Part 11

Well, we didn't think of anything, and I went home feeling pretty mean and went in the alley way and my mother was keeping supper for me and had my things and sister's all ready for us to go over to Aunt Nell's and after supper she kissed us and we went. She gave me a dollar and she gave Sis fifty cents, and she hugged us a long time before she let us go.

The next morning Aunt Nell started right in on me. She made me go upstairs and brush my hair again and looked at my finger nails and in my ears, and then said I didn't look as well as usual and wanted to know if I slept well. I got away as soon as I could and went up to the cave. Swatty and Bony was there already, digging at the roof of the back room of the cave.

“What you doing that for?” I asked. “If you dig up there much more the roof will bust through.”

“Well, ain't that what we want it to do?” Swatty asked.

“Why do we?” I asked back.

“You come on and help us work,” he said, “and I'll tell you why.”

So I helped them work and Swatty told me he had thought of a bully plan. I wouldn't have thought of it in a thousand years. I had stayed awake all night--or anyway almost half an hour--trying to think how we could get Doctor Miller into the cave, and all I could think of was grabbing him somehow and tying ropes to him and yanking him up to the door of the cave, and I knew we couldn't do it, because we weren't strong enough. But Swatty had thought it all out, like he always does. I might have known he would.

We went ahead and dug at the roof of the cave, and pretty soon we dug through to daylight. It took us all day and the dirt we got we spaded into the tunnel between the two rooms and filled it up good and solid, except a short way out of the front room. The next day we worked hard, too. We dug out more of the roof of the back room, and then worked on the door of the cave so we could fasten it up sound and quick when we got the doctor in it. We took the stove out and everything else he could use to dig with, and when we had to go home for supper we had it all ready. Swatty said so.

Well, all of us knew Jake Hines, the doctor's hired man, and he was foreman of Fearless Hose Company No. 2, and every night he went over to the hose-house and played cards after he got his work done at the doctor's. I went to bed about nine o'clock, but I left my clothes on, and when I thought it was midnight I got up and went downstairs and went out into the alley. Swatty was there already, sitting in the shadow of Doc Miller's manure box, but Bony hadn't come, so we guessed he was a 'fraid-cat and didn't dare. So we went ahead without him.

The doctor's old gray mare was standing with her head at the little square window, and Swatty got on the manure box and climbed in. He opened the stable door and I went in after him. The old mare looked around at us, but she didn't make any trouble, and Swatty untied the halter strap and we led her out into the alley. We led her across the public square, and down into the creek and then up the creek to where our cave was. She came right along as easy as anything and we got her up the bank and to where we had caved in the roof of the back cave. She didn't want to go down there. I guess she thought it was kind of funny to be taken into a hole like that, but a doctor's horse is used to being out at night and to going into all sorts of places, and at last she set her front feet and slid down. It was pretty steep, but she went down easy. Swatty tied the halter strap to one of her front feet and we left her there.

We went back home and I went to bed. I was pretty scared. I thought the doctor would get up in the morning and see his mare was gone and would get a lot of people and police and there would be crowds hunting the mare. I had pretty bad dreams. I dreamed I was hung about eight times for horse stealing.

When I got up in the morning I was mighty sick of it, you bet. I made up my mind I wouldn't do any more, no matter how many babies the doctor brought to our house. I would stay at Aunt Nell's and let on I didn't know anything about gray mares or anything. I was through.

So about nine o'clock, Swatty came to Aunt Nell's to get me, and he was just hopping, he was so tickled.

“Garsh!” he said. “It's better than I ever thort it would be. I came through the alley and Jake Hines was sitting on the manure box waiting for the mare to come home. And what do you think?”

“What?” I asked.

“He said he would give me a quarter if I found the mare,” Swatty said. “He said he guessed he had left the stable door open and she had wandered away and maybe she would come back, but if I hunted around and found her and brought her back he would give me a quarter. So I'm hunting around for her.”

