The Adventures of Jimmy Brown

by W. L. Alden

They knew what was the matter, and jumped right up and got their pillows, and went at us so fierce that they drove us out into the hall. Of course this made a good deal of noise, for we knocked over the wash-stand in the room, and upset a lot of lamps that were on the table in the hall, and every time I hit one of the boys he would say "Ouch!" so loud that anybody that was awake could hear him. We fought all over the hall, and as we began to get excited we made so much noise that Mr. Travers got up and came out to make us keep quiet.

It was pretty dark in the hall, and though I knew Mr. Travers, I thought he couldn't tell me from the other boys, and I thought I would just give him one good whack on the head, and then we'd all run up-stairs. He wouldn't know who hit him, and, besides, who ever heard of a fellow being hurt with a pillow?

So I stood close up by the wall till he came near me, and then I gave him a splendid bang over the head. It sounded as if you had hit a fellow with a club, and Mr. Travers dropped to the floor with an awful crash, and never spoke a word.

I NEVER WAS SO FRIGHTENED IN MY LIFE.

I never was so frightened in my life, for I thought Mr. Travers was killed. I called murder help fire, and every body ran out of their rooms, and fell over trunks, and there was the most awful time you ever dreamed of. At last somebody got a lamp, and somebody else got some water and picked Mr. Travers up and carried him into his room, and then he came to and said, "Where am I Susan what is the matter O now I know."

He was all right, only he had a big bump on one side of his head, and he said that it was all an accident, and that he wouldn't have Sue scold me, and that it served him right for not remembering that boarding-house pillows are apt to be loaded.

The next morning he made me bring him my pillow, and then he found out how it came to hurt him. All the chicken bones, and the gravel-stones, and the chunks of wood that were in the pillow had got down into one end of it while we were having the fight, and when I hit Mr. Travers they happened to strike him on his head where it was thin, and knocked him senseless. Nobody can tell how glad I am that he wasn't killed, and it's a warning to me never to have pillow fights except with pillows that I know are not loaded with chicken bones and things.

I forgot to say that after that night my mother and all the boys' mothers took all the pillows away from us, for they said they were too dangerous to be left where boys could get at them.