Butler Ellis Parker
Swatty: A Story of Real Boys
“Is Doctor Miller at home?” Swatty asked.
She said he was, and Swatty told her we had found his horse, and she said she would tell him. He came right out. He looked sort of jolly and he said: “Well, boys, I suppose you are looking for a reward. Did you bring old Jenny home?”
“No, sir,” Swatty said. “We would of but we couldn’t. We couldn’t get her out of the hole.”
So he wanted to know what hole and Swatty told him. He told him we had a cave up the creek and that it looked like the old mare had walked on top of the cave and fell through. He asked if she was hurt and we said she wasn’t, we guessed, but she wouldn’t come out for us. He got his hat.
“Come on,” he said; “I’ll see about it.”
Well, he took us out the back way to the stable and yelled for Jake, and Jake came.
“Jake,” he said, “these boys have found Jenny, and she’s fallen into a hole and they can’t get her out.”
“All right,” Jake said; “I’ll go with them.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. We hadn’t thought of that. The doctor started to go back to the house. Then he stopped.
“Just wait a minute,” he said. “I think I’ll go with you. If the mare is hurt, I may be able to attend to her right there.”
When the doctor came out with his medicine case we started, and me and Swatty pretended to be eager to hurry up. Bony sort of held back behind. The doctor talked to us a lot. He was sort of happy and good-natured about it, like fat men are, and joked some how far it was. We took him out the Graveyard Road and down into the creek bottom and showed him the mouth of our cave up the bank.
“Well, well,” he said. “This is mountain climbing indeed! If I had much of this to do I’d be a smaller and a better man.”
He made me carry his medicine case so he could use both hands, and I went first. Then Jake came and then the doctor, and then Swatty and then Bony. When we got to the door of the cave I stopped and Jake looked in.
“Where’s the mare?” he said. “I don’t see no mare.”
He turned to look back and the doctor was just behind him, panting pretty hard.
“What?” the doctor asked, and he stepped up. I started to say it was the back cave the mare was in, but just then the doctor bumped against me and went sort of down on his knees. It was as dark as pitch. Swatty had slammed the door shut against the doctor and jolted him into the cave, and me and Jake with him. I heard Swatty fastening the cave door, and there we were – me and the doctor and Jake. We were locked in the cave.
I was the first one to know what Swatty had done, and I pounded on the door and hollered for them to let us out, but they didn’t do it. Jake was just standing and saying:
“I’ll be dumed! I’ll be dumed!”
“What does this mean?” Doctor Miller asked.
I didn’t know what to say, I was so scared. But I didn’t have to say anything. Jake said it.
“I know mighty well what this means, Doc,” he said. “This is some of Tom Foley’s work, this is. He’s been trying to get me out of the foremanship of Fearless Hose No. 2 for the last three years, and we’ve got the annual election to-night. He knows mighty well if I ain’t there to-night he can put it over on me, and this is his game. I’m mighty sorry you got drug into it, Doc; but I’ll make him suffer for this when I get out!”
He struck a match and saw the food I had brought. He kept striking more matches and looking around the cave.
“Yes, by Susan!” he said. “Look at the food. This is Foley’s work – the great big mush! He thinks this is a good joke. I’ll show him! Son,” he said to me, “did Foley talk to you?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“I knew it!” Jake said. “It’s that Swatty kid. He’s a terror, he is. Well, son, don’t you mind; we’ll mighty soon get out of here.”
I felt a whole lot better. But I guess the doctor didn’t.
“Get out? How’ll we get out?” he wanted to know. “If your friend Foley fixed this up, you may be sure he did not expect you to get out to-night. And I’ve got to get out. I’ve got two important cases, and I must get out.”
“Oh, we’ll get out, Doc,” said Jake. And he lit another match.
He looked at the door and tried it, butting into it with his shoulder. But we had fixed it dandy. It didn’t give at all. It was like butting a rock. He tried it awhile, and then he said, but not so gay: “Well, we’ll have to dig out.”
“Then, Jake, let us dig,” said the doctor. And they dug. I dug too, but mostly I only pretended to dig. It was dark in there and you couldn’t see, and clay isn’t anything to dig with your fingers. Jake and the doctor had pocket knives, but you know how much you can dig with a pocket knife. But they had the right idea. They didn’t try to dig through the tunnel, like me and Swatty thought they would. They dug around the door.
