Peck's Bad Boy in an airship — George W. Peck

PECK’S BAD BOY IN AN AIRSHIP

“Take That from Your Little Hennery.”

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Peck’s Bad Boy
in an Airship

By Hon. Geo. W. Peck

Author of Peck’s Bad Boy, Peck’s Bad Boy Abroad, Peck’s Bad Boy With the Circus, Peck’s Bad Boy With the Cowboys, Etc.

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Humorous and Interesting

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.

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Illustrated by Charles Lederer
The Celebrated Illustrator and Cartoonist

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CHICAGO
STANTON and VAN VLIET CO.
PUBLISHERS

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CONTENTS.

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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 15

CHAPTER II.

No Encouragement for Inventive Genius in Orphan Home—The Boy Uses His New Invention, a Patent Clothes Wringer, in Milking 28

CHAPTER III.

The Boy Escapes from Orphan Asylum—The Boy and His Chum Had Red Letter Days—The Boy is Adopted by New Friends 42

CHAPTER IV.

A Bad Railroad Wreck—The Boy Contrasts Their Ride to One in a Parlor Car—The Lawyer is the Greatest Man on Earth—The Boy Settles His Claim for $20 55

CHAPTER V.

The Bad Boy Leaves St. Louis in a Balloon—The Boy Makes a Trip to San Francisco and Joins Evans’ Fleet—The Police Arrest Boy and Tie Up Balloon 67

CHAPTER VI.

The Balloon Lands in Delaware—The Boy Visits the Battleships—They Scour the Boy With a Piece of Brick and Some Laundry Soap—The Boy Investigates the Mechanism of the Battleships—The Boy Goes With the Ships as a Mascot 78

CHAPTER VII.

A Storm Comes from the Coast of Cuba—Everyone Goes to Sleep on the Ship Except the Watchman and Pilot—The Bad Boy is Put in the Dungeon—The Captain Says to Throw the Boy Overboard to Feed the Sharks 91

CHAPTER VIII.

The Boy Dresses Up in His Sunday Clothes and Tells the Captain He is Ready to Die—The Crew Throw a Steer Overboard to Feed a School of Sharks—The Boy Produces His New Electric Battery—The Bad Boy Makes a Trip to France to Meet His Pa 104

CHAPTER IX.

The Bad Boy Arrives in France—The Boy’s Pa is Suspected of Being an Anarchist—The Boy Finds Pa Seated at a Large Table Bragging About America—He Told Them the Men in America Were All Millionaires and Unmarried 131

CHAPTER X.

Pa Had the Hardest Time of His Life in Paris—Pa Drinks Some Goat Milk Which Gives Him Ptomaine Poison in His Inside Works—Pa Attends the Airship Club in the Country—Pa Draws on American Government for $10,000 145

CHAPTER XI.

The Boy and His Pa Leave France and Go to Germany, Where They Buy an Airship—They Get the Airship Safely Landed—Pa and the Boy With the Airship Start for South Africa—Pa Shows the Men What Power He Has Over the Animal Kingdom 157

CHAPTER XII.

All Kinds of Climates in South Africa—Pa Hires Men to Capture Wild Animals—The Boy and His Pa Capture Some Tigers and a Big Lion—They Have a Narrow Escape from a Rhinoceros 170

CHAPTER XIII.

Pa Was a Hero After Capturing Two Tigers and a Lion—Pa Had an Old Negro With Sixty Wives Working for Him—Pa Makes His Escape in Safety—Pa Goes to Catch Hippopotamusses 181

CHAPTER XIV.

Pa Was Blackmailed and Scared Out of Lots of Money—Pa Teaching the Natives to Speak English—Pa Said the Natives Acted Like Human Beings—Pa Buys Some Animals in the Jungle 194

CHAPTER XV.

