CHAPTER XOUR MEETING WITH GOLIATH
Therewasn’t so much sand here. More black dirt. We could see stuff growing in a field. Still, it wasn’t the best kind of soil—not for Illinois. And I had a hunch that Jonah and his gang had bought the land for a song. That is why they had settled here.
And what kind of people were they, I wondered, curious over the outfit, of which there seemed to be about thirty or forty families, all living in squatty, unpainted houses. Did the men and women alike have names out of the Bible? Had they dropped their own names to take up the Bible names? If so, was my conclusion, they must be a gang of religious nuts.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Religion is all right—good religion, I mean. Take Dad and Mother—they both belong to the Tutter Methodist church, and when Sunday comes around we all dress up, as we should, and trot down the street to listen to the preacher—only I don’t always stay to hear the preaching, though I’m always on hand for Sunday-school.That kind of religion is all right. It keeps a fellow honest and square in his own neighborhood. He’s a better citizen than the fellow who hasn’t any religion. Take my dad again—you don’t hearhimcussing around like some of the ignorant dumb-bells who never see the inside of a church. I guess not.
But freak religion is a kind of side-show. It makes monkey-work out of stuff that God intended to be serious and sacred. Along comes some half-baked guy who thinks he’s a prophet, and getting a bunch of simple-minded people together he starts a “heaven on earth,” or some such bunk. And usually in the end he gets the people’s money! I had a second cousin who got stung that way. A “prophet” picked him up, with the story that the world was coming to an end that year, so my soft-headed relation, after paying for his ascension robe, kept just enough money to last a year and the “prophet” got the rest. That sort of reads as though in my mind all “prophets” are crooks. As a matter of fact you don’t find many of them doing business. And out of what few there are probably the majority really believe their own bunk. They’re just on the wrong track, that’s all. Kind of cuckoo, to use a plain word.
I read those names over again:Noah!I had heard of him, all right—he was the fellow who builtthe ark.Jonah!Every kid knows the story of Jonah and the whale.Adam!The fellow who ate the green-apple pie, of course.Moses!I wasn’t quite sure about him.Goliath!Oh, yes—David and Goliath! David was the little wart with the sling-shot and Goliath was the giant.Zingwent the sling-shot anddownwent old blunderbuss. Hip-hip-hurray for David!
“Well, Jerry,” Poppy spoke up, and at the sound of his voice I sort of cut short my cheering to listen to him, “what are we going to do?”
“If we believe in signs,” says I, “I guess we’re licked.”
“It’s a wonder Ma Doane didn’t put us wise to this,” the other grumbled. “Blame the luck!”
“Sh-h-h-h!” says I. “Get out your popgun. For here comes old Goliath, himself.”
Swinging toward us on high gear, with feet as big as canal boats, and dressed in faded blue overalls that were a mile too short for him, the giant, from whom I never once took my eyes, soon drew up beside our car. Say, that bird wastall, let me tell you. A regular walking Woolworth tower, and nothing else but. Nor was he skinny, like some unusually tall men. I guess not. His arms at the muscle part looked bigger around to me than my own body. What a brave little guy David must have been, I thought!
“Howdy, brothers,” came the throaty greeting, and getting a closer look at the giant I saw now that there was nothing in his sun-browned face to be afraid of. “Come fur?”
“Ten miles, more or less,” says Poppy, looking at the big one curiously.
“Pore road,” the giant waggled, looking down the sandy trail. “Awful pore road. But then we don’t need good roads ’round here, fur we never use ’em.”
“Does that sign tell the truth?” Poppy pointed.
“Supposedly, brother; supposedly.”
“What do you mean by ‘supposedly?’”
“Wa-al,” came shrewdly, “you’re wantin’ to git through town, I take it.”
“Sure thing. We’re headed for Neponset Corners.”
“Exactly,” and the voice was a drawl now. “Got some money, I s’pose.”
“A little,” says Poppy guarded-like, and he looked at me to see if I had the same suspicions of the stranger that he had.
“As much as five dollars?” came the continued drawl, as the man sort of bent over and studied our faces.
“I think so.”
“Wa-al, then,” came the quick decision, “it’ll cost you an even five dollars.”
“To go through town?”
“Exactly, brother,” and the man rubbed his hands. “Exactly.”
Poppy isn’t the kind of a kid to lay down like a door mat and let other people walk all over him. I guess not. So you can imagine how sore he was over the holdup.
“And suppose we want to dance a jig in front of your skating rink,” says he, sort of sarcastic-like. “Does that cost us another five dollars?”
“Um ...” came in continued craftiness. “How much money you got, anyway?”
