that a powder which he was preparing
dusted all over his clothing. "Have you lost your
senses, my boy?"

"No, sir," said Jack, hanging his head. "I guess
I've just found them. I've been a dreadfully bad
boy, and I think I deserve to be punished severely."

"Well," said the doctor, after several moments of
silent contemplation of his boy, "that's the
strangest case I ever heard of."

The doctor dropped the paper which had held
the powder, hurried to the desk, took out the notes
for his work on heredity, and made the following
memorandum: "It is undeniable that the mental,
like the physical nature, sometimes generates a
quality utterly different from itself." Then the
doctor erased this, and re-wrote and amplified it.
The second form did not satisfy him entirely, so
again he erased and wrote, and repeated the process
several times. As he was making his sixth erasure
// 216.png
he became conscious that Jack had lounged up to
his elbow.

"Oh!" said the doctor, "you said you wanted to
be punished, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir."

The doctor wanted to say "Confound it!" but
he habitually refrained from such remarks before his
boy; as he looked back to his doubly scrawled page,
however, he unconsciously penned "Confound it!"
directly after his late erasure, and he followed it
with exclamation points to the end of the line.

"What do you think should be done to you?"
asked the doctor, finally.

"I don't know," said Jack, "but it ought to be
something dreadful, for I've been so bad."

"Why did you get drunk?"

"I didn't mean to do it," said Jack, "but that's
just the way with everything I do," and Jack explained
the affair with the brandy-bottle.

"You did something worse than get drunk when
you took that brandy, my boy," said the doctor.

"I suppose so," said Jack; "I always do something
worse. But I don't know what it was."

"You showed yourself to be a coward," replied
the doctor. "What do you think of cowards?"
// 217.png

"They'd have called me a coward if I hadn't
drunk it," said Jack.

"Yes," said the doctor, "and that's what you
were cowardly about, can't you see?"

Jack admitted that he could.

"Wouldn't it have taken more bravery to have
laughed and fought down such a charge, than it required
to drink the liquor?" asked the doctor.

"Yes, sir. And I want to be punished for being
a coward too."

"Goodness!" exclaimed the doctor, seizing his
hat and vanishing. A few minutes later the Reverend
Mr. Daybright, just as he had entered his
study, received a call from Dr. Wittingham, and the
doctor promptly proceeded to detail Jack's case and
ask for advice. Now Mr. Daybright belonged to a
denomination which has very pronounced ideas on
the subject of sin and punishment, and the minister
preached as his church believed, and was sure that
he believed what he preached, yet he counselled the
doctor to let the boy alone.

"But he wants to be punished," urged the doctor.

"What good can it do him?" asked the minister;
"if he is in that frame of mind, the sole object of
punishment is attained in advance."
// 218.png

"But he has done wrong; he has kept his mother
and me in intolerable misery for twenty-four hours,
and it seems to me that something should be done
to him."

"Ah!" said the minister, "you're thinking about
revenge, which is very different from punishment.
And it is my duty, as your pastor, to urge you to
give up the thought at once, for it is unchristian
and brutal."

"Why," said the doctor, flushing angrily, "I don't
want to punish him; I simply think it a matter of
duty."

"Yes," sighed the minister, "revenge has generally
been considered a duty, so great is the influence
of inheritance even upon minds intentionally
honest."

The doctor abruptly departed, muttering to himself:

"That's a point for the book, any how!"

Arrived at his office, the doctor found Jack still
there. He picked the boy up in his arms, and as
Jack mentally submitted to whatever was to be his
fate, his father sat down, hugged the boy close,
and said:

"My darling fellow, tell me what I can do to keep
// 219.png
you out of further mischief and trouble. That
shall be your punishment."

The exquisite sarcasm of the potter questioning
his clay did not strike Jack, which is not very
strange, as the doctor himself was unconscious of
it. But Jack could only say:

"I don't know."

"I would sell everything I own, if money would
do it," said the doctor.

