“Well, sir, my girl has got a technique just like that. She can sing the socks right off of—”
“Oh, hold on; don’t work any of your slang into this musical discussion. When you want to know anything about music, or falling in love, or farming, come to your Uncle Ike. Office hours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. No cure no pay. If you are not satisfied your money will be cheerfully refunded,” and the old man got an oil can and begun to oil the old shotgun, while the boy started to sing “Killarney” in a bass voice, and Uncle Ike drew the gun on him and said: “If you are looking for trouble, sing in that buzz-saw voice in my presence. I could murder a person that sang like that.”
CHAPTER XIX
Uncle Ike was leaning over the gate late in the afternoon, waiting for the red-headed boy and some of his chums to come back from the State fair. He had gone to the fair with them, and gone around to look at the stock with them, and had staked them for admission to all the side shows, and when they had come out of the last side show, and were hungry, he had bought a mess of hot wiener sausages for them, and while they were eating them somebody yelled that the balloon was going to go up, and the boys grabbed their wieners and run across the fair grounds, losing Uncle Ike; and being tired, and not caring to see a young girl go up a mile in the air, and come down with a parachute, with a good prospect of flattening herself on the hard ground, he had concluded to go home before the crowd rushed for the cars, and here he was at the gate waiting for the boys, saddened because a pickpocket had taken his watch and a big seal fob that had been in the family almost a hundred years. As he waited for the boys to come back he smoked hard, and wondered what a pickpocket wanted to fool an old man for, a man who would divide his money with any one out of luck, and he wondered what they could get on that poor old silver watch, that never kept time that could be relied on, and a tear came to his eye as he thought of some jeweler melting up that old fob that his father and grandfather used to wear before him, and he wondered if the boys would guy him for having his pocket picked, he, who had mixed up with the world for half a century and never been touched. It was almost dark when the red-headed boy and his partners in crime, came down the sidewalk, so tired their shoes interfered, and they stubbed their toes on the holes in the walk, even.
“Well, I s’pose you ducks spent every cent you had and had to walk five miles from the fair ground,” said Uncle Ike, as he opened the gate and let them fall inside and drop on the grass, their shoes covered with dust, and their clothes the same. He invited them in to supper, but the peanuts, the popcorn, the waffles, the lemonade, the cider and the wieners had been plenty for them, and it did not seem as though they ever wanted to eat a mouthful again.
“Where is your fob and watch?” said the redheaded boy, as he noticed that the big stomach of the old man carried no ornament.
“Well, I decided this afternoon that it did not become a man of my age to be wearing gaudy jewelry,” said Uncle Ike, “and hereafter you have got to take your uncle just as he is, without any ornaments. The watch never did keep time much, and I have had enough of guessing whether it was 1 o’clock or 3.”
“Never going to wear it any more?” asked the red-headed boy, with a twinkle in his eye.
“No, I guess not,” said Uncle Ike, as he heaved a sigh.
“Then I guess we can draw cuts for the old rattle-box,” said the boy, as he pulled the watch and fob out of his pants pocket.
“Here! where did you get that watch?” said Uncle Ike, in excitement. “I thought a pickpocket on the trolley car got it, and I was hot. Say, that is one of the best watches in this town. Where did you find it? Did the police get the man?”
“Oh, police nothin’,” said the boy. “Say, Uncle Ike, you were the easiest mark on the fair ground. There you stood, looking up at the kites, with your hands behind your back, like a jay from way back, and I knew somebody would get your watch; so I just reached up and took it, and left you standing there. I wanted to teach you a lesson. Don’t ever wear your jewelry at a fair. Here’s your old ticker. Sounds as though it had palpitation of the heart,” and the boy handed it to the old man.
“Well, by gum! To think I should live all these years, and go through what I have, and then have an amateur pickpocket take me for a Reuben, and go through me! But how did you like the great agricultural display?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the boy, taking off his shoes and emptying the sand out. “It seems to me the farmers ought to be encouraged. I wonder how many hundred dollars it cost to hire that girl to go up in a balloon; and what good could that exhibition do the farmers? If that girl’s parachute hadn’t parachuted at the proper time, and she had come down and been killed, wouldn’t the people have been so horrified they would never go to another fair, and couldn’t the state have been sued for damages for hiring her to kill herself?”
“Oh, maybe,” said the old man, winding up his watch a lot ahead, and holding it to his ears to see if it had heart disease, as the boy had intimated. “But, you see, people have got to be amused. It has got so there is not the inspiration in looking at vegetables that there used to be, and the patchwork quilt does not draw like a house afire. The farmers are not going to blow in money to exhibit things for a blue ribbon, and the wealthy people who have fancy stock take the premiums and advertise their business. Money is paid for exhibits that more properly belong to the circus and the vaudeville, that ought to be paid in premiums to farmers who raise things. We hire a balloonist, believing that she will fall and kill herself before the season is over. We take the chance that she will kill herself at our fair, but if she does not, and is killed at some cheap fair, somewhere else, we feel that we are abused, and have been trifled with. What interested you the most at the fair?” asked the old man.
