CHAPTER V.
JOHN HENRY GETS EXCITED.
The next day being Sunday, I determined to forget all my troubles and take Peaches out buggy riding.
I felt sure that Bunch was rid of his grouch by this time, and that he wouldn't have a rock in his hat for me for pulling that "Uncle Cornelius" gag.
I rather expected he'd show up at Ruraldene some time Sunday evening. At any rate, I was sure Skinski and the Dodo bird had conned him back to real life, and that by Monday morning he'd be ripe for work again.
Peaches and Aunt Martha said very little about Bunch's new relatives. They decided that "Uncle Cornelius" was eccentric and rather interesting, but when they thought of "Aunt Flora" they both got nervous and changed the subject.
When I suggested the buggy ride to Peaches she was delighted, and I moseyed for the Ruraldene livery stable to get staked to a horse.
Anybody who has ever lived in a suburban town will doubtless recall what handsome specimens of equine perfection may be found in the local livery stable—not.
The livery man at Ruraldene is named Henlopen Diffenbingle, and he looks the part,
I judged from the excited manner in which he grabbed my deposit money that morning that he had a note falling due next day.
Then Henlopen shut his eyes, counted six, turned around twice, multiplied the day of the week by 19, subtracted 17, and the answer was a cream-colored horse with four pink feet and a frightened face, which looked at me sadly, sighed deeply and then backed up into the shafts of a buggy with red wheels and white sulphur springs.
[Illustration: The answer was a cream-colored horse which looked at me sadly.]
The livery man said that the name of the horse was Parsifal, because it seemed to go better in German.
I drove Parsifal up to our modest home, and all the way there we ran neck and neck with a coal cart.
Parsifal used to be a fast horse, but quite some time ago he stopped eating his wild oats and now leads a slower life.
When I reached the gate I whistled for Peaches, because I was afraid to get out and leave Parsifal alone. He might go to sleep and fall down.
My wife came out, looked at the rig, and then went back in the house and bade everybody an affecting farewell.
There were tears in her eyes when she came out and climbed into the buggy. She said she was crying because Aunt Martha wasn't there to see us driving away and have the laugh of her life.
We started off and we were rushing along the road, passing a fence and overtaking a telegraph pole every once in a while, when suddenly we heard behind us a very insistent choof-choof-choof-choof!
"It's one of those Careless Wagons," I whispered to Peaches, and then we both looked at Parsifal to see if there was a mental struggle going on in his forehead, but he was rushing onward with his head down, watching his feet to make sure they didn't step on each other.
Choof-choof-choof! came the Torpedo Destroyer behind us, and I wrapped the reins around my wrist, in case Parsifal should get uneasy and want to print horseshoes all over that automobile.
The next minute the machine passed us, going at the rate of 14 constables an hour, and as it did so Parsifal stopped still and seemed to be biting his lips with suppressed emotion.
I coaxed him to proceed in English, in Spanish and Italian, and then in a pale blue language of my own, but he just stood there and bit his lips.
I believe if he had possessed fingernails he would have bitten them too.
I gave the reins to my wife with instructions how to act if the horse started, and I jumped out to argue with him.
Just when I had picked out a good-sized rock, which was to be my argument, Parsifal came out of his trance and started off, but Peaches forgot her instructions and spoke above a whisper and he stopped again.
Then I took the reins, cracked the whip, shouted a couple of banzais from the Japanese national anthem, and away we rushed like the wind—when it isn't blowing hard.
The hours flew by and we must have gone at least half a mile, when another Kerosene Wagon came bouncing towards us from the opposite direction.
In it was a happy party of ladies and gentlemen, who were laughing and chatting about some people they had just run over.
Parsifal saw them coming and stopped still in the middle of the road. Then he hung his head as low as he could, and I believe if that horse had been supplied with hands he would have put them over his ears.
The people in the Bubble began to shout at us, and I began to shout at the horse, and my wife began to shout at me, while Parsifal stood there and scratched his left ankle with his right heel.
