The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack

by George W. Peck

  “The sisters gathered around her, and they said her face was all covered with perspiration, and the paint was coming off, and they took her in the kitchen, and she told them Pa had slapped her with a dish of ice cream, and the wimmin told the minister and the deacons, and they went to Pa for a nexplanation, and Pa told them it was not so, and the minister got interested and got near Pa, and Pa let the water go at him, and hit him on the eye, and then a deacon got a dose, and Pa laughed; and then the minister who used to go to college, and be a hazer, and box, he got mad and squared off and hit Pa three times right by the eye, and one of the deacons kicked Pa, and Pa got mad and said he could clean out the whole shebang, and began to pull off his coat, when they bundled him out doors, and Ma got mad to see Pa abused, and she left the sociable, and I had to stay and eat ice cream and things for the whole family. Pa says that settles it with him. He says they haven’t got any more christian charity in that church than they have in a tannery. His eyes are just getting over being black from the sparring lessons, and now he has got to go through oysters and beef-steak cure again. He says it is all owing to me.”

  “Well, what has all this got to do with your putting up signs in front of my store, ‘Rotten Eggs,’ and ‘Frowy Butter a specialty,’ said the grocery man as he took the boy by the ear and pulled him around. You have got an idea you are smart, and I want you to keep away from here. The next time I catch you in here I shall call the police and have you pulled. Now git!”

  The boy pulled his ear back on the side of his head where it belonged, took out a cigarette and lit it, and after puffing smoke in the face of the grocery cat that was sleeping on the cover to the sugar barrel he said:

  “If I was a provision pirate that never sold anything but what was spoiled so it couldn’t be sold in a first class store, who cheated in weights and measures, who bought only wormy figs and decayed cod-fish, who got his butter from a fat rendering establishment, his cider from a vinegar factory, and his sugar from a glucose factory, I would not insult the son of one of the finest families. Why, sir, I could go out on the corner, and when I saw customers coming here, I could tell a story that would turn their stomachs, and send them to the grocery on the next corner. Suppose I should tell them that the cat sleeps in the dried apple barrel, that the mice made nests in the prune box, and rats run riot through the raisins, and that you never wash your hands except on Decoration day and Christmas, that you wipe your nose on your shirt sleeves, and that you have the itch, do you think your business would be improved? Suppose I should tell the customers that you buy sour kraut of a wood-en-shoed Polacker, who makes it of pieces of cabbage that he gets by gathering swill, and sell that stuff to respectable people, could you pay your rent? If I should tell them that you put lozengers in the collection plate at church, and charge the minister forty cents a pound for oleomargarine, you would have to close up. Old man, I am onto you, and now you apologize for pulling my ear.”

  The grocery man turned pale during the recital, and finally said the bad boy was one of the best little fellows in this town, and the boy went out and hung up a sign in front:—

  GIRL WANTED TO COOK

  CHAPTER III.

  HIS PA STABBED—THE GROCERY MAN SETS A TRAP IN VAIN—A BOOM IN LINIMENT—HIS PA GOES TO THE LANGTRY SHOW—THE BAD BOY TURNS BURGLAR—THE OLD MAN STABBED—HIS ACCOUNT OF THE FRAY— A GOOD SINGLE HANDED LIAR.

  “I hear you had burglars over to your house last night,” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came in and sat on the counter right over a little gimlet hole, where the grocery man had fixed a darning needle so that by pulling a string the needle would fly up through the hole and run into the boy about an inch. The grocery man had been laying for the boy about two days, and now that he had got him right over the hole the first time, it made him laugh to think how he would make him jump and yell, and as he edged off and got hold of the string the boy looked unconscious of impending danger. The grocery man pulled, and the boy sat still. He pulled again, and again, and finally the boy said:

  “Yes, it is reported that we had burglars over there. O, you needn’t pull that string any more. I heard you was setting a trap for me, and I put a piece of board inside my pants, and thought I would let you exercise yourself. Go ahead if it amuses you. It don’t hurt me.”

  The grocery man looked sad, and then smiled a sickly sort of a smile, at the failure of his plan to puncture the boy, and then he said, “Well, how was it? The policeman didn’t seem to know much about the particulars. He said there was so much deviltry going on at your house that nobody could tell when anything was serious, and he was inclined to think it was a put up job.”

