The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack

by George W. Peck

  Say, we think in America that we have plenty of ways to rob the tenderfoot, but they give us cards and spades and little casino and beat us every time. Dad wanted to hire a hack and go back and finish that old woman with an ax, because he said he had a corpse coming to him, but the police told him he could be arrested for thinking murder, and that he was a dangerous man, and that they would give him 12 hours to get out of France, and so we bought tickets for Switzerland, though what we came here for I don’t know, only dad said it was a republic like America and he wanted to breathe the free air of mountains in the home of the Switzerkase.

  Well, anybody can have Switzerland if they want it. I will sell my interest cheap. The first three days we were here everybody wanted us to go out on the lake, said to be the most beautiful lake in the world, and we sailed on it, and rowed on it, and looked down into the clear water where it is said you can see a corpse on the bottom of the lake 100 feet down. We hadn’t lost any corpse, except the corpse of that old woman we run over at Nice, but we wanted to get the worth of our money, so we kept looking for days, but the search for a corpse becomes tame after awhile, and we gave it up. All we saw in the bottom of the lake was a cow, but no man can weep properly over the remains of a cow, and dad said they could go to the deuce with their corpses, and we just camped at the hotel till our money came. Say, that lake they talk so much about is no better than lakes all over Wisconsin, and there are no black bass or muskellunges in it.

  The tourists here are just daffy about climbing mountains and glaziers, and they talk about it all the time, and I could see dad’s finish. They told him that no American that ever visited Switzerland would be recognized when he got home if he had not climbed the glaziers, so dad arranged for a trip up into the sky. We went 100 miles or so on the cars, passing along valleys where all the cows wear tea bells, and it sounds like chimes in the distance. It is beautiful in Switzerland, but the cheese is something awful. A piece of native Swiss cheese would break up a family.

  At night we arrived at a station where we hired guides and clothes, and things, and the next morning we started. Dad wanted me to stay at the station a couple of days, while he was gone, and play with the goats, but I told him if there were any places in the mountains or glaziers any more dangerous than Paris or Monte Carlo, I wanted to visit them, so he let me go. Well, we were rigged up for discovering the north pole, and had alpenstocks to push ourselves up with, and the guides had ropes to pull us up when we got to places where we couldn’t climb. I could get along all right, but they had dad on a rope most of the time pulling him until his tongue run out and his face turned blue. But dad was game, and don’t you forget it.

  Before noon we got on top of a glazier, which is the ice of a frozen river, that moves all the time, sliding towards the sea.

  There was nothing but a hard winter, in summer, to the experience, and we would have gone back the same night, only dad slipped down a crevice about 100 feet with the rope on him, and the two guides couldn’t pull him up, and we had to send a lunch down to him on the rope and one of the guides had to go back to the village for help to get dad up. Well, sir, I think dad was nearer dead than he ever was before, but they sent down a bottle of brandy, and when he drank some of it the snow began to melt and he was warm enough to use bad language.

  He yelled to me that this was the limit and wanted to know how long they were going to keep him there. I yelled to him that one of the guides had gone for help to pull him out, and he said for them to order a yoke of oxen. I told him that probably he would have to remain there until spring opened and that I was going back to America and leave him there, and he better pray.

  I don’t know whether dad prayed, down there in the bowels of the mountains, but he didn’t pray when help came, and they finally hauled him up. His breath was gone, but he gave those guides some language that would set them to thinking if they could have understood him, and finally we started down the mountain. They kept the rope on dad and every little while he would slip and slide 100 feet or so down the mountain on his pants, and the snow would go up his trousers legs clear to his collar, and the exercise made him so hot that the steam came out of his clothes, and he looked like a locomotive wrecked in a snow bank blowing off steam.

  It became dark and I expected we would be killed, but before midnight we got to the station and changed our clothes and paid off the guides and took a train back. Dad said to me, as we got on the cars: “Now, Hennery, I have done this glazier stunt, just to show you that a brave man, whatever his age, is equal to anything they can propose in Europe, but by ginger, this settles it, and now I want to go where things come easier. I am now going to Turkey and see how the Turks worry along. Are you with me?” “You bet your life,” says I.