Then the big machine made a sudden jump to the right and hiked by us at the rate of about a $100 fine, while the lady passengers on the hurricane deck stood up and began to hand out medals to each other because they didn't run us down.
Ten minutes later Parsifal came to and looked over his shoulder at us with a smile as serene as the morning and once more resumed his mad career onward, ever onward.
We were now about two miles from home, and suddenly we came across a big red Bubble which stood in front of a road-house, sneezing inwardly and sobbing with all its corrugated heart.
Parsifal saw the machine before we did.
We knew there must be an automobile somewhere near, because he stopped still and quietly passed away.
I jumped out and tried to lead him by the Coroner's Delight, but he planted his four feet in the middle of the road and refused to be coaxed.
I took that horse by the ear and whispered therein just what I thought about him, but he wouldn't talk back.
I told him my wife's honor was at stake, but he looked my wife over and his lips curled with an expression which seemed to say, "Impossible."
It was all off with us.
Parsifal simply wouldn't move until that sobbing Choo Choo Wagon had left the neighborhood, so I went inside the road-house to find the owner.
I found him. He consisted of a German chauffeur and eight bottles of beer.
When I explained the pitiful situation to him the chauffeur swallowed two bottles of beer and began to cry.
Then he told the waiter to call him at 7:30, and he put his head down on the table and went to sleep with his face in a cute little nest of hard-boiled cigarettes.
I rushed to the telephone and called up the liveryman, but before I could think of a word strong enough to fit the occasion he whispered over the wire, "I know your voice, Mr. Henry. I suppose Parsifal is waiting for you outside!"
Forthwith I tried to tell that liveryman just what I thought about him and Parsifal, but the telephone girl short-circuited my remarks and they came back and set fire to the woodwork.
"My, my!" I could hear the liveryman saying. "Parsifal's hesitation must be the result of the epidemic of automobiles which is now raging over our country roads. The automobile has a strange effect on Parsifal. It seems to cover him with a pause and gives him inflammation of the speed."
I thought of poor Peaches sitting out there in that blushing buggy staring at a dreaming horse, while in front of her a Red Devil Wagon complained internally and shook its tonneau at her, and once more I jolted that liveryman with a few verbal twisters.
"Don't get excited," he whispered back over the phone. "Parsifal is a new idea in horses. Whenever he meets an automobile he goes to sleep and tries to forget it. Isn't that better than running away and dragging you to a hospital? There must be something about an automobile that affects Parsifal's heart. I think it is the gasolene. The odor from the gasolene seems to penetrate his mind to the region of his memory and he forgets to move. Parsifal is a fine horse, with a most lovable disposition, but when the air becomes charged with gasolene he forgets his duty and falls asleep at the switch."
I went out and explained to my wife that Parsifal was a victim of the gasolene habit, and that he would never leave that spot until the Bubble went away, and that the Bubble couldn't go away until the chauffeur could wake up, and that the chauffeur couldn't wake up until his mind had digested a lot of wood alcohol, so she jumped out of the buggy and we walked home.
Parsifal may be a new idea in horses, but the next time I go buggy riding it will be in a street car.
When we reached home that afternoon I found a note from Bunch which cheered me up wonderfully.
The note read as follows:
CITY, Sunday Morning.
DEAR JOHN—Sorry we had the run in but it was all my fault. Am sending you two rosebuds this evening as a peace offering.
Yours,
BUNCH.
"Two rosebuds!" I snickered. "That boy Bunch is a honey-cooler all right. But I'm sorry he didn't make it two cigars."
"Oh! John!" Peaches said to me a little while later, when we went over to Uncle Peter's villa to take dinner with them and spend the evening. "I do wish I could tell you about the surprise, but Uncle Peter made me promise not to say a single word."
"Well, if you feel tempted to give the old gentleman the double cross and tell me, why I'll lock myself up in the doghouse till he gives you the starting pistol," I chimed in. "Who is that dragging the works out of the clock in the sitting room?"
"It isn't any such thing!" Peaches exclaimed indignantly. "It's Uncle Peter, and he has a dreadful cold, but Aunt Martha has it nearly cured now, she says."
