Part 17

The brilliant plan I finally settled on was to put the pillows between us. It was nearly midnight before I had courage enough to retire at all. I pulled him up on his side, straightened him out and put the barrier between us, and then crept gingerly in. I lay still for a while listening. My success was so complete I wanted to stay awake a while and enjoy it. He would start out on his journey across the bed, but would wind up suddenly against my barricade. There he would lie a while, and I could feel his thumps against it.

In my vanity I chuckled.

I had dozed off in this state of self-conceit when I felt something rammed into my mouth. I thought at first that burglars had entered and that I had been chloroformed and gagged. It was not so. That boy had shot his foot through under the pillow and popped me square in the mouth. I had been told that it was not well to sleep with one's mouth open--now I knew it.

When people treat me that way, asleep or awake, I resent it. I fight. I boxed that boy's ears. I pounded his head against the headboard so that I would awaken him. I shook him, kicked him, and used words I should not have wished his mother to hear. When I had finished, he quietly sighed another of his long, peaceful, happy sighs, and slept on.

Sleep was not for me after that, and I spent the next hour lying awake and cataloguing the different things he would do. These were only a few of them:--Another fit; seeing cats, and wolves and dragons around his bed; chasing rabbits; talking in his sleep; telling of seeing a bear ride a bicycle down the pike; breaking a colt; swimming in the creek; fighting another boy; wheezing and thumping and making strange noises; dreaming he was an infant again and imbibing from an imaginary bottle; smacking his lips so loud that the noise could be heard all over the house.

It was three o'clock before a bright idea entered into my head. I remembered that the only request that his mother had made of me was to see that he did not fall out of bed. I remembered that in all his circulations and maneuverings, this was the one thing that he never did, like a runaway mule he knew how to take care of himself even in his sleep. I began to anticipate him. I determined to humor some of his little whims. I put a pitcher of ice water by the bed. I got a link of the garden hose that felt clammy and looked like a snake. I doubled up my pillow so I could strike hard with it. Then I sat up and waited. I would make him realize all he dreamed.

I did not have long to wait. This time he was falling from a tree or down an endless precipice, for he sat on the edge of the bed, yelling: "Catch me--catch me--I'm falling!"

I let him fall. In fact I helped him along. I put a lot of force into that pillow and it caught him squarely under the ear. He went out of the bed, hitting the floor in a heap. It wakened him. "Where am I, mamma? O, mamma?" he called.

"Come to your mamma," I said softly; "dear little boy, you have fallen out of the bed. Be careful how you roll."

He was asleep before he touched the pillow. But in the next half hour he did not roll any more, and so I learned that a boy may be taught things even in his sleep if only the proper implements are used.

But he was not yet cured of swimming in his sleep, for, just as I began to doze off, thinking that he was properly broken, he began to splash around in the bed, lamming me on the head and stomach, and shouting: "Look out! There's a snake--pull for the shore!"

This gave me my cue. Seizing a water pitcher I turned it over on him, at the same time wrapping the clumsy hose around his leg.

"Snakes," I cried in his ear, "dive for the shore!"

He gave a wide-awake yell that time, and rolled backward out of bed. One jump and he had cleared the room, going up stairs yelling: "Snakes, mamma, s-n-a-k-e-s!"

I let him go. Nay, I locked the door behind him and went to sleep.

The breakfast bell rang twice, but I did not hear it. Little Sister had to come to awaken me. They were all at breakfast when I came down, Thesis, the baby, and the boy.

"How soundly you must have slept!" she said, smiling. "I forgot to tell you that the dear little fellow sometimes walks in his sleep; and do you know, this morning I found him fast asleep on the first stair landing?"

Little Sister, however, was wiser. She looked at me in her quaint way and said, funnily: "Uncle Jack, you look real tired; like you'd dropped your candy last night, sure enough."

*CHAPTER IV*

*MY FIRST AUTOMOBILE*

It was one of those beautiful December mornings when the frost had hung his laces everywhere, and a hunting fever fairly burned within me. It comes over me at times, and then--well--I run away and obey it.

As though through mental telepathy my telephone rang. "Hello! Is that you, Jack? This is Horace Raymond, your old neighbor. I'm in town to-day. Ever see such a pretty day? Let's take a quail hunt."

