PECK’S BAD BOY IN AN AIRSHIP

“Take That from Your Little Hennery.”

A story relating the adventures of Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa who are sent to Europe to investigate airships with an idea of using them in the United States Navy. Tells of their adventures in Europe also in South Africa where the airship is used in hunting wild animals.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

Gee, My Ideas of an Orphan Home Got a Shock.

The Way Freshmen Do in College When They’re Being Murdered.

Gosh, But I Never Had Such an Excursion.

Grabbed the Balloon Rope and Gave it a Hitch Around the Pole.

Any Man That Lays Hands on the Government Mail Can Be Imprisoned for Life for Treason.

Hit the Chief of Police With a Bottle.

They Pulled Me Through the Forty-Foot Gun to Swab it Out.

When it Exploded the Jap Was the Scaredest Person I Ever Saw.

The Boss of the Boat Ordered Me Pulled Out With a Boat Hook.

I Am Thy Father’s Ghost—Come on in, the Water’s Fine.

The Captain Got Upon a Chair and Pulled a Revolver and Was Going to Shoot.

I Gave Him a Squeeze That Sent a Shock Through Him That Loosened His Teeth.

10Pa’s Face Was Scratched So They Sent Him to the Pest House.

After Pa Had Been Ducked in the Fountain They Charged for Two Ducks He Killed by Falling on Them.

The Fireworks Went Off. The Woman Threw a Fit and Pa Raised Out of the Smoke.

Up She Went With the Inventor Steering and Pa Hanging on for Dear Life.

Pa Gave a Honk Honk Like an Auto, But the Lion Wasn’t Frightened So You Would Notice.

When Pa Found the Snake Coiled Up on His Blanket He Threw a Fit.

Looking Him Square in the Face I began to Chant, Ene-Mene-Miny-Mo.

Pa Astride of a Zebra, Has Frightened the Elephants Into a Stampede by Playing “A Hot Time” on a Mouth Organ.

Pa Made a Lunge and Fell on Top of the Little Elephant, Which Began to Make a Noise Like a Baby.

“There’s Your Lions, About a Dozen, Captured Down in That Hole; Help Yourselves,” Said Pa.

“Get in There, You Measly Cur Dog,” Said Pa, Kicking the Big Lion at Every Jump.

Pa Stopped the Music and Repeated an Old Democratic Speech of His, and They Acted Just Like a Caucus.

All He Had to Do Was Play “Supper is Now Ready in the Dining Car.”

Some of Those Negroes are Running Yet, and Will, No Doubt, Come Out at Cairo, Egypt.

Pa Had to Put His Foot on Their Necks and Acknowledge Him Their King and Protector.

CHAPTER I.

The Bad Boy Wants to Be an Orphan—The Bad Boy Goes to an Orphan Asylum—The Government Gives the Bad Boy’s Pa an Appointment to Travel Over the World and Get Information About Airships, Dirigible Balloons and Everything to Help Our Government Know What Other Governments Are Doing in Case of War.

I have always wanted to be an orphan and I guess now I have got my wish.

I have watched orphans a whole lot and they have seemed to me to have the easiest job outside of politics.

To see a good mess of orphans at an Orphan Asylum, with no parents to butt in and interfere with your enjoyment has seemed to me to be an ideal existence.

16When a boy has a father that he has to watch constantly to keep him from going wrong he has no time to have any fun, but to belong to a syndicate of orphans, with an easy old maid matron to look after the whole bunch, an individual orphan who has ginger in him can have the time of his young life. At least that is the way it has always seemed to me.

They set on the food at an orphanage, and if you have a pretty good reach, you can get enough corralled around your plate to keep the wolf from the door, and when it comes to clothes, you don’t have to go to a tailor, or a hand me down store, and take something you don’t want because it is cheap, but you take any clothes that are sent in by charitable people, which have been worn enough so there is no style about them, and no newness to wear off by rolling in the grass, and you put them on and let it go at that, if they do smell of moth balls.

Pa has skipped and I am left alone and I 17shall enter as a freshman in an Orphan Asylum, and later go out into the world and travel on my shape.

Pa took me to Washington and for a week he was visiting the different Departments, and nights he would talk in his sleep about air ships and balloons, and forts and battleships, and about going abroad, until I thought he was getting nutty.

