Pa yelled to them that if he ever got off that hay rack alive he would pay the damages, and he thought he was swearing at them. Then the worst thing possible happened. The airship went up over a tree, and Pa was scared and he grabbed a limb and let go of the bamboo, and there he was in the top of a thornapple tree. The balloon went over all right, and the inventor steered it away to where it started from, and the woman and I watched Pa. The thorns were about two inches long and more than a hundred of them got into Pa and he yelled all kinds of murder, and then the women who owned the cows and onions the ship had wrecked surrounded the tree with hoes and rakes and pitchforks, and they made such a frantic noise that Pa did not dare to come down out of the tree. So Pa told us to take the train back to Paris and send the American Consul and the police and a hook and ladder company to get him down and protect him.
I told Pa I didn’t want to go off and leave him to be killed by strange women, and maybe eaten by wolves before morning, but he said, “Don’t talk back to me, you go and send that patrol wagon and the hook and ladder truck, and be quick about it or I won’t do a thing to you when I catch you.”
So we went and put the airship in a barn and went back to town and turned in a police and fire alarm to rescue Pa. The chief said there was no use in going out there in the country before morning, because the women couldn’t get up the thornapple tree and Pa couldn’t get down. So I went to bed and dreamed about Pa all night, and had a perfectly lovely time.
CHAPTER X.
Pa Had the Hardest Time of His Life in Paris—Pa Drinks Some Goat Milk Which Gives Him Ptomaine Poison in His Inside Works—Pa Attends the Airship Club in the Country—Pa Draws on American Government for $10,000.
Pa has had the hardest time of his life in Paris, and if I ever pitied a man it was Pa.
You see that last fly in the airship pretty near caused him to cash in his chips and go over the long road to the hereafter, cause he got blood poison from the thorns that run into him where he landed in the top limbs of the thorn apple tree, and he sprained his arm and one hind leg while being taken down with a derrick, and then before we left the country town for Paris he drank some goat’s milk, which gave him ptomaine poison in his inside works, and a peasant woman who sewed up his pants where they were torn on the tree pricked him with a needle, and he swelled up so he was unable to sit in a car seat, and his face was scratched by the thorns of the tree, and there were blotches all over him, so when we got to Paris the health officers thought he had smallpox and sent him to a pest house, and they wouldn’t let me in, but vaccinated me and turned me loose, and I went to the hotel and told about where Pa was and all about it, and they put our baggage in a sort of oven filled with sulphur and disinfected it and stole some of it, and they made me sleep in a dog kennel, and for weeks I had to keep out of sight, until Pa was discharged from the hospital, and the friends of Pa out at the airship club in the country got Pa’s airship that he bought for a government out of the tree and took it to the club and presented a bill for two hundred dollars, and I only had seven dollars, so they held it for ransom.
Gee, but I worried about Pa!
Well, one day Pa showed up at the hotel looking like he had been in a railroad wreck, and he was so thin his clothes had to be pinned up with safety pins, and he had spent all his money and was bursted.