"Glad to hear your voice again, Horace. No, I never did. I am ready for a quail hunt any day except Sunday. Never had any luck on Sunday at all."

"I have just bought a new automobile," he went on, "and I want to try it out to-day. I will be right out in a hurry."

"Oh, say, Horace, now that's another thing. I have never ridden in one of those things; they aren't bred right, don't like their gait; and loving horses as I do, confound them, I've got religious scruples on the subject. Now you come out here in the thing and I will have the little mare and the buggy hooked up, a good lunch and the setters in, and--"

I heard him laugh derisively. "Nonsense! Why, man, we're going way out beyond you on the Lebanon pike--ten miles--and we want to go in a hurry. I'll have you there in thirty minutes. Now the little mare would be fully an hour making it, and then dead tired for a long drive back, with a pointer and two setters crowding us out of the buggy. I'll be at your place in twenty minutes with two dogs--have that champion pointer of yours ready." And he rang off.

I hung up the receiver. "I guess I'm up against it," I said, as I went off to put on my hunting clothes, "but if it gets out on me I can prove I didn't want to do it. Besides, this new hunting cap I've just bought would make Moses look like a Turk in Hades; nobody would recognize me."

"Jack, I'm ashamed of you," said Eloise with becoming scorn. "What would Satan say? But of course, if you are going in that thing, and happen to bag any birds--which I know you'll never do--please remember the luncheon I am going to give to-morrow, dear. But you'll never get them, going back on your raising like that--see if you do!"

"No, see if you do," said one of the twins, now aged four.

And the other added, "No, see if you do!"

For which I kissed them both, because they were so femininely consistent.

The truth is, I wanted to go hunting. It was in my blood that morning, and these beautiful December days with a hazy glow on the blue hills and that stillness that comes like a dropping nut in a forest would put it into anybody's blood, anybody who had it. And when the infection hits you there is only one antidote, a dog, a gun, a tramp over the hills, and--whir! bang! bang!

And to-day was ideal. I had felt it all morning; the cool, bracing air with that little frosty aroma of leaves curling to crispness under the first blight of things, and that other delightful odor of pungent woodland damp with frost-biting dew. And the hills blue and beautiful are alone worth going to meet, and the trees crimson in the hectic flush of the dying year.

Dick, my pointer, was jumping all over me and turning dogsprings of delight.

"Down, Dick! Heigh ho, old boy; that machine is against my religion, but I'd go hunting in a negro hearse to-day. Besides," I said, with a twinge of conscience, "he'll get us to the field in forty minutes, and the little mare is getting old and we've got a late start."

I sighed and felt better. I had fought so long and said so much for the horse, and now--now--it was inexorable; they were being driven to their fate; they had to go before the relentless wheel of progress. I was virtually admitting it, I, who had said I'd never--

I shouldered my gun. Somehow it didn't seem like the old, joyous hunt.

At the front gate the automobile stood, a pretty thing, to be sure. Its owner was smiling, goggle-eyed and all aglow, his hand on the wheel, or whatever you call the steering end of it.

"Jump in, Jack, old man; we must be in a hurry. Slap Dick in there behind with my two setters. Be in a hurry! By George! I know where there are a dozen coveys, and we'll be there in forty minutes. Hi, Dick! What's the matter? Get in! Confound him, what's the matter with that old dog?"

I was lugging Dick and trying to get him in. He was kicking like a half-roped steer. He had always jumped to his place in the little buggy, but now--

I knew what was the matter. Even Dick, dog that he was, had his principles, and he was man enough to say so. While I--

I turned crimson.

"Get in, old boy," I begged. "We'll be there in a jiffy. Dead bird--good doggie."

I got him in, with his head down and his tail between his legs. To all intents he was going to a funeral. I turned quickly away, for I could not stand the scorn and dumb reproach of his eyes. Right then I would have quit and gone back, but I didn't want to hurt my friend's feelings.

"Jump in, jump in, let's be going," he shouted, in his nervous, business way. "Oh, just a minute! There--you're on the ground. Say, here, take this and give that starting crank a turn. I'm not very expert myself," he went on, "and I sometimes forget; but you're on the ground--there--right there!"