Well, I didn't feel so bad. Bony came and said it wasn't because he was scared that he didn't come out last night, but because he had gone to sleep and hadn't waked up. So Swatty talked some more and we all felt fine. We seen it was bully. So I took my dollar, like we had fixed it for me to do, and I bought some bread and some butter and some things to eat while Swatty and Bony went out to the cave. We didn't want Doctor Miller to starve to death while we had him locked in the cave because that would be murder. So I took what I had bought to the cave and we put it where the doctor could see it, and then we went down to the doctor's house. It was about ten o'clock. We went to the front door and rung the bell and Mrs. Miller came to the door.

“Is Doctor Miller at home?” Swatty asked.

She said he was, and Swatty told her we had found his horse, and she said she would tell him. He came right out. He looked sort of jolly and he said: “Well, boys, I suppose you are looking for a reward. Did you bring old Jenny home?”

“No, sir,” Swatty said. “We would of but we couldn't. We couldn't get her out of the hole.”

So he wanted to know what hole and Swatty told him. He told him we had a cave up the creek and that it looked like the old mare had walked on top of the cave and fell through. He asked if she was hurt and we said she wasn't, we guessed, but she wouldn't come out for us. He got his hat.

“Come on,” he said; “I'll see about it.”

Well, he took us out the back way to the stable and yelled for Jake, and Jake came.

“Jake,” he said, “these boys have found Jenny, and she's fallen into a hole and they can't get her out.”

“All right,” Jake said; “I'll go with them.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. We hadn't thought of that. The doctor started to go back to the house. Then he stopped.

“Just wait a minute,” he said. “I think I'll go with you. If the mare is hurt, I may be able to attend to her right there.”

When the doctor came out with his medicine case we started, and me and Swatty pretended to be eager to hurry up. Bony sort of held back behind. The doctor talked to us a lot. He was sort of happy and good-natured about it, like fat men are, and joked some how far it was. We took him out the Graveyard Road and down into the creek bottom and showed him the mouth of our cave up the bank.

“Well, well,” he said. “This is mountain climbing indeed! If I had much of this to do I'd be a smaller and a better man.”

He made me carry his medicine case so he could use both hands, and I went first. Then Jake came and then the doctor, and then Swatty and then Bony. When we got to the door of the cave I stopped and Jake looked in.

“Where's the mare?” he said. “I don't see no mare.”

He turned to look back and the doctor was just behind him, panting pretty hard.

“What?” the doctor asked, and he stepped up. I started to say it was the back cave the mare was in, but just then the doctor bumped against me and went sort of down on his knees. It was as dark as pitch. Swatty had slammed the door shut against the doctor and jolted him into the cave, and me and Jake with him. I heard Swatty fastening the cave door, and there we were--me and the doctor and Jake. We were locked in the cave.

I was the first one to know what Swatty had done, and I pounded on the door and hollered for them to let us out, but they didn't do it. Jake was just standing and saying:

“I'll be dumed! I'll be dumed!”

“What does this mean?” Doctor Miller asked.

I didn't know what to say, I was so scared. But I didn't have to say anything. Jake said it.

“I know mighty well what this means, Doc,” he said. “This is some of Tom Foley's work, this is. He's been trying to get me out of the foremanship of Fearless Hose No. 2 for the last three years, and we've got the annual election to-night. He knows mighty well if I ain't there to-night he can put it over on me, and this is his game. I'm mighty sorry you got drug into it, Doc; but I'll make him suffer for this when I get out!”

He struck a match and saw the food I had brought. He kept striking more matches and looking around the cave.

“Yes, by Susan!” he said. “Look at the food. This is Foley's work--the great big mush! He thinks this is a good joke. I'll show him! Son,” he said to me, “did Foley talk to you?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“I knew it!” Jake said. “It's that Swatty kid. He's a terror, he is. Well, son, don't you mind; we'll mighty soon get out of here.”

I felt a whole lot better. But I guess the doctor didn't.

“Get out? How'll we get out?” he wanted to know. “If your friend Foley fixed this up, you may be sure he did not expect you to get out to-night. And I've got to get out. I've got two important cases, and I must get out.”

