Peck's Bad Boy in an airship

by George W. Peck

There is not much fun in being an orphan until you escape from the orphan asylum, and I want to say that my chum and myself have had two red letter days in the town where we seemed to drop out of a balloon into the hearts of the country people.

They took up a subscription to buy clothes for us, and dressed us up, and we looked as though we had been clothing dummies in front of a clothing store, and then the people got into a quarrel as to who should adopt us.

A farmer drew my chum and wanted him to get acquainted with some mules and drive six mules to haul fertilizer on the farm. My chum had to set on a saddle on one mule, and drive the other five mules by using one line, which he pulled and hauled to make them gee round grand right and left.

The fat woman adopted me because I was such a dear little thing. She was one of those hay widows, whose husband got plenty of her sauce, and took to the tall timber, and all she wanted to do was to hug me, and tell me that if I had not dropped into her life, out of that balloon, she would have kicked the bucket, and I thought of how any bucket I ever saw would have collapsed, for she had a foot like a fiddle box.

She made me tell her the story of my past life, and when she found I was Peck’s Bad Boy, and I thought I had made my story so sanguinary that she would want me to go away, so she could have a quiet life, she just froze to me and said she could see that she had been selected by Providence to take the badness out of me, and she went to work hypnotizing me, and giving me absent treatment on my meals, to take my strength for wickedness away, and then she got me so weak I could not hug back when she squeezed me, and you can imagine the condition a growing boy would be in who could not do his share of the hugging.

The second day of my sentence to be her adopted son, with all my crimes on my head, she let me go out on the farm to visit my chum, and there is where my whole new life changed.

My chum was driving his mules around the farm, and I was riding behind him on the wheel mule, when a balloon from St. Louis came over, and the men in the balloon yelled to us to grab hold of the rope as they wanted to land in the field. The mules began to act up and my chum couldn’t control them, and I jumped off the mule and grabbed the rope and gave it a hitch around the pole of the wagon, and that settled it with the mules. They rolled their fawn like eyes around at the great gas bag that was swaying over the wagon, with the two men yelling, and the mules started to run, with the wagon and the balloon, around that field, the balloon striking the fence occasionally, and a tree once in a while, the men yelling for us to cut the rope, and the mules braying and saying mule prayers, and me chasing along to try and cut the rope, and my chum hanging on to the ears of the wheel mule, and the farmers rushing into the field from every direction to stop the mules, and the men in the balloons using the worst language.

Grabbed the Balloon Rope and Gave It a Hitch Around the Pole.

The mules had run around the field several times, and the balloon was doing its best to keep up, when I yelled to the men in the balloon, “Why don’t you throw out your anchor?” and they then seemed to recollect about the anchor, and they threw it out, and when it caught fast in the ground the mules pulled loose from the wagon and went through a fence, and started for Texas, and I guess they are going yet. My chum got off all right, except he was so scared he could not stand up. Well, we had a time straightening things out, the farmers wanted to lynch the balloon men, and make them pay for the mules, but in rolling up the balloon to take to the station, to ship to St. Louis, I found a mail bag, and I told the farmers these balloonists were carrying the U. S. mail, and any man that laid hands on the government mail could be imprisoned for life for treason, and I scared the farmers so they gave the balloonists their dinner, and hauled the balloon to the station with the whole bunch of us, and when the balloonists went away on the train they told my chum and me that if we would come to St. Louis they would give us jobs carrying off balloons, and they would teach us how to fly. Gee, but that was nuts for us. To rise, at once, from being mule drivers and adopted boys, to a place in balloon society, was what we wanted, and my chum and I deserted our more or less happy homes and began to plan to jump a freight train bound for St. Louis.