I gave her a whirl, several of them. I whirled her like blue blazes. I kept on whirling, while her owner grasped the wheel and his eyes danced nervously, as he expected her to flash into the throb that said steam was on.

But she didn't fire, and I kept cranking.

"Faster, Jack, harder!" he cried.

I whirled and whirled. I began to get warm. The sweat began to pour off.

"Say," I said, gasping for breath, "this beats turning a grindstone. What the devil--"

"Why, I canth--thee," he lisped, "turnth again--quick--a tharp, sthnappy onth!"

I turned her again, quick, sharp and snappy. The thing pulled heavy and felt like an unoiled grindstone, just out of the store. My arms ached, the sweat poured off, and my back was nearly broken.

I gave her a final desperate twist, and--there she was! Dead as a log wagon.

"Confound it," I said, mopping my forehead and staggering up; "I could have curried the mare and hitched her up six times. Why, something's wrong with your old gas wagon," I went on, getting hot. "I'll not turn this crank any more," I said; "I'll be so sore in my arms I couldn't hold my gun straight to-day."

He looked puzzled, annoyed.

"Why, I can't thee--" he began to lisp again.

"What's that you've got in your mouth?" I jerked out. "You don't lisp that way naturally."

A smile broke over his face. He took out a little, black peg, and roared. It was too funny--to him.

"Beg yo' pardon, old boy--beg yo' pardon--ha-ha-ha! Good joke. That's the switch plug. You take it out when the machine's idle, and I forgot to put it back in the little hole. Here," he said, sticking it in, "it connects the current--ha-ha--good joke--now give her a whirl." I gave the whirl, but in no manner to enjoy the joke. I heard her fire up and begin to throb. We moved off beautifully. We began to fly up the smooth pike, my hand back in Dick's collar, for fear he'd jump out and commit suicide. I dared not turn round to look the honest dog in the eyes.

"Fine, fine--ain't this fine, old man?" cried my friend enthusiastically, as he buzzed up the road. "Look at your watch--nine-twenty. Ah, now we'll be in the field at ten sharp--sharp--two good hours for hunting before we eat our pocket lunch.

"Now your little old mare," he laughed, "would take up those fifteen miles by now? Say, ha! ha!--acknowledge the corn, old man--the decree has gone forth--it's all over with the old pacers."

I growled and said nothing. So did Dick. It was good, though, the way we were eating up space and getting nearer to the birds, those game, nervy, whirring birds that dart like winged flashes of thunder before your gun. We whirled over the bridge at the river at lightning speed. I saw the sign up about the fine for going faster than a walk, but how--

"How can an automobile walk--ha! ha!" he shouted, for he had read it also and divined my thoughts and winked knowingly at me. "That applies to horses and jackasses and such," he laughed--"things that walk. But this don't walk, eh?"

Honk! Honk!

He was blowing for a stray mule to get out of his way.

The mule got, tail up, and settled into a barbed wire fence, which he tried to jump, but only succeeded in cutting up his countenance.

Honk! Honk! "Get out of the way, if that's all the sense, you've got. My! but ain't we buzzing?"

I nodded, beginning to become exhilarated myself.

"This is pretty good," I admitted. "I begin to see how you people soon become speed-crazy. We'll get the birds to-day," I warmed up, "and I thank you for--look out! Stop!"

He stopped, but not in time. It was a nervous-looking, old, fleabitten, gray mare, full of Stackpole, Traveler, Dan Rice and Boston blood. I had seen it so often that I knew the very turn of its tail. In the buckboard she was pulling were three country girls, fat, solid, happy, their lines wabbling around anywhere, and the old mare going where she listeth. They were the kind of girls I knew and loved in my sappy days. I used to commence to kiss 'em about Christmas, knowing they'd wake up and respond about the Fourth of July. Two of them amply filled up the buckboard, but, as usual, a third one had piled on top of the others somewhere, and--

"Great heaven, Horace!" I shouted. "Stop--that one there on top is holding a baby!"

I sprang out, for I saw the old mare begin to squat, her old, scared, brown eyes blazing in her white face like holes in a big lard can. I heard her snort like a scared bear and saw her feet pattering jigs all over the pike. Then she whirled, running into a fence, where, between the overturned buckboard, the shafts and the rail fence, she stood wedged upon her hind legs, pawing the air.