The Idea of Airships is All Right in Theory, but They are Never Going to Be a Reliable Success—Pa Drowns the Lions Out With Gas—The Bad Boy and His Pa Capture a Couple of Lions—Pa Moves Camp to Hunt Gorillas 207

CHAPTER XVI.

The Boy’s Pa Shows Bravery in the Jungles in Africa—Four Gorillas Chase Pa—The Boy and His Pa Don’t Sleep Much at Night—The Boy Discovers a Marsh Full of Wild Buffaloes 220

CHAPTER XVII.

The Boy’s Experience With an African Buffalo—The Boy’s Pa Shoots Roman Candles to Scare the Buffaloes—The Boy’s Pa Tames the Wild Animals 234

CHAPTER XVIII.

The Boy and His Pa Start for the Coast in an Airship—Pa Saluted the Crowd as We Passed Over Them—The Airship Lands Amid a Savage Tribe—The King of the Tribe Escorts Pa and the Boy to the Palace 246

CHAPTER XIX.

The Boy’s Pa Becomes King over the Negroes—Pa Shows the Natives How to Dig Wells—Pa Teaches the Natives to become Soldiers—The Boy Uses a Dozen Nigger Chasers and Some Roman Candles—The Boy, His Pa and the Natives Assist at the 4th of July Celebration 258

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ILLUSTRATIONS.

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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.

Pa’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.

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Peck’s Bad Boy in an Airship.

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CHAPTER I.

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.

When 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 shall 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 the 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 in her arms and hug me, and say, “Poor little boy, I will be a sister to you,” but there was 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 rough 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, and 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 everything necessary around a farm.

Before I was set to work I had a few minutes of silent reflection, and I thought of 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 had 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 with 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 the 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.”

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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 have 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 ahead, 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 there 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 back 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 me, 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, and 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 for 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 of 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.

Did you ever have an idea strike you so sudden that it made you dizzy? Well, I was struck with one so quick that it made me snicker, and I pulled my new chum away and told him how we would get supper and a place to sleep, and that was to go into the woods near where the people were looking up into the air, and when a balloon went over, after it got good and dark, we could set up a yell, as though murder was being done, and when the crowd came to see what was the matter, he could say we fell out of a balloon, and landed in a tree and squirmed down to the ground.

Well, I didn’t want to lie, but my chum, who had once been in a Reform School, did not care so much about lying, so he was to do the talking and I was to be deaf and dumb, as though the fall from the balloon had knocked me silly.

Well, when we saw a light in the sky over us and the people were going wild over thinking they saw a balloon, we began to scream like wild cats, and groan like lost souls, and yell for “help, help.” When the people came on the run, and when they found us with our clothes torn, and our hair standing on end, and our eyes bulging out, and my chum, the old liar, said when we were leaning over the basket of the balloon to see what town we were passing over, we fell out in a tree, and we were so hungry.

“Tossed him over the fence.”

Well, the way those good people swallowed that yarn was too comical, and they picked us up and took us into a house. A pussy woman got me under her arm and said “Poor dear, every bone in his body is busted, but I saw him first, and I am going to have him mended and keep him for a souvenir,” and I hung my legs and arms down so I would be heavy, and she dragged me to the house. All I said was, “pie, pie, pie,” and she said I was starving for pie, and when they got us in bed, with nice night shirts on, they crowded around us and began to feed us, and we took everything from soup to mints, and went to sleep, and the last thing I heard was balloon talk, and the woman who drew me in the shuffle said, “The ways of Providence are past finding out,” and as I rolled over in bed I heard my chum in another bed say “You can bet your sweet life,” and then the people began to go away, talking about the narrow escape of those dear boys, and my pussy fat lady held my hand and stroked my aching stomach until long after midnight, and then she tip-toed off to bed.

I spoke to my chum and said, “Did it work out all right?” and he groaned and said, “Gee, but I et too much, I otter have saved some of it for breakfast,” and then we went to sleep in nice feather beds instead of those beds at the orphanage made of breakfast food.

