“Now, what kind of a circus have you been having, and what do you mean by destroying wine that way! and where are your folks?”
“Well, I’ll tell you. Ma she has got the hay fever and has gone to Lake Superior to see if she can’t stop sneezing, and Saturday Pa said he and me would go out to Oconomowoc and stay over Sunday, and try and recuperate our health. Pa said it would be a good joke for me not to call him Pa, but to act as though I was his younger brother, and we would have a real nice time. I knowed what he wanted. He is an old masher, that’s what’s the matter with him, and he was going to play himself for a batchelor. O, thunder, I got on to his racket in a minute. He was introduced to some of the girls and Saturday evening he danced till the cows come home. At home he is awful fraid of rheumatic, and he never sweats, or sits in a draft; but the water just poured off’n him, and he stood in the door and let a girl fan him till I was afraid he would freeze, and just as he was telling a girl from Tennessee, who was joking him about being a nold batch, that he was not sure as he could always hold out a woman hater if he was to be thrown into contact with the charming ladies of the Sunny South, I pulled his coat and said, ’Pa how do you spose Ma’s hay fever is to-night. I’ll bet she is just sneezing the top of her head off.” Wall, sir, you just oughten seen that girl and Pa. Pa looked at me as if I was a total stranger, and told the porter if that freckled faced boot-black belonged around the house he had better be fired out of the ball-room, and the girl said the disgustin’ thing, and just before they fired me I told Pa he had better look out or he would sweat through his liver pad.
“I went to bed and Pa staid up till the lights were put out. He was mad when he came to bed, but he didn’t lick me, cause the people in the next room would hear him, but the next morning he talked to me. He said I might go back home Sunday night, and he would stay a day or two. He sat around on the veranda all the afternoon, talking with the girls, and when he would see me coming along he would look cross. He took a girl out boat riding, and when I asked him if I couldn’t go along, he said he was afraid I would get drowned, and he said if I went home there was nothing there too good for me, and so my chum and me got to firing bottles of champane, and he hit me in the eye with a cork, and I drove him out doors and was just going to shell his earth works, when the policeman collared me. Say, what’s good for a black eye?”
The grocery man told him his Pa would cure it when he got home, “What do you think your Pa’s object was in passing himself off for a single man at Oconomowoc,” asked the grocery man, as he charged up the cucumber to the boy’s father.
“That’s what beats me. Aside from Ma’s hay fever she is one of the healthiest women in this town. O, I suppose he does it for his health, the way they all do when they go to a summer resort, but it leaves a boy an orphan, don’t it, to have such kitteny parents.”
CHAPTER IX.
HIS PA HAS GOT ’EM AGAIN! HIS PA IS DRINKING HARD—HE HAS
BECOME A TERROR—A JUMPING DOG—THE OLD MAN IS SHAMEFULLY
ASSAULTED—“THIS IS A HELLISH CLIMATE MY BOY!”—HIS PA
SWEARS OFF—HIS MA STILL SNEEZING AT LAKE SUPERIOR.
’“If the dogs in our neighborhood hold out I guess I can do something that all the temperance societies in this town have failed to do,” says the bad boy to the grocery man, as he cut off a piece of cheese and took a handful of crackers out of a box.
“Well for Heaven’s sake, what have you been doing now, you little reprobate,” asked the grocery man, as he went to the desk and charged the boy’s father with a pound and four ounces of cheese and two pounds of crackers. “If you was my boy and played any of your tricks on me I would maul the everlasting life out of you. Your father is a cussed fool that he dont send you to the reform school. The hired girl was over this morning and says your father is sick, and I should think he would be. What you done? Poisoned him I suppose.”