  Yours truly,

  Hennery.

  CHAPTER XV.

  Dad Plays He Is an Anarchist—They Give Alms to the Beggars and the Bad Boy Ducks a Gondolier and His Dad in the Grand Canal.

  Venice, Italy.—

  My Dear Old Chumireno: Dad couldn’t get out of Switzerland quick enough after he got thawed out the day after we climbed the glaziers. We found that almost all the tourists in Geneva were there because they did not want to go home and say they had not visited Switzerland, so they just jumped from one place to another. The people who stay there any length of time are like the foreign residents of Mexico, who are wanted for something they have done at home, that is against the law. There are more anarchists in Geneva than anything else, and they look hairy and wild eyed, and they plot to kill kings and drink beer out of two quart jars.

  When we found that more attention was paid to men suspected of crime in their own countries, and men who were believed to be plotting to assassinate kings, dad said it would be a good joke if a story should get out that he was suspected of being connected with a syndicate that wanted to assassinate some one, so I told a fellow that I got acquainted with that the fussy old man that tried to ride a glazier without any saddle or stirrup was wanted for attempting to blow up the president of the United States by selling him baled hay soaked in a solution of dynamite and nitro-glycerine.

  Say, they will believe anything in Switzerland. It wasn’t two hours before long-haired people were inviting dad to dinners, and the same night he was taken to a den where a lot of anarchists were reveling, and dad reveled till almost morning. When he came back to the hotel he said his hosts got all the money he had with him, through some game he didn’t understand, but he under stood it was to go into a fund to support deserving anarchists and dynamiters. He said when they found out he was a suspected assassin nothing was too good for him. He said they wanted to know how he expected to kill a president by soaking baled hay in explosives, and dad said it came to him suddenly to tell them that the president rode on horseback a good deal, and he thought if a horse was filled with baled hay, and nitro-glycerine and the president spurred the horse and the horse jumped in the air and came down kerchunk on an asphalt pavement, the horse would explode, and when the rider came down covered with sausage covers and horse meat, he would be dead, or would want to be. Dad said the anarchists went into executive session and took up a collection to send a man to Berlin to fill the emperor’s saddle horse with cut feed like dad suggested.

  Well, the anarchist story was too much for Switzerland, and the next morning dad was told by a policeman that he had to get out of the country quick, and it didn’t take us 15 minutes to pack up, and here we are in Venice.

  Well, say, old friend, this is the place where you ought to be, because nobody works here, that is, nobody but gondoliers. We have been here several days, and I have not seen a soul doing anything except begging, or selling things that nobody seems to want. If anybody buys anything but onions, it is for curiosity, or for souvenirs, and yet the whole population sits around in the sun and watches the strangers from other lands price things and go away without buying, and then everybody looks mad, as though they would like to jab a knife into the stranger. The plazas and the places near the ca
nal are filled with hucksters and beggars, and you never saw beggars so mutilated and sore and disgusting. I never supposed human beings could be so deformed, without taking an ax to them, and it is so pitiful to see them that you can’t help shedding your money.

  As hard hearted as dad is, he coughed up over $40 the first day, just giving to beggars, and he thought he had got them all bought up, and that they would let him alone, but the next day when he showed up there were ten beggars where there was one the day before, and they followed him everywhere, and all the loafers in the plazas laughed and acted as if they would catch the cripples when dad got out of sight and rob the beggars. Dad thinks the way the people live is by dividing with beggars. A man who has a deformity, or a sore that you can see half a block away, seems to be considered rich here, like a man in America who owns stock in great corporations. These beggars pay more taxes than the dukes and things who live in style.

