When he read it to me, and I saw how I had been broken up and damaged by the soulless corporation, and how my promising career had been ruined, I never was so overcome in my life. While I was not hurt any, except where the horse laid on me and squeezed my dog biscuits in my stomach so my backbone was poulticed by the chewed biscuit, the lawyer had the doctors at the hospital put my legs and arms in plaster of paris casts, and had my body done up in splints and bandages, and my face covered with strips of court plaster, until nothing but my mouth was in working order, and I wore out a nurse bringing me things to eat, and I never enjoyed myself more in my life than I did in that hospital, just eating and being petted by good looking nurses.
My lawyer told me to groan all the time when anybody was present, and when a railroad lawyer called at the hospital to take an invoice of my wounds, and my lawyer was present to see that I groaned plenty, it was all I could do to keep from laughing, but my lawyer would run a paper knife into my slats every time I quit groaning, so we were working the railroad all right, and the hospital doctors, who were going to have a share in the money, made a list of my broken bones, and the railroad lawyer wanted to be shown every break in my anatomy.
Well things went on this way for several days, and I was getting nervous from the plaster casts on me.
I didn’t like it very much when the railway lawyer offered to settle for five dollars, claiming I was a tramp stealing a ride, but he brought my chum to see me, and my chum who had his neck twisted around by a bale of hay falling on him, settled for twenty dollars, and so I did the same, and when the nurses were asleep in the afternoon, my chum and me left the hospital with forty good dollars, and started across the bridge for St. Louis, to find the air ships.
We were sitting down on a railroad track, at the east entrance to the bridge, and I had taken off my clothes, and was breaking the plaster of paris off my limbs, when my lawyer came along on his motorcycle, on the way to the hospital to make me groan some more, and when he saw us he had a fainting spell, and when I told him we had been discharged cured, he said it was hard for a deserving lawyer to be knocked out of a half million dollar fee by a dumb fool client who didn’t know enough to look out for his own interests, and he was going to have us arrested for highway robbery, but I told him I wouldn’t have known what to do with so much money if we had kanoodled the railroad out of a million dollars, in addition to a free ride on its palatial freight car, and besides it would be cheating, and the lawyer drew a long sigh and told us to get out of the country and he would continue the suit on the ground that we had been injured so bad that we became insane and jumped into the river, and he offered to throw us in the river, but we jumped on a street car and went across to St. Louis in search of the park where the balloon man was that had offered us a job riding in balloons.
We found the man and he said they were all going to start for somewhere the next morning and we could go along, my chum in one balloon and I in another, and all we would have to do was to throw out ballast when told to do so, and open cans of stuff to eat, and for us to buy thick sweaters, and show up at nine o’clock in the morning, and write the address where we wanted our remains sent to in case we were killed, and pin the address on our sweaters.
It wasn’t cheerful and my chum and I talked it over until late that night, and I am sorry to say my chum showed a streak of yellow, and he confessed to me that he was a coward, and came from a family of cowards, and that he didn’t have sand enough to go up in a balloon, and he would let me go up, but he would rather stay on the ground, where he could feel the earth with his feet, and watch the balloons.
He said that people who go up in balloons were either crazy, or had met with some disappointment in life, and took the balloon method of committing suicide, and he would side step balloons, and if the time ever came when he was tired of life, he would take a job firing on an engine, or go into burglary, or get in love with some old man’s wife, or marry a chorus girl, or something that would be fatal, but on land.
Gee, but I was disappointed in my chum. He had been in a reform school, and I thought he had gravel in his crop, but he proved to have the chilblains, and so I went to the balloon man in the morning alone, and told him I had made my will, and was ready to go up to heaven or down to Helena, Arkansas, any minute he was ready, but my chum had weakened and gone glimmering.