One day he called me up to our room in the hotel and after locking the door, and plugging up the keyhole with chewed paper he said: “Now, Hennery, I want you to listen right out loud. The government has given me an appointment to travel over the world and get information about air ships, divagable balloons, and everything that will help our government to know what other governments are doing in inventing things to be used in case of war. I am to be the Billy Pinkerton of the War Department and shall have to spy in other governments, and I am to be the traveling diplomat of 18the government, and jolly all nations, and find out how things are running everywhere.

“You will have to stay home this time because you would be a dead give away, so I will send you to a nice orphan home where you will be taught to work, and where guards will keep you on the inside of the fence, and put you to bed in a straight jacket if you play any of your jokes, see?” and Pa gave me a ticket to an orphans’ home, and a letter of introduction to the matron and the next day I was an inmate, with all the degrees coming to me. What do you think of that, and Pa on the ocean, with a government commission in his pocket?

Gee, but my ideas of an orphans’ home got a shock when I arrived at the station where the orphans’ home was located. I thought there would be a carriage at the train to meet me, and a nice lady dressed in white with a cap on her head, to take me 19in her arms and hug me, and say, “Poor little boy, I will be a sister to you,” but there 20was no reception committee, and I had to walk a mile with my telescope valise, and when I found the place and went in the door, to present my letter to the matron, a man with a scar on his face, and one eye gone, met me and looked over my papers, and went, one eye on me, and called an assistant private and told him to take me and give me the first or entered apprentice degree.

Gee, My Ideas of an Orphan Home Got a Shock.

The private took me by the wrist and gave me a jerk and landed me in the laundry, and told me to strip off, and when I had removed my clothes and folded them and laid them on a table, he took the clothes away from me, and then told me to climb into a laundry tub, and he turned cold water on me and gave me a bar of yellow laundry soap, and after I had lathered myself he took a scrubbing brush, such as floors are scrubbed with, and proceeded in one full swoop to peel the hide off of me with a 21rough crash towel till you could see my veins and arteries, and inside works as well as though you had used X-rays, and when I was ready to die and wanted to, I yelled murder, and he put his hand over my mouth so hard that he loosened my front teeth, and I guess I died right there or fainted, for when I came to, and thought the resurrection morning, that they used to tell me about in the Sunday School, had come. I found myself dressed in a sort of combination shirt and drawers, like a bunny nightie, made of old saddle blankets, and he told me that was the uniform of the orphanage and that I

could go out and play for fifteen minutes, after which the bell would ring and I could go from play to work. Gosh, but I was glad to get out doors, but when I began to breathe the fresh air, and scratch myself where the saddle blanket clothes pricked me, about fifty boys, who were evidently sophomores in the orphanage, came along, 22and made a rush for me, to haze me as a freshman.

Well, they didn’t do a thing to me. They tied a rope around one ankle, and threw the rope over a limb, and pulled me off the ground, and danced a war dance around me and run thistles up my trouser’s legs, and spanked me with a board with slivers in it, and let me down and walked over me in a procession, singing “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night.” I laughed all the time, because that is the way freshmen do in college when they are being murdered, and I thought my new associates would like me better if I died game. Just before I died game the bell rang, and the one eyed pirate and his chief of staff came out and said we would go to work, and the boys were divided into squads and put to work, some husking corn, others sweeping up dead leaves, others milking cows, and doing 23everything necessary around a farm.

Before I was set to work I had a few minutes of silent reflection, and I thought 24of my changed condition from my porcelain lined bath tub with warm water and soft towels, to that bath in the laundry, and the skinning process of preparing a boy for a better life.

The Way Freshmen Do in College When They’re Being Murdered.