Well, when Swatty and Bony had locked us in they went and sat on the bank across the creek to see what would happen. Nothing happened. Then Swatty got to thinking. He didn’t worry about Jake, because Jake was a hired man and nobody ever knew when he would get home; but he knew my aunt would want to know where I was. That made him think of Mrs. Miller, and she would want to know where the doctor was. He was mighty worried. We had thought that maybe we could keep the doctor in the cave a couple of weeks until everything was all right, but he knew right away that me and Jake and the doctor couldn’t live on the food I had put in the cave, and he knew my aunt would start out to find where I was, and Mrs. Miller to find out where Doctor Miller was. He was mighty worried, and he didn’t know what to do. So he didn’t do anything.
It turned out like he thought it would. My aunt was mad when I did not come home to dinner, and madder when I didn’t come home to supper, but when I didn’t come home at all she was worried almost crazy and she got my father to go hunt for me. He hunted awhile, and then he got some other men to hunt for me, because he had to go home.
They hunted all night. Along toward morning the hunters who were hunting for me ran into the hunters who were hunting for Doctor Miller. They had Swatty with them, because Mrs. Miller had said Swatty had come to the house and the doctor had gone away with him. They were trying to make Swatty tell where the doctor went, but he wouldn’t. He just let on like he was crying and said he didn’t know.
Well, the hunters who were hunting for Doctor Miller had just started out, because Mrs. Miller hadn’t got worried until toward morning, because she thought he was attending to his business. But toward morning my father and Bony’s father came to his house, and it was at their houses Mrs. Miller thought Doctor Miller was. So she was frightened and got some men to hunt him.
I guess I went to sleep about ten or eleven o’clock that night while Jake find Doctor Miller were still digging. I woke up all of a sudden and there I was in the cave, and the door open and men coming in and Doctor Miller brushing off his hands. Him and Jake had almost dug a way out, but the hunters had got Swatty to tell where we were. So about the first thing I heard was a man saying:
“Where’s that Swatty? Don’t let him get away!”
But he had got. We didn’t see him for about a week. He went over into Illinois and got a job with a farmer.
Well, all the way home Jake kept talking about Tom Foley and what he would do to him, and when the hunters heard it they laughed like sixty and said it was the best joke they ever heard. They said they would have to hand it to Foley – he was a dandy. So I guess they told Foley so. I guess he listened to them and didn’t let on, only said he didn’t do it, and of course they didn’t believe him, because he had been elected foreman of Fearless Hose No. 2, like Jake had said he would be. So Foley got sort of proud of it and let them think. So me and Bony and Swatty never got anything, except Swatty got licked for being away for a week, and that was all right; it was worth it for the fun we had.
But the worst of it was that all of it wasn’t any use. We had gone to all the work for nothing. We had caved up the wrong doctor. We ought to have caved up Doctor Wilmeyer and Doctor Brown. Because while we had Doctor Miller caved up, and thought we had everything fine and dandy, it was Doctor Wilmeyer and Doctor Brown who were the ones all the time. When we got home from the cave with the hunters there was a new baby at our house and one at Bony’s house, and they had brought them. And that wasn’t the worst – they were both girls. So we had done worse than nothing, because if we had left Doctor Miller alone he might, anyway, have brought boys.
IX. THE MURDERERS
Well, when we came to find out about it the new babies at my and Bony’s houses weren’t near as hard to bear as we had thought they would be. One reason was because they came at vacation time, when we didn’t have to go to school, and the other was that they didn’t make us take them out in baby carriages like we was afraid they would. One thing was that they was too fresh yet, and the other was that they wouldn’t trust them to such young hoodlums anyway.
At our house Fan spent most of her time loving the new kid, and Lucy and Mamie Little didn’t do much but hang around and coax to hold the baby a minute, and Toady Williams just hung around and waited for Mamie Little to come out and play. I guessed that I would never have anything to do with Mamie Little again, but that when I got a new girl it would be a different kind, like Scratch-Cat. I wished I hadn’t got religion, or anything that I’d got because of Mamie Little.
A lot of us got religion at once, because that’s how you usually get it. It makes it easier and you don’t feel so foolish going up front.