Jack was still unable to answer, but the doctor's
assertion caused the boy to squeeze closer to his father's
breast, which movement greatly comforted
the old gentleman.

"I think if you'd always let me be with you,
father, I would be a real good boy," said Jack. "I
like you better than I do anybody—but Matt; yes,
better than Matt either."

"Thank you, my boy," said the doctor, with
some little coolness which Jack detected.

"I've got to do something," said Jack, "and if I
can't see things that's good to do, I have to do
others."

The doctor remembered having had some such
experience himself, in the days of his own mischief-making,
but he answered gravely:
// 220.png

"I have to spend a great deal of time in sickrooms,
my boy, where it would be inconvenient for
you to be."

"Then let me be with you when you're at home,"
said Jack, "and," he continued, rather hesitatingly,
"let me ask questions, and you try to answer so
I can understand you."

The doctor dimly realized that when he was busy
he did not answer questions willingly or lucidly, but
he replied:

"You ask a great many questions about things
which I don't think you should know about, Jack."

"Well," said Jack, "I can't help thinking about
them, and when you turn me off, I nearly always
ask somebody else and I find out anyhow."

The idea that other people should be telling his
boy about matters which he declined informing him
upon was a blow to the doctor's self-respect, and his
sense of propriety, too, for he knew what class of
people Jack would be likely to apply to for information,
and the nature of the answers which would be
given. The doctor pondered a little while, and then
said:

"Jack, how would you like to learn a trade? You
could be with me in the evenings, you know."
// 221.png

"What sort of a trade?" said Jack.

"Whatever you like," said the doctor, "I
wouldn't for anything have you at any that was distasteful
to you. You certainly like to use tools—you
have ruined all of mine in various ways."

"I think I'd like to be a carpenter," said Jack.

"Then you shall," said the doctor. "If you like
it, and stick to it, I'll set you up as a builder when
you learn it, but the moment you grow sick of it I
want you to let me know. You are smart enough
to become a good architect, and that's a more profitable
profession than mine."

"May I have tools of my own?" asked Jack.

"Yes," replied his father, "the best that money
can buy. And I will go right away and find some
one who will teach you."

The doctor went straightway to the best builder
in the neighborhood, and had the proposition civilly
but promptly declined.

"Every boy I ever took managed to ruin all my
best tools within a year," explained the builder, "to
say nothing of the lumber which he worked up into
fancies of his own, and ruined by failures of one
sort and another."

"I'll buy my boy the best and largest set of tools
that you can select," said the doctor.
// 222.png

For a moment this offer seemed an inducement
to the builder, for there were many tools which he
disliked to buy yet needed occasionally to use; he
might borrow from the promised outfit. But as he
thought further, he replied:

"You're very fair, but tools aren't everything. If
I do the square thing by the boy, I must use a great
deal of time in teaching him, and time is money.
My time is worth a great deal more than the boy's
work will be for a couple of years."

"I'll pay you cash for your time," said the doctor;
"I'll give you a thousand dollars in advance, if
you say so."

This offer staggered the builder, prosperous
though he was, for where is the man who does not
want a thousand dollars?

But still the builder hesitated, and the doctor
asked:

"What else do you want?"

"Well," said the builder, prudently retiring to
the doorway of a house he was building, "what I
want is to tell you something that maybe you won't
like, but I can't help taking it into consideration.
They do say—<i>I</i> don't say it, mind, but I've heard
it from a good many—that Jack is the worst boy in
town."
// 223.png

"It's a lie!" roared the doctor. "He's the best—that
is, he has the best stuff in him. He's never
quiet; he learns his lessons as quickly as a flash; he
hates work about the house, just as I'll warrant you
did when you were a boy, and he must do something.
He likes to handle tools, though, and wants
to be a carpenter."

"Liking is all very well," said the builder, "but
sticking to work don't naturally follow."

