Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

by Ellis Parker Butler

Well, she was one of the things we were afraid of, but the new street got her away from there. The new street went right through where her shanty was, so they tore the shanty down, and after that we weren't afraid of her any more, because she was gone.

So this day—it was Saturday—I was sitting on the porch fixing my foot when Swatty came over, like he said he would. Bony was with him, but he waited in the alley because he knew his mother was at my house. I got around the corner of the house without my mother seeing I was limping much, so she didn't call me back, and when we got to the alley Bony was there all right, with a shovel he had borrowed out of their coal bin while his mother wasn't home. It was to go ahead and make another room in our cave with. I could walk pretty good, but I had to walk on the toe end of one of my feet to keep the heel off the ground because the nail hole was in the palm of my foot. We got to our cave all right.

Our cave was a good one, it was the best one I ever saw anybody make. It was in the clay bank at the side of Squaw Creek up where there are no more Irish shanties or geese and where the creek bed is gravelly instead of sandy. We found the place one day when we were explorers, exploring the creek to its headwaters, only we stopped when we got to this place and turned pirates and began digging the cave. We didn't do much that day, but the next chance we got Swatty had us go up and dig again. We dug a little every time we went up until the hole was big enough for us all to get in, and then Swatty said we'd keep right on digging until it was big enough to live in.

That was what we thought of right at first, but we forgot it. We had had enough cave digging, I guess. Swatty said: “Aw, garsh! come on and make a good cave!” but we didn't want to. We wanted to smoke com silk and talk and be comfortable. So Swatty went outside and climbed up the bank; but pretty soon he came sliding down the bank. He made the silence sign and motioned us to come with him. He looked good and scared. So we all climbed up the bank and looked.

The grass and weeds came right to the edge of the bank and from the edge they stretched away over a big field. All around the field were trees, edging it in, but that wasn't what Swatty wanted us to see.

Away over in one corner of the field the Graveyard Gang was playing One Old Cat.

So that was where we were. The old Squaw Creek had turned and twisted until it went right into the part of the edge of town where the Graveyard Gang kids lived, and we had dug our cave right in a place where we had never dared to go. Gee, I was scared!

We were always scared of the Graveyard Gang. They had to come down to our school, and there were a lot of them and mostly bigger than we were and we generally fought after school, but it was only sometimes that they could catch us and mailer us, because we could throw clods at them and then skip into our yards where we lived, and they couldn't come after us. But what they always tried to do was to get some of us cornered off and chase us out toward the cemetery way. If they got us out there they could surround us and mailer the life out of us. And they would.

So me and Bony saw that our cave was a pretty good thing. If the Graveyard Gang got us cornered off and we had to run out their way they would think they had us, but we would just run and slide down to our cave and then we could fight them until they had enough or we had killed them all. So every day that we went to the cave we took up stones, and we dug and dug. It was a dandy cave. It was big enough to stand up in, and we made a stove out of old iron and made a hole up through the ceiling for the smoke to go out, and we had some potatoes and things so we could stand a long siege. We worked at it nearly all vacation. Swatty showed us how to make a door, and we made it and we painted the outside with wet clay so the door would look like the side of the bank but it didn't. It did some, but not much.

Well, when school began again we began having clod fights with the Graveyard Gang again and some of them were pretty tough fights. Once, Swatty said, when me and Bony wasn't with him some of the Graveyard kids cornered him off and chased him all the way out to their part of town, but he dodged and went behind some bushes and got to the cave and hid there until night, and they never found him. So we knew the cave was a good thing to have. So this day I'm telling about we went right up the creek to our cave and the minute we got there Swatty stopped short.