“Oh, we'll get out, Doc,” said Jake. And he lit another match.

He looked at the door and tried it, butting into it with his shoulder. But we had fixed it dandy. It didn't give at all. It was like butting a rock. He tried it awhile, and then he said, but not so gay: “Well, we'll have to dig out.”

“Then, Jake, let us dig,” said the doctor. And they dug. I dug too, but mostly I only pretended to dig. It was dark in there and you couldn't see, and clay isn't anything to dig with your fingers. Jake and the doctor had pocket knives, but you know how much you can dig with a pocket knife. But they had the right idea. They didn't try to dig through the tunnel, like me and Swatty thought they would. They dug around the door.

Well, when Swatty and Bony had locked us in they went and sat on the bank across the creek to see what would happen. Nothing happened. Then Swatty got to thinking. He didn't worry about Jake, because Jake was a hired man and nobody ever knew when he would get home; but he knew my aunt would want to know where I was. That made him think of Mrs. Miller, and she would want to know where the doctor was. He was mighty worried. We had thought that maybe we could keep the doctor in the cave a couple of weeks until everything was all right, but he knew right away that me and Jake and the doctor couldn't live on the food I had put in the cave, and he knew my aunt would start out to find where I was, and Mrs. Miller to find out where Doctor Miller was. He was mighty worried, and he didn't know what to do. So he didn't do anything.

It turned out like he thought it would. My aunt was mad when I did not come home to dinner, and madder when I didn't come home to supper, but when I didn't come home at all she was worried almost crazy and she got my father to go hunt for me. He hunted awhile, and then he got some other men to hunt for me, because he had to go home.

They hunted all night. Along toward morning the hunters who were hunting for me ran into the hunters who were hunting for Doctor Miller. They had Swatty with them, because Mrs. Miller had said Swatty had come to the house and the doctor had gone away with him. They were trying to make Swatty tell where the doctor went, but he wouldn't. He just let on like he was crying and said he didn't know.

Well, the hunters who were hunting for Doctor Miller had just started out, because Mrs. Miller hadn't got worried until toward morning, because she thought he was attending to his business. But toward morning my father and Bony's father came to his house, and it was at their houses Mrs. Miller thought Doctor Miller was. So she was frightened and got some men to hunt him.

I guess I went to sleep about ten or eleven o'clock that night while Jake find Doctor Miller were still digging. I woke up all of a sudden and there I was in the cave, and the door open and men coming in and Doctor Miller brushing off his hands. Him and Jake had almost dug a way out, but the hunters had got Swatty to tell where we were. So about the first thing I heard was a man saying:

“Where's that Swatty? Don't let him get away!”

But he had got. We didn't see him for about a week. He went over into Illinois and got a job with a farmer.

Well, all the way home Jake kept talking about Tom Foley and what he would do to him, and when the hunters heard it they laughed like sixty and said it was the best joke they ever heard. They said they would have to hand it to Foley--he was a dandy. So I guess they told Foley so. I guess he listened to them and didn't let on, only said he didn't do it, and of course they didn't believe him, because he had been elected foreman of Fearless Hose No. 2, like Jake had said he would be. So Foley got sort of proud of it and let them think. So me and Bony and Swatty never got anything, except Swatty got licked for being away for a week, and that was all right; it was worth it for the fun we had.

But the worst of it was that all of it wasn't any use. We had gone to all the work for nothing. We had caved up the wrong doctor. We ought to have caved up Doctor Wilmeyer and Doctor Brown. Because while we had Doctor Miller caved up, and thought we had everything fine and dandy, it was Doctor Wilmeyer and Doctor Brown who were the ones all the time. When we got home from the cave with the hunters there was a new baby at our house and one at Bony's house, and they had brought them. And that wasn't the worst--they were both girls. So we had done worse than nothing, because if we had left Doctor Miller alone he might, anyway, have brought boys.