“None of your business.”
But old Goliath found nothing in that to scowl over. Instead, he sort of grinned to himself, cat fashion, as though everything was nice and cozy in the back part of his mind.
“Um ...” says he, digging puzzled-like at his hair, which hadn’t seen a barber in sixteen months. “What day did you say this was?”
“Tuesday,” says Poppy innocently.
“Do tell!” the shaggy eyebrows lifted. “Tuesday, you say. An’ I sort of had an idear in my head it wasMonday. Almost let two dollars git away from me that time. You see,” came the further drawl, and the big boy kind of leaned heavily on us now, “fur small cars like this ’un, we charge five dollars on Monday, but on Tuesday it’s seven dollars.”
Poppy promptly turned on the gas.
“Good-by,” says he, “we’ll be back on the thirty-second of the month.”
But the giant knew a good thing when he saw it.
“Jest a minute; jest a minute,” says he, taking hold of a front wheel—and bu-lieve me, westopped! “If it’s cash in advance,” he came down, “we’ll call it five-fifty.”
“Guess again,” says Poppy, putting on more gas to turn around, though to no success.
“Five dollars even,” dickered the wheel holder.
“Nothin’ doin’.”
“Four-fifty.”
“Nope.”
“Brother,” then came the sad waggle, and the blue eyes shamed us, “you’ve got a penurious disposition.”
“Yah,” grinned Poppy, unable to stay sore at the queer old geezer, “whatever that is.”
“An’ furthermore, you’ve got aselfishdisposition, my brother. Here I be, a pore, hard-working man— I’ve got to have money to live on, even if they hain’t no chewin’ terbaccy in it fur me, yet with money in your pocket you begrudge me this chance of earnin’ an honest dollar.... I don’t s’pose,” and there was a hungry, begging look in the giant’s face now as he bent over us, “that you’ve got a plug of J. T. tucked away in some inside pocket, hey?”
The old hypocrite! For a moment or two I could only stare at him. Some fine religionhiswas!
“Three years ago,” then came the sad story, as the giant, touched by the memory of his earlier life wiped real tears out of his big blue eyes, “I was a man of the world. Chewin’ terbaccy, movin’ pitchers an’ a car of my own jest like this ’un.... What is it, a Ford?”
“A Rolls-Royce,” says Poppy proudly, spitting on his finger and massaging a fly speck on the windshield frame.
“Of course; of course. Never heerd tell of it though. Looks kinda shot.”
“And it’s shot worse than it looks,” the grinning driver admitted.
“Wa-al,” came the continuation of the story, “steeped in the sin an’ iniquity of the world, an’ with two wimmin wantin’ me to pick ’em fur a wife, one an actress an’ the other a church worker, I up an’ made the foolishest move of my life, pickin’ the wrong one, an’ in consequence here I be in a religious penitentiary.... Gotta cigarette?”
“We don’t use ’em,” says Poppy, wondering, I guess, what crazy junk was coming next.
“Any new wars goin’ on?” the giant then inquired.
“Wars?”
“We never git no newspapers out here—theyhain’t ’lowed—so I don’t know what’s goin’ on more ’an a mile away.... Douglas Fairbanks still livin’?”
The old fellow was dead in earnest. Can you imagine? No wonder that Poppy and I laughed our heads off. He had been dragged here against his wishes by his new religious wife, he said. And to please her he had let the leader of the gang give him a Bible name.
He was like a big kid in his talk. Some day, he told us, with a sort of wistful, far-away look in his big eyes, he was going to run away from his wife, of whom he seemed to be scared to death, and go back to the “sins of the world.” Then he inquired about the latest prize-fight news, ending up by asking who was President. I wanted to tell him “George Washington,” but Poppy told him the truth.
Well, it was fun talking with him, but we were wasting a lot of good time. Having sort of made friends with us, he confessed, as we further dickered with him, that the regular toll fee for going through town in an automobile was two dollars. If we hadn’t been smart, you see, he would have stuck us for a five-spot, knocking down the other three dollars. As it was, we hated like the dickens to let go of our money, for to a boy two dollars is two dollars. But there was no way out of it. Paying him the money, we sort of rode in state through town, looking for Noahand the whale, but to our disappointment nobody came to rubber at us. There was a big community picnic down the river, the giant told us. That’s where the people were.
Having crossed the river, we came to a steep hill. And how we ever got to the top of it I can’t imagine. But we did. From then on the road was more or less hilly. It was a glad moment, let me tell you, when we got a whiff of the Neponset Corners slaughter-house. Hot dog, was our happy thought, as we cantered into town. The good old concrete now.
