“Did you ever see a fight at a circus, Uncle Ike?” asked the red-headed boy, who seemed to have been more impressed with the fight he had seen than with the performance.
“See a circus fight?” said Uncle Ike. “Gosh, I was right in the midst of a circus fight, where several people were killed, and the whole town was a hospital for a month. See that scar on top of my head,” and the old man pointed with pride to a place on his head that looked as though a mule had kicked him. “I was a deputy constable the day Levi J. North's old circus, menagerie and troupe of Indians showed in the old town where I lived.”
“Some country boys got in a muss with a side-show barker and they got to fighting, and some Irish railroad graders heard the row, and they rushed in with spades and picks' and clubs, and some gentleman said, 'Hey, Rheube,' and the circus men came rushing out, and I came up with a tin star, and said, 'In the name of the state I command the peace,' and I grabbed a circus man by the arm, and an Irishman named Gibbons said, 'to hell wid 'em,' and then a box car or something struck me on the head, and I laid down, and three hundred circus men and about the same number of countrymen and railroad hands walked on me, and they fought for an hour, and when the people got me home and I woke up the circus had been gone a week, and they had buried those who died, and a whole lot were in jail, and my head didn't get down so I could get my hat on before late in the fall.”
“I grabbed a circus man by the arm.”
“Did you resign as constable?” asked the redheaded boy, and he looked at Uncle Ike with awe, as he would at a hero of a hundred battles.
“Did I? That's the first thing I did when I came to, and I have never looked at a tin star on a deputy since without a shudder, and I have never let an admiring public force any office on to me to this day. One day in a public office was enough for your Uncle Ike, but I would like to go to a circus once more and listen to those old jokes of the clown, which were so old that we boys knew them by heart sixty years ago,” and Uncle Ike lighted his pipe again, and tried to laugh at one of the old jokes.
“Uncle Ike, I've got a scheme to get rich, and I will take you into partnership with me,” said the redheaded boy, as Uncle Ike began to cool off from his circus story. “You go in with me and furnish the money, and I will buy a lot of hens, and fix up the back yard with lath, and just let the hens lay eggs and raise chickens, and we will sell them. I have figured it all up, and by starting with ten hens and two roosters, and let them go ahead and attend to business, in twenty years we would have seventeen million nine hundred and sixty-one fowls, which at 10 cents a pound about Thanksgiving time would amount to——”
“There, there, come off,” said Uncle Ike, as he lit up the old pipe again, and got his thinker a'thinking. “I know what you want. You want to get me in on the ground floor, I have been in more things on the ground floor than anybody, but there was always another fellow in the cellar. You are figuring hens the way you do compound interest, but you are away off. Life is too short to wait for compound interest on a dollar to make a fellow rich, and cutting coupons off a hen is just the same. I started a hen ranch fifty years ago, on the same theory, and went broke. There is no way to make money on hens except to turn them loose on a farm, and have a woman with an apron over her head hunt eggs, and sell them as quick as they are laid, before a hen has a chance to get the fever to set. You open a hen ranch in the back yard, and your hens will lay like thunder, when eggs are four cents a dozen, but when eggs are two shillings a dozen you might take a hen by the neck and shake her and you couldn't get an egg. When eggs are high, hens just wander around as though they did not care whether school kept or not, and they kick up a dust and lallygag, and get some disease, and eat all the stuff you can buy for them, and they will make such a noise the neighbors will set dogs on them, and the roosters will get on strike and send walking delegates around to keep hens from laying, and then when eggs get so cheap they are not good enough to throw at jay actors, the whole poultry yard will begin to work overtime, and you have eggs to spare. If the hens increased as you predict in your prospectus to me, it would take all the money in town to buy food for them, and if you attempted to realize on your hens to keep from bankruptcy, everybody would quit eating chicken and go to eating mutton, and there you are. I decline to invest in a hen ranch right here now, and if you try to inveigle me into it I shall have you arrested as a gold-brick swindler,” and Uncle Ike patted the red-headed boy on the shoulder and ran a great hard thumb into his ribs.