IX. THE MURDERERS

Well, when we came to find out about it the new babies at my and Bony's houses weren't near as hard to bear as we had thought they would be. One reason was because they came at vacation time, when we didn't have to go to school, and the other was that they didn't make us take them out in baby carriages like we was afraid they would. One thing was that they was too fresh yet, and the other was that they wouldn't trust them to such young hoodlums anyway.

At our house Fan spent most of her time loving the new kid, and Lucy and Mamie Little didn't do much but hang around and coax to hold the baby a minute, and Toady Williams just hung around and waited for Mamie Little to come out and play. I guessed that I would never have anything to do with Mamie Little again, but that when I got a new girl it would be a different kind, like Scratch-Cat. I wished I hadn't got religion, or anything that I'd got because of Mamie Little.

A lot of us got religion at once, because that's how you usually get it. It makes it easier and you don't feel so foolish going up front.

Well, they had this revival at our church the winter before the vacation I'm telling about. When they had it I was having Mamie Little for my secret girl and she went up in front, so I got religion and went up in front too. But you see I'd ought to have waited, because it made me feel a lot worse about murdering a man. Or maybe it didn't. I guess Swatty felt almost as bad as I did. We both felt awful bad. Swatty didn't go to our church, he went to the German Lutheran church, and nobody in that church ever got religion, they just had it. At our church we didn't have it until we got it, and mostly we got it when there was a revival meeting, and that was when I got it.

So, I guess it was a lot worse for me when the thing happened that I'm going to tell you, because I had religion and Swatty hadn't.

Well, the way it happened was this way: I'm awfully croupy. I don't know anybody that's as croupy as I am, so they rub hot goose grease on me when I get to honking and then make me swallow a lot out of a spoon, and that was all right when I was little enough so they could hold my nose, but after I got big Mother said she wouldn't struggle with me another time, and she changed and gave me a dime a spoonful. So I took the old stuff because if I hadn't took it Father would have licked me, and I'd have had to take it anyway. So I got a dime a spoonful. So I bought a target rifle with the money, when I had enough, and then the rifle got broke and I couldn't get it fixed until my mother gave me three dollars because I had been such a good boy when the new baby came.

So then all the kids were coming over to my yard to shoot all the time--Swatty and Bony and the whole lot of them--and we shot at tin cans and things against the barn, but we weren't any of us very good shooters. I guess Swatty was the best. Or maybe I was about as good as he was.

That was all right, and I guess nobody cared anything, only Mother was always putting her head out of the window and saying, “Boys, do be careful with that gun!” So one day Swatty come over, like he always does, and he says, “Say! we can't shoot the rifle any more!” And I says, “Why can't we?” And Swatty says, “They made a law that we can't.” And I says, “Who made a law that we can't?” And Swatty says, “The city council made a law that nobody can shoot inside the city limits.”

So I guessed they had, because that winter they had made a law we couldn't slide down Third Street hill, and if they made a law like that they might make almost any kind of a law. So Swatty says, “If we want to shoot we've got to go outside the city limits.” And I said--I don't know what I said but I guess I said that was so.

So, anyway, we didn't shoot in my yard any more, and that wasn't our fault but the fault of the city council. So that was one of the things we thought of after we killed the man; but it didn't seem to make us feel much better, like you'd think it would. I guess there wasn't anything could make us feel better. Nobody wants to be hanged unless he has to be, I guess.

Well, it was vacation time, anyway, and we didn't want to shoot all the time because part of the time we wanted to do something else. Only when we wanted to go rowing on the river we took the rifle along anyway, because sometimes we rowed up beyond the city limits and then it was all right to shoot if we wanted to.

So one day me and Swatty and Bony we went up the river in a skiff. We always hired a skiff from old Higgins because it was ten cents an hour or three hours for a quarter from him, and Rogers charged ten cents straight. So when we got into the skiff and Higgins gave us the oars he said, “Well, boys, have a good time, but don't shoot anybody with that cannon.” And we said, all right, we wouldn't. We took turns rowing, like we always did, and pretty soon we got to the Slough, and we rowed in and shot at turtles awhile, and then Bony said, “Gee! the mosquitoes are eating me up,” and they were eating all of us up, so we floated out onto the river and just floated. We threw the bailing can over and shot at it until it went down, and just about then we were going past the old shanty boat, and we began to shoot at that.

