Peck's Bad Boy in an airship

by George W. Peck

I told him I had never been a dairy farmer, anyway, and a cow was a new proposition to me, and he said I could go and live on bread and water till doomsday, and that I was the worst orphan he ever saw, and he pushed me out of the room.

The boys met me when I came out of the presence of the one-eyed manager, and we went off into the woods and held an indignation meeting, and passed resolutions condemning the management of the orphanage, and I suggested that we form a union and strike for shorter hours and more food, and if we did not get it, we could walk out, and make the orphan school business close up.

We discussed what we would do and say to the boss, and just before supper time we lined up in a body before the house and called out the manager and made our demands, and gave him fifteen minutes to accept, or out we would go, and I tell you we looked saucy.

I never saw anything act as quick as that strike did. In five minutes the manager came out and said he wouldn’t grant a thing, and besides we were locked out, and couldn’t ever get back into the place unless we crawled on our hands and knees and stood on our hind feet like dogs, and barked and begged for food, and he shut the door and the dining room was closed in our faces, and we were told to get off the place or they would set the dogs on us.

For a few minutes not a word was said, then the boys pitched on to me and another boy that had brought on the strike, and gave us a good licking, and made us run to the woods, and when we got nearly out of sight we turned and all the brave dubs that were going to break up the orphanage were down on their seats on the grass, begging like dogs to be taken back, because supper was ready, and my chum and me were pulling for tall timber, wondering where the next meal was coming from, and where we are going to sleep.

We were the only boys in that bunch of strikers that had sand enough to stand up for union principles, and as is usually the case the fellows who had the most gravel in their crops had little else, and I was never so hungry in my life.

A diet of fried bull heads and skim milk, and sour bread for a few days in the orphanage had left me with an appetite that ought to have had a ten course banquet at once, but we walked on for hours, and finally struck a railroad track and followed it to a town.

My chum stopped at a freight car on a side track and began to poke around one of the oil boxes on a wheel, and when I asked him what he was going to do, he said that to a hungry man the cotton waste and the grease in a hot box of a freight car was just as good as a shrimp salad, and he began to poke the stuff out of the hot box to eat it. He said the lives of tramps were often saved by eating out of hot boxes. I swore that I would never eat no hot box banquet, and I pulled him away from the box car just as a brakeman came along with a hook and a can of oil and a bucket of water to cool it off, and we escaped.

I told him we would have a good supper all right, if he would stick by me.

We went into the little town and it was getting dark, and all the people were out doors looking up into the sky, and saying, “there it is, I see it,” and I asked a man in front of a saloon what the excitement was about, and he said that they were watching the balloons from St. Louis, about two hundred miles away, which were sailing to the east.