  I suppose dad never studied geography, so he didn’t know how Venice was situated, so he told me to go out and order a hack the first morning we were here, and we would go and see the town. When I told dad there were no hacks, no horses and no roads in Venice, he said I was crazy in my head and wanted me to take some medicine and stay in bed for a few days, but I convinced him, when we got outdoors, that everything run by water, and when I showed him the canal and the gondolas, he remembered all about Venice, and picked out a gondalier that looked like one dad saw at the world’s fair, and we hired him because he talked English. All the English the gondolier could use were the words “you bet your life,” and “you’re dam right,” but dad took him because it seemed so homelike, and we have been riding in gondolas every day.

  On the water you can get away from the beggars. This is an ideal existence. You just get in the gondola, under a canopy, and the gondolier does the work, and you glide along between build ings and wonder who lives there, and when they wake up, as all day long the blinds are closed, and everybody seems to be dead. But at night, when the canals are lighted, and the moon shines, the people put on their dress clothes and sit on verandas, or eat and drink, and talk Eyetalian, and ride in gondolas, and play guitars, and smoke cigarettes, and talk love. It is so warm you can wear your summer pants, and the water smells of clams that died long ago. It is just as though Chicago was flooded by the bursting of the sewers, and people had to go around State street, and all the cross streets, and Michigan avenue, in fishing boats, with three feet of water on top of the pavements. Imagine the people of Chicago taking gondolas and riding along the streets, landing at the stores and hotels, just as they do now from carriages.

  We had been riding in gondolas for two days, getting around in the mud when the tide was out, and going to sleep and waiting for the tide to come in, when it seemed to me that dad needed some excitement, and last night I gave it to him.

  We were out in our gondola, and the moon was shining, and the electric lights made the canal near the Rialto bridge as light as day. The Rialto bridge crosses the Grand canal, and has been the meeting place for lovers for thousands of years. It is a grand structure, of carved marble, but it wouldn’t hold up a threshing machine engine half as well as an iron bridge. Well, the canal was filled with thousands of gondolas, loaded with the flower of Venetian society, and the music just made you want to fall in love. Dad said if he didn’t fall in love, or something, before morning, he would quit the place. I made up my mind he should fall into something, so I began by telling dad it seemed strange to me that nobody but Eyetalians could run a gondola. Dad said he could run a gondola as well as any foreigner, and I told him he couldn’t run a gondola for shucks, and he said he would show me, so he got out of the hen house where we were seated, and went back on to the pointed end of the gondola, and grabbed the pole or paddle from the gondolier, and said: “Now, Garibaldi, you go inside the pup tent with Hennery, and let me punt this ark around awhile.”

  Garibaldi thought dad was crazy, but he gave up the pole, and just then, when they were both on the extreme point of the gondola, and she was wabbling some, I peeked out through the curtains and thought the fruit was about ripe enough to pick, so I threw myself over to one side of the gondola, and, by gosh, if dad and Garibaldi didn’t both go overboard with a splash, and one yell in the English language, and one in Eye-talian, and I rushed out of the cabin and such a sight you never saw.

  Dad retained the paddle, and had his head out of water, but nothing showed above the water, where Garibaldi was except a red patch on his black pants. Dad was yelling for help, and finally the gondolier got his head out of the water, and said something that sounded like grinding a butcher knife on a grindstone, and I yelled, too, and the gondolas began to gather around us, and the two men were rescued. The gondolier had been gondoling all his life and he had never been in the water before, and they thought it would strike in and kill him, so they wrapped him up in blankets and put him aboard his canoe, and he looked at me as though I was to blame. They got a boat hook fastened in dad’s pants and landed him in the gondola, and he dripped all the way to our hotel, and he smelled like a fish market.

  I asked Garibaldi, on the way to the hotel, if he was counting his beads when he was down under the water with nothing but his pants out of the water, and he said: “You’re dam right,” but I don’t think he knew the meaning of the words, because he probably wouldn’t swear in the presence of death. Dad just sat and shivered all the way to the hotel, but when we got to our room I asked him what his idea was in jumping overboard right there before folks, with his best clothes on, and he said it was all Garibaldi’s fault, that just as dad was getting a good grip on the paddle, the gondolier heaved a long sigh, and the onions in his breath paralyzed dad so he fell overboard.