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CHAPTER III.

The Boy Escapes from Orphan Asylum—The Boy and His Chum Had Red Letter Days—The Boy Is Adopted by New Friends.

There is not much fun in being an orphan until you escape from the orphan asylum, and I want to say that my chum and myself have had two red letter days in the town where we seemed to drop out of a balloon into the hearts of the country people.

They took up a subscription to buy clothes for us, and dressed us up, and we looked as though we had been clothing dummies in front of a clothing store, and then the people got into a quarrel as to who should adopt us.

A farmer drew my chum and wanted him to get acquainted with some mules and drive six mules to haul fertilizer on the farm. My chum had to set on a saddle on one mule, and drive the other five mules by using one line, which he pulled and hauled to make them gee round grand right and left.

The fat woman adopted me because I was such a dear little thing. She was one of those hay widows, whose husband got plenty of her sauce, and took to the tall timber, and all she wanted to do was to hug me, and tell me that if I had not dropped into her life, out of that balloon, she would have kicked the bucket, and I thought of how any bucket I ever saw would have collapsed, for she had a foot like a fiddle box.

She made me tell her the story of my past life, and when she found I was Peck’s Bad Boy, and I thought I had made my story so sanguinary that she would want me to go away, so she could have a quiet life, she just froze to me and said she could see that she had been selected by Providence to take the badness out of me, and she went to work hypnotizing me, and giving me absent treatment on my meals, to take my strength for wickedness away, and then she got me so weak I could not hug back when she squeezed me, and you can imagine the condition a growing boy would be in who could not do his share of the hugging.

The second day of my sentence to be her adopted son, with all my crimes on my head, she let me go out on the farm to visit my chum, and there is where my whole new life changed.

My chum was driving his mules around the farm, and I was riding behind him on the wheel mule, when a balloon from St. Louis came over, and the men in the balloon yelled to us to grab hold of the rope as they wanted to land in the field. The mules began to act up and my chum couldn’t control them, and I jumped off the mule and grabbed the rope and gave it a hitch around the pole of the wagon, and that settled it with the mules. They rolled their fawn like eyes around at the great gas bag that was swaying over the wagon, with the two men yelling, and the mules started to run, with the wagon and the balloon, around that field, the balloon striking the fence occasionally, and a tree once in a while, the men yelling for us to cut the rope, and the mules braying and saying mule prayers, and me chasing along to try and cut the rope, and my chum hanging on to the ears of the wheel mule, and the farmers rushing into the field from every direction to stop the mules, and the men in the balloons using the worst language.

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

The mules had run around the field several times, and the balloon was doing its best to keep up, when I yelled to the men in the balloon, “Why don’t you throw out your anchor?” and they then seemed to recollect about the anchor, and they threw it out, and when it caught fast in the ground the mules pulled loose from the wagon and went through a fence, and started for Texas, and I guess they are going yet. My chum got off all right, except he was so scared he could not stand up. Well, we had a time straightening things out, the farmers wanted to lynch the balloon men, and make them pay for the mules, but in rolling up the balloon to take to the station, to ship to St. Louis, I found a mail bag, and I told the farmers these balloonists were carrying the U. S. mail, and any man that laid hands on the government mail could be imprisoned for life for treason, and I scared the farmers so they gave the balloonists their dinner, and hauled the balloon to the station with the whole bunch of us, and when the balloonists went away on the train they told my chum and me that if we would come to St. Louis they would give us jobs carrying off balloons, and they would teach us how to fly. Gee, but that was nuts for us. To rise, at once, from being mule drivers and adopted boys, to a place in balloon society, was what we wanted, and my chum and I deserted our more or less happy homes and began to plan to jump a freight train bound for St. Louis.