  “Now let’s have an understanding,” says the boy. “Whatever I say, you are not to give me away. It’s a go, is it? I have always been afraid of you, because you have a sort of decayed egg look about you. You are like a peck of potatoes with the big ones on top, a sort of a strawberry box, with the bottom raised up, so I have thought you would go back on a fellow. But if you won’t give this away, here goes. You see, I heard Ma tell Pa to bring up another bottle of liniment last night. When Ma corks herself, or has a pain anywhere, she just uses liniment for all that is out, and a pint bottle don’t last more than a week. Well, I told my chum, and we laid for Pa. This liniment Ma uses is offul hot, and almost blisters. Pa went to the Langtry show, and did not get home till eleven o’clock, and me and my chum decided to teach Pa a lesson. I don’t think it is right for a man to go to the theaters and not take his wife or his little boy.

  “So we concluded to burgle Pa. We agreed to lay on the stairs, and when he came up my chum was to hit him on the head with a dried bladder, and I was to stab him on his breast pocket with a stick, and break the liniment bottle, and make him think he was killed.

  “It couldn’t have worked better if we had rehearsed it. We had talked about burglars at supper time, and got Pa nervous, so when he came up stairs and was hit on the head with the bladder, the first thing he said was ‘Burglars, by mighty,’ and he started to go back, and I hit him on the breast pocket, where the bottle was, and then we rushed by him, down stairs, and I said in a stage whisper, ‘I guess he’s a dead man,’ and we went down cellar and up the back stairs to my room and undressed.”

  “Pa hollered to Ma that he was murdered, and Ma called me, and I came down in my night-shirt, and the hired girl she came down, and Pa was on the lounge, and he said his life-blood was fast ebbing away. He held his hand on the wound, and said he could feel the warm blood trickling clear down to his boots. I told Pa to stuff some tar into the wound, such as he told me to put on my lip to make my mustache grow, and Pa said, ‘My boy, this is no time for trifling. Your Pa is on his last legs. When I came up stairs I met six burglars, and I attacked them, and forced four of them down, and was going to hold them and send for the police, when two more, that I did not know about, jumped on me, and I was getting the best of them when one of them struck me over the head with a crowbar, and the other stabbed me to the heart with a butcher knife. I have received my death wound, my boy, and my hot southern blood, that I offered up so freely for my country in her time of need, is passing from my body, and soon your Pa will be only a piece of poor clay. Get some ice and put on my stomach, and all the way down, for I am burning up.’ I went to the-water pitcher and got a chunk of ice and put inside Pa’s shirt, and while Ma was tearing up an old skirt to stop the flow of blood, I asked Pa if he felt better, and if he could describe the villains who had murdered him. Pa gasped and moved his legs to get them cool from the clotted blood, he said, and he went on, ‘One of them was about six foot high, and had a sandy mustache. I got him down and hit him on the nose, and if the police find him, his nose will be broke. The second one was thick set, and weighed about two hundred. I had him down, and my boot was on his neck, and I was knocking two more down when I was hit. The thick set one will have the mark of boot heels on his throat. Tell the police when I’m gone, about the boot heel marks.’

  “By this time Ma had g
ot the skirt tore up, and she stuffed it under Pa’s shirt, right where he said he was hit, and Pa was telling us what to do to settle his estate, when Ma began to smell the liniment, and she found the broken bottle in his pocket, and searched Pa for the place where he was stabbed, and then she began to laugh, and Pa got mad and said he didn’t see as a death-bed scene was such an almighty funny affair; and then she told him he was not hurt, but that he had fallen on the stairs and broke his bottle, and that there was no blood on him, and he said, ‘do you mean to tell me my body and legs are not bathed in human gore?’ and then Pa got up and found it was only the liniment. He got mad and asked Ma why she didn’t fly around and get something to take that liniment off his legs, as it was eating them right through to the bone; and then he saw my chum put his head in the door, with one gallus hanging down, and Pa looked at me, and then he said, ‘Lookahere, if I find out it was you boys that put up this job on me, I’ll make it so hot for you that you will think liniment is ice cream in comparison.’ I told Pa it didn’t look reasonable that me and my chum could be six burglars, six feet high, with our noses broke, and boot-heel marks on our neck, and Pa, he said for us to go to bed alfired quick, and give him a chance to rinse of that liniment, and we retired. Say, how does my Pa strike you as a good, single-handed liar?” and the boy went up to the counter, while the grocery man went after a scuttle of coal.