I easily picked out Lawyer Chew’s house. For not only was it big like he was, but it had the owner’s name chiseled on the stone horse block at the curb. As further proof, I saw a fat boy in the yard who was a dead ringer for old Chew himself.
Bang!went something under the car. But I didn’t jump this time. For I had a hunch that it was a blow-out.
“Lawyer Chew will think that you’re trying to shoot him,” I grinned.
“Is that where he lives?” Poppy rubbered.
“Sure thing. Don’t you see his understudy on the lawn?”
The fat kid meandered into the street to watch the tire repairs.
“Some junk,” says he, turning up his nose—onlyhe couldn’t turn it up very high, for it was too fat.
Now, if anybody else had said that we would have grinned. But not this young geezer. He was too much like his old man.
“Lookit!” I nudged the tire fixer. “We’ve got company.”
“Is it human?” says Poppy, taking a sweaty squint.
“It’s got arms and legs,” says I. “Nice plump ones, too.”
The kid’s face got red.
“Don’t get rosy,” says he, showing us a cute little scowl, “or you’ll get pinned on.”
“Shall we kill it,” says I to Poppy, “and put it out of its misery?”
“Huh!” snorted little roly-poly. “You better shut up, if you know what’s good for you. And you better git that old junk-pile out of the street, too. For we don’t want trash like that in front of our house.”
Poppy promptly let out his neck.
“Where is it?” he rubbered.
“Where’s what?”
“Thedoghouse that you were just talking about.”
“Bow-wow,” says I, to help things along.
“I’m going to call my father,” fatty then blew up, madder than a dozen wet hens.
“Don’t bother,” Poppy turned up his nose, “for we’ve already met him.”
That put the kid wise, which proved that he wasn’t such a hopeless dumb-bell after all.
“Now I know who youse guys are,” says he, giving us a pair of evil eyes.
“Who told you, Lena?”
“Lena? Lena who?”
“Lean against ’er.”
“You think you’re smart,” fatty danced. “But just wait! My father’s going over to Garrison this afternoon to get the sheriff. And you’ll hear from him before night—you and that other trashy pair out in the country. We’ll show you who owns that house.”
“Eggbert!” a woman called from the porch of the big house. “EGGbert!”
Fatty turned.
“Now we know what it is,” I laughed. “It’s an egg.”
“Yah,” says Poppy, “adonkeyegg.”
“Another crack like that,” frothed fatty, “and I’ll punch your face.”
“EGGbert!” came the impatient call. “Do you hear me? Papa wants you to get under the buggy and tighten a nut. Come now, for he’s hurrying to go over to Sandy Ridge on business.”
“Yah,” hooted Poppy, “go roll under the family carryall,EGGbert, and tighten some of the nuts in your head.”
“Is there a county sheriff in Sandy Ridge?” I inquired of Poppy, when the kid had gone.
Reading my thoughts, the other laughed.
“Old Chew isn’t heading for Sandy Ridge to get the sheriff, Jerry. He’s going over there—so he thinks!—to draw up a will for a deaf and dumb lady with cork legs who read about him in the Police Gazette and wants him to take her money and build a home for crippled nutmegs.”
“Goodnight!” I stared at him. “Are you cuckoo?”
“Don’t you catch on, Jerry?” he further laughed. “To keep old Chew from calling in the Garrison sheriff, I ’phoned here to the house, getting his wife, and now he’s heading for Sandy Ridge on a wild-goose chase. He’ll be gone all day looking for the rich lady with the cork legs, so Ma is safe until to-morrow at least.”
Our tire fixed, we went another block to the concrete, only to learn, in sort of sickening disappointment, that the road to Pardyville was closed. A bridge had been washed out during the storm, and the automobiles going east and west were hitting it along C. H. O., which was open again. Our only way to get to Pardyville was to go back over the same road that we had come, and then east on C. H. O.
I now saw that Poppy was worried. And I knew why. Facing another long trip across the SaharaDesert he was thinking that we never would be able to get to Pardyville and back that night. Not that we expected to meet the granddaughter at the depot, but it had been a sort of vague hope with us that we would get track of her in town, for Pardyville wasn’t a big place. If we didn’t find her, or she didn’t soon show up of her own accord, it would be all day with poor Ma. And that was no happy thought for us.
Young fatty yelled something at us when we passed his house on the way back. But our old buss made too much racket for us to hear him. Anyway, his smart gab didn’t interest us.
We never expected to see him again. But we did! And toward the last under conditions that were pretty blamed exciting, let me tell you.