“The wieners,” said the boys, all at once. And the red-headed boy added: “When a feller is so hungry his eyes look straight ahead, and he can’t turn them in the sockets, there is nothing like a hot wiener to start things moving, and the man who invented wieners ought to have a chromo. By gosh, I am going to bed,” and the boys all started for their resting places, while Uncle Ike felt of his stomach where the fob rested, and looked as happy as though he had never been robbed.
“Come on, Mr. Train-robber,” said Uncle Ike the next morning, as the boy showed up in the breakfast room, and the old man held up his hands as he supposed passengers did when train-robbers attacked a train. “Go through me, condemn you, and take every last dollar I have got. I have brought you up to be an honest boy, and you turn out to be a pickpocket, and rob me of my watch. Oh, I tell you, no old bachelor ever had so much trouble bringing up a boy as I have. Now, I expect you will graduate in burglary, bunko, and politics, won’t you?” and the old man looked at the laughing boy with such pride that the boy knew he was only fooling.
“No, if I went into burglary and kindred industries, I could never find such easy marks to practice on as dear old Uncle Ike,” and the boy put his arms around the old man and asked him what time it was, and the Uncle grabbed his fob as though he was not sure whether it was there or not. “Now, let’s eat breakfast,” and they sat down together, and Aunt Almira poured the coffee, while Uncle Ike looked over the morning paper.
“You can disband your army, and let them go back to the paths of peace, for Dreyfus has been pardoned,” said the old man. “I knew that they would pardon that man.”
“Now, wouldn’t that kill you,” said the boy, as he sampled two or three pieces of canteloupe to find one to his taste. “That breaks up my scheme to fight the French. Uncle Ike, I have about made up my mind to lead a different life and become a minister, and preach, and go to sociables, and just have a dandy time. Say, it’s a snap to be a minister, and only have to preach an hour Sunday, and have all the week to go fishing and hunting. What denomination would you advise me to become a minister of?”
“Well,” said Uncle Ike, as he dropped a few lumps of sugar into his coffee, and looked at the boy across the table, “from the color of your hair
, and your constant talk about falling in love every time you see a pretty girl, and the manner in which you take up a collection every time you see me anywhere, I should say you would make a pretty fair Mormon. Yes, if I was in your place I would preach Mormonism, as your experience in taking things out of people’s pockets, in the way of watches, would come handy, and you are so confounded freckled you would have to have wives sealed to you or they would not stay. A minister has got to be pretty condemned good-looking, nowadays, to hold a job in a fashionable church.”
“But the minister business is easy, ain’t it? They don’t have to work, anyway,” and the boy looked at Uncle Ike as though life expected an opinion that was sound.
“If you took a job preaching,” said the old man, whirling around from the table, and sitting down in his old armchair, and lighting his pipe, “you wouldn’t have any, soft snap. Do you know anything about what a minister has to do? Let’s take one week out of the life of a regular minister. He starts in on Monday morning by having a woman call at the parsonage, a woman dressed poorly, and whose pained face makes his heart ache, and she tells him a tale of woe, and he goes to his wife and gets a basket of stuff out of the kitchen to give her, a kitchen not stocked any too well, and sends her home with immediate relief, and then goes out to hunt up the relief committee of his church to give the woman permanent relief. He comes back after a while and finds other callers, some to have him make a diagnosis of their souls, over which they are worrying, another to have him help get a son out of the police station, who used to belong to the Sunday-school, and one man wants him to preach a funeral sermon in the afternoon. He gets out of the police station in time for the funeral, and they make him go clear to the cemetery, and stop at the house with the mourners on the way back, and he gets a cold dinner that night, and has to call on several sick friends that evening, and one of them is so nearly gone that he remains with him to the last, and gets home at midnight. The other days of the week are the same, only more so, and in addition he has to run a prayer meeting, several society meetings, a sociable, settle a quarrel in the choir, and bring two members of the church together who have not spoken to each other for months, attend a ministers’ meeting and map out a plan of campaign against the old boy, run out into the country to preach a little for a neighboring preacher who is sick, or off on a vacation, attend a missionary meeting, marry a few couples, and prepare two sermons for Sunday forenoon and evening, sermons that are new, and on texts that have not been preached on before. One night in the week he can get on his slippers and sit in the library, and the other nights he is running from one place to another to make a lot of other people happier, and he has more sickness at home than any man in his congregation, and he works harder than the man who digs in the sewer, and half the time the people kick on his salary and wonder why he doesn’t do more, and say he looks so dressed up it can’t be possible he has much to do, and when he gets worn down to the bone, and his cheeks are sunken, and his voice fails, and his step is not so active, they saw him off on to some country church that never did pay a minister enough to live on, and he never kicks, but just keeps on praying for them until he kicks the bucket, when he ought to give them a piece of his mind. How do you like it?”
