CHAPTER XXX.
The Bad Boy’s Delayed Letter about Holland and Cuba—Dad and the Boy go for a Drive in a Dogcart—They have a Great Time— Land in Cuba and See the Island t we Fought for.
Havana, Cuba.
My Dear Old Greaser: We stopped in Holland for a couple of days after we left Belgium, and it was the most disappointing country we visited on our whole trip. We expected to be walked on with wooden shoes, and from what we had heard of that Duke that married Queen Wilhelmina, we thought we were going to a country where men were cruel to their wives, and swatted them over the head when things didn’t go right, but when we saw the queen riding with her husband, as free, from ostentation as a department store clerk would ride out with his cash girl wife, and saw happiness beaming on the face of the queen and her husband, and saw them squeeze hands and look lovingly into each other’s eyes, we made up our minds that you couldn’t believe these newspaper scandals. And when we saw the broad-shouldered, broad-chested and broad-everywhere women of Holland we concluded that it would be a brave or reckless husband who would be unkind to one of them, and mighty dangerous because the women are stronger than the men, and any woman could whip four men at the drop of the hat, because she could take off her wooden shoes and strike out and a man would think he had been hit by a railroad tie.
Illustration: Any woman could whip four men at the drop of the hat 388
I do not know what makes Hollanders wear wooden shoes, unless they are sentenced to do it, or that they are unruly, and have to be hobbled, to keep them from jumping fences, but the people are so good and honest that after you have met them you forget the vaudeville feature of their costumes, and love them, and wish the people of other countries were as honest as they. For two or three days we were not robbed, and I do not believe there is a dishonest man or woman in Holland, except one. There was one woman that played it on dad in Amsterdam, but I think she only played him for a sucker for a joke, for she laughed all the time.
Dad was much struck at seeing the women selling milk from little carts, hauled by teams of big dogs, and he negotiated with a woman for a dog team and cart, and all one day dad and I put on wooden shoes, and Dutch clothes and drove the dog team around town, and we had the time of our lives, more fun than I ever had outside of a circus, but the shoes skinned our feet, and when the dogs laid down to rest, and dad couldn’t talk dog language to make them get up and go ahead, he kicked the off dog with his wooden shoe, and the dog got up and grabbed a mouthful of dad’s ample pants and shook dad till his teeth were loose.
A woman driving another mess of dogs had to come and choke the off dog so he wouldn’t swallow dad, pants and all. Dad gave her a dollar for rescuing him, and what do you think? Say, she pulled an old stocking of money out of her bosom and counted out ninety-six cents in change and gave it back to dad, and only charged four cents for saving his life, and that couldn’t occur in any other country, cause in most places they would take the dollar and strike him for more.
Dad wanted to take the dog team and cart to Milwaukee to give it to a friend who sells red hot weiners, and so we arranged to have the team loaded on the boat, but just before the boat sailed, the dog team was lying down on the dock, sleeping and scratching flees, when the woman dad bought the team of came along and spoke to the dogs in Dutch, and, say, those dogs woke up and started on a regular runaway down the dock, after the laughing woman, and disappeared up the street. Just as the boat whistled to pull in the gang planks, dad and I stood on deck and saw the team disappear, and dad said, “Buncoed again, by gosh, and it is all your condemned fault. Why didn’t you hang on to that off dog.” Well, we lost our dog team, but we got the worth of our money, for we saw a people who do not eat much beside cabbage and milk, and they are the strongest in the world, and there never was a case of dyspepsia in their country. We saw a people with stone bruises on their heels and corns on their toes, smiling and laughing all the time. We met a people that work all the time, and never take any recreation except churning and rocking babies, and yet never have to call a doctor, because there are no doctors except veterinary surgeons, who care for dogs and cattle.
The people we met in Holland wear wooden shoes to teach them patience and humility. With wooden shoes no frenzied financier of Holland will ever travel the fast road of speculation, slip on a bucket-shop banana peel, and fall on the innocent bystander who has coughed up his savings and given them to the honest financier to safely invest.
The bank of Holland is an old woolen stock ing, and money never comes out of the stocking unless there is a string to it, and the string is the heart string of an honest people, that will stand no trifling. If a dishonest financier came to Holland from any other country, and did any of his dirty work, the women of Holland, who handle the funds, would give him such a hazing that he would never open his three-card monte lay-out in any other country.
It is a country where you get the right change back, and the cows give eighteen carat milk, and the hens have not learned to lay small, cold storage eggs. It is the country for me, if the women would wear corsets, and not be the same size all the way down, so that if you hugged a girl you wouldn’t make a dent in her, that would not come out until she got her breath.
And we left such a country and such a people, to come here to Cuba, where the population now comprises the meanest features of the desperate and wicked Spaniards, beaten at their own game of loot, the trickiness of the native Cuban, flushed with pride because his big American brother helped him to drive away the Spaniard that he could never have gotten rid of alone, and with no respect for the American who helped, and only meets him respectfully because he is afraid of being thrown into the ocean if he is impudent, and the worst class of Yankee grafters and highway robbers that have ever been allowed to stray away from the land of the free. That is what Cuba is to-day.