It was up on the mud and partly sunk into it and the hull was so rotten you could kick a hole in it, and it wasn't anybody's anyway. Everybody had thrown stones at the windows in the side and broken them and nobody cared, I guess; but nobody had broken all the windows in the end toward the river, because that end was toward the river, so we shot at the windows. At first we couldn't hit them and we drifted below, but we rowed back again and in closer and then we all hit them. We hit them a lot of times, until they were all smashed out, and we began to say who had hit the most times, and Swatty said, “Let's go ashore and see who is the best shot. I bet I am.” So we went.

So we shot at cans and things, and Swatty was the best shot, and then nobody said anything but we just thought we'd go on the shanty boat for fun. We climbed up on the little front deck, and Bony was first, and Swatty was next, and then I come. So Bony pushed the door open and looked in, and he stood there looking in and didn't move, and then, all at once he made a sound--well, I don't know what kind of sound it was. It was a frightened sound. I guess it was like the sound a rabbit makes when you step on it by mistake. And then he turned, and his face was so scary it frightened me and Swatty and we turned and jumped off the front deck onto the railroad bank; but Bony jumped sideways off the deck and landed on the cracked crust that was over the mud the shanty boat was stuck in. He went right through the crust and over his knees in the mud, but me and Swatty was so scared we started to run down the railroad track as fast as we could.

Pretty soon we stopped, because the sand between the ties was full of sandburs, and then we didn't know what we were running for, so we looked back. Bony was sort of swimming on top of the mud crust and he was crying as hard as he could cry, but not loud. He was trying to get away from the shanty boat as fast as he could, and every time he got a foot out of the mud and tried to step he broke through the crust again, so he sort of laid on the crust and bellied along. He looked like an alligator swimming in the mud, and he was crying like an alligator, too. Only I guess it is crocodiles that cry. Bony was trying to get to the skiff, and Swatty knew that if Bony got there before we did he would get in the skiff and go home and leave us. So we picked the sandburs out of our feet and tried to hurry, but Bony got to the skiff and got in and pushed off.

We ran and hollered, but he didn't stop. He was so frightened that the oars jumped out from between the pins almost every time he pulled on them, and he was crying hard; but he rowed the boat pretty fast because he was working his arms so hard. Swatty and me hollered at him and told him what we would do to him if he didn't come back, but it didn't do any good. He was too scared. All he wanted to do was to get away.

Well, we tried to throw stones at him, to bring him back, but we couldn't throw that far and we just stood and watched him row down-river as hard as he could.

“Say, what do you think he saw in there?” Swatty said after while.

“I don't know what he saw,” I said. “What do you think he saw?”

“I don't know what he saw, but I'm going to see what he saw,” Swatty said.

Swatty was always like that. If anybody saw anything he wanted to see it too.

“I ain't afraid to see it,” he said.

“Well, I ain't afraid if you ain't afraid,” I said.

So we climbed up on the deck of the shanty house again. We climbed up careful and went to the door and peeked in.

As soon as I had the first peek I turned, and jumped off the deck and started to run, but Swatty just stood and looked. I hollered at him. I guess I was crying, too.

“Swatty! Swatty, come on! Oh, Swatty, come on, Swatty!” I hollered.

He turned his head and looked at me and then he looked back into the shanty boat. All he said to me was, “Shut up!”

I guess you know what we saw when we looked into the shanty boat. There was almost a whole page about it in the paper later on. He--the man--was lying there on the floor of the shanty boat in the broken bottles and straw and the dry mud that had sifted in when the river was high. He was lying on his face with his feet to the door and he was sort of crumpled up with one hand stretched out. He was dead. One side of his face was up and there was blood from the place in his forehead where he had been shot. It was on the floor.