  “Then you don’t blame your little boy, do you?” says I, and dad looked at me as he was hanging his wet shirt on a chair. “Course not; you were asleep in the cabin. But say, if I ever hear that you did tip that gondola, it will go hard with you,” but I just looked innocent, and dad went on drying his shirt by a charcoal brazier and never suspected me. But I am getting the worst of it, for dad and his clothes smell so much like a clam bake that it makes me sick.

  Well, old friend, you ought to close up your grocery and come over here and go to Vesuvius and Pompeii with us, where we can dry our clothes by the volcano, and dig in the city that was buried in hot ashes 2,000 years ago. They say you can dig up mummies there that are dead ringers for you, old man.

  O, come on, and have fun with us.

  Your friend,

  Hennery.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  The Bad Boy Writes from Naples—Dad Sees Vesuvius and Calls the Servants to Put Out the Fire—They Have Trouble with a “Dago” in Pompeii.

  Naples, Italy.—

  Dear Old Partner in Crime: Well, sir, we have struck a place that reminds us of home, and your old grocery store. The day we got here dad and I took a walk into the poorer districts, where they throw all the slops and refuse in the streets, and where nobody ever seems to clean up anything and burn it. The odor was something that you cannot describe without a demonstration, and after we had turned pale and started to go away, dad said the smell reminded him of something at home, and finally he remembered your old grocery in the sauerkraut season, early in the morning, before you had aired out the place. Your ears must have burned when we were talking about you.

  If you want to get an idea of Naples, at its worst, go down into your cellar and round up all the codfish, onions, kraut, limburger cheese, kerosene, rotten potatoes, and everything that is dead, put it all in a bushel basket, and just before the Health officers come to pull your place, get down on your knees and put your head down in the basket, and let some one sit on your head all the forenoon, and you will have just such a half day as dad and I had in the poor quarter of Naples, and it will not cost you half as much as it did us, unless, after you have enjoyed yourself in your cellar with your head in the basket, you decide to have a run of sickness and hire a doctor who will charge you the pric
e of a trip to Europe.

  Well, sir, Naples is a dandy, in its clean part. The bay of Naples is a dead ringer for Milwaukee bay, in shape and beauty, but Milwaukee lacks Vesuvius and Pompeii, for suburbs, and she lacks the customary highwaymen to hold you up. Every man, woman and child we have met makes a living out of the tourists, and nobody that I have seen works at any other business.

  We woke up the first morning and dad looked out the window and saw Vesuvius belching forth flame and lava and stone fences, and wanted to turn in a fire alarm, but I told him that that fire had been raging ever since the Christian era, and was not one of these incendiary barn burnings, but he opened the window and yelled fire, and the porters and chambermaids came running to our room, with buckets of water, and wanted to know where the fire was. Dad pointed out of the window towards Vesuvius and said: “Some hired girl has been starting a fire with kerosene, in that shanty on the knoll out there, and the whole ranch will burn if you don’t turn out the fire department, you gosh blasted lazy devils. Get a move on and help carry out the furniture.”

  Well, they calmed dad, and then I had to go to work and post dad up on the geography he had forgotten, and finally he remembered seeing a picture of a volcano or burning mountain in his geography 50 years ago, but he told me he never believed there was a volcano in the world, but that he always thought they put those pictures in geographies to make them sell. How a man can attain the prominence and position in the business world that dad has, and not know any more than he does, is what beats me.

  Of course, you know, having kept a grocery since the war, and having had opportunities to study history, by the pictures on the soap boxes and insurance calendars, that Nero, the Roman tyrant, after Rome was burned, while he fiddled for a dance in a barn, got so accustomed to fire and brimstone that he retired to Naples and touched off Vesuvius, just so he could look at it. But Vesuvius, about 2,000 years ago, got to burning way down in its bowels, and the fire got beyond control, and I suppose now the fire is away down in the center of the earth, and you know when you get down in the earth below the crust, on which we live and raise potatoes, everything is melted, like iron in a foundry, and Vesuvius is the spigot through which the fluid comes to the surface. You see, don’t you?