Soulless Yankee corporations have got hold of most of the branches of business that there is any money in, and the things that do not pay and never can be made to pay, are for sale to tenderfeet. The cuban hates the Yankee, the Yankee hates the Cuban, and the Spaniard hates both, and both hate him. In Havana your hotel, owned by a Cuban, run by a Yankee, with a Spanish or Portuguese cashier, will take all the money you bring into it for a bed at night, and hold your baggage till your can cable for money to buy breakfast. It is a “free country,” of course, run by men who will fly high as long as they can borrow money for some one else to pay after they are dead, but within ten years the taxes will eat the people so they will be head over heels in debt to the Yankee and the Spaniard, the German and the Englishman, the Frenchman and the Italian, and some day warships will sail into Havana harbor, over the submerged bones of the “Maine,” and there will be a fight for juicy morsels of the Cuban dead horse, by the congregated buzzards of strange navies, unless they shall shake the dice for the carcass, and by carefully loading the dice saw the whole thing off on to Uncle Sam, and make him pay the debts of the deceased republic, and act as administrator for the benefit of the children of the sawed off republic, whose only asset now is climate that feels good, but contains germs of all diseases, and tobacco that smells good when it is in conflagration under your nose, and does not kill instantly if it is pasted up in a Wisconsin wrapper, that is the pure goods. If tobacco ever ceases to be a fad with the rich consumer of fifty-cent cigars, and beet sugar is found to contain no first aid to Bright’s disease, Cuba will amount to about as much as Dry Tortugas, which has purer air, and the Isle of Pines, which has more tropical scenery and less yellow fever. But now the Island of Cuba is a joy, and Havana is like Heaven, until you come to pay your bill, when it is hell. Streets so wide you cannot see a creditor on the other side, pavements as smooth as the road to perdition, and tropical trees, plants and flowers, with birds of rare plumage, you feel like sitting on a cold bench in the shade, and wishing all your friends were here to enjoy a taste of what will come to those who are truly good, in the hereafter, when suddenly you are taken with a chill up the spinal
column, and a cold sweat comes out on the forehead, and the internal arrangements go on a strike because of the cold, perspiring cucumber you had for lunch, and you go to the doctor, who does not do a thing to you, but scare you out of your boots by talking of cholera, and giving you the card of his partner, the undertaker, telling you never to think of dying in a tropical country without being embalmed, because you look so much better when you are delivered at your home by the express company, and then he gives you pills and a bill, and an alarm clock that goes off every hour to take a pill by, and furnishes you an officer to go home to your hotel with you to collect his bill, and you pawn your watch and sleeve buttons for a steerage ticket to New York, where you arrive as soon as the Lord will let you, and stay as long as He thinks is good for you.
Dad has not been much good in Havana, cause he wanted to see the whole business in one day. He got a row boat and went out in the harbor to where the back-bone of the “Maine” acts as a monument to the fellows who yet sleep in the mud of the bottom, and after tying a little American flag on the rigging that sticks up above the water, and damning the villains who blew up the good ship, we went back to town and drove out to the cemetery where several hundred of our boys are buried, where we left flowers on the graves and a cuss in the balmy air for the guilty wretches who fired the bomb, and then we went back to the city and walked the beautiful streets, until dad began to have cramps, from trying to eat all the fruit he could hold, and then it was all off, and I was going to call a carriage to take him to the hotel, when dad saw a negro astride a single ox, hitched to a cart, who had come in from the country, and dad said he wanted to ride in that cart, if it was the last act of his life, and as dad was beginning to swell up from the fruit he had eaten, I thought he better ride in an open cart, cause in a carriage he might swell up so we couldn’t get him out of the door when we got to the hotel, so I hired the negro, got dad in the cart, and we started, but the ox walked so slow I was afraid we would never get dad there alive, so I told the negro dad had the cholera, and that settled, for he kicked the slats of the ox in with his heels, and the ox bellowed and run away, and the negro turned pale from fright, and I guess the runaway ride on the cobble stone pavement was what saved dad’s life, for the swelling in dad’s inside began to go down, and when we got to the hotel he got out of the cart alone, and I knew he was better, for he shook himself, gulluped up wind, and said, “You think you are smart, don’t you?” So I will close.
Yours,
Hennery.
PECK’S BAD BOY WITH THE COWBOYS
CHAPTER I.
The Bad Boy and His Pa Go West—Pa Plans to Be a Dead Ringer for Buffalo Bill—They Visit an Indian Reservation and Pa Has an Encounter with a Grizzly Bear.
Well, I never saw such a change in a man as there has been in pa, since the circus managers gave him a commission to go out west and hire an entire outfit for a wild west show, regardless of cost, to be a part of our show next year. He acts like he was a duke, searching for a rich wife. No country politician that never had been out of his own county, appointed minister to England, could put on more style than Pa does.
