Part 13

But no self-respecting dog would be jealous if his boss scratched a pig. For after all, what is a pig? It is just a pig, and that is all you can say for it. A pig is not a person; a pig is something to eat. But Burning Deck is a peculiar dog, and he gets ideas into his head. And so, right in the midst of the show, when I chased that coloured man across the stage, Burning Deck all of a sudden jumped up on to the platform and grabbed me. I would have licked him then and there, but what was left of the show's bloodhound come crawling out on to the stage dragging two of his legs, and Burning Deck turned from me to him, and then all the actors run on to the stage to save what was left of the bloodhound, and Si Emery, the city marshal, threw open his coat so you could see his big star and climbed on to the stage and arrested everybody, and somebody dropped the curtain down right into the midst of it.

And the way it happened, on the outside of the curtain was left Freckles and me and the Little Eva of that show, which she is beautiful, with long yellow hair and pink cheeks and white clothes like an angel. And before Freckles could stop her, she took hold of him by the hand and says to the audience won't they please be kind to the poor travelling troupers and not let them be under arrest, and let the show go on? And she cried considerable, and all through her crying you could hear Si Emery behind the curtain arresting people; and after while some of the women in the audience got to crying, too, and the city fathers was all in the audience, and they went up on to the stage and told Si, for the sake of Little Eva, to release everyone he had arrested, and after that the show went on.

Well, after the show was out, quite a lot of the dogs and boys that was friends of mine and of Freckles was waiting for us. Being in a show like that made us heroes. But some of them were considerably jealous of us, too, and there would have been some fights, but Freckles says kind of dignified that he does not care to fight until his show is out of town, but after that he will take on any and all who dare--that is, he says, if he doesn't decide to go with that show, which the show is crazy to have him do. And me and him and Stevie Stevenson, which is his particular chum, goes off and sets down on the schoolhouse steps, and Stevie tells him what a good actor he was, running across the stage with me after that Uncle Tom. But Freckles, he is sad and solemn, and he only fetches a sigh.

“What's eatin' you, Freckles?” Stevie asks him. Freckles, he sighs a couple of times more, and then he says:

“Stevie, I'm in love.”

“Gosh, Freckles,” says Stevie. “Honest?”

“Honest Injun,” says Freckles.

“Do you know who with?” says Stevie.

“Uh-huh!” says Freckles. “If you didn't know who with, how would you know you was?”

But Stevie, he says you might be and not know who with, easy enough. Once, he says, he was like that. He says he was feeling kind of queer for a couple of weeks last spring, and they dosed him and dosed him, with sassafras and worm-medicine and roots and herbs, and none of it did any good. His mother says it is growing-pains, and his father says it is either laziness and not wanting to hoe in the garden or else it is a tapeworm. And he thinks himself maybe it is because he is learning to chew and smoke tobacco on the sly and keeps swallowing a good deal of it right along. But one day he hears his older sister and another big girl talking when they don't know he is around, and they are in love, both of them, and from what he can make out, their feelings is just like his. And it come to him all of a sudden he must be in love himself, and it was days and days before he found out who it was that he was in love with.

“Who was it?” asks Freckles.

“It turned out to be Mabel Smith,” says Stevie, “and I was scared plumb to death for a week or two that she would find out about it. I used to put toads down her back and stick burrs into her hair so she wouldn't never guess it.”

Stevie says he went through days and days of it, and for a while he was scared that it might last forever, and he don't ever want to be in love again. Suppose it should be found out on a fellow that he was in love?

“Stevie,” says Freckles, “this is different.”

Stevie asks him how he means.

“I _want_ her to know,” says Freckles.

“Great Scott!” says Stevie. “No!”

“Uh-huh!”

“It don't show on you, Freckles,” says Stevie.

Freckles says of course it don't show. Only first love shows, he says. Once before he was in love, he says, and that showed on him. That was last spring, and he was only a kid then, and he was in love with Miss Jones, the school teacher, and didn't know how to hide it. But this time he can hide it, because this time he feels that it is different. He swallows down the signs of it, he says, the way you keep swallowing down the signs of it when you have something terrible like heart-disease or stomach-trouble, and nobody will ever know it about him, likely, till after he is dead.