  In the meantime, one of the grocery man’s best customers—a deacon in the church—had come in and sat down on the counter, over the darning needle, and as the grocery man came in with the coal, the boy pulled the string, and went out door and tipped over a basket of rutabagas, while the deacon got down off the counter with his hand clasped, and anger in every feature, and told the grocery man he could whip him in two minutes. The grocery man asked what was the matter, and the deacon hunted up the source from whence the darning needle came through the counter, and as the boy went across the street, the deacon and the grocery man were rolling on the floor, the grocery man trying to hold the deacon’s fists while he explained about the darning needle, and that it was intended for the boy. How it came out the boy did not wait to see.

  CHAPTER IV.

  HIS PA BUSTED—THE CRAZE FOR MINING STOCK—WHAT’S A BILK?— THE PIOUS BILK—THE OLD MAN INVESTS—THE DEACONS AND EVEN THE HIRED GIRLS INVEST—HOT MAPLE SYRUP FOR ONE—GETTING A MAN’S MIND OFF HIS TROUBLES.

  “Say, can’t I sell you some stock in a silver mine,” asked the bad boy of the grocery man, as he came in the store and pulled from his breast pocket a document printed on parchment paper, and representing several thousand dollars stock in a silver mine.

  “Lookahere,” says the grocery man, as he turned pale, and thought of telephoning to the police station for a detective, “you haven’t been stealing your father’s mining stock, have you? Great heavens, it has come at last! I have known, all the time that you would turn out to be a burglar, or a defaulter or robber of some kind. Your father has the reputation of having a bonanza in a silver mine, but if you go lugging his silver stock around he will soon be ruined. Now you go right back home and put that stock in your Pa’s safe, like a good boy.”

  “Put it in the safe! O, no, we keep it in a box stall now, in the barn. I will trade you this thousand dollars in stock for two heads of lettuce, and get Pa to sign it over to you, if you say so. Pa told me I could have the whole trunk full if I wanted it, and the hired girls are using the silver stock to clean the windows, and to kindle fires, and Pa has quit the church, and says he won’t belong to any concern that harbors bilks. What’s a bilk?” said the boy, as he opened a candy jar and took out four sticks of hoarhound candy.

  “A bilk,” said the grocery man, as he watched the boy, “is a fellow that plays a man for candy, or money, or anything, and don’t intend to return an equivalent. You are a small sized bilk. But what’s the matter with your Pa and the church, and what has the silver mine stock got to do with it?”

