I had that driven into my mind and spiked down when I hired the widow’s son a few years ago. His name was Clarence—Clarence St. Clair Hicks—and his father used to keep books for me when he wasn’t picking the winners at Washington Park or figuring out the batting averages of the Chicagos. He was one of those quick men who always have their books posted up half an hour before closing time for three weeks of the month, and spend the evenings of the fourth hunting up the eight cents that they are out on the trial balance. When he died his wife found that his life insurance had lapsed the month before, and so she brought Clarence down to the office and asked me to give him a job.
Clarence wasn’t exactly a pretty boy; in fact, he looked to me like another of his father’s bad breaks; but his mother seemed to think a heap of him. I learned that he would have held the belt in his Sunday-school for long-distance verse-reciting if the mother of one of the other boys hadn’t fixed the superintendent, and that it had taken a general conspiracy of the teachers in his day-school to keep him from walking off with the good-conduct medal.
I couldn’t just reconcile those statements with Clarence’s face, but I accepted him at par and had him passed along to the head errand boy. His mother cried a little when she saw him marched off, and asked me to see that he was treated kindly and wasn’t bullied by the bigger boys, because he had been “raised a pet.”
A number of unusual things happened in the offices that morning, and the head office boy thought Clarence might be able to explain some of them, but he had an alibi ready every time—even when a bookkeeper found the vault filled with cigarette smoke and Clarence in it hunting for something he couldn’t describe. But as he was a new boy, no one was disposed to bear down on him very hard, so his cigarettes were taken away from him and he was sent back to his bench with a warning that he had used up all his explanations.
Along toward noon, a big Boston customer came in with his little boy—a nice, plump, stall-fed youngster, with black velvet pants and hair that was just a little longer than was safe in the stock-yards district. And while we were talking business, the kid wandered off to the coat-room, where the errand boys were eating lunch, which was a pretty desperate place for a boy with velvet pants on to go.
“Clarence looked to me like another of his father's bad breaks.”
As far as we could learn from Willie when he came out of his convulsions, the boys had been very polite to him and had insisted on his joining in a new game which Clarence had just invented, called playing pig-sticker. And, because he was company, Clarence told him that he could be the pig. Willie didn’t know just what being the pig meant, but, as he told his father, it didn’t sound very nice and he was afraid he wouldn’t like it. So he tried to pass along the honor to some one else, but Clarence insisted that it was “hot stuff to be the pig,” and before Willie could rightly judge what was happening to him, one end of a rope had been tied around his left ankle and the other end had been passed over a transom bar, and he was dangling headforemost in the air, while Clarence threatened his jugular with a lath sword. That was when he let out the yell which brought his father and me on the jump and scattered the boys all over the stock yards.
Willie’s father canceled his bologna contract and marched off muttering something about “degrading surroundings brutalizing the young;” and Clarence’s mother wrote me that I was a bad old man who had held her husband down all his life and now wouldn’t give her son a show. For, naturally, after that little incident, I had told the boy who had been raised a pet that he had better go back to the menagerie.