Then what do you suppose they set me to work at? Skinning bull heads and taking out the insides. It seems the boys catch bull heads in a pond, and the bull heads are used for human food, and the freshest boys were to dress them. Well, I wasn’t going to kick on anything they gave me for a stunt, so I put on an apron, and for four hours I skinned and cut open bull heads in a crude sort of way, until I was so sick I couldn’t protect myself from the assaults of the live bull heads, and the cook said I done the job so well that she would ask to have me skin all the bull heads after that. I said I would rather milk cows so the pirate gave me a milk pail and told me to go and milk the freckled cow, and I went up to the cow as I 25had seen farmers do, and sat down on a wooden camp stool and put the pail under the cow, and began to squeeze the Summer Sausages she wore under her stomach, four of ’em, and the more I squeezed the more there didn’t any milk come, and the cow looked around at me in a pitying sort of way, but the milk did not arrive on schedule

time, and then I thought of a farmer I once saw kick a cow in the slats, and I thought maybe that was the best way to cause the milk to hurry and flow, so I got up off the stool and hauled off my hind leg and gave that cow a swift kick that sent her toes clear in to her liver and lights and sausage covers.

Well I thought it was a car of dynamite running into an elevator and exploding, but the boys that picked me up and poured milk on my face to bring me to, said it was not an explosion, but that the cow had reared up in front and kicked up behind, and struck me with all four feet, and had hooked me 26with her horns, and switched me with her tail, and pawed me with her forward feet, and licked my hair with her tongue, and laid down and rolled on me. Well, I certainly looked it. Gee, but I don’t want any more farmer’s life in mine.

I certainly thought that was the way to cause a cow to give milk. Maybe I ought to have sworn at her the way the farmer did. I remember now, that he used language not fit to print, but I have not taken the swearing degree yet.

Well, they got me braced up so I could go to dinner, and it was surely a sumptuous repast, fried bull heads and bread. I have eaten fish at home and at hotels, where you had ketchup, and celery, and vegetables, and gravy, and pie, and good things, but to sit down with fifty boys and eat just bull heads, and stale bread, and try to look pleasant like you were at a banquet, was one on your little Hennery that made him feel that 27the pleasures of being an orphan had been over drawn.

Gosh, but the boys tell me we have bull heads here six times a week, because they don’t cost anything, and that the bones stick through your skin so they hold your clothes on.

I am organizing a union among the boys and we are going to call a strike, and if the pirate with one eye does not grant all we ask, we are going to walk out in a body, and jump a freight train, and go out in the wide world to make our fortunes. I shall go look for pa. There can’t no man give me such a dirty shake. I feel like I had been left on a door step, with a note on the basket asking the finder to take good care of me “’cause I was raised a pet.”

CHAPTER II.

No Encouragement for Inventive Genius in Orphan Home—The Boy Uses His New Invention, a Patent Clothes Wringer, in Milking.

There is no encouragement for inventive genius in this orphans’ home that I am honoring with my patronage.

I always supposed that an orphanage was a place where they tried to make an orphan feel that it wasn’t such a great loss not to have a regular home, among your people as long as you could be lovingly cared for in big bunches by charitable people, who would act like a High School to you, and when you got a diploma from an orphans’ home you could go out into the world and hold up your head like a college graduate, but I can see from my experience at this alleged home that when we boys get out the police will 29have a tab on us, and we will be pinched like tramps.

What encouragement is there to learn anything but being chambermaid to cows? Gee, but I never want to look a cow in the face again. When I failed to milk that cow and she galloped all over the place, and kicked my liver around where my spleen ought to be, the one-eyed warden of the place told me I must practice on that cow till I got so that I could milk her with my eyes shut, and that I wouldn’t get much to eat until I could show him that I was a he-milkmaid of the thirty-third degree.

I told him I saw a machine last year at the State Fair that had a suction pump that was put on to the cow’s works, and by touching a button the milk and honey flowed into a pail, and if he would get such a machine I could touch the button all right. He said the orphanage couldn’t afford to buy such a machine, but if I wanted to invent any device to milk cows I could go 30ahead, but it was up to me to produce milk, one way or another.

Well, an idea struck me just like being hit with a base ball bat, and in a short time I was ready.