  “Well, you remember that exhorter that was here last fall, that used to board around with the church people all the week, and talk about Zion and laying up treasures where the moths wouldn’t gnaw them, and they wouldn’t get rusty, and where thieves wouldn’t pry off the hinges. He was the one that used to go home with Ma from prayer meetings, when Pa was down town, and who wanted to pay off the church debt in solid silver bricks. He’s the bilk. I guess if Pa should get him by the neck he would jerk nine kinds of revealed religion out of him. O, Pa is hotter than he was when the hornets took the lunch off of him. When you strike a pious man on the pocket-book it hurts him. That fellow prayed and sang like an angel, and boarded around like a tramp. He stopped at our house over a week, and he had specimens of rock that were chuck full of silver and gold, and he and Pa used to sit up nights and look at it. You could pick pieces of silver out of the rock as big as buck shot, and he had some silver bricks that were beautiful. He had been out in Colorado and found a hill full of the silver rock, and he wanted to form a stock company and dig out millions of dollars. He didn’t want anybody but pious men that belonged to the church, in the company, and I think that was one thing that caused Pa to unite with the church so suddenly. I know he was as wicked as could be a few days before he joined the church; but this revivalist, with his words about the beautiful beyond where all shall dwell together in peace, and sing praises; and his description of that Colorado mountain where the silver stuck out so you could hang your hat on it, converted Pa. That man’s scheme was to let all the church people who were in good standing, and who had plenty of money, into the company, and when the mine begun to return dividends by the car load, they could give largely to the church and pay the debts of all the churches, and put down carpets and fresco the ceiling. The man said he felt that he had been steered on to that silver mine by a higher power, and his idea was to work it for the glory of the cause. He said he liked Pa, and would make him vice president of the company. Pa, he bit like a bass, and I guess he invested five thousand dollars in stock, and Ma, she wanted to come in, and she put in a thousand dollars that she had laid up to buy some diamond ear-rings, and the man gave Pa a lot of stock to sell to other members of the church. They all went into it, even the minister. He drew his salary ahead, and all of the deacons they come in, and the man went back to Colorado with about thirty thousand dollars of good, pious money. Yesterday Pa got a paper from Colorado, giving the whole snap away, and the pious man has been spending the money in Denver, and whooping it up. Pa suspected something was wrong two weeks ago, when he heard that the pious man had been on a toot in Chicago, and he wrote to a man in Denver, who used to get full with Pa years ago when they were both on the turf; and Pa’s friend said the man that sold the stock was a fraud, and that he didn’t own no mine, and that he borrowed the samples of ore and silver bricks from a pawnbroker in Denver. I guess it will break Pa up for a while, though he is well enough fixed with mortgages and things; but it hurts him to be took in. He lays it all to Ma—he says if she hadn’t let that exhorter for the silver mine go home with her this would not have occurred, and Ma says she believes Pa was in partnership with the man to beat her out of her thousand dollars that she was going to buy a pair of diamond ear-rings with. O, it is a terror over to the house now. Both the hired girls put in all the money they had, and took stock, and they threaten to sue Pa for arson, and they are going to leave to-night, and Ma will have to do the work. Don’t you never try to get rich quick,” said the boy as he peeled a herring, and took a couple of crackers.

  “Never you mind me,” said the grocery man, “they don’t catch me on any of their silver mines; but I hope this will have some influence on you, and teach you to respect your Pa’s feelings, and not play jokes on him while he is feeling so bad over his being swindled.”

  “O, I don’t know about that, I think when a man is in trouble, if he has a good little boy to take his mind from his troubles and get him mad at something else, it rests him. Last night we had hot maple syrup and biscuit for supper, and Pa had a saucer full in front
of him, just a steaming. I could see he was thinking too much about his mining stock, and I thought if there was anything I could do to take his mind off of it and place it on something else, I would be doing a kindness that would be appreciated. I sat on the right of Pa, and when he wasn’t looking I pulled the table cloth so the saucer of red hot maple syrup dropped off in his lap.”

  “Well, you’d a dide to see how quick his thoughts turned from his financial troubles to his physical misfortunes. There was about a pint of hot syrup, and it went all over his lap, and you know how hot melted maple sugar is, and how it sort of clings to anything. Pa jumped up and grabbed hold of his pants legs to pull them away from hisself, and he danced around and told Ma to turn the hose on him, and then he took a pitcher of ice water and poured it down his pants, and he said the condemned old table was getting so ricketty that a saucer wouldn’t stay on it, and I told Pa if he would put some tar on his legs, the same kind that he told me to put on my lip to make my moustache grow, the syrup wouldn’t burn so; and then he cuffed me, and I think he felt better It is a great thing to get a man’s mind off of his troubles, but where a man hasn’t got any mind like you, for instance—”

  At this point the grocery man picked up a fire poker, and the boy went out in a hurry and hung up a sign in front of the grocery:

  CASH PAID FOR FAT DOGS.

  CHAPTER V.

  HIS PA AND DYNAMITE—THE OLD MAN SELLING SILVER STOCK— FENIAN SCARE—“DYNAMITE” IN MILWAUKEE—THE FENIAN BOOM— “GREAT GOD HANNER WE ARE BLOWED UP!”—HIS MA HAS LOTS OF SAND—THE OLD MAN USELESS IN TROUBLE. THE DOG AND THE FALSE TEETH.

  “I guess your Pa’s losses in the silver mine have made him crazy, haven’t they?” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came in the store with his eye winkers singed off, and powder marks on his face, and began to play on the harmonica, as he sat down on the end of a stick of stove wood, and balanced himself.