Anyway, it didn't seem to make Bony feel any better that his father had taken his shotgun and had gone off somewhere else to kill himself instead of killing himself right at home in the barn. He kept right on with a kind of whine-blubber, even when Swatty and me were jawing, so Swatty said:
“Aw! what you bellerin' about?”
“I'll—I'll beller if I want to,” Bony said. “I guess you'd beller if your father was going to kill himself, you would.”
“I would not so!” Swatty said. “What's the use of bellerin' when you can't do nothing about it? If he's going to kill himself, he's going to, and you can't help it. If my father was going to do what you said your father was going to do I'd let him do it, and I wouldn't spoil everybody's fun by bawling about it. I'd just go ahead and play like nothing was going to happen, until I had to go in and dress for the funeral.”
Well, I guess that wasn't a very good thing for Swatty to say, because it made Bony blubber more than ever. So then Swatty got sore and disgusted and he said:
“Aw! shut up, then, and we'll go and find your father and take the shotgun away from him, if you 're going to be a baby about it!”
That's the way Swatty always is; me or Bony would never think of going and taking a shotgun away from a father that wanted to kill himself, and if we did think of it we would never dare to do it; but Swatty wouldn't care who he took a shotgun away from if he got mad because somebody bellered about nothing. So we knew he'd do it if we went along. So we went along.
When we saw Bony's father go by with the shotgun he was going toward downtown, so me and Bony and Swatty started toward downtown, and we talked about where Bony's father would probably go to kill himself if he didn't want to kill himself in his barn, and none of us thought he would go downtown to do it because somebody might see him start to do it and stop him. So we talked about it and we made up our minds we would go over into the Illinois bottom, across the Mississippi, because a man once went over there to kill himself, and did it and nobody bothered him while he was doing it or knew about it until afterward.
Of course the ferry wasn't running, but it was easy enough for Bony's father to get across the river because the ice was frozen and the river was closed and he could go over on the ice.
We went down to the river. There was a good deal of water on the ice in some places, and the snow was mushy everywhere on it and it was pretty bad walking. I guess you know what the river is like when it is closed. There is a lot of snow on it because nobody shovels it off, and they couldn't if they tried, because the river is three quarters of a mile wide there, and there's no place to shovel the snow to, and it's just as good right where it is as it would be anywhere else.