"Did you ever hear of his dropping a job of mischief
until he had thoroughly finished it?" asked
the doctor.

"No," answered the builder with great promptness.

The final result was that sundry papers and
moneys passed between the doctor and the builder,
and on the following Monday morning, Jack was at
work at seven o'clock nailing planking upon a barn.
The news got about town very rapidly, and by noon
there were at least twenty boys looking at the unexpected
spectacle, and tormenting Jack with ironical
questions. When night came Jack's hand felt
as if it could never grasp a hammer again, and he
was otherwise so weary that he declined, without
thanks, an invitation to go with the other boys to
// 224.png
serenade a newly-married couple with horns and
bells. Then he helped shingle a portion of the roof
of the new barn, but his mind was greatly distracted
by the awkwardness of a boy, in an adjoining
pasture, who was trying to braid together the tips
of the tails of two calves; the consequence was
that he had progressed so short a distance with his
own row of shingles that the other workmen had
gone across the barn and returned to start afresh,
and, as they rested until Jack got out of the way,
they ungratefully upbraided him because of his
slowness, and he wasn't going to be called slow
again, not for all the calves' tails in the universe.

.hr w=20%

This book might have been continued indefinitely,
had it not been that Jack was steadily at
work which he liked, and had a great deal of his
father's society out of working hours. Gaining
these, he lost his reputation for being the worst
boy in town, for although he remained for several
years a boy and a very lively one, he had something
besides mischief to exercise his busy brain
upon, and a boy cannot be honestly busy and mischievous
also, any more than he can eat his cake
and have it too. Even the doctor and Mrs. Wittingham
// 225.png
reformed, though it was very hard for the
latter to stop fretting at the boy, and for the former
to cease acting as if his son, like his horse,
merely needed food, rest and correction.

Jack did not go about preaching reform to the
boys and advising them all to be carpenters, but he
unconsciously talked from a standpoint very different
from that which he had habitually occupied in
other days, and his talk came gradually to exert
considerable influence among the boys, though they
seldom noticed the change themselves. Jack's
very title, "The Worst Boy in Town," was in considerable
danger of lapsing for lack of a successor,
and the inhabitants of Doveton are still undecided
as to where it belongs.

As for the doctor's great work on heredity, it is
not in print yet, for the doctor happened one day,
while mourning over a neglected and consequently
unproductive Bartlett pear tree, to drift into some
analogies between the animal and vegetable kingdoms,
with the result that he realized that if the
splendid hereditary tendencies of the tree could not
prevent its bareness and its running to superfluous
wood, there could be no hope of an untrained boy,
even if he was a scion of the Wittingham stock.
// 226.png
This idea took such entire possession of the doctor
that he went into the house and burned his
manuscript as far as completed, and all the notes
beside.

According to Jack, who professes to be an infallible
authority on the subject, nice little Mattie
Barker grows nicer every day, and she has promised
to change her name in the course of time, and
her parents have endorsed her decision, for though
Jack is not yet of age, steady boys who are also
bright, and have learned a business which is not
akin either to gambling or theft, are not numerous
enough to be despised. And Jack has a whole
portfolio full of cottage plans, all of his own designing,
over which he and Mattie spend long and
industrious evenings, and Jack has taken a solemn
vow that when the proper plan is decided upon, and
the building begins, Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel shall
be the sole hod-carrier, and shall be paid the highest
market rates for his services.

Being practically a successful man, Jack is the
receptacle for the confidences of hosts of his old
playmates, who feel that their good qualities are
not appreciated by a world which is quick to complain
of their occasional irregularities, but he has
// 227.png
sent many of these youths sadly away by remarking:

"It doesn't matter how many good qualities are
inside of a fellow, if only his bad ones make themselves
lively on the surface."
.sp 4
.ce
FINIS.
.pb 
.sp 4
.ul
.it Transcriber's Notes:
.ul indent=1
.it Punctuation, hyphenation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant \ 
form was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
.ul-
.ul-