CHAPTER XX.
The Boy Goes Home from Church with a Girl—The Boy Meets the Girl’s Pa at a Barbecue—Pa Fills the Gas Bag and They Get Ready to Sail the Airship—Pa, the Boy and the King Take a Ride up in the Clouds—Pa Meets a New Tribe and They Take Him for Mr. Roosevelt.
I have spent a good many terrible nights in my time, but I never spent such a night as I did up the tree, the night I fired the nigger chasers into the barbecue crowd in Africa, with hyenas and jackals sitting on their haunches and looking up at us, licking their chops, and yapping for us to come down and be chewed.
Once when I was quite a bit younger, a party of us boys went to rob a melon patch, and the farmer shot us in the pants with rock salt, and chased us up a tree, while thedogs stood at the foot of the tree all night and barked, and the salt in our wounds was making us smart awful, but it was not so dangerous as this hyena stunt.
Once I went home from church with a girl, and on the way back home the father of the girl came out with a ghost sheet over him, with phosphorus eyes, and scared me into a hen coop, and as I was praying to die, a negro with a dark lantern came to steal the chickens, and when he saw me in the coop he gave me some chickens he had stolen from another coop, and he run one way and I run the other, and I guess he went around the world one way and I the other, and we met last night at the barbecue, sure, and he started back around the world the other way when my fireworks went off.
But I was not as scared in the hen coop, with the ghost and the frightened negro, as I was up the tree, looking down the throats of the hyenas, with the lions howling around sniffing at the remains of thebarbecue, and a few tigers waving their tails from side to side, waiting for us to drop off the limbs.
Pa went to sleep a-straddle of a limb because he was tired, and the cowboy went to sleep on another limb because he was drunk, and your little Hennery was on watch, crying to be put to bed.
When daylight came the animals slunk away into the jungle, and when it got light enough I could see black faces peering through the bushes trying to find out if it was safe to return, so I woke Pa and the cowboy, and told Pa his subjects were coming into camp to cut his liver out, and toast it on a forked stick, and Pa climbed down from the tree and kicked the fire, and as the negroes began to come nearer he said, “Welcome to our beautiful city.â€
Pretty soon all of the tribe returned, but they did not kowtow to Pa like they used to, until the old king showed up.
He was so scared he was fairly pale, andhe had a grouch too, and Pa noticed it, for he said to the cowboy, “You go and fill that gas bag and get ready to sail, because there is going to be a mutiny, and we have got to get out of this country pretty precious, or they will eat us,†and the cowboy went to work to inflate the gas bag.
Pa stood around trying to look like a saint, and he pointed to the sun, just rising over the hills, and got on his knees to worship the sun, and motioned for all the tribe to do likewise, but they turned their backs on Pa and the sun, and surrounded the old king whose place Pa had usurped, and by the motions they made and the few words I could understand it was evident they proposed to drive us out of the tribe. The old king came to Pa and said his tribe wanted to have peace again, and wanted him to run the shebang, and they wanted an old fashioned cannibal feast, and that they insisted on eating Pa and the cowboy and myself roasted. Pa said all right, he was willing tobe roasted in the evening but not in the morning. He said white meat always tasted better in the evening, after a ride up in the clouds, and he propsed to the old king that we all three, with the king, take a nice ride in the sky cart, take along all the gold we had, and visit an adjoining tribe, buy all their wives, and herd them, and let the cowboy drive them back to camp and then they could roast us and have the time of their lives.
They Turned Their Backs On Pa and the Sun.
They Turned Their Backs On Pa and the Sun.
They Turned Their Backs On Pa and the Sun.
This looked good to the old king, and he went and dug up all the gold and diamonds they had, and put them in a bag, which was tied to the bamboo frame of the airship, and after breakfast we got ready to sail.
We fixed a sort of chair for the king to ride in, tied with rawhide to a cross stick right in front of where the cowboy always sits, and I heard Pa whisper to the cowboy that he would head the ship direct to the coast, and when we got away from camp afew miles, Pa would give the signal and the cowboy was to cut the rawhide rope and let the king take a fall out of himself.