Well, they had this revival at our church the winter before the vacation I’m telling about. When they had it I was having Mamie Little for my secret girl and she went up in front, so I got religion and went up in front too. But you see I’d ought to have waited, because it made me feel a lot worse about murdering a man. Or maybe it didn’t. I guess Swatty felt almost as bad as I did. We both felt awful bad. Swatty didn’t go to our church, he went to the German Lutheran church, and nobody in that church ever got religion, they just had it. At our church we didn’t have it until we got it, and mostly we got it when there was a revival meeting, and that was when I got it.
So, I guess it was a lot worse for me when the thing happened that I’m going to tell you, because I had religion and Swatty hadn’t.
Well, the way it happened was this way: I’m awfully croupy. I don’t know anybody that’s as croupy as I am, so they rub hot goose grease on me when I get to honking and then make me swallow a lot out of a spoon, and that was all right when I was little enough so they could hold my nose, but after I got big Mother said she wouldn’t struggle with me another time, and she changed and gave me a dime a spoonful. So I took the old stuff because if I hadn’t took it Father would have licked me, and I’d have had to take it anyway. So I got a dime a spoonful. So I bought a target rifle with the money, when I had enough, and then the rifle got broke and I couldn’t get it fixed until my mother gave me three dollars because I had been such a good boy when the new baby came.
So then all the kids were coming over to my yard to shoot all the time – Swatty and Bony and the whole lot of them – and we shot at tin cans and things against the barn, but we weren’t any of us very good shooters. I guess Swatty was the best. Or maybe I was about as good as he was.
That was all right, and I guess nobody cared anything, only Mother was always putting her head out of the window and saying, “Boys, do be careful with that gun!” So one day Swatty come over, like he always does, and he says, “Say! we can’t shoot the rifle any more!” And I says, “Why can’t we?” And Swatty says, “They made a law that we can’t.” And I says, “Who made a law that we can’t?” And Swatty says, “The city council made a law that nobody can shoot inside the city limits.”
So I guessed they had, because that winter they had made a law we couldn’t slide down Third Street hill, and if they made a law like that they might make almost any kind of a law. So Swatty says, “If we want to shoot we’ve got to go outside the city limits.” And I said – I don’t know what I said but I guess I said that was so.
So, anyway, we didn’t shoot in my yard any more, and that wasn’t our fault but the fault of the city council. So that was one of the things we thought of after we killed the man; but it didn’t seem to make us feel much better, like you’d think it would. I guess there wasn’t anything could make us feel better. Nobody wants to be hanged unless he has to be, I guess.
Well, it was vacation time, anyway, and we didn’t want to shoot all the time because part of the time we wanted to do something else. Only when we wanted to go rowing on the river we took the rifle along anyway, because sometimes we rowed up beyond the city limits and then it was all right to shoot if we wanted to.
So one day me and Swatty and Bony we went up the river in a skiff. We always hired a skiff from old Higgins because it was ten cents an hour or three hours for a quarter from him, and Rogers charged ten cents straight. So when we got into the skiff and Higgins gave us the oars he said, “Well, boys, have a good time, but don’t shoot anybody with that cannon.” And we said, all right, we wouldn’t. We took turns rowing, like we always did, and pretty soon we got to the Slough, and we rowed in and shot at turtles awhile, and then Bony said, “Gee! the mosquitoes are eating me up,” and they were eating all of us up, so we floated out onto the river and just floated. We threw the bailing can over and shot at it until it went down, and just about then we were going past the old shanty boat, and we began to shoot at that.
It was up on the mud and partly sunk into it and the hull was so rotten you could kick a hole in it, and it wasn’t anybody’s anyway. Everybody had thrown stones at the windows in the side and broken them and nobody cared, I guess; but nobody had broken all the windows in the end toward the river, because that end was toward the river, so we shot at the windows. At first we couldn’t hit them and we drifted below, but we rowed back again and in closer and then we all hit them. We hit them a lot of times, until they were all smashed out, and we began to say who had hit the most times, and Swatty said, “Let’s go ashore and see who is the best shot. I bet I am.” So we went.