And when he is dead, Freckles says, they will all wonder what he died of, and maybe he will leave a note, wrote in his own blood, to tell. And they will all come in Injun file and pass through the parlour, he says, where his casket will be set on to four chairs, and She will come filing by and look at him, and she will say not to bury him yet, for there is a note held tight in his hand.

And everybody will say: “A note? A note? Who can it be to?”

And She will say to pardon her for taking the liberty at a time like this, but She has saw her own name on to that note. And then, Freckles says, She will open it and read it out loud right there in the parlour to all of them, and they will all say how the departed must have liked her to draw up a note to her wrote in his own blood like that.

And then, Freckles says, She will say, yes, he must have liked her, and that she liked him an awful lot, too, but She never knew he liked her, and She wished now she had of known he liked her an awful lot, because to write a note in his own blood like that showed that he liked her an awful lot, and if he only was alive now she would show she liked him an awful lot and would kiss him to show it. And she would not be scared to kiss him in front of all those people standing around the sides of the parlour, dead or alive. And then she would kiss him, Freckles says. And maybe, Freckles says, he wouldn't be dead after all, but only just lying there like the boy that travelled around with the hypnotizer who was put in a store window and laid there all the time the hypnotizer was in town with everybody making bets whether they could see him breathing or not. And then, Freckles says, he would get up out of his casket, and his Sunday suit with long pants would be on, and he would take the note and say: “Yes, it is to you, and I wrote it with my own blood!”

Which, Freckles says, he has a loose tooth he could suck blood out of any time, not wanting to scrape his arm on account of blood poison breaking out. Though he says he had thought of using some of Spot's blood, but that would seem disrespectful, somehow. And the tooth-blood seemed disrespectful, too, for he did not know the girl right well. But it would have to be the tooth-blood, he guessed, for there was a fellow out by the county line got lockjaw from blood poison breaking out on him, and died of it. And when She handed him the note, Freckles says, he would tell the people in the parlour: “Little Eva and I forgive you all!”

“Little Eva!” says Stevie. “Gosh all fish hooks, Freckles, it ain't the girl in the show, is it?”

“Uh-huh!” says Freckles, kind of sad and proud. “Freckles,” says Stevie, after they had both set there and thought, saying nothing, for a while, “I got just one more question to ask you: Are you figuring you will get married? Is it as bad as that?”

“Uh-huh!” says Freckles.

Stevie, he thought for another while, and then he got up and put his hand on to Freckles's shoulder.

“Freckles, old scout,” he says, “good-bye. I'm awful sorry for you, but I can't chase around with you any more. I can't be seen running with you. I won't tell this on you, but if it was ever to come out I wouldn't want to be too thick with you. You know what the Dalton Gang would do to you, Freck, if they ever got on to this. I won't blab, but I can't take no risks about chumming with you.”

And he went away and left Freckles and me sitting there. But in a minute he came back and said:

“Freckles, you know that iron sling-shot crotch of mine? You always used to be stuck on that slingshot crotch, Freckles, and I never would trade it to you. Well, Freckles, you can have that darned old iron slingshot crotch free for nothing!”

“Stevie,” says Freckles, “I don't want it.”

“Gosh!” says Stevie, and he went off, shaking his head.

And I was considerable worried myself. I tagged him along home, and he wasn't natural. He went into the house, and I tagged him along in and up to his room, and he took no notice of me, though I'm not supposed to be there at all.

And what do you suppose that kid did?--he went and washed his ears. It was midnight, and there wasn't any one to make him do it, and there wasn't any one to see his ears but me, but he washed 'em careful, inside and out. And then he wet his hair and combed it. First he parted it on one side, and then he parted it x on the other, and then he blushed and parted it in the middle. I was sitting on the floor by the foot of the bed, and he was facing the looking-glass, but I saw the blush because it spread clear around to the back of his neck.

