Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler

XII. THE RED AVENGERS

Well, vacation got over, and school started again, and me and Swatty and Bony got promoted into the A Class in Miss Carter's room, and so did Mamie Little and Scratch-Cat. Lucy got promoted into the B Class in Miss Carter's room, and she hated Miss Carter. I guess the reason was because Miss Carter got in love with Herb Schwartz when Fan was mad at him.

Anyway Miss Carter heard Lucy tell somebody that if Fan wanted Herb Miss Carter would never have got him, and that anybody could catch a second-hand fellow that a body had thrown away, so Miss Carter and Lucy didn't like each other. But I guess it was Lucy's fault, because I always liked Miss Carter all right. Most always.

So school started again. Professor Martin came back with only a limp in his leg and Herb Schwartz stopped being a professor and was in Judge Hannan's law office all the time. He began smoking a curved pipe and wearing spectacles and his hair pompadour, because he would pretty soon be a lawyer, and he kept on going with Miss Carter, but I didn't care, because Fan had stopped dying of love. She was going with Tom Burton.

We liked Tom Burton good enough—me and Swatty and Bony did—until the time Dad Veek's barn burned, but after that we didn't. We had it in for him after that.

I guess old Dad Veek was a cabinet maker or something. Anyway, he used to work in his barn with a saw and a plane and he made a lot of shavings. His barn was level, but to make it level it had to be up on posts at the hind end because it was on a side hill, and that made a kind of cave under it, and sometimes me and Bony and Swatty, when we got tired playing in the creek, or it was raining, or we got cold skating, would go up there and maybe smoke com silk or maybe just talk. So we got all the shavings old Dad Veek swept out of his barn, and we made a kind of nest under the barn, and we called it that—the Nest.

Dad Veek did not like to have us under his barn, because when we smoked com silk the smoke would go up between the boards of the floor and he would come out and chase us. He didn't like us much, anyway, for any boys, because there were grapevines between his barn and his house and he thought maybe when we thought he wasn't around we crawled through the fence and took some grapes. And we did. But only when they were ripe and we happened to be over there.

So one night his barn burned down.

I guess that don't sound like much, but it was a good deal more than it sounds like. You don't know about Toady Williams and the Red Avengers and the fire insurance inspector yet. The fire insurance inspector was a man who came over from Chicago and said old Dad Veek had set the barn afire to get the insurance money, and said he guessed he would put old Dad Veek in jail for it, because there was too much of that sort of thing just now, and it was time to learn somebody a lesson. And I guess nobody would have cared much if it hadn't been for Mrs. old Dad Veek.

The reason my mother felt sorry for Mrs. old Dad Veek was because when my mother was a little girl Mrs. old Dad Veek's name was Tilly, and she worked for my mother's mother, and now she was a dear old lady and it was too bad her husband was going to jail. So she thought somebody ought to bestir themselves.