Pa steered the airship South, and occasionally the negro king would yell and point to the East, where the tribe was located whose wives we had designs on, but Pa kept his direction, and after running an hour or so we came to a beautiful lake of blue water, and Pa told the cowboy to get ready to throw off about two hundred pounds of dead weight. The cowboy said, “Aye, aye, sir,†and got his knife ready. Pa let the airship down about fifty feet above the water of the lake, so the fall would not kill the negro king, and when we got nearly across the lake, Pa said, “Cut the rope,†and the cowboy reached over with his knife and cut it, and down went Mr. McGinty, hanging on to the rope, and turning over in the air a dozen times, and striking the surface of the lake with a spash that shot the water up nearly to the airship. “So long, you senegambiancannibal,†said Pa as the king struck the water, and the airship shot up about fifty feet higher.
“Give my love to forty or fifty of your wives,†said the cowboy as he sheathed his knife. “Take that from your little Hennery,†says I as I lit a giant firecracker and threw it down near him, where it exploded like a bomb. And then as we went along through the air we watched him loosen himself from the chair and strike out for the shore, swearing in negro dialect that he would eat us yet, without salt, and then we got out of sight of the lake, laughing at our escape and wondering where we would land.
“Take That from Your Little Hennery.â€
“Take That from Your Little Hennery.â€
“Take That from Your Little Hennery.â€
We sailed along for a couple of hours, and passed over villages of natives, but Pa said he would not take chances on another nigger king, but would run the ship towards the coast as long as the gas held out, and on we went until after midday, when the gas bag began to flap as though the gas was escaping, and Pa acted nearly crazy, because wewere over a dense jungle, filled with wild animals, and not a thing to eat.
After two o’clock P. M. we sighted a clearing ahead, with nice modern houses, and as we got nearer we could see herds of Jersey cattle, and girafs, and horses and elephants, and the queerest mixture of wild life and civilization, and the nearer we got the more it looked like a Yankee settlement, and when Pa saw some automobiles and a tennis court, with men, women and children playing tennis and riding around in gasoline and steam autos, and a creamery and a wind mill and an ice house, he said that was the place he was looking for, and he pointed the airship for the clearing, and told the cowboy to get the anchor ready.
The people on the plantation saw the airship and quit playing tennis, the autos pointed towards where we were going to land, and when we threw out the anchor and came down to the ground and made a landing right on the golf links near the tenniscourt, we were soon surrounded by twenty or thirty men, women and children, and Pa got out and took off his hat and made a bow that would have captured any people of any nationality.
Pa was going to speak to the people in French or German, but a man in riding breeches came up and in the purest English said, “I beg pardon, but is this Mr. Roosevelt?†and Pa said, “Not on your life, but just as good a man all right.â€
The man said he was expecting Mr. Roosevelt but not until after the 4th of March, but he didn’t know but what he had come a little ahead of schedule time. Pa said he was a Roosevelt man all right, though he’d always been a Democrat, and that he was an American.
“But what are you doing in Africa?†said the man who seemed to be the leading citizen. “O!†said Pa, as he lit a cigarette, “I have been taking in a large part of Africa,and just dropped down to see if you had any news of the election in the United States.â€
The man said he was an American too, and lived in Michigan when at home, but he came out here for his wife’s health, and opened up a little ranch. He said Taft was elected all right, and Pa said he thought it would come out that way, and then the man asked us into the house, and the others crowded around our airship, and before long the cowboy was riding a polo pony, and I was playing tennis with some boys about as big as me, and Pa was drinking highballs and club soda, and as the rum went down and we sat around a regular dining table, eating off of regular dishes, with knives and forks, and listening to people talk our language, and laugh right out loud, the first experience of the kind we had enjoyed in six months, and we thought how only a few hours before we were with a tribe of canniballs, billed to be eaten at sundown, we thought how small the world was, and joined in the prayer offered by the host.