“Say, Uncle Ike, I surrender. I don’t want to preach. Where can a man enlist as a pirate? The pirate business appeals to me,” and the boy got up and took his golf club to go out.
“Yes, you have many qualifications that would come in handy as a pirate, and I will use my influence to get you into politics, you young heathen,” and the old man gave the red-headed boy a poke in the ribs with his big hard thumb, and they separated for the day, the old man to smoke and dream, and the boy to have fun and get tired and hungry.
CHAPTER XX
Uncle Ike did not get up very early, on account of a little pain in one of his hind legs, as he expressed it, a rheumatic pain that he had almost come to believe, as the pension agent had often suggested, was caused by his service in the army thirty-five years ago. The pension agent, who desired to have the honor of securing a pension for the old man, had asked him to try and remember if he was not exposed to a sudden draft, some time in the army, which might have caused him to take cold, and thus sow the seeds of rheumatism in his system, which had lain dormant all these years and finally appeared in his legs. The old man had thought it over, and remembered hundreds of occasions when he was soaked through with icy water, and had slept on the wet ground, and gone hungry and taken cold, but he realized that he had taken no more colds in the army than he had at home, and he could not see how he could swear that a chill he received thirty-five years ago could have anything to do with his present aches, and though he knew thousands of the old boys were receiving pensions, that were no worse off than he was, he had told the pension agent that he need not apply for a pension for his pain in the knee. He said he felt that he might just as well apply for a pension on account of inheriting rheumatism from an uncle who fought in the Mexican war, and he would wait until the government did not insist on a veteran having such an abnormal memory about sneezing during the war, as a basis for pension claims, and when it got so a pension would come to a soldier by simply looking up his record, and examining his physical condition, he would take a pension. The old man had heard a peculiar clicking down in the sitting room, all the morning, while he was dressing, and he wondered what it was. As he limped into the sitting room, with his dressing-gown on, and began to round up his shaving utensils, preparatory to his morning shave, he found the red-headed boy in his night shirt, sitting at a table with an old telegraph instrument that looked as though it had been picked out of a scrap-pile, and the boy was ticking away for dear life, his hair standing on end, his brow corrugated, and his eyes glaring.
“What dum foolishness you got on hand now?” asked the old man, as he set a cup of hot water on the mantel, and began to mix up the lather. “What you ticking away on that contrivance for, and looking wise?”
“This is a telegraph office,” said the boy, as he stopped operations long enough to draw his cold bare feet up under him, and pulled his night shirt down to cover his knees. “I am learning to telegraph, and am going into training for president of a railroad. Did you see in the papers the other day that Mr. Earling was elected president of a railroad, and did you know that he started in as a telegraph operator and a poor boy, with hair the color of tow? They used to call him Tow-Head.”
“Yes, I read about that,” said Uncle Ike, as he looked in the glass to see if the lather was all right on his face, and began to strop his razor. “I knew that boy when he was telegraphing. But he knew what all those sounds meant. You just keep ticking away, and don’t know one tick from another.”
“Yes, I do,” said the boy, as he smashed away at the key. “That long sound, and the short one, and the one about half as long as the long one—that spells d-a-m, dam.”
“Well, what do you commence your education spelling out cuss words for?” asked the old man, as he raked the razor down one side of his face, pulling his mouth around to one side so it looked like the mouth of a red-horse fish. “Anybody would think you were in training for one of these railroad superintendents who swear at the men so their hair will stand, and then swear at them because they don’t get their hair cut. The railroad presidents and general managers nowadays don’t swear a blue streak, and keep the men guessing whether they will get discharged for talking back. This man Earling never swore a half a string in his life, and in thirty years of railroading he never spoke a cross word to a living soul, and his brow was never corrugated as much as yours has been spelling out that word dam. Got any idea what railroad you will be president of?” and the old man wiped his razor, stropped it on the palm of his hand, put it in a case, and went to a washbowl to wash the soap off his face.
“Well, I thought I would start in on some narrow-gauge railroad, and work up gradually for a year or two, and finally take charge of one of those Eastern roads, where I can have a private car, and travel all
over the country for nothing. As quick as I get this telegraph business down fine I shall apply for a position of train dispatcher, and then jump right along up. Uncle Ike, you will never have to pay a cent on my railroad. I will have a caboose fixed up for you, with guns and dogs, and you can hunt and fish all your life, with a negro to cook for you, and a porter to put on your bait, and another negro chambermaid to make up your bed, and I will wire them from the general office to sidetrack you, and pick you up, and all that.”
