CHAPTER II.
No Encouragement for Inventive Genius inOrphan Home—The Boy Uses His New Invention, a Patent Clothes Wringer, in Milking.
There is no encouragement for inventive genius in this orphans’ home that I am honoring with my patronage.
I always supposed that an orphanage was a place where they tried to make an orphan feel that it wasn’t such a great loss not to have a regular home, among your people as long as you could be lovingly cared for in big bunches by charitable people, who would act like a High School to you, and when you got a diploma from an orphans’ home you could go out into the world and hold up your head like a college graduate, but I can see from my experience at this alleged home that when we boys get out the police willhave a tab on us, and we will be pinched like tramps.
What encouragement is there to learn anything but being chambermaid to cows? Gee, but I never want to look a cow in the face again. When I failed to milk that cow and she galloped all over the place, and kicked my liver around where my spleen ought to be, the one-eyed warden of the place told me I must practice on that cow till I got so that I could milk her with my eyes shut, and that I wouldn’t get much to eat until I could show him that I was a he-milkmaid of the thirty-third degree.
I told him I saw a machine last year at the State Fair that had a suction pump that was put on to the cow’s works, and by touching a button the milk and honey flowed into a pail, and if he would get such a machine I could touch the button all right. He said the orphanage couldn’t afford to buy such a machine, but if I wanted to invent any device to milk cows I could goahead, but it was up to me to produce milk, one way or another.
Well, an idea struck me just like being hit with a base ball bat, and in a short time I was ready.
I got a clothes wringer out of the laundry, and went to corral the cow. I thought if a clothes wringer could squeeze the blue water out of a wash tub of clothes, it would squeeze a pail of milk out of a cow, so I took my clothes wringer and the milk pail and got under the cow and gathered all her four weiners together in my hands and put the ends of them between the rubber rollers, just easy, and the boys gathered round to see where my inventive genius was going to get off at. Then when my audience was all ready to cheer me, if the machine worked, I took hold of the handle of the machine, which was across my lap, and turned the crank with a yuck motion, until all the cow’s weiners went through between the rollers, and I noticed the cow flinched, and justthere one of the sophomore boys threw a giant firecracker under the cow’s basement near the milk pail, and when the explosion came, just when I was cranking her up a second time and turning on the high speed clutch, the cow bleated as though she had lost her calf, and she went up into the air like the cow that jumped over the moon, and she went across the country on a cavalry charge, with me hanging on the handle of the wringer with one hand, on her tail with the other, and the boys giving the orphan school yell, and the cow bellowing like a whole drove of cattle that have smelled blood around a slaughter house.
Gosh, but I never had such an excursion. The cow went around the house and on to the porch where the manager and some women were, and finally rushed into the kitchen, and everybody came and tied me loose from the cow, and got the clothes wringer off her vital parts, and shooed herback to the barn, and then they took me to the manager’s office, and I fainted away.
Gosh, But I Never Had Such an Excursion!
Gosh, But I Never Had Such an Excursion!
Gosh, But I Never Had Such an Excursion!
When I came to the one-eyed manager had a bandage over his nose where the handle of the clothes wringer hit him when he tried to turn the handle back to release the pressure on the cow’s bananas, and he was so mad you could hear him “sis,” like when you drop water on a hot griddle.
He got up and took me by the neck and wrung it just like I was a hen having its neck wrung when there is company coming and he dropped me “kerplunk” and said I had ruined the best cow on the place by flattening out her private affairs so that nothing but skim milk could ever get through the teats, and he asked me what in thunder I was doing, milking a cow with a clothes wringer, when I ought to have known that a clothes wringer would squeeze the milk up into the second story of the cow.
I told him I had never been a dairy farmer, anyway, and a cow was a new proposition tome, and he said I could go and live on bread and water till doomsday, and that I was the worst orphan he ever saw, and he pushed me out of the room.
The boys met me when I came out of the presence of the one-eyed manager, and we went off into the woods and held an indignation meeting, and passed resolutions condemning the management of the orphanage, and I suggested that we form a union and strike for shorter hours and more food, and if we did not get it, we could walk out, and make the orphan school business close up.
We discussed what we would do and say to the boss, and just before supper time we lined up in a body before the house and called out the manager and made our demands, and gave him fifteen minutes to accept, or out we would go, and I tell you we looked saucy.