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

We laid down on the platform of the station that night and went to sleep and I dreamed that I sailed across the ocean in a balloon, and landed in a park in Paris, and when the populace came to welcome us to dear old France, Pa was one of the first to see me, and he fell upon my neck, and when the people were going to give me a reception, and a cross of the Legion of Honor, for being the first to cross the ocean in a balloon, Pa told them I was his boy, and Pa wanted to take all the credit for my grand achievement, and when I woke up a watchman at the station kicked us off the platform like we were tramps, and we walked down the tracks and were so mad we wanted to throw stones at the switch lights, and my chum wanted to put a tie on the track to wreck a train, but I persuaded him that it was that kind of revenge that caused the enmity between tramps and the richer class. Then he wanted to set fire to a tank car of kerosene, because Rockafeller owned the railroad, and the watchman who kicked us was an agent of the Standard Oil Company. If I hadn’t been a pretty good citizen there would have been a bon-fire sure, but I showed my chum that we were only temporary tramps, and that in a few days we would achieve success, and own railroads, and that we should show an example of patience, and strive to become members of the four hundred. So we refrained from getting even, and Rockafeller was not kept awake by hearing that another tank car of oil had gone skyward.

We were pretty hungry, but tightened up our belts and pretty soon a freight car stopped on a side track and a brakeman came along with a lantern and I gave him the last half dollar I had and told him we wanted to land in St. Louis, and he looked us over and pointed to a car, and we hustled in and he locked the side door of the car, and we were alone in the dark, hungry and thirsty.

We found a part of a bale of hay, and scattered some on the floor and went to sleep, and I never slept better on a spring mattress, but I dreamed of home, and all the fun I had ever had, making it hot for other people, playing tricks on them, but now all was changed, and I felt that I was on my own resources, making my own way in the world, handicapped by always having an easy life.

Along towards daylight in the morning some horses began to paw and whinner and a colly dog began to bark in the car, and some sheep bleated in the car, and as morning came, and a little light came in the car, which was hitting the high places, running at high speed, so it shook us out of our hay bed, we looked around starved and stiff, and sick at heart.

When the train stopped I walked through the car, over bags of oats, and looked at the horses, and wished I was a horse. The dog was a watch dog, and when I got near him he snarled and grabbed a mouthful of my new pants and held on and shook me, and I yelled and got away.

As it grew lighter I saw a box near the dog, and in it were some square things that my practiced eye, as the son of an old hunter, told me were dog biscuit, a sort of petrified dough and meat scraps made for high class dogs that are not allowed to eat scraps from the table, and I told my chum we would have breakfast. It took me half an hour to steal a few dog biscuit away from that dog, and all the time he was trying to make his breakfast off of me, but I finally poked out enough for breakfast, and I called my chum to partake of the repast. He said he always had to have some kind of breakfast food before he ate meat, so I cut into a bag of oats, and gave him a handful, and there we sat and chewed away, trying to imagine that we were happy, and thinking of coffee and pancakes and sausage, and waffles, and biscuit and honey.

It was probably the worst breakfast ever eaten by anybody. The dog biscuits were so hard we had to pound them on the floor with a currycomb, and that did not help the flavor much.

After breakfast we laid down on the hay with a horse blanket over us, and slept till noon, when we heard water being poured into the tin trough for the horses, and we quenched our thirst, and ate more dog biscuit, and I hoped that other boys would hear of our distress, and that no boys would ever run away from a happy home again.

My chum and I talked over the depression in the money market, and the panic in Wall street, and tried to think we were better off than millionaires who did not know where the next meal was coming from, and with our stomachs full, and no care on our minds, we wished we could give some of our dog biscuit to the hungry rich.

While we were thinking of the good one can do with a few dog biscuit, there was a terrible crash, the car jumped on the ties and reared up, and finally rolled over and down a bank and all was still as death, except that the boiler of the engine was blowing off steam, and the horses were groaning, and the confounded dog that chewed me was dead.

