“I bought a revolver and a lot of cartridges. Oh! I tell you I’m primed and ready, and I’m in favor of not leaving a single Injun in the West!”
“Them’s my idees,” chimed Billy Waylett.
“Well, how have you made out, Billy?”
“I got hold of father’s watch, day before yesterday, but he catched me when I was sneaking out of the house and wanted to know what I was up to. I told him I thought it needed cleaning and was going to take it down to the jeweler’s to have it ’tended to.”
“Well, what then?”
Billy sighed as he said, meekly:
“Father said he guessed I was the one that needed ’tending to, and he catched me by the nape of the neck, and, boys, was you ever whipped with a skate strap?”
His friends shook their heads as an intimation that they had never been through that experience.
“Well, I hope you never will; but, say,” he added, brightening up, “mother has a way of leaving her pocket-book layin’ round that’s awful mean, ’cause it sets a fellow to wishing for it. Pop makes her an allowance of one hundred dollars a month to run things, and last night I scooped twenty dollars out of her pocket-book, when it laid on the bureau in her room.”
“Did she find it out?” asked Tom Wagstaff.