CHAPTER XXXV.
HIS PA AN INVENTOR THE BAD BOY A MARTYR—THE DOG-COLLAR IN
THE SAUSAGE—A PATENT STOVE—THE PATENT TESTED!—HIS PA A
BURNT OFFERING—EARLY BREAKFAST!
“Ha! Ha! Now I have got you,” said the grocery man to the bad boy, the other morning, as he came in and jumped upon the counter and tied the end of a ball of twine to the tail of a dog, and “sicked” the dog on another dog that was following a passing sleigh, causing the twine to pay out until the whole ball was scattered along the block. “Condemn you, I’ve a notion to choke the liver out of you. Who tied that twine to the dog’s tail?”
The boy choked up with emotion, and the tears came into his eyes, and he said he didn’t know anything about the twine or the dog. He said he noticed the dog come in, and wag his tail around the twine, but he supposed the dog was a friend of the family, and did not disturb him. “Everybody lays everything that is done to me,” said the boy, as he put his handkerchief to his nose, “and they will be sorry for it when I die. I have a good notion to poison myself by eating some of your glucose sugar.
“Yes, and you do about everything that is mean. The other day a lady came in and told me to send up to her house some of my country sausage, done up in muslin bags, and while she was examining it she noticed something hard inside the bags, and asked me what it was, and I opened it, and I hope to die if there wasn’t a little brass pad-lock and a piece of a red morocco dog collar imbedded in the sausage. Now how do you suppose that got in there?” and the grocery man looked savage.
The boy looked interested, and put on an expression as though in deep thought, and finally said, “I suppose the farmer that put up the sausage did not strain the dog meat. Sausage meat ought to be strained.”
The grocery man pulled in about half a block of twine, after the dog had run against a fence and broke it, and told the boy he knew perfectly well how the brass pad-lock came to be in the sausage, but thinking it was safer to have the good will of the boy than the ill will, he offered him a handfull of prunes.
“No,” says the boy, “I have swore off on mouldy prunes. I am no kinder-garten any more. For years I have eaten rotten peaches around this store, and everything you couldn’t sell, but I have turned over a new leaf now, and after this nothing is too good for me, Since Pa has got to be an inventor, we are going to live high.”
“What’s your Pa invented? I saw a hearse and three hacks go up on your street the other day, and I thought may be you had killed your Pa.”