Men run over the cars, and chopped with axes, and finally a fire engine began to throw water on the burning cars, my chum and I were wedged under bales of hay, one of my legs was asleep, and we both yelled murder, and finally the fire was out, the side was chopped out of the car, and they took us out and put us in an ambulance and the brakeman who had let us into the car said, “Tickets, please,” and the ambulance was driven to a hospital at East St. Louis, and they wanted to amputate us, just for practice. One of the hospital attendants asked me who I was, and when I told him I was “Peck’s Bad Boy,” traveling for my health, he said, “Well, you are certainly getting what is coming to you,” and I guess that is no lie.

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CHAPTER IV.

A Bad Railroad Wreck—The Boy Contrasts Their Ride to One in a Parlor Car—The Lawyer Is the Greatest Man on Earth—The Boy Settles His Claim for $20.

The accident by the wrecking of the freight train on which my chum and myself were touring the country, viewing the scenery through an auger hole in the side of a box car, was a darn sight worse than I thought it was. What a come down it was for me, who have always traveled with pa, in a parlor car, to have to ride in a box car, with live stock, and feast on dog biscuit, instead of ordering from the menu in a dining car.

No one likes the luxuries of foreign travel any better than I do, but that freight car experience showed me that we do not know when we are well off, but when a boy goes out into the world to make his fortune, and cuts loose from home ties, and pie, and bath tubs, and a warm bed, and victuals such as mother makes, and winds up in a wreck, under a horse that he does not know the name of, he is going some.

When we got to the hospital a lawyer, who had chased the ambulance on a motorcycle, retained me as his client and offered to sue the railway company for a million dollars damage, and he would furnish all the evidence, and take half of what he got for his fee. I thought it was a good proposition, and probably I can own a railroad if I take stock for my damages, but I shall take nothing but money, and let my lawyer have the railroad stock. Gee, but a lawyer is the greatest man on earth. This one has been riding alongside the railroad track on a motorcycle for years, waiting for an accident, and when he selected me for a client he just cried for joy, and he has drawn a complaint against the Railroad Company that is a work of art.

Started on a stampede.

When he read it to me, and I saw how I had been broken up and damaged by the soulless corporation, and how my promising career had been ruined, I never was so overcome in my life. While I was not hurt any, except where the horse laid on me and squeezed my dog biscuits in my stomach so my backbone was poulticed by the chewed biscuit, the lawyer had the doctors at the hospital put my legs and arms in plaster of paris casts, and had my body done up in splints and bandages, and my face covered with strips of court plaster, until nothing but my mouth was in working order, and I wore out a nurse bringing me things to eat, and I never enjoyed myself more in my life than I did in that hospital, just eating and being petted by good looking nurses.

My lawyer told me to groan all the time when anybody was present, and when a railroad lawyer called at the hospital to take an invoice of my wounds, and my lawyer was present to see that I groaned plenty, it was all I could do to keep from laughing, but my lawyer would run a paper knife into my slats every time I quit groaning, so we were working the railroad all right, and the hospital doctors, who were going to have a share in the money, made a list of my broken bones, and the railroad lawyer wanted to be shown every break in my anatomy.

Well things went on this way for several days, and I was getting nervous from the plaster casts on me.

I didn’t like it very much when the railway lawyer offered to settle for five dollars, claiming I was a tramp stealing a ride, but he brought my chum to see me, and my chum who had his neck twisted around by a bale of hay falling on him, settled for twenty dollars, and so I did the same, and when the nurses were asleep in the afternoon, my chum and me left the hospital with forty good dollars, and started across the bridge for St. Louis, to find the air ships.