I went in and jollied the old chap along a bit, and little by little I heard his awful story.
He caught the cold about three days previously, but, after taking the prescription of every loving friend within a radius of four miles, the cold had almost disappeared. In place of the cold, however, Uncle Peter now had acute indigestion, nervous procrastination, delirium tremens and a spavin on his off fetlock.
All this was caused by a rush of home-made medicine to his brain.
Aunt Martha is a great believer in the simple life, so when Uncle Peter acquired a simple cold she got a simple move on and poured enough simple medicines into him to float a simple tug.
Every friend she had in the world suggested a different remedy, and she tried them all on Uncle Peter.
The cold got frightened and left on the second day, but a woman has to be loyal to her friends, so Aunt Martha kept on spraying Uncle Peter's system with dandelion tea and fried peppermint until every microbe heard about him and dropped in to pay him a long visit.
The first thing Aunt Martha wanted to do was to rub Uncle Peter's chest with goose grease.
"Goose grease is such a noisy companion," Uncle Peter remonstrated.
"Goose grease may be loud, but it is never vulgar," said Aunt
Martha, and she went after it.
In about ten minutes she came back with the painful news that the only thing in the neighborhood which looked like a goose was a quill toothpick, and that was ungreasable.
"But, my dear," Aunt Martha whispered, "I have something Just as good. I found this box of axle grease in the barn."
Uncle Peter shuddered and said nothing.
"My idea is to rub it on your chest and call it goose grease, because the moral effect will be the same," Aunt Martha told him.
Then that loving wife rubbed so much axle grease into Uncle Peter that for hours afterwards he thought he had a pair of shafts on him, and every time he saw a horse he felt like making fifty revolutions a minute.
I suppose the axle grease gave him wheels in the noddle and made him buggyhouse.
Then Aunt Martha said to him, "Now, Peter, we could cure that cold in five minutes if we can get a woolen stocking to tie around your throat."
After a little while she found out that the only woolen stocking in our village was owned by the night watchman.
The night watchman said he liked Uncle Peter well enough, but he'd be switched if he was going to walk around all night with one bare foot even to let the Mayor use his stocking for a necktie.
Selfish watchman.
The next morning Uncle Peter's cold was much worse, but the axle grease had cured his appetite.
About nine o'clock his friend Dave Torrence came in, and after Uncle Peter had barked for him a couple of times Dave decided that the trouble was information of the lungs and he suggested that Uncle Peter should tie a rubber band around his chest and rub his shoulder blades with gasolene.
Uncle Peter told his friend that he had no desire to become a human automobile, so Dave got mad, kicked the piano on the shins and went home.
An hour later Deacon Ed. Sprong, the Mayor's next-door neighbor, came in and in ten minutes he had Uncle Peter making signs to an undertaker.
Deacon Sprong decided that Uncle Peter had the galloping asthma with compressed tonsilitis, and a touch of chillblainous croup on the side, aggravated by asparagus on the chest.
Deacon Sprong told Uncle Peter to drink a pint of catnip tea, take eight grains of quinine, rub the back of his neck with benzine, soak his ankles in kerosene, take two grains of phenacetine, and drink a hot whiskey toddy every half-hour before meals.
Deacon Sprong volunteered to run over every half-hour and help
Uncle Peter drink the toddy if it tasted bitter.
Then Deacon Sprong went home, and Uncle Peter's temperature came down about ten degrees, while his respiration began to sit up and notice things.
During the rest of the day every friend and relative Uncle Peter had in the world rushed in, suggested a couple of prescriptions, and then rushed out again.
Aunt Martha tried them all on Uncle Peter.
Before the shades of evening fell that day Uncle Peter was turned into a human medicine chest.
And to make matters worse, he took some dogberry cordial and it chased the catnip tea all over his interior from Alpha to Omaha.
Then Aunt Martha gave him some hoarhound candy to bite the dogberry, so it would leave the catnip alone, but blood will tell, and the hoarhound joined with the dogberry and chased the catnip up Uncle Peter's family tree.
But it cured the cold. Now all Uncle Peter had to do was to cure the medicine.