And then he went to the closet and put on his long pants that belonged to his Sunday suit. The looking-glass wasn't big enough so he could see his hair and his long pants all at the same time, but he tilted the glass and squirmed and twisted around and saw them bit by bit. At first I thought maybe he was going out again, even at that time of night, but he wasn't; all he was doing was admiring himself. Just then his father pounded on the wall and asked him if he wasn't in bed yet, and he said he was going. He put the light out right away. But he didn't go to bed. He just sat in the dark with his clean ears and his long pants on and his hair parted in the middle, and several times before I went to sleep myself I heard him sigh and say: “Little Eva! Little Eva's dying! Little Eva!”

He must have got so tired he forgot to undress, staying up that late and everything, for in the morning when his father pounded on the door he didn't answer. I was under the bed, and I stayed there. Pretty soon his father pounded again, and then he came into the room. And there Freckles was lying on the bed with his Sunday pants on and his hair parted in the middle and his ears clean.

“Harold!” says his father, and shook him, “what does this mean?”

Harold is Freckles's other name, but if any one of his size calls him Harold, there will be a fight. He sat up on the bed and says, still sleepy:

“What does what mean, Pa?”

“Your lying there asleep with your clothes on,” says his father..

“I was dressing, and I went to sleep again,” says Freckles.

“Uh-huh!” says his father. “It looks like it, don't it?”

“Yes, sir,” says Freckles.

I had crawled out to the foot of the bed where I could see them, and he was still sleepy, but he was trying hard to think up something.

“It looks a lot like it,” says his father. “If you had slept in that bed, the covers would have been turned down, wouldn't they?”

“Yes, sir,” says Freckles, looking at them.

“Well, what then?” says his father.

“Well, Pa,” says Freckles, “I guess I must have made that bed up again in my sleep, and I never knew it.”

“Humph!” says his father. “Do you do that often?”

“Yes, sir,” says Freckles, “a good deal lately.”

“Harold,” says his father, real interested, “aren't you feeling well these days?”

“No, Pa,” says Freckles, “I ain't felt so very well for quite a while.”

“Humph!” says his pa. “How does it come when you dressed yourself you put on your Sunday pants, and this is only Tuesday?”

Harold says he guesses he did that in his sleep, too, the same time he made the bed up.

His pa wants to know if that has ever happened to him before.

“Yes, sir,” says Freckles, “once I woke up in the moonlight right out on one of the top limbs of the big maple tree in the front yard, with my Sunday suit on.”

“Humph!” says his father. “And was your hair parted in the middle that time, too?”

Freckles, he blushes till you can hardly see his freckles, and feels of his hair. But he is so far in, now, that he can't get out. So he says:

“Yes, sir, every time I get taken that way, so I go around in my sleep, Pa, I find my hair has been parted in the middle, the next morning.”

“Uh-huh!” says his pa. “Let's see your ears.” And he pinched one of them while he was looking at it, and Freckles says, “Ouch!”

“I thought so,” says his pa, but didn't say what he thought right away. Then pretty soon he says: “Those ears have been washed since that neck has.”

“Yes, sir,” says Freckles.

“Did you do that in your sleep, too?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you always do that when you have those spells of yours?”

“Yes, sir, I always find my ears have been washed the next morning.”

“But never your neck?”

“Sometimes my neck has, and sometimes it hasn't,” said Freckles.

“Uh-huh!” says his father, and took notice of me. I wagged my tail, and hung my tongue out, and acted friendly and joyful and happy. If you want to stay on good terms with grown-up humans, you have to keep them jollied along. I wasn't supposed to be in the house at night, anyhow, but I hoped maybe it would be overlooked.

“Did you paint and dye that dog up that way?” asked Freckles's father. For of course the paint and dye they had put on me was still there.

“Yes, sir,” says Freckles. “Nearly always when I come to myself in the morning I find I have dyed Spot.”

“That's queer, too,” said his father. And then Harold says he dyes other dogs, too, and once when he woke up in the maple tree there were three strange dogs he had dyed at the foot of it.

“Harold,” says his father, “how often do these spells come on?”

Freckles, he says, some weeks they come often and some weeks hardly ever.

“Humph!” says his father. “And when they come on, do you notice it is harder for you to tell the truth than at any other times?”

Freckles says he doesn't know what he says in his sleep when those spells take him, nor even whether he talks in his sleep or not, but he guesses if he does talk in his sleep what he says would be talk about his dreams, but he can't remember what his dreams are, so he doesn't know whether what he says is true or not.