We were sitting down on a railroad track, at the east entrance to the bridge, and I had taken off my clothes, and was breaking the plaster of paris off my limbs, when my lawyer came along on his motorcycle, on the way to the hospital to make me groan some more, and when he saw us he had a fainting spell, and when I told him we had been discharged cured, he said it was hard for a deserving lawyer to be knocked out of a half million dollar fee by a dumb fool client who didn’t know enough to look out for his own interests, and he was going to have us arrested for highway robbery, but I told him I wouldn’t have known what to do with so much money if we had kanoodled the railroad out of a million dollars, in addition to a free ride on its palatial freight car, and besides it would be cheating, and the lawyer drew a long sigh and told us to get out of the country and he would continue the suit on the ground that we had been injured so bad that we became insane and jumped into the river, and he offered to throw us in the river, but we jumped on a street car and went across to St. Louis in search of the park where the balloon man was that had offered us a job riding in balloons.

We found the man and he said they were all going to start for somewhere the next morning and we could go along, my chum in one balloon and I in another, and all we would have to do was to throw out ballast when told to do so, and open cans of stuff to eat, and for us to buy thick sweaters, and show up at nine o’clock in the morning, and write the address where we wanted our remains sent to in case we were killed, and pin the address on our sweaters.

It wasn’t cheerful and my chum and I talked it over until late that night, and I am sorry to say my chum showed a streak of yellow, and he confessed to me that he was a coward, and came from a family of cowards, and that he didn’t have sand enough to go up in a balloon, and he would let me go up, but he would rather stay on the ground, where he could feel the earth with his feet, and watch the balloons.

He said that people who go up in balloons were either crazy, or had met with some disappointment in life, and took the balloon method of committing suicide, and he would side step balloons, and if the time ever came when he was tired of life, he would take a job firing on an engine, or go into burglary, or get in love with some old man’s wife, or marry a chorus girl, or something that would be fatal, but on land.

Gee, but I was disappointed in my chum. He had been in a reform school, and I thought he had gravel in his crop, but he proved to have the chilblains, and so I went to the balloon man in the morning alone, and told him I had made my will, and was ready to go up to heaven or down to Helena, Arkansas, any minute he was ready, but my chum had weakened and gone glimmering.

I got in the basket and looked things over, and jumped out and in several times, and asked questions of the two men who were to go up in it, and they seemed pleased that I was not afraid, and they asked me if I thought my father would make a kick if I was killed or lost at sea, or anything, and I told them from my last conversation with Pa I thought he would take it as a kindness if they should find it convenient to spill me out somewhere or lose me, and when they landed, if they could make affidavit that I had been permanently disposed of, like a mess of kittens under water in a bag, with a stone in it, that Pa would be willing to cough up quite a premium.

That held them for a little while, and then they asked me who I was, anyway, and when I told them that I was the only original “Peck’s Bad Boy,” they said that from their recollection of my tricks on my father they could readily see how a fatality might be a blessing, and they seemed relieved of any responsibility, and we went to work to get things in the basket, and they instructed me what I was to do.

The basket was about nine feet square, and it had more things in it than a delicatessen store.

At about ten o’clock in the morning, with thousands of people watching the balloons, they began to cut loose and go shooting into the air, and it was a race.

The man told me that the balloon that went the farthest from St. Louis before being compelled to land would get the prize, and I began to feel anxious to have our balloon win.

I watched those that started first, and they went up so far I could only see little specks in the sky, and I thought of balloons I had seen go up on fair grounds, where a girl sat on a trapeze bar, and jumped off, and a parachute opened and took her safely to the ground, and I looked around our balloon for a parachute, but there was none, and I wondered what would happen if the balloon came down, with its gas all escaped, like the fair ground balloon, and there is where I came the nearest to weakening and climbing out, but I thought if I did I would be a coward like my chum, and then I thought if those two grown men, with families depending on them for support, were going up, they were not doing it for any suicidal purpose, and I could go if they could, and when the boss man said, “Now, Bub, if you want to stay ashore, this is your last chance,” I said, “Your little Hennery is ready to go where you go, and you can’t tie her loose any too soon to suit me,” and he patted me on the head and said, “Hennery, you sure are game,” and then all was ready and he said to them to let go. My heart went up and rubbed against my palate, and the balloon made a jump like a horse going over a five foot fence, advertising a brand of whiskey, and we shot up into the air, the people yelling, and I saw my chum sitting on a dray, driving a mule, and I thought of the difference between a brave boy and a mucker like my chum, the houses began to look smaller, until St. Louis looked like play houses, with a ribbon of gray on the side of it, which was the river.

