Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler

“'Where are you going, Mr. Reginald de Vere?' 'I'm going down-town to vote a while if you do not need me to take care of the baby.' 'Not at all, but I do hope you will show folks you are a prohibition. If I ever heard you were an anti-prohibition I would cut you up into mincemeat.'”

So then I most generally went away.

I got kind of sick of girls. I made up my mind they were no good anyway, and that I'd never have another one if I lived to be a million years old, and when I wrote notes to Mamie in school it wasn't any use because she always tore them up without reading them. It made me feel awful to have her so mean. Because she wasn't mean to Toady.

Well, it came to examination time and we began to be examined. Swatty and Bony and I didn't have to be examined in arithmetic until Thursday afternoon and neither did Lucy or Mamie, so Swatty and Bony and I thought we might as well go fishing that morning. We got our poles and some bait and started, and we went down Third Street and when we came to the railway track we cut across through Burman's lumber yard toward the river because that was the quickest way.

Burman's sawmill was the biggest one in Riverbank then. I guess you know how big those sawmills were. Great big red buildings with gravel roofs where they sawed the logs that came down the river in rafts, and where they made shingles, and the row of sheds where they dried the lumber with steam, and another big one where the planers were. There were hundreds and hundreds of piles of lumber, each one as tall as a house, and all the ground was made of sawdust and rattlings, because it was filled ground.

There were railway sidings here, and there were flat cars and box cars being loaded.

Burman's sawmill and lumber yards were just under the bluff. Once there had been a brickyard there, and the bluff was cut down steep where they had dug clay. Across the street there was still a brickyard, with hundreds and hundreds of cords of wood, ready to be used to burn brick, and with the kilns loosely roofed over. Back toward the town was a sash and door factory, a pretty big building, and then some houses, and then the stores began. About the fifth store on one side was Swatty's father's tailor shop. It was a building all by itself, and it was one story high and frame, and it had a false front above the first story, with Swatty's father's name on it, and there was one window on the street.

Well, Swatty and Bony and me went through the lumber yard to the place where Burman's oil shed was.

The oil shed was right up against the bluff, almost at the railway, and it was up on stakes, so that it was safer. It was about as big as a kitchen, and was painted red and the floor and part of the and part of the stakes were soaked with oil, and the grass underneath was withered and oily because the oil had dripped and killed it.

Just as we got there we saw Slim Finnegan, who was in our class at school but ever so much older than we were, and he was under the oil shed smoking a corncob pipe. His coat was on the grass beside him, and just as we got there he jumped up and began slamming at the grass with his coat, for the grass was afire. Before we could guess what happened, the flames seemed to run up the stakes like live animals, and all at once the whole bottom of the floor of the oil shed was afire.