Peck's Bad Boy in an airship

by George W. Peck

I left my baggage at a hotel where we stopped when we were in Paris before, and the man who spoke shattered English told me Pa was rooming there, but he was not around much, because he was being entertained by the American residents, and had some great scheme that took him away on secret expeditions often, and they thought he was either an anarchist or grafter, and since the assassination of the king and crown prince of Portugal the police had overhauled his baggage in his room several times, but couldn’t find anything incriminating, so I had my baggage sent to Pa’s room, and went out to find Pa, and pick up something that would throw suspicion on him if he showed any inclination to go back on me when I found him.

It was getting along towards dark when I walked down a bullyvard where Pa used to go when we were in Paris before, and as I came to a café where there was a sign, English spoken, I saw a crowd out on the sidewalk surrounding tables, eating and drinking, and there was one big table with about a dozen men and women, Americans, Frenchmen and other foreigners, listening to an elderly man bragging about America, and I saw it was Pa, but he was so changed that but for his bald head and chin whiskers I would not have known him.

He had on French clothes, one of those French silk hats that had a flat brim and a bell crown, and he had a moustache that was pointed at the ends and was waxed so it would put your eyes out.

Pa was telling them that all the men in America were millionaires and unmarried, and that all of them came abroad to spend money and marry foreign ladies, to take them back to America and make queens of them, and he looked at a French woman across the table with goo-goo eyes, and she said to the man next to her, “Isn’t he a dear, and what a wonder he is not married before,” and Pa smiled at her and put his hand on his watch chain, on which there hung gold nuggets as big as walnuts, and he fixed a big diamond in his scarf, so the electric light would hit it plenty.

They ate and drank and the party began to break up, when Pa and the beautiful woman were alone at the table, and they hunched up closer together, and Pa was talking sweet to her, and telling her that all wives in America had special trains on railroads, and palaces in New York, and at Newport and in Florida, and yachts and gold mines, and she could be the queen of them all if she would only say the word, and she was just going to say the word, or something, and had his fat, pudgy hand in both of hers, and was looking into his eyes with her own liquid eyes, and seemed ready to fall into his arms, when I got up behind him and lighted a giant fire cracker and put it under his chair and just as the fuse was sputtering, I said, “Pa, ma wants you at the hotel,” and the fireworks went off, the woman threw a fit and Pa raised up out of the smoke and looked at me and said, “Now, where in hell did you come from just at this time?” and the head waiter took the woman into a private room to bring her out of her fit, the waiters opened the windows to let the smoke out, and the crowd stampeded, and the police came in to pull the place and find the anarchist who threw the bomb, and Pa took me by the hand and we walked up the sidewalk to a corner, and when we got out of sight of the crowd Pa said, “Hennery, your ma ain’t here, is she?” in a pitiful tone, and I said no she wasn’t along with me this trip, and Pa said, “Hennery, you make me weary,” and we walked along to the hotel, Pa asking me so many questions about home that it was a like a catekism.

The Fireworks Went Off—the Woman Threw a Fit, and Pa Raised Out of the Smoke.

When we got to the hotel and went to Pa’s room and I told him what I had been doing since he abandoned me, he said he was proud of me, and now he had plenty of work and adventure for me to keep him in.

He said he had tried several airships, by having someone else go up in them, and that he was afraid to go up in one himself, and he seemed glad that I had been ballooning around home, and he said he could use me to good advantage.

I asked him about the woman he was talking to about marriage, and he said that was all guff, that she had a husband who had invented a new airship, and he was trying to get title to it for use in America, for war purposes, and that the only way to get on the right side of these French women was to talk about marriage and money, because for money any of them would leave their husbands on fifteen minutes’ notice. He said he had arranged for a trial of the airship the next day, from a place out in the country, and that I could go up with the inventor of the ship and see how it worked and report, so we went to bed and I slept better than I had since I shipped on the cattle ship.