The boss looked at a machine and said we were five miles high, and I thought how I had always enjoyed high life, and I was trying to get my heart swallowed down where it belonged.

The balloon basket was as steady as a house, and I got up and looked over the side of the basket, and it seemed awful, cause I had never been higher than the top of a twenty story building before, and I began to weep tears, and the air seemed queer, and I was just going to faint when the boss told me to open a can of lobsters, and I woke up.

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CHAPTER V.

The Bad Boy Leaves St. Louis in a Balloon—The Boy Makes a Trip to San Francisco and Joins Evans’ Fleet—The Police Arrest Boy and Tie Up Balloon.

When our balloon left St. Louis, and got up in the air so far that the earth looked like a piece of rag carpet, with pop corn scattered over it, which were villages, and I realized that if anything busted, we would be dropping for hours before we struck a church steeple, and would be so dead when we hit the ground, and stiff and cold that we would be driven down in the mud so far no one would ever find us, and I looked at the two fool men in the basket with me, who didn’t seem to care what became of them, as though they were unhappily married or had money in a shaky bank, I began to choke up, and the tears came to my eyes, and I took a long breath of thin air, and fainted dead away.

When I fainted we were being driven south, and when I came to, with a smell of ammonia on my hair, we were going east, and the balloon had gone down within a mile of the earth, and the men gave me some hot tea out of a patent bottle, and pretty soon I began to enjoy myself and wonder if I could hit a mess of negroes picking cotton in a field, with a sand bag.

When you are up in the air so far that a policeman cannot reach you, you feel loose enough to insult men that would knock your block off if you should give them any lip when you were on the ground.

We came down a half a mile more, and I asked the boss man if I might throw a sand bag at the negroes, and he said I might throw a bundle of advertisements for liver pills at them, so I yelled, “Hello, you black rabbits,” and when the negroes looked up and saw the balloon, they turned pale, and dropped on their knees, and I guess they began to pray, and I didn’t mean to interfere with their devotions, so I threw a bottle of ginger ale at a mule hitched to a wagon near them, and when the bottle struck the mule on the head and exploded and the ginger ale began to squirt all over the colored population, the mule run one way with the wagon, and the negroes ran for the cane brakes. The boss man in the balloon complimented me on being a good shot, and said I had many characteristics of a true balloonist, and probably before we got to the end of the trip I would get so I could hit a church steeple with a bag of ballast, and break up a Sunday School in the basement. He said that being up in the rarefied air made a man feel as though he would like to commit murder, and I found out that was so, for the next town we passed over, when all the people were out in the main street, and the balloon man told me to throw over a bag of sand, so we could go up higher, instead of trying to throw the bag into a field, where there was nobody to be hurt or frightened, do you know, I shied that bag at a fountain in the public square and laughed like a crazy person when the water splashed all over the crowd, and the fountain was smashed to pieces, and the pirates in the balloon complimented me, and yet, when those men are at home, on the ground, they are christian gentlemen, they told me, so I made up my mind that if ballooning became a fashionable pastime, those who participated in it would become murderers, and the people on the ground would shoot at a balloonist on sight.

