Swatty: A Story of Real Boys. Butler Ellis Parker
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be a goner and break a leg or something, but he got onto the window sill and hung down with his hands on the sill, and dropped. He dropped straddle of the roof and hung on the best way he could.
He said the only thing he thought about was what a fool he had been not to shut the window, but it was J une and most of the windows were wide open anyway, and I guess Miss Murphy didn’t notice. She unlocked the door and looked into the room and Swatty wasn’t there. Then I guess she thought maybe somebody had come to the library room for a book and had let Swatty out. She never put her head out of the window at all. So she was beaten that time, and she went home.
So Swatty waited until the janitor had swept all the rooms and started to sweep the walk and he hollered to him. It is none of the janitor’s business who gets licked or who don’t, so he came up to the room and helped Swatty get in the window. He just laughed about it.
So the next day Swatty went to school just the same as always, but at noon he came over to my barn and Bony came with him. They generally came because I had to feed my rabbits at noon. This time Swatty sort of poked at the sawdust that was the floor of our barn and didn’t say much. He most generally wore his hat on the back of his head, but this time he had it pulled down over his eyes and that was the way he did when he was getting ready to fight a fellow.
After a while he looked up.
“Are you fellows going to school this afternoon?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Ain’t you?”
“Go and get licked? I guess not!” he said. “I’m going down to the river.”
“What are you going to do down at the river?” Bony asked.
“Going to look at it; what you think I’m going to do?” said Swatty.
Well, looking at it wasn’t a bad thing to do, because the river was away up, and when the Mississippi is up it is worth looking at. It looks twice as big and sort of rounded up in the middle, and all sorts of things floating down it – dead trees, and boxes, and logs, and dead pigs, and sometimes sheds and things. It generally gets up in June, and we always go down on Saturdays to see how she’s getting along.
“She’s higher than she ever was,” said Swatty.
“Well, I guess she’ll be mighty high by Saturday,” said Bony.
“No, she won’t,” said Swatty, “because she’s going to begin falling to-day, the paper says. Why don’t you come along down with me?”
“Yes, and get licked for staying out of school!” I said.
“All right for you fellows, then!” said Swatty. “I’ll be mad at you for good. If you were going to get licked I’d just want to do something so I could get licked too. Don’t I always stick by you fellows? And when I’m going to get licked you go back on me. You’re ‘fraid-cats.”
“Who’s a ‘fraid-cat?” I asked, for I don’t let anybody call me that.
“You are!” said Swatty. “And so’s Bony. You’re afraid to stay out of school one afternoon. You’re afraid to stay out the day the river hits high-water mark. You’ll look nice, won’t you, with just you and Bony and a lot of girls in school!”
“Who said we’d be the only kids there?” I asked.
“Who said it? Why, I said it. You don’t think any kids will go to school this afternoon, do you? Everybody will be down at the levee – men and everybody. If the river don’t drop this afternoon she’ll go over the island levee. And you sit around in school like it was a common day! Why, it’s like – like election, or Fourth of July, or something like that! It’s worse than when the ice goes out.”
Well, I never knew a boy to get licked for staying out of school when the ice was going out of the river. He gets kept in the next day, or something, but nobody can blame a boy for wanting to see the ice go out, not even a teacher. So I guessed I’d go with Swatty, if I could sneak it. Bony didn’t want to go much, but he didn’t like both of us to call him a ‘fraid-cat, so he came. We climbed out of my barn window, because Swatty said we’d have to be careful; but I guess it wasn’t much use, because if we had gone out of the back gate it would have done just as well, and if we had gone out of the front gate nobody would have thought anything but that we were going to school. We kept in the alley all the way down to Indian Creek, and Indian Creek was worth seeing, I tell you.
Mostly there is nothing in it but a little bit of water twisting along in the wet sand, away down in the bottom of the creek bed, but now the creek was full right up to the top, and there were rowboats moored in it. We played in the rowboats a while, until a man came and chased us away, and then we went down along the creek to the river. I tell you, she was some river!
She went rushing along, all big and muddy and foamy, and she was half covered with floating stuff – bark and whole haystacks and old trees and boards and boxes and things. It scared a fellow just to look at her. It made me feel the way a little baby feels when a big twelve-wheel mogul engine comes roaring up to the depot platform, only ten times as scary. It was like a whole ocean starting out to rush away somewhere. We just stood and looked at it, and pretty soon Swatty says, “Gosh!” Only he always says “Garsh!” And I said, “Gee!” That was all we said, and Bony didn’t say anything. He just stepped backward three or four steps and looked frightened. That’s the way you always feel when you see the old Mississippi on a rampage. You feel as if you ought to do something to stop it, and you know you can’t – that nobody can. When it gets going it is going to keep right on. So we went down to the levee.
Well, there wasn’t any levee! Our levee is just a long down-hill of sand, and it wasn’t there. The river had backed clean up to the railroad tracks and was sploshing against the second rail of the outside track, and at the down-river end of the levee it had gone under the tracks and was all over Front Street at the corner. The ferry dock, that was usually away down at the bottom of the levee, was tied right up close to the railroad track, and the ferry was tied in behind the steamboat warehouse, so she wouldn’t wash away. The water was clean up over the floor of the steamboat warehouse, too, and nothing looked the way it used to look. It was worth forty lickings just to see how different everything was. We just stood and looked and couldn’t believe it.
“Come on,” said Swatty, all at once, “let’s have some fun. Let’s take off our shoes and stockings and have some fun.”
We went across the street and asked a man if we could leave our shoes and stockings in his store, and he said we could, and then we went back and began to wade where the water wasn’t very deep. There were a few other boys there, wading, and a lot of men standing around, looking at the water. Some would come down and look a while and then go away again, and all at once Swatty said, “Garsh! What if our fathers came down here!”
So we got away from there, quick. We went down below the steamboat warehouse, where the ferryboat was tied, because nobody was apt to come down there, and nobody did. We played on the ferryboat a while and then we got off her, and Swatty saw where somebody had fastened a lot of logs and bridge timbers to the railway track. I guess they were stuff some men had gone out in skiffs to catch as they floated by, before the river got so rampageous. The way they fastened them was to drive a spike in one end and tie a rope to that, and then tie the other end to the railway track. So Swatty said, “Come on! Let’s have some fun with these logs and bridge timbers,” or something like that; so we did. We walked on them, and some of them would sink under us, and then we would jump to another.
Well, there below the steamboat warehouse the water made an eddy, and the bark and foam and some sticks kept going around and around in the eddy, and pretty soon Swatty said: “Let’s ride on these logs,” and that was all right, too, because we could sit straddle of a log or a bridge timber and paddle with our feet. So we did that. Swatty cut three of them loose, and we each took a bridge timber, because they didn’t turn over like the logs did, and we paddled around in the eddy and played we were steamboats. I was the “War Eagle,” and Swatty was the “Mary Morton,” and Bony was the “Centennial.” We played that a long time and then we took boards for paddles, and we could go better that way so we played Indians in canoes, and