“Is that so?” said the old man, as he stood rubbing his face with a crash towel till it shone like a boiled lobster. “You are hurrying your railroad career mighty fast, and if you are not careful you will replace Chauncey Depew before you get long pants on. Now, you go get your clothes on and come to breakfast, and after breakfast I will tell you something.” The boy dropped the key, after ticking to the imaginary general office not to disturb him with any messages for half an hour, as he was going to be busy on an important matter, and he went to his room and soon appeared at the breakfast table, and after the breakfast was over, and the old man had lighted his pipe, the boy said:
“Now, Uncle Ike, tell me all you know about railroading in one easy lesson, for I have to go to a directors’ meeting at ten, and then we are going out to look over the right of way,” and the boy ticked off a message to have his special car ready at eleven-thirty, stocked for a trip over the line.
“I see you are getting well along in your railroad career, and like nine out of ten boys who want to be railroad men, you are beginning at the private car instead of the gravel train, issuing general orders instead of working in the ranks,” and the old man smoked up and thought a long time, and continued: “The successful railroad man begins at the bottom, and learns the first lesson well. Do you know how long this man Earling has been getting where he is today? Thirty-five years. More than the average age of man. The successful railroad man, if he begins telegraphing, gets so he can send or receive anything, with his eyes shut, and never makes a mistake. After a long time he gets a measly country station, where he does all kinds of work, and he is satisfied. He goes to work to increase the business of that station, to clean up around the depot, and please all the customers, as though he was going to live there all his life. He never thinks he is going to be a high official, but just makes the best of the present. Some day he is awfully surprised to be given a better station, and he hates to leave, and maybe sheds a tear as he parts with the friends he has made there. But he goes to his new place and improves it, and gets in with a new, pushing class of people, and begins to grow. He maybe works there ten years, and his work shows so the officials recognize it, and he never makes a mistake in his telegraphing, and some day they call him into headquarters during a rush, to help the train dispatcher, and then he has to move into the city and watch trains on thousands of miles of road, to see that they don’t get together, as train dispatcher. He thinks that position is good enough, and he hopes they will let him alone in it, but some day he assists the superintendent, and he is so well posted they are all surprised. They wonder how that station agent got to knowing all the men on the road, and how much a train of freight cars weigh, and how many cents per mile each loaded car earns for the company, and what cars ought to go to the shops for repairs, and how many new cars will have to be bought to handle the crops on his division. The ‘old man,’ as the president is always called, gets to leaning on this always good-natured, promoted, station agent, who is so modest he wouldn’t offer a suggestion unless asked his opinion, and when asked gives it so intelligently that you could set your watch by it, as the boys say. He is always sober, never sleepy, and whether figuring on the wheat crop of Dakota to a carload, or wearing rubber boots and dining on sausage and bread for a couple of days fixing up a washout, he is always calm and smiling, and every man works as though his own house was afire, till the washout is repaired and the first train pulls over. When the rich, fat, gouty directors come around, once a year, to take an account of stock, and see the property at work, they see the modest man, and by and by he is taken off his feet by a promotion that almost makes him dizzy. Other railroads see that he is all wool, and they try to steal him away, but he says he has got used to his old man, and he knows every spike in the system, and there are gray hairs beginning to come around his ears, and he guesses he will not go away and have to make new acquaintances, and he remains with the road where he learned to tick, as you are ticking, and one day he is at the head of it. But if you examine into the head of the man who gets up from station agent to president, you will find that there is brain there and no cut feed. Another station agent might get the bighead the first time he was promoted, and they would have to promote him backward, on that account, but it would be because there was excelsior in his head, instead of brain, and he would be mad and jealous, and say mean things about those who got promoted, and stayed promoted. Now, let me give you a pointer. Don’t train for general manager or president of a road. Train for the thing you are going to get first, whether it is operator or brakeman, and when you have mastered the details of that place, learn something about the next above. It is like going up a ladder; you have got to go up one step at a time, and get your foot on the step so it will stay, then go up another step. If you attempt to step from the ground to the top of the ladder, you are going to split your pants from Genesis to Revelations, and come down on your neck, and show your nakedness to those who have watched you try to climb too fast, and they will laugh at you. Now, go on with your condum ticking, but tick out something besides d—a—m, dam,” and the old man went out to see if there had been any frost the night before, with an idea that if there was he would shoot a few teal duck, and cure his rheumatism that way, instead of putting on liniment.
The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack Page 77