But the girls surprised me. Without a change in their fat, immutable, expressionless faces, they simply rolled out on the pike in a bunch, the baby on top, like snow folks tilted over by a boy.

They got up, dusting their frocks. They had taken it for granted. It was all right. There was not a squawk, not even from the baby, as one of them picked it up and I grabbed the bits and straightened out the old mare.

"I hope you ladies aren't hurt," said my friend from the roadside, in his machine.

"Sally, is you hurt?" asked the fattest one.

"Naw," she grunted.

"Mamie, is you?"

Mamie merely wiggled.

"Is Tootsy hurt?"

Tootsy was eating an apple, with unblinking eyes fixed on the wonderful machine.

Nothing was hurt but the harness.

That was hurt before they started, but I had to spend the next twenty minutes patching it up. Finally we got them all in, Tootsy on top. No word had they spoken, but I could see they were eyeing me, with that country suspicion that makes every maid of them rate every man she meets in the road as Lothario, Jr., or a prince in disguise.

"Now, ladies, you are all right," I said, trying to keep cheerful. "And I am so glad none of you was hurt."

Then one of them drawled, but looking over toward the distant horizon, "Ain't you named Mister Jack?"

I turned red and pleaded guilty.

"After all you've writ, I don't think you had oughter done this," she said, and then they all drove sedately off, still looking toward the horizon.

"Now that's the worst thing about automobiles," said Horace, after we started again, "these fool country horses. Why, I waited till this time of day, thinking they'd all be in town by now, for they get up with the chickens. Anyway, we're not likely to meet any more of them."

"I hope not," I sighed, pulling out a cigar and a match, as I'd always done in the buggy. It was blown out before the sulphur burned.

"You can't do that in an automobile," he yelled, "we're going too fast. Like to stop for you, but we're fairly humming--be there in half an hour, old man." Honk! Honk!

We had turned a bend in the road.

"Great Caesar!" I shouted. "Nobody going to town! Look!"

His jaws dropped. There they were. We could see for half a mile, and so help me heaven, but this was the procession that passed as we pulled out of the narrow pike on the roadside, consumed with impatience to get to the field, the machine throbbing beneath us like a loft over a barn dance:

First an old sorrel mare, a worn-out buggy of the vintage of 1874, and two old ladies.

The whole thing approached gingerly, creeping up like a yellow cat. It was a toss-up as to which of the two's eyes popped the biggest, or which had her mouth shut tightest. The old mare was game, and sidled up, and just as I saw the wheels begin to form in her head the occupants threw down the lines and began to pop two pairs of country-yarned legs out of the two sides of the buggy, exclaiming, "Fur ther Lord's sake thar, Mister, ketch 'er!"

I jumped out and had her by the bits.

One of them relieved herself by spitting snuff over the dashboard, while the other took it out on me, deprecating the day when "Sech folks an' things blocks up ther public trail--an' so help me, ain't that thar Mister Jack, an' my old man bred this mar' by his say so! Jack,--Ananias," she sniffed, as she drove off.

The next were right on us, two slick, three-year-old sugar-mules, hauling a load of darkies. They came on at a rattling clip, making more noise than a freight train, jollying, laughing and cackling. The men were on plank seats across the wagon, the women in high-back hickory chairs, squatting low and feeling as good as Senegambians usually do in a white man's country, where he does all the worrying and thinking and they do all the loafing and eating.

They passed us without a wabble. I expected that, for a mule, like a negro, never sees anything until he has passed it. I saw the gate of the wagon had been taken out in the rear to let the damsels in: also the chickens, the coop of ducks, a bundle of coon-skins, pumpkins, a sack of unwashed wool, some spare ribs and a tub of only such nice chitlings as a country mammy can prepare. They passed, and then the scare got into those three-year-old corn feds good by way of their tails. For I saw these straighten out first, then their ears. I saw the big driver fall back on the lines, and--

"Whoa, dar!"

They jumped twenty feet in the first jump, and ran half a mile in spite of his lugging and sawing. But the first jump was enough. The damage was done then, for everything in it but the driver, who held on to the reins, came boiling out of the rear. Up the road for half a mile was a telegraph line of chitlings, the rest were mixed up. They all rose but one damsel, weighing close to 468 pounds. She sat still. A young buck went to help her up.

