“Why did he make you?” asked Bony.
“Because my aunt had a felon on her finger. She had a felon on her finger and it almost killed her to dam stockings, so my uncle said if I wore any more holes in my stockings I'd have to get a wife of my own to dam them.”
So then we asked Swatty what his wife was like, and he told us a lot about her. She was an Indian princess, and when you first looked at her she looked all right, but pretty soon you saw she had a tomahawk in her belt and the edge of it was all dried over with blood, because she had had eight other husbands before Swatty, and she had got mad at all of them and had killed them and scalped them. She had an album on her parlor table, but instead of photographs in it she had the scalps of her husbands.
Swatty said there was just room in the scalp album for one more scalp, and that every once in a while when he was at her house having his stockings darned she would look at his head and kind of sigh.
Well, we talked it over, and Swatty made us promise never to tell any one he had been married, because if his mother knew it she would take him out in the stable and wale him with a strap. He said that was why he didn't dare take any girl to the new school reception, because if his wife heard of it she would be jealous and she would come down and tomahawk him and maybe kill him. And if she didn't kill him his mother would notice his scalp was gone, the next time she washed his head, and would wale him anyway.
Well, my mother helped me dress for the reception, and then she gave me twenty cents to spend. I had five cents of my own she didn't know about. So that was all right.
It was dark already. I went along, kind of dragging my hand along the pickets of the fences and wishing I was dead or something, and it got darker and darker. The new house Mamie Little lived in was away out over Grimes's Hill, and when I got to the door Mr. Little and Mrs. Little and Mamie were just getting ready to come out, and Mr. Little said: “Well! Here is our cavalier!”
Mamie and me walked in front, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but I kept feeling sort of chilly when I thought of going into the reception with Mamie. But before we got to the schoolhouse Mamie said to me:
“Say, Georgie! Don't you want a ticket for the circus?”
I said aw, I didn't want to take her ticket away from her; but she said she had one too, because her father was editor of the paper and he got them complimentary.