Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 October 1883 — THE BAD BOY. [ARTICLE]

THE BAD BOY.

"What is this I hear about your lather creating a panic in a dry-goods store,” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he took a butter tryer and run it into a pumpkin- a few times. “They tell me that he had about a hundred female clerks treed on the shelves and on the counters, and all of them screaming bloody murder, and that a floorwalker hit him over the head with a roll of paper cambric, and somebody turned in a fire alarm. How was it?” “Well, if you will keep watch for pa, at the door, I will tell you about it,” said the boy. “Somebody has told pa that I was at the bottom of the whole business, and when a man loses confidence in his boy, and rolls up a trunkstrap and carries it habitually, it stands a boy in hand to keep his eye peeled. Yon see, pa lias been in a habit lately of going to the store a good deal and lallygagging with the girl clerks. Any girl that will smile on pa, and look sweet, catches him. and he would sit on a stool in front of the counter ten hours a day, pretending to want to buy some kind of fringe, or corsets, or something, and he would fai»ly talk the aim off the girls. Ma didn’t like it at all, and she told pa he ought to be ashamed of himself, cause the girls was only making a fool of him, and all the people in the store were laffin at him, but pa said for her to shut her yawp, and he kept on trying to find excuses to go to the store. Ma told me about it, and she felt real sorry, and, by jinks, it made me mad to see an old man, old enough to have gout or paralysis, going round mashing clerks in a store, and I told ma if she would let me I would break pa up in that sort of business, and she told me to go ahead and make him jump like a box-car. So ’tother day ma gave pa a piece of ribbon to match and a corset to change for a larger size, and a pair of gloves to return because the thumb of one of ’em ripped off, and told him to buy four yards of baby flannel, and see how much it would cost to have her seal-skin coat relined, and to see if her new hat was done. Pa acted as though he didn’t want to go to the store, but ma and me knew that he looked upon it as a picnic, and he blacked his boots and changed ends with his cuffs, and put on his new red necktie, and shaved hisself, and fixed up as though he was going to be married. I asked him to let me go along to carry the packages, and he said he didn’t mind if I did go. You have seen these injy-rubber rats they have at the rubber stores, haven’t you ? They look so near like a natural rat that you can’t tell the difference unless you offer the rubber rat some cheese. I got one of those rats and tied a fine thread to it with a slipnoose on the end, and when pa got into the store I put the slipnoose over the hind button of his coattail, and put the rat on the floor, and it followed him along, and I swow it looked so natural I wanted to kick it. Pa walked along smiling, and stopped at the ribbon counter, and winked at a girl, and she bent over to see what he wanted, and then she saw the rat, and she screamed and crawled up on the shelf where the boxes were, and put her feet under her, and said: ‘ Take it away! kill it!’ and she trembled all over. Pa thought she had gone into a fit ’cause she was paralyzed on his shape, and he turned blue, and went on ’cause he didn’t want to kill her dead; and, as he walked along, the rat followed him, and just as he bowed to four girls who were standing together, talking about the fun they had at the exposition the night before, they caw the rat, and they began to yell, and climb up things. One of them get on a stool and pulled her clothes tight around her ankles, so alive rat couldn’t have got in her stocking, let alone a rubber rat, and the girls all squealed just like when you tickle them in the ribs. Pa looked scared, as though he was afraid he was breaking them all up with his shape, and he kept on and another flo. k of girls saw the rat, and they jumped up on the counter and sat down on their feet, and yelled ‘rat’ Then the others yelled ‘rat,’ and in a minute about 100 girls were getting up on things and saying ‘shoo,’ and one of them got on a pile of blankets, and the pile fell off on the floor with her, and the men began to dig her out. Pa’s face was a study. He looked at one girl, and then at another, and wondered what was the matter, and finally the floOr-walker came along and see what it was, and took pa by the collar and led him out of doors, and told him if he ever came in there again he would send the police after him. I had gone by the time pa had got out on the sidewalk, and he picked up the rubber rat and found it was hitched to his coat, and he went right home. Ma says he was so mad that he stuttered, and she thinks I better board around for a day or two. She tried to reason with pa that it was intended for his good, to uhow him that he was making a fool of fiimself, but he does not look at it in that light. Say, do you think it was wrong to break him up that way. He was going wrong entirely. ” “Oh, I don’t know. You and your ma are the best judges. But I would have liked to see them girls climbing ujj the side of the store. But what is the trou- . ble with the minister?” said the groceryman. “He was in here this morning with the tail of his black coat sewed up, and when I as'ked him to sit down he said he was stauding up almost entirely now, and when I asked him if he had seen you lately, he said he had, to his sorrow, and he never wanted to see you again. I hope you have not done anything you will be sorry for. ” “It wasn’t me at aIL It was Duffy s dog,” said the boy, as he broke out with a laugh. “You see, tbe minister felt as though he had been cross to me, when I asked questions of him, and he met me on the streets and apologized, and said, hereafter he would try to show a Christian spirit, and would answer any questions I might ask him. So I began to ask him how he thought it was that Daniel had such control over the lions when they cast him into the den. I told him I thought Daniel had chloroform on his handkerchief, and when the lions got a sniff of it they didn’t want any Daniel in theirs, but he said that wasn’t it. He said it was the power of man over the brute creation, and showed the efficacy of pray or. He said

Daniel prayed three times every day, and then looked the lions right in the eye, and a lion wouldn’t have gall euongh to eat a man that looked straight in his eye. To illustrate, he said he could look a vicious dog right in the eye and the dog would turn tail and run, and just then we passed Duffy’s, and the dog barked and growled, and the minister said he would demonstrate to me the power of the human eye over the brute, and he went right into Duffy’s yard. Well, I know that dog, ’cause Duffy used to raise melons, and I went right up a tree. I didn’t want that dog to think I was trying to play any Daniel business on him, because every little while Duffy has to take a file and pry pieces of pants out of that .dog’s teeth, so I got upon a limb. The dog looked at the minister a minute, and the minister looked at the dog, and when the dog began to lick his chops I says to myself, ‘Daniel, you better be getting hence,’ but Daniel didn’t get hence till it was everlastingly too late. But I guess he would have saved his eoat if he hadn’t tried to pull the dog over a picket fence. The minister is usually a very deliberate man, but when the dog began to tangle his teeth up in his coat tail, he felt that it was good to be somewhere else, and he begun to go* away to look some other dog in the eye. I guess Duffy’s dog is not the right kind of a dog to look in the eye. I think some dogs is different about being looked in the eye. The minister looked like a flying trapeze performer when he come over that fence. They needn’t tell me our minister never belonged to a gymnasium, ’cause he couldn’t get over a fence that way, and always have been a good little boy who never stole melons. I could tell by the way he got over the fence that his neighbors tfsed to raise melons when he was a boy. Well, Duffy was taking a nap, but he woke up and came out and called the dog off, and the minister went off with his hand on where his coat was tore, and when Duffy chained up the dog I came down. I am not ydt convinced about that Daniel business, and until the minister demonstrates it I shall hold to the chloroform theory. And so the minister wouldn’t sit down. I thought that dog’s teeth had been filed.”— Peck's Sun.