HENRY PETERS'S SIGNATURE
THE HIRED MAN'S SECOND TALE
The Colonel's story of how the law and the courts work, reminded me of what happened to old Hen Peters and his forty-second nephew, Hank. It all arose from a debate at the literary at the Bollinger school-house back in Iowa.
You see, old Hen's girl Fanny come home from the State Normal at Cedar Falls as full of social uplift as a yeast-cake, and framed up this literary. It was a lulu of a society, and nights when the sledding was good, the teams just surrounded the lot, and the bells jingled as uplifting as you could ask.
The night of the scrap Hank brought Fanny. The debate was on which was the most terrible scourge, fire or water. Hank was on the negative, and Fanny's father on the affirmative. Old Hen spoke of the way prairie fires devastated things in an early day, and read history, and gave a beautiful tribute to the Chicago fire and the O'Leary cow. Hank coughed with the dust kicked up when Hen sat down, but he got back with a rhapsody on the Hoang-Ho floods, and the wet season in Noah's time. He said that his honorable opponent ought to take a moment or two from time to time to ascertain the properties of water as a scourge, as an inward remedy, and as a lotion.
Now besides having an appetite for red-eye, old Hen was whiskery and woolly-necked, and handling lots of tame hay, he looked sort of unwashed. So the crowd yelled shameful and laughed; and when Hen got up to answer, he was so mad his whiskers stood out like a rooster's hackle, his words came out in a string like, all lapped on one another, and blurred, and linked together so you couldn't tell one from the other; and finally they reversed on the bobbin, and gigged back into his system, and rumbled and reverberated around in him like a flock of wild cattle loose in an empty barn; and the crowd got one of those giggly fits when every one makes the other laugh till they are sore and sick. Asa Wagstaff fell backward out of a window on to a hitching-post, and made Brad Phelps' team break loose. Old Hen stood shaking his fist at them and turning so red in the face that he got blue, and sat down without saying a syllable that any one could understand. You could hear folks hollering and screaming in fits of that laughing disease going home, and getting out and rolling in the snow because they were in agony, and nothing but rolling would touch the spot. But old Hen Peters seemed to be immune.
Now, in a debate, no man is supposed to have friends or relations, and he floors his man with anything that comes handy, and Hank never dreamed that Hen would hold hardness when he got over his mad fit. Hank and Fanny had things all fixed up, and had been pricing things at the Banner Store, and sitting up as late as two o'clock; but the next Sunday night she met him at the door and told him maybe he'd better not come into the sitting-room till her pa cooled off. Hank was knocked off his feet, and they stood out in the hall talking sort of tragic until old Hen yelled "Fanny!" from the sitting-room, and they pretty near jumped out of their skins, and stood farther apart, and Fanny went in. In the spring there was a row over the line fence, ending in a devil's lane. Fanny looked pretty blue, only when she was fighting with her pa. Hen would lecture about the two Peters brothers that came across in 1720, and how all Peterses that were not descended from them were Nimshies and impostors. "I despise and hate," says he, "a Nimshi and an impostor."
Then Fanny would shoot back a remark about the Iowa Herald's college, and when was her pa going to paint the Peters coat-of-arms on the hay-rake and the hog-house, using sarcasm that no man could understand after being out of school as long as her father had been. Sometimes the old man would forget the spurious registry of the Hank family in the Peters herd-book, and would argue that relations, even the most remote and back-fence kind, ought to be prosecuted if they even dreamed of marrying; and then Fanny would say that it is such a pleasure to know that folks are not always related when they claim to be. Hen would then cuss me for not taking care of my horses' shoulders or something, and things would get no better rapidly.
Young folks need to meet once in a while in order to keep right with each other, and Jim Miller and I often spoke of the way old Hen was splitting Hank and Fanny apart. Then an Illinois man come out and bought Hank out at a hundred an acre, and Hank wadded his money into his pocket, and bid good-by to the neighborhood for good and all. He never crossed the township line again. Fanny flirted like sixty, and cried when she was alone; but old Hen was as tickled as a colt.
It seemed like a judgment on Hen for driving as good a man as Hank to Dakota to have Fillmore Smythe begin yelping on his trail. His first yelp was a letter, asking Hen to call and pay a three-hundred-dollar note Fillmore had for collection. And here's where the law begins to seep into the story. Hen had Fanny type-write a scorching answer, saying that Hen Peters had discounted his bills since before Fillmore Smythe was unfortunately born, and didn't owe no man a cent; and Hen was so mad that he kicked a fifty-dollar collie pup, and hurt its feelings so it never would work, but went to killing young pigs and sheep the way a collie will if you ever sour their nature by licking them. Funny about collies.