Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler

Well, I guess Toady knew mighty well that if he was going to get mallered for saying either of us said it he had better say I said it, because Swatty could lick any of us. So he said I did say it.

So I went for him and mallered him as much as I could. I got so mad I cried, and I guess I kicked him. Not Swatty, Toady. So when I got tired I was still mad, and I sat down on a box and cried. Then Toady sneaked over to the stairs and went part way down, and just before he was out of sight he looked back.

“Cry-baby!” he said, and that meant me. Then he said: “All right, you'd better look out! You both said you did it, and you both said you said it, and Dad Veek's got that Red Avengers' notice you fastened on his barn door and Tom Burton knows all about it.”

Gee, we were scared! I was so scared I didn't throw anything at Toady, and Swatty was so scared he just said: “Garsh!” and stood there. Well, me and Swatty we talked it over.

We knew we hadn't set the barn afire, but we knew we had said we had, and we knew old Dad Veek would do 'most anything to keep out of jail, and that my mother and the Ladies' Aid ladies were bestirring. So then we knew why Toady had come up to get us to say again we had done it; he was one of the Red Avengers and unless we said we had set the barn afire ourselves all the Red Avengers would be sent to reform school, and he wanted to get out of it and had gone and told Tom Burton about us and the Red Avengers and that we had set the barn afire.

“Garsh!” said Swatty, “he took the memorandum book you had old Veek's barn wrote down at the top of the list of!”

And he had! So Bony sort of doubled down in his corner and cried, but me and Swatty sat down on a box to think and talk and see what we had better do.

Well, the way Tom Burton had gone to work to help my mother and the Ladies' Aid ladies who were bestirring themselves, was this: He found out that the reason old Dad Veek had so much insurance was because he was a slow worker, and sometimes he had the barn almost full of stuff he was working on, and then it was worth as much as it was insured for. So that helped some. Then old Dad Veek showed him the Red Avengers' warning Swatty had fastened on his barn door, and that was pretty bad, because the time it said the barn would burn down was the time it did burn.

I guess he might have thought it was some men or something, if it hadn't been for the name of the Red Avengers. It sounded like boys. So Tom Burton found out there was a dime lib'ry named “The Red Avengers,” because one was hanging in Toady Williams's father's store window, and then he knew it was boys. So he asked Toady Williams if he knew anything about it, and Toady went and told him. He told him me and Swatty and Bony was the Red Avengers and that we had set the barn afire.

We found all that out mighty soon, because it wasn't half an hour after Toady went out of the barn before Tom Burton came up. The tattle-tale had gone right to him.