Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler

So three or four or five men made up their minds they would stop the saloons again, and they started in to do it. Mamie Little's father was one of them, because he printed the newspaper that wanted the saloons closed; so one night three or four of the men's houses were blown up with gunpowder, but the fuse went out on the other keg, so it didn't blow up its house. But three of them were blown up. That was about three months after me and Swatty and Bony saw Slim Finnegan steal the keg of powder; and right away we thought of that and that Slim Finnegan was one of the men that blew up the houses.

Gee! We was scared! All we could think of was that now Slim Finnegan would come round and stab us, so we wouldn't tell on him. One whole afternoon we hid in the old box stall in my barn and didn't dare talk above a whisper; and we had my target rifle, because if Slim came we were going to sell our lives dearly.

But that was afterward. We went to see the blown-up houses first—right after breakfast the morning after the night they were blown up—and they were all pretty bad. Everybody said it was a miracle nobody was killed, and how Mamie Little and her folks walked across the bare rafters and got out, and everything like that. So then the mayor offered five hundred dollars reward and the governor offered a thousand dollars more; and there was a big meeting downtown one night and everybody gave money to hire detectives to catch the dynamiters.

There were lots of detectives came to Riverbank; I guess maybe there were a thousand. Everybody said it would be just a little while before the dynamiters were all caught and sent to prison; but pretty soon everybody began saying the detectives were no good, and that Mr. Murphy, who was the one the committee had hired, was just pretending it was worth while to detect, and that he would never get the dynamiters, and that all he was staying in Riverbank for was to get the money the committee paid him every week. All he found out, I guess, was that the dynamite was gunpowder and that some of it was stole from the powder house across the river and some from the powder houses up the river. But me and Swatty and Bony knew who stole it. That's why we were scared.

And you bet we were mighty scared! We made a fort in the hayloft of my barn, with loopholes to shoot my target rifle through, so we could flee to it if Slim Finnegan came round, and pop him from behind the fort before he could stab us. Swatty got us to do that. He was going to show us how to fix the barn stairs with each step on a hinge so when we pulled a rope the steps would drop and make a slide, so that whenever Slim tried to come up the steps he would get just part way and then slide down again; but when we tried to pry the treads of the steps loose the nails were rusted and the treads split; so we thought we'd better not.

We got up a signal word—only it was Swatty thought of it—so that when any of us saw Slim we could say it, and we'd know we had to run for shelter to our fort. The word was Vamoose! But it was too long, so Swatty shortened it. He made it Vam!

We did everything we could to get ready not to be stabbed. We made daggers out of some kitchen knives I got in my kitchen, and Swatty showed us how to do it while me and Bony turned the grindstone. We sharpened them on both edges and made points on them and tied string round the handles in loops, so we could hang them on our suspender buttons and let them hang down inside our pants. Swatty showed me how to carry my target rifle stuck down one pants leg, too, so it wouldn't be visible. It made me walk stiff-legged, like I was lame, but Swatty said that was a good thing—it would throw Slim Finnegan off his guard. Swatty showed us how to stand back to back when Slim Finnegan attacked us, so we would have a dagger in each direction and he couldn't stab us in the backs.

Whenever we could we got together and Swatty told us new ways to keep from being stabbed, because he said he knew a feller in Derlingport—where he had visited once—who was fixed just like we were, with a big feller after him; and Swatty remembered other things he had done. He didn't remember them all at once, but every day he remembered a new one. When he remembered them we did them. One of them was to rub our knee joints with sewing-machine oil, so they would be limber and we could run like a deer when Slim Finnegan took after us. Before he got through Swatty remembered a lot of things like that. We did them.

Well, after a while I guess we sort of forgot about Slim Finnegan, because he didn't come round to stab us. Maybe it was because Swatty couldn't remember any more of the things the feller in Derlingport had done, and maybe it was because school began again. We sort of turned the fort in my hayloft into a dressing room for a circus. Swatty was ringmaster. So then Bony's birthday started to come and his mother thought she'd have a party for him, because they had a new parlor carpet and had had the dining-room papered. So she had it.

At first Bony said he wasn't going to his party, because there would be girls there and they would want to play kissing games; but Swatty said, Aw! he wasn't afraid to kiss all the girls there were in the world! and that if Bony would go to the party he would go too. So I said if Bony and Swatty would go I would go. I said, Aw! I bet I wasn't afraid to kiss all the girls in the world, either! only I bet I wouldn't kiss Mamie Little if she asked me a million times, because she was mad at me. So we went to Bony's party.