Peck's Bad Boy in an airship

by George W. Peck

After we had enjoyed the morning with the wild animals on the race track, Pa and the Michigan man set into a game of draw poker with some other sharps and the cowboy, and they must have stacked the cards on Pa and the cowboy, for before night they had got all Pa’s money away, and the cowboy was burst, too, and in the evening Pa put the airship up against the creamery and a drove of Jerseys, and Pa lost the airship, and then Pa gave checks on a bank in the River Nile, and lost all the checks, and about a pint of the diamonds, and when we went to bed the Michigan man said he hated to part with us, but if we must go he would send us over to Lake Victoria Nigouza, where we could take a steamer for Hamburg.

We didn’t sleep much that night, and the next morning the auto was at the door, and we took what little stuff Pa had not lost playing poker, and crossed the country to the lake, at a town where Pa sold some of his uncut diamonds for money enough to pay for our passage to Hamburg, and we got on board the vessel and got into our state rooms.

Just before we were ready to start an officer came on board looking for two white men who had been giving checks that were no good, and for selling diamonds that would not wash.

I heard about it, and there was such a crowd that the vesselmen did not remember Pa and the cowboy, but they said the officers could search the vessel if they wanted to.

I went to the state room and told Pa and he turned pale, and trembled like a leaf, and the brave cowboy had a fit. They were scared at the prospect of being taken ashore and put in an English jail, and Pa sweat so he looked like a hippopotamus sweating blood.

Pa said they were up a stump, and asked me if I could think of anything to help them out. I told Pa the only thing for us to do was to take a burned cork and black up, and pretend that Pa was an African king, on the way to England to have a conference with King Edward about tribal affairs.

Gee, but Pa and the cowboy bit like a bass and I got a champagne cork and burned it over the lamp and went to work bleaching us all up, and in half an hour we were three of the blackest niggers that ever emigrated from Africa. I even blacked the place on Pa’s leg where the lion had chewed a hole through his pants.

We looked at ourselves in the mirror, and inspected each other, and couldn’t find a white spot, and then I told Pa what to do when the officers of the law came.

He was to be seated in state, on a high chair, looking like a nigger king, and the cowboy and I were to get down on our knees before him and kowtow.

I got a crown made out of a tin basin, and a feather duster for a plume, and fixed Pa up so that any tribe would have gone wild over him.