The first day after the show left us at St. Louis we felt pretty bum, ’cause we missed the smell of the canvas, and the sawdust, and the animals, and the indescribable odor that goes with a circus. We missed the performers, the band, the surging crowds around the ticket wagon, and the cheers from the seats. It almost seemed as though there had been a funeral in the family, and we were sitting around in the cold parlor waiting for the lawyers to read the will. But in a couple of days Pa got busy, and he hired a young Indian who was a graduate of Carlisle, as an interpreter, and a reformed cowboy, to go with us to the cattle ranges, and an old big game hunter who was to accompany us to the places where we could find buffalo and grizzly bears. Pa chartered a car to take us west, and after the Indian and the cowboy and the hunter got sobered up, on the train, and got the St. Louis ptomaine poison out of their systems, and we were going through Kansas, Pa got us all into the smoking compartment.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I want you to know that this expedition is backed by the wealth of the circus world, and that there is nothing cheap about it. We are to hire, regardless of expense, the best riders, the best cattle ropers, and the best everything that goes with a wild west show. We all know that Buffalo Bill must soon, in the nature of things, pass away as a feature for shows, and I have been selected to take the place of Bill in the circus world, when he cashes in. You may have noticed that I have been letting my hair and mustache and chin whiskers grow the last few months, so that next year I will be a dead ringer for Bill. All I want is some experience as a hero of the plains, as a scout, a hunter, a scalper of Indians, a rider of wild horses, and a few things like that, and next year you will see me ride a white horse up in front of the press seats in our show, take off my broad-brimmed hat, and wave it at the crowned heads in the boxes, give the spurs to my horse, and ride away like a cavalier, and the show will go on, to the music of hand-clapping from the assembled thousands, see?”
The cowboy looked at pa’s stomach, and said: “Well, Mr. Man, if you are going to blow yourself for a second Buffalo Bill, I am with you, at the salary agreed upon, till the cows come home, but you have got to show me that you have got no yellow streak, when it comes to cutting out steers that are wild and carry long horns, and you’ve got to rope ‘em, and tie ’em all alone, and hold up your hands for judgment, in ten seconds.”
Pa said he could learn to do it in a week, but the cowman said: “Not on your life.” The hunter said he would be ready to call pa B. Bill when he could stand up straight, with the paws of a full-grown grizzly on each of his shoulders, and its face in front of pa’s, if Pa had the nerve to pull a knife and disembowel the bear, and skin him without help. Pa said that would be right into his hand, ’cause he use to work in a slaughter house when he was a boy, and he had waded in gore.
The Indian said he would be ready to salute Pa as Buffalo Bill the Second, when Pa had an Indian’s left hand tangled in his hair, and a knife in his right hand ready to scalp him, if Pa would look the Indian in the eye and hypnotize the red man so he would drop the hair and the knife, turn his back on pa, and invite him to his wigwam as a guest. Pa said all he asked was a chance to look into the very soul of the worst Indian that ever stole a horse, and he would make Mr. Indian penuk, and beg for mercy.
And we all agreed that Pa was a wonder, and then they got out a pack of cards and played draw poker awhile. Pa had bad luck, and when the Indian bet a lot of chips, Pa began to look the Indian in the eye, and the Indian began to quail, and Pa put up all the chips he had, to bluff the Indian, but Pa took his eye off the Indian a minute too quick, and the Indian quit quailing, and bet Pa $70, and Pa called him, and the Indian had four deuces and pa had a full hand, and the Indian took the money. Pa said that comes of educating these confounded red devils, at the expense of the government, and then we all went to bed.
The next morning we were at the station in the far west. We got off and started for the Indian reservation where the Carlisle Indian originally came from, and where we were to hire Indians for our show. We rode about 40 miles in hired buckboards, and just as the sun was Setting there appeared in the distance an Indian camp, where smoke ascended from tepees, tents and bark houses. When the civilized Carlisle Indian jumped up on the front seat of the buckboard and gave a series of yells that caused pa’s bald head to look ashamed that it had no hair to stand on end, there came a war whoop from the camp, Indians, squaws, dogs, and everything that contained a noise letting out yells that made me sick. The Carlisle Indian began to pull off his citizen clothes of civilization, and when the horses ran down to the camp in front of the chief’s tent the tribes welcomed the Carlisle prodigal son, who had removed every evidence of civilization, except a pair of football pants, and thus he reinstated himself with the affections of his race, who hugged him for joy.
Pa and the rest of us sat in the buckboard while the Indians began t
o feast on something cooking in a shack. We looked at each other for awhile, not daring to make a noise for fear it would offend the Indians. Pretty soon an old chief came and called Pa the Great Father, and called me a pup, and he invited us to come into camp and partake of the feast.
Well, we were hungry, and the meat certainly tasted good, and the Carlisle civilized Indian had no business to say it was dog, ’cause no man likes to smoke his pipe of peace with strong tobacco in a strange pipe, and feel that his stomach is full of dog meat. But we didn’t die, and all the evening the Indians talked about the brave great father.
It seemed that they were not going to take much stock in pa’s bravery until they had tried him out in Indian fashion. We were standing in the moonlight surrounded by Indians, and Pa had been questioned as to his bravery, and Pa said he was brave like Roosevelt, and he swelled out his chest and looked the part, when the chief said, pointing to a savage, snarling dog that was smelling of pa: “Brave man, kick a dog!”
The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack Page 43