We went up so high that we were out of range of people on the ground, so you couldn’t pick out any particular person to hit with a bundle of pickle advertisements, so you had to shoot into a flock, and run chances of winging somebody, so I did not enjoy it, but along towards evening we passed over a town in Tennessee or Kentucky, where there was a race track, and races going on, and just as we got over it I said to the boss balloon man, “Just watch me break up that show,” and I pitched overboard a whole mass of advertisements of different things we carried, and two bundles hit the grand stand, and exploded, and about a million circulars advertising pills and breakfast food struck the track, just as the horses were in the home stretch, and of all the stampedes you ever saw that was the worst, horses running away, riders fell off, carriages tipped over, and the people in the grand stand falling over themselves, and as we sailed along none of us seemed to care two whoops whether anybody was killed or not. It was the craziness of being up in the air, and not caring for responsibility, like a drunken chauffeur running a crazy automobile through a crowd of children, and acting mad because they were in the way of progress.

We laughed and chuckled at the sensation we had caused, but cared no more for the results than a hired girl who starts a fire with kerosene.

It came on dark after a while, and all we had to do was to look at the stars and the moon, and it seemed to me that the stars were as big as locomotive headlights, and that you could see into them, and on several of the largest stars I was sure I could see people moving, and the moon seemed so near that you could catch the smile of the man in the moon, and see him wink at you.

The two men had to remain awake all night, but after awhile I said I guessed I would have my berth made up, and the boss man handed me a shredded wheat biscuit for a pillow, and laid me down by the sand bags and the canned food, and threw a blanket over me, and I slept all night, sailing over states, the balloon moving so still there was no sound at all.

I woke up once or twice and listened for a street car, or some noise to put me to sleep again, and found myself wishing there was a fire, so a fire department would go clanging by, making a noise that would be welcome in the terrible stillness.

I dreamed the awfulest dreams, and thought I saw Pa, in another balloon, with a rawhide in his hand, chasing me, and the great bear in the heavens seemed to be getting up on his hind legs, with his mouth open, ready to hug me to his hairy chest.

It was a terrible night, and at daylight the boss man woke me up and I looked over the side of the basket and we were going across a piece of water where there were battle ships lined up like they were at San Diego, when Cevera’s fleet was smashed, and the men said now was the time to demonstrate whether balloons would be serviceable in case of war, and told me to take a bundle of malted milk advertisements, and imagine it was a dynamite bomb, and see if I could land it on the deck of a big white battleship. I took a good aim and let the bundle go and it struck on deck just in front of a cross looking man in a white uniform, and scattered all over the deck and the sailors and marines came up on deck in a wild stampede, and threw the malted milk advertisements overboard, and as we sailed on there was an explosion of red hot language from the cross looking man in the white uniform, and the boss balloon man said, “That is a good shot, Bub, for you landed that bundle of alleged dynamite square on the deck of Admiral Bob Evans’ flagship. Didn’t you hear him swear?” and then we went on, and the man in the white uniform was shaking his fists and his mouth was working overtime, but we couldn’t hear the brand of profanity he was emitting, but we knew he was going some, for before we got out of hearing the bugles were sounding on more than a dozen battleships, the men came up from below and took positions in the rigging and everywhere, and all was live with action, and the boss balloon man said the fleet was preparing for its trip around the horn, to San Francisco, and then I told the balloon man that he couldn’t land me a minute too quick, because I was going to join that fleet and go with Bob Evans, if I never did another thing in my life.

Hit the Chief of Police with a Bottle.

The inspiration came to me up there in the rarefied air, and I was as sure I was going around the Horn as though I was already on one of the ships.

We sailed along part of the day and the gas began to give out, and I had to throw over ballast, and open cans of food, and bottles of stuff to drink, and I made some good shots with the sand bags and the bottles. Once I hit right in front of a brakeman on a freight train with a bottle of soda water, and again I hit an oyster schooner with a sand bag and must have chuckled at least a barrel of oysters. The gas kept escaping, and presently we came down in a field in Delaware, after I had hit a chief of police in Wilmington with a bottle of beer, which is a crime in a prohibition country, and after we landed the police arrested the two balloon men, and tied up the balloon. They paid me thirty dollars for my services, and I took a train for Fortress Monroe to join the fleet, and left the two balloon men on the way to a whipping post.

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