“Uh-huh!” says his father. “Harold, do you own a gun?”

“No, sir,” says Harold. Which is true, for he only owns a third interest in a gun. Tom Mulligan and Stevie Stevenson own the rest of it, and they are keeping it hid in the rafters of Tom Mulligan's barn till they can save money enough to get it fixed so it will shoot.

“You haven't killed anybody in these spells of yours, have you, Harold?” asks his father.

“No, sir,” says Freckles.

“How would you know if you had?” asks his father.

Freckles says there would be blood on him next morning, wouldn't there?

“Not,” says his father, “if you stood at a distance and killed them with a gun.”

Freckles knows he hasn't ever really had any of these spells he says he has had, but from his looks I should judge he was scared, too, by the way his father was acting.

“Pa,” he says, “has any one been found dead?”

“The body hasn't been found yet,” says his father, “but from what I heard you say, early this morning in your sleep, I should judge one will be found.”

I thinks to myself maybe Freckles does do things in his sleep after all, and from the looks of his face he thinks so, too. He is looking scared.

“Pa,” he says, “who did I kill? What did I say?”

“You said: 'Little Eva's dying! Little Eva's dying!'” said his father. “I heard you say it over and over again in your sleep.”

Freckles, he gets red in the face again, and stares at his feet, and his pa stands and grins at him for a minute or two. And then his pa says: “Get into your weekday clothes and wash your face and neck to match your ears, and come on down to breakfast. When you get ready to tell what's on your mind, all right; but don't try to tell lies to your dad.”

“Yes, sir,” says Freckles.

But he looked mighty gloomy. And when his father went out of the room he got his fountain pen and sucked some blood out of his loose tooth and tried to spit it into his fountain pen. From which I judged he was still of a notion to write that letter and was pretty low in his mind. But he couldn't spit it into the pen, right. And he cried a little, and then saw me watching him crying and slapped at me with a hairbrush; and then he petted me and I let him pet me, for a dog, if he is any sort of dog at all, will always stand by his boy in trouble as well as gladness, and overlook things. A boy hasn't got much sense, anyhow; and a boy without a dog to keep him steered right must have a pretty tough time in the world.

If he was low in his mind then, he was lower in his mind before the day was through. For after breakfast there was Stevie Stevenson and Tom Mulligan waiting for him outside, and in spite of his promise, Stevie has told everything to Tom. And Tom has a wart and offers some wart blood to write that letter in. But Freckles says another person's blood would not be fair and honourable. He has a wart of his own, if he wanted to use wart blood, but wart blood is not to be thought of. What would a lady think if she found out it was wart blood? It would be almost and insult, wart blood would; it would be as bad as blood from a corn or bunion.

“Well, then,” says Stevie, “the truth is that you don't want to write that letter, anyhow. Last night you talked big about writing that letter, but this morning you're hunting up excuses for not writing it.”

“I'll write it if I want to write it, and you can't stop me,” says Freckles. “And I won't write it if I don't want to write it, and nobody of your size can make me.”

“I can too stop you,” says Stevie, “if I want to.”

“You don't dast to want to stop me,” says Freckles.

“I do dast,” says Stevie.

“You don't,” says Freckles.

“I do,” says Stevie.

“You're a licked, licked liar--and so's your Aunt Mariar,” says Freckles.

“I ain't got any Aunt Mariar,” says Stevie.

“You don't dast to have an Aunt Mariar,” says Freckles.

“I do dast,” says Stevie.

Then Tom put a chip on each of their shoulders, and pushed them at each other, and the chips fell off, and they went down behind the barn and had it out, and Freckles licked him. Which proves Freckles couldn't be stopped from writing that note if he wanted to, and he was still so mad that he wrote it right then and there back of the barn on a leaf torn out of a notebook Tom Mulligan owned, with his fountain pen, using his own nose bleed that Stevie had just drawed out of him; and he read out loud what he wrote. It was:

_Dear Miss Little Eva: The rose is red, the violet's blue. Sugar is sweet and so are you. Yours truly. Mr. H. Watson. This is wrote in my own blood._

“Well, now, then,” says Stevie, “where's the coffin?”

