“O, we bought new clothes in New Orleans, and let our old ones out of the window of a hotel with a rope. A man picked them up, and they sent him to the quarantine for smallpox patients. O, we came out all right, but it was a close call. Say, I bet this prairie dog can lick your cat in a holy minute,” and the boy pushed the dog against the cat, said “sik em,” and the cat scratched the dog, the dog yelled and bit the cat, the cat run up the shelves, over the canned goods, and tipped over some bottles of pickles, and the old groceryman got crazy, while the boy took his prairie dog under his arm, and his horned toad in his hand and started to go out.
“I'll drop in some day and have some fun with you,” says the boy.
“If you do I will stab you with a cheese knife,” said the groceryman as he picked up the broken glass.
CHAPTER XV.
The Bad Boy's Joke with a Stuffed Rattlesnake—He Tells the Old Groceryman About his Dad's Morbid Appetite.
The old groceryman was sitting on the counter, with his legs stretched lengthwise, his heels resting on a sack of flour, and his back against a pile of wrapping paper, his eyes closed, his pipe gone out, and the ashes sifting from it on the cat that was asleep in his lap. He was waiting for a customer to come in and buy something to start the day's business. He had sprinkled the floor and swept the dirt up in a corner, and he was sleepy. There was a crash in front of the door, a barrel of axe handles and garden tools had been tipped over on the sidewalk, the door opened with a jerk and closed with a slam, and the bad boy came in with a long paper bax, perforated with holes, slammed it on the counter beside the groceryman's legs, and yelled:
“Wake up, Rip Van Winkle, the day of judgment has come, and you are still buried. You get a move on you or the procession will go off and leave you. Say, are you afraid of rattlesnakes?” and the bad boy shook the paper box, when an enormous rattle came from within, as though a snake had shaken its tail good and plenty.
“Great Scott, boy, I believe you have got a rattlesnake in that box,” and he jumped off the counter and grabbed an iron fire poker, while the boy got out his knife to cut the string on the box. “Now, look here, I am suffering from nervous prostration, and a snake turned loose in this store would settle it with me. I am at your mercy, but by the holy smoke, if I am bitten by that snake I will kill you and your old snake. Now take that box out of here,” and the old man picked up a hatchet and got behind a barrel.
“Well, wouldn't that skin you,” said the bad boy, as he sharpened his knife on a piece of old cheese, and felt of the edge. “Here you have been telling me for years what a brave man you were, and how you were not afraid of anything that wore hair, and now you have fits because a little five-foot rattlesnake, with only ten rattles on, makes a formal call on you. Gee, but you are a squaw. Why, there is no danger in the bite of a rattlesnake, since science has taken the matter up. All you got to do, when a snake bites you and you begin to turn black, is to drink a couple of quarts of whisky, and bind a poultice of limberg cheese on the wound, and go to bed for a week or ten days, and you come out all right,” and the bad boy began to cut the string.