I got a clothes wringer out of the laundry, and went to corral the cow. I thought if a clothes wringer could squeeze the blue water out of a wash tub of clothes, it would squeeze a pail of milk out of a cow, so I took my clothes wringer and the milk pail and got under the cow and gathered all her four weiners together in my hands and put the ends of them between the rubber rollers, just easy, and the boys gathered round to see where my inventive genius was going to get off at. Then when my audience was all ready to cheer me, if the machine worked, I took hold of the handle of the machine, which was across my lap, and turned the crank with a yuck motion, until all the cow’s weiners went through between the rollers, and I noticed the cow flinched, and just 31there one of the sophomore boys threw a giant firecracker under the cow’s basement near the milk pail, and when the explosion came, just when I was cranking her up a second time and turning on the high speed clutch, the cow bleated as though she had lost her calf, and she went up into the air

like the cow that jumped over the moon, and she went across the country on a cavalry charge, with me hanging on the handle of the wringer with one hand, on her tail with the other, and the boys giving the orphan school yell, and the cow bellowing like a whole drove of cattle that have smelled blood around a slaughter house.

Gosh, but I never had such an excursion. The cow went around the house and on to the porch where the manager and some women were, and finally rushed into the kitchen, and everybody came and tied me loose from the cow, and got the clothes wringer off her vital parts, and shooed her 32back to the barn, and then they took me to the manager’s office, and I fainted away.

Gosh, But I Never Had Such an Excursion!

When I came to the one-eyed manager had a bandage over his nose where the handle of the clothes wringer hit him when he tried to turn the handle back to release the pressure on the cow’s bananas, and he was so mad you could hear him “sis,” like when you drop water on a hot griddle.

He got up and took me by the neck and wrung it just like I was a hen having its neck wrung when there is company coming and he dropped me “kerplunk” and said I had ruined the best cow on the place by flattening out her private affairs so that nothing but skim milk could ever get through the teats, and he asked me what in thunder I was doing, milking a cow with a clothes wringer, when I ought to have known that a clothes wringer would squeeze the milk up into the second story of the cow.

I told him I had never been a dairy farmer, anyway, and a cow was a new proposition to 34me, and he said I could go and live on bread and water till doomsday, and that I was the worst orphan he ever saw, and he pushed me out of the room.

The boys met me when I came out of the presence of the one-eyed manager, and we went off into the woods and held an indignation meeting, and passed resolutions condemning the management of the orphanage, and I suggested that we form a union and strike for shorter hours and more food, and if we did not get it, we could walk out, and make the orphan school business close up.

We discussed what we would do and say to the boss, and just before supper time we lined up in a body before the house and called out the manager and made our demands, and gave him fifteen minutes to accept, or out we would go, and I tell you we looked saucy.

I never saw anything act as quick as that strike did. In five minutes the manager came out and said he wouldn’t grant a thing, 35and besides we were locked out, and couldn’t ever get back into the place unless we crawled on our hands and knees and stood on our hind feet like dogs, and barked and begged for food, and he shut the door and the dining room was closed in our faces, and we were told to get off the place or they would set the dogs on us.

For a few minutes not a word was said, then the boys pitched on to me and another boy that had brought on the strike, and gave us a good licking, and made us run to the woods, and when we got nearly out of sight we turned and all the brave dubs that were going to break up the orphanage were down on their seats on the grass, begging like dogs to be taken back, because supper was ready, and my chum and me were pulling for tall timber, wondering where the next meal was coming from, and where we are going to sleep.

We were the only boys in that bunch of strikers that had sand enough to stand up 36for union principles, and as is usually the case the fellows who had the most gravel in their crops had little else, and I was never so hungry in my life.

A diet of fried bull heads and skim milk, and sour bread for a few days in the orphanage had left me with an appetite that ought to have had a ten course banquet at once, but we walked on for hours, and finally struck a railroad track and followed it to a town.

My chum stopped at a freight car on a side track and began to poke around one of the oil boxes on a wheel, and when I asked him what he was going to do, he said that to a hungry man the cotton waste and the grease in a hot box of a freight car was just as good as a shrimp salad, and he began to poke the stuff out of the hot box to eat it. He said the lives of tramps were often saved by eating out of hot boxes. I swore that I would never eat no hot box banquet, and I pulled him away from the box car just as a brakeman came along with a hook and a can 37of oil and a bucket of water to cool it off, and we escaped.

I told him we would have a good supper all right, if he would stick by me.

We went into the little town and it was getting dark, and all the people were out doors looking up into the sky, and saying, “there it is, I see it,” and I asked a man in front of a saloon what the excitement was about, and he said that they were watching the balloons from St. Louis, about two hundred miles away, which were sailing to the east.