So we shot at cans and things, and Swatty was the best shot, and then nobody said anything but we just thought we’d go on the shanty boat for fun. We climbed up on the little front deck, and Bony was first, and Swatty was next, and then I come. So Bony pushed the door open and looked in, and he stood there looking in and didn’t move, and then, all at once he made a sound – well, I don’t know what kind of sound it was. It was a frightened sound. I guess it was like the sound a rabbit makes when you step on it by mistake. And then he turned, and his face was so scary it frightened me and Swatty and we turned and jumped off the front deck onto the railroad bank; but Bony jumped sideways off the deck and landed on the cracked crust that was over the mud the shanty boat was stuck in. He went right through the crust and over his knees in the mud, but me and Swatty was so scared we started to run down the railroad track as fast as we could.
Pretty soon we stopped, because the sand between the ties was full of sandburs, and then we didn’t know what we were running for, so we looked back. Bony was sort of swimming on top of the mud crust and he was crying as hard as he could cry, but not loud. He was trying to get away from the shanty boat as fast as he could, and every time he got a foot out of the mud and tried to step he broke through the crust again, so he sort of laid on the crust and bellied along. He looked like an alligator swimming in the mud, and he was crying like an alligator, too. Only I guess it is crocodiles that cry. Bony was trying to get to the skiff, and Swatty knew that if Bony got there before we did he would get in the skiff and go home and leave us. So we picked the sandburs out of our feet and tried to hurry, but Bony got to the skiff and got in and pushed off.
We ran and hollered, but he didn’t stop. He was so frightened that the oars jumped out from between the pins almost every time he pulled on them, and he was crying hard; but he rowed the boat pretty fast because he was working his arms so hard. Swatty and me hollered at him and told him what we would do to him if he didn’t come back, but it didn’t do any good. He was too scared. All he wanted to do was to get away.
Well, we tried to throw stones at him, to bring him back, but we couldn’t throw that far and we just stood and watched him row down-river as hard as he could.
“Say, what do you think he saw in there?” Swatty said after while.
“I don’t know what he saw,” I said. “What do you think he saw?”
“I don’t know what he saw, but I’m going to see what he saw,” Swatty said.
Swatty was always like that. If anybody saw anything he wanted to see it too.
“I ain’t afraid to see it,” he said.
“Well, I ain’t afraid if you ain’t afraid,” I said.
So we climbed up on the deck of the shanty house again. We climbed up careful and went to the door and peeked in.
As soon as I had the first peek I turned, and jumped off the deck and started to run, but Swatty just stood and looked. I hollered at him. I guess I was crying, too.
“Swatty! Swatty, come on! Oh, Swatty, come on, Swatty!” I hollered.
He turned his head and looked at me and then he looked back into the shanty boat. All he said to me was, “Shut up!”
I guess you know what we saw when we looked into the shanty boat. There was almost a whole page about it in the paper later on. He – the man – was lying there on the floor of the shanty boat in the broken bottles and straw and the dry mud that had sifted in when the river was high. He was lying on his face with his feet to the door and he was sort of crumpled up with one hand stretched out. He was dead. One side of his face was up and there was blood from the place in his forehead where he had been shot. It was on the floor.
I didn’t dare run away without Swatty, because I guess I was as scared as Bony had been, and I didn’t dare go back to the shanty boat, so I just stood, and all at once I began to shake all over, the same as a wet kitten shakes in cold weather. I couldn’t help shaking. I felt pretty sick. But most of all I was scared.
I thought Swatty was going to stand there forever, looking into the shanty boat, but pretty soon he went inside, and that shows he’s as brave as he always brags he is. I wouldn’t have gone in for a million billion quadrillion dollars. In a minute he come out and he dropped off the end of the deck and sort of crouched low. He kept crouched low as he come up the railroad bank, and he crouched low when he dodged down the other side, so I crouched low, too, and went down the other side of the railroad bank. And when Swatty come up to me I saw he was scared, too, but he wasn’t scared the way I was. I was just scared because I’d seen a dead man, but Swatty was frightened.
There was a lot of tall ragweed and a pile of railroad ties in the bottom of the cut along side the railroad track, and Swatty went right in close to the pile of ties where the ragweed hid everything and he sat down there. He looked pretty frightened.
“Well,” he said, “we killed him.”
That was the first I’d thought that we’d killed the dead man; but the minute Swatty said it I knew we had killed him by shooting through the windows of the shanty boat. I couldn’t shake any more than I had been shaking so I just kept on shaking like I had been, but I got sicker at my stomach. When I was through being sick Swatty he got mad.