“What do you mean, the coffin?” says Freckles.

“Last night,” says Stevie, “you was makin' a lot of brags, but this morning it looks like you didn't have the sand to act up to them.”

“If you think you've got size enough to make me lay down into a coffin with that note,” says Freckles, “you got another think cornin' to you. There ain't a kid my size, nor anywhere near my size, in this whole town can make me lay down into a coffin with that note. And if you think so, you just try it on!”

Stevie, he doesn't want to fight any more. But Tom Mulligan says never mind the casket. Nobody really wants him to lay in a casket anyhow. He says he is willing to bet a million dollars Freckles doesn't dast to carry that note to the show grounds and give it to that Little Eva.

“I dast!” says Freckles.

“Dastn't!” says Tom.

“You don't dast to knock this chip off my shoulder,” says Freckles.

“I dast!” says Tom. And Stevie give him a push, and he did it. And they had it. Freckles got him down and jammed his head into the ground.

“Now, then,” he says, “do I dast to carry that note, or don't I dast to?”

“You dast to,” says Tom. “Leave me up.”

And that was the way it come about that Freckles had to carry the note, though not wanting to at all. But he did it. We all went with him over to the show grounds, Stevie Stevenson and Tom Mulligan and Mutt, Tom's dog, and me.

There was a lady sitting out in front of one of the tents on a chair. She had been washing her hair, and it was spread out to dry over her shoulders, and she was sewing on a pair of boy's pants. She had on a pair of those big horn-rimmed glasses, and we could see from her hair, which had gray in it, that she was quite an old lady, though small. I heard later that she was all of thirty-five or thirty-six years old.

The rest of us hung back a little ways, and Freckles went up to her and took off his hat.

She laid down her sewing and smiled at him.

“Well, my little man, what is it?” she said. “Were you looking for somebody?”

“Yes, ma'am,” says Freckles. He stuttered a little and he was standing on one foot.

“For whom?” she asked.

“For Little Eva,” says Freckles.

The lady stared at him, and then she smiled again.

“And what do you want with Little Eva, sonny?” she said.

Freckles, he stands on the other foot a while, and says nothing. And like as not he would have backed away, but Tom Mulligan yells: “You don't dast give it to her, Freck!”

Then Freckles hands her the letter and gulps and says: “A letter for Miss Little Eva.”

The lady takes it and reads it. And then she reads it again. And then she calls out: “Jim! Oh, Jim!”

A man comes out of the tent, and she hands it to him. He reads it, and his mouth drops open, and a pipe he is smoking falls on to the grass.

“Jim,” says the lady, “someone is making love to your wife!”

Jim, he reads the letter again, and then he laughs. He laughs so hard he bends double, and catches the back of the lady's chair. And she laughs of a sudden and puts her hand in front of her face and laughs again. And then Jim, he says to Freckles, who has been getting redder and redder:

“And who is Mr. H. Watson?”

“Don't you get it?” says the lady, taking off her glasses to wipe them, and pointing to Freckles. “This is the boy that owns the dog that played the bloodhound last night, and _he_ is Mr. H. Watson!”

And when she took off her glasses like that, we all saw she was the Little Eva of that show!

“Mr. H. Watson,” says Jim to Freckles, “did you intend matrimony, or were you trying to flirt?”

“Quit your kidding him, Jim,” says Little Eva, still laughing. “Can't you see he's hacked nearly to death?”

“None of your business what I intended!” yells Freckles to Jim. And he picks up a clod of dirt and nearly hits Jim with it, and runs. And we all run. But when we had run half a block, we looked back, and nobody was following us. Jim and Little Eva had busted out laughing again, and was laughing so hard they was hanging on to each other to keep from falling down.

“Good-bye, Mr. H. Watson,” yells Jim. “Is it really your own blood?”

And then began a time of disgrace for Freckles and me such as I never hope to live through again. For the next thing those two boys that had been his friends was both dancing round him laughing and calling him Mr. H. Watson; and by the time we got down to the part of Main Street where the stores are, every boy and every dog in town was dancing around Freckles and hearing all about it and yelling, “H. Watson! Mr. H. Watson! Is it your own blood? Is it your own blood, Mr. H. Watson?”