"G'way f'm heah, nigger, wait till I see ef my condiments is busted," she cried, feeling her sides and her chest. "'Sides, I wants Brer Simon to hope me up."

Brother Simon helped her and she was all right.

We gave her a dollar and the others a quarter each. It was expensive, but I deemed it just.

The following then passed with more or less hesitancy, shying and plunging: a surrey and team; a boy and his best girl; a log wagon and four mules, the leaders rushing by in terror, pulling the wheelers by the neck, as they were trying to go the other way.

Then came Old 'Squire Jones on his roan Hal pacer. The horse got half-way by before he decided that the goggle eyes on the roadside had him. Well--no goggle eyes had ever caught any of his tribe--not yet! In bucking to wheel, he tapped the old 'Squire in the mouth with his poll. The old man had been raised a Presbyterian, with Baptist propensities, and he made the ozone sulphuric. He brought his horse back to the scratch, spurring and swearing. It was all right this time, till the old horse looked into the back of the machine. True to the fool in his pedigree, he knew what the machine was, because he had never seen one before; but the dogs--they were things he had seen all his life, and he bolted backward again, jamming the old 'Squire's stomach against the pommel and his back against the cantle. It was the time to go, and we shot out, leaving the old horse waltzing into town on his hind legs.

"I didn't hear his last remarks," I said, as we went along. "They seemed to be rather personal."

"Let 'em go," said Horace. "You wouldn't want to put them in your scrap-book."

"I don't think the mare and buggy would have made us all these enemies," I remarked, "and we would have been there by now. Do you know it's eleven o'clock?"

"We've got a fine run, now," he apologized. "We'll be there in thirty minutes."

"We'll be there by night," I snarled. "Say, we'll just call it a possum hunt, eh?"

This made him mad, and he did not speak till he got to the big hill.

Here at the foot we stopped and sat, throbbing.

Horace fumbled with a side brake a moment, touched a pedal and looked wise.

"What's all this for?" I said.

"I'm resting for a little headway before taking that steep hill. And say, while we're at it, you ought to know something about a machine, you might be called on to help me in an emergency."

I turned pale. Up to this time I had felt secure. Now I understood something of the feelings of that pair of mules that never saw danger until they had passed it.

"Why, I thought you knew all about it," I began.

"Of course I do, but something might happen to me. You might be thrown on your own resources. Now here," he went on. "This little lever on the wheel is the spark-control--it quickens things--the next one is the throttle; that means more power. This is the switch-plug here: this is the clutch, and this the brake. Now, remember, and watch me start."

He did, the thing starting slowly up the hill and then beginning to go in little jumps, exactly like a horse galloping.

"Pull him down," I growled, "he's broken his gait." For I felt every moment as if it would soon wabble and quit. But he kept galloping and I settled down and began unconsciously to wabble my body as I would in motion to a galloping horse. I couldn't help it. I glanced at Horace, he was doing the same, but hitching at the side lever all the time, and we were bobbing like two Muscovy ducks over a mud hole.

It was uncomfortable, it was uncanny.

"Confound you," I growled, "I tell you the thing's galloping--he's all tangled up; bring him down."

_Snap_ went something, and Horace breathed easy.

"All right now," he said, as we began to climb the hill beautifully. Over the top we went, and then--down--down! How she did fly! My heart jumped into my throat! I held my breath and felt that same feeling I used to feel pumping in a swing when I'd soar up to the top and start down again, the same when I started down the elevator from the 19th story of the Masonic Temple and felt my legs give way and threw my arms around the neck of the elevator boy and begged him for heaven's sake to stop until I got my breath and my legs in speaking distance of each other, and collected the rest of myself.

"Stop her," I cried, "down-this-hill-I'm-feeling-queer-Lord-I'm-stop, I tell you!"

"It's easy," he laughed. "Do it yourself--on that brake--there--just to teach you--there!"

Gasping for breath and pale with fright, I kicked up a little pedal.

The thing jumped twenty feet!

"Don't!" I heard him yell, "Good Lord, that's the throttle!"