I never saw anything act as quick as that strike did. In five minutes the manager came out and said he wouldn’t grant a thing,and besides we were locked out, and couldn’t ever get back into the place unless we crawled on our hands and knees and stood on our hind feet like dogs, and barked and begged for food, and he shut the door and the dining room was closed in our faces, and we were told to get off the place or they would set the dogs on us.
For a few minutes not a word was said, then the boys pitched on to me and another boy that had brought on the strike, and gave us a good licking, and made us run to the woods, and when we got nearly out of sight we turned and all the brave dubs that were going to break up the orphanage were down on their seats on the grass, begging like dogs to be taken back, because supper was ready, and my chum and me were pulling for tall timber, wondering where the next meal was coming from, and where we are going to sleep.
We were the only boys in that bunch of strikers that had sand enough to stand upfor union principles, and as is usually the case the fellows who had the most gravel in their crops had little else, and I was never so hungry in my life.
A diet of fried bull heads and skim milk, and sour bread for a few days in the orphanage had left me with an appetite that ought to have had a ten course banquet at once, but we walked on for hours, and finally struck a railroad track and followed it to a town.
My chum stopped at a freight car on a side track and began to poke around one of the oil boxes on a wheel, and when I asked him what he was going to do, he said that to a hungry man the cotton waste and the grease in a hot box of a freight car was just as good as a shrimp salad, and he began to poke the stuff out of the hot box to eat it. He said the lives of tramps were often saved by eating out of hot boxes. I swore that I would never eat no hot box banquet, and I pulled him away from the box car just as a brakeman came along with a hook and a canof oil and a bucket of water to cool it off, and we escaped.
I told him we would have a good supper all right, if he would stick by me.
We went into the little town and it was getting dark, and all the people were out doors looking up into the sky, and saying, “there it is, I see it,” and I asked a man in front of a saloon what the excitement was about, and he said that they were watching the balloons from St. Louis, about two hundred miles away, which were sailing to the east.
Did you ever have an idea strike you so sudden that it made you dizzy? Well, I was struck with one so quick that it made me snicker, and I pulled my new chum away and told him how we would get supper and a place to sleep, and that was to go into the woods near where the people were looking up into the air, and when a balloon went over, after it got good and dark, we could set up a yell, as though murder was beingdone, and when the crowd came to see what was the matter, he could say we fell out of a balloon, and landed in a tree and squirmed down to the ground.
Well, I didn’t want to lie, but my chum, who had once been in a Reform School, did not care so much about lying, so he was to do the talking and I was to be deaf and dumb, as though the fall from the balloon had knocked me silly.
Well, when we saw a light in the sky over us and the people were going wild over thinking they saw a balloon, we began to scream like wild cats, and groan like lost souls, and yell for “help, help.” When the people came on the run, and when they found us with our clothes torn, and our hair standing on end, and our eyes bulging out, and my chum, the old liar, said when we were leaning over the basket of the balloon to see what town we were passing over, we fell out in a tree, and we were so hungry.
“Tossed him over the fence.”
“Tossed him over the fence.”
“Tossed him over the fence.”
Well, the way those good people swallowed that yarn was too comical, and theypicked us up and took us into a house. A pussy woman got me under her arm and said “Poor dear, every bone in his body is busted, but I saw him first, and I am going to have him mended and keep him for a souvenir,” and I hung my legs and arms down so I would be heavy, and she dragged me to the house. All I said was, “pie, pie, pie,” and she said I was starving for pie, and when they got us in bed, with nice night shirts on, they crowded around us and began to feed us, and we took everything from soup to mints, and went to sleep, and the last thing I heard was balloon talk, and the woman who drew me in the shuffle said, “The ways of Providence are past finding out,” and as I rolled over in bed I heard my chum in another bed say “You can bet your sweet life,” and then the people began to go away, talking about the narrow escape of those dear boys, and my pussy fat lady held my hand and stroked my aching stomach untillong after midnight, and then she tip-toed off to bed.
I spoke to my chum and said, “Did it work out all right?” and he groaned and said, “Gee, but I et too much, I otter have saved some of it for breakfast,” and then we went to sleep in nice feather beds instead of those beds at the orphanage made of breakfast food.