“Stop shaking like that!” he said. “We’ve gone and done it and we’ve got to think what we ‘re going to do about it. Stop shaking and help me think.”
“I c-c-c-can’t stop sh-sh-sh-shaking!” I said. “I w-w-w-would if I c-c-c-c-could, w-w-w-wouldn’t I?”
“Well, you’ve got to stop shaking,” Swatty said. “If you go shaking all around town like that everybody will know we did it. If you don’t stop shaking I’ll lick you!”
I began to cry. I didn’t cry because Swatty said he’d lick me but because I just had to cry. So Swatty tried to make me stop shivering. He took the backbone of my neck in his thumb and fingers and pinched it hard, because you can stop hiccoughs that way; but it didn’t do any good. So he got madder.
“What are you shaking for, anyway?” he asked. “I ain’t shaking.”
“W-well, y-y-you h-h-haven’t got r-r-religion,” I said. “It’s w-w-worse for anybody that’s g-g-g-got r-r-religion to kill anybody.”
Well, he hauled off and hit me. He hit me in the jaw, and then he said what I wouldn’t let anybody say about my getting religion, and I fought him. Then we stopped fighting and I was still shaking, but not so bad.
“Yah! Little sissy boy got religion!” he said. “Little sissy boy went and got religion ‘cause he’s stuck on Mamie Little!”
Well, that did make me mad! I lit into him, and we had another good fight, and pretty soon he said, “‘Nuff!” and I stopped. So I started to tell him what I’d do to him if he ever said that again. I was crying, I guess.
“That’s all right,” he said; “I just said it on purpose. I just said it to make you fight. You ain’t shaking now.” And I wasn’t. I’d got so mad I forgot to shake. So, as Swatty had just said what he said on purpose, I didn’t care. So I stopped crying.
“Now you’ve got some sense,” Swatty said. “Don’t you get that way again. We don’t want to get hung, do we?”
I hadn’t thought of that. Of course they would hang us if they found out we’d killed the man in the shanty boat, and it made us pretty sober. I guess I began to cry again.
“Oh, shut up!” Swatty said. “If you’re going to blubber all the time, and not try to help, I wish I’d killed that man all by myself. You shut up and try to help me think what to do, or I’ll go and tell everybody you killed him.”
“You won’t do it!” I said.
“Yes, I will,” he said back. “And I’ll prove it on you. You didn’t look at that man and I did, and I know what kind of a man he is.”
“What kind of a man is he?” I asked.
“He’s a tough kind,” Swatty said. “And if you don’t shut up your bawling I’ll say you and him got into an argument about religion, and you shot him because he wouldn’t come and join in with you and get it. And folks will believe that, because you’ve just got it, and there ain’t any other reason why any of us should kill him. I haven’t got religion, have I?”
“Well,” I said, for I saw Swatty could do like he said, “what are we going to do, anyway?”
“We’ve got to keep from getting arrested and put into jail and hung,” Swatty said. “I don’t know how, but we’ve got to. We’ve got to be careful, and not let anybody know we shot that man. If they find it out they’ll hang us sure.”
“We didn’t mean to shoot him,” I said. “We had a right to shoot outside the city limits.”
“We didn’t have a right to shoot anybody,” said Swatty. “We had a right to see if there was anybody in the shanty boat before we shot at it. We’ll all three be hung if they find out we did it.”
Well, I had an idea just then, but I didn’t say it to Swatty. I didn’t really think it, it just come. I knew as soon as I thought it that I wouldn’t be so mean, and I knew Swatty wouldn’t either. But it would have been easy enough for me and Swatty to say Bony did it. We was two to one. Maybe I would have said it if I hadn’t got religion. But it made me feel better for a while to think that I’d thought it and hadn’t said it. So the next thing I thought was that it would be mighty noble and true and religious if I’d go to the mayor or somebody and just say: “I killed a man up there at the old shanty boat on the river, but nobody is to blame but me. Swatty ain’t and Bony ain’t, so go ahead and hang me. I did it, and it was my target rifle.” But I thought that if I was going to be hung I’d not feel as lonesome if Swatty and Bony got hung too. Anyway, Swatty started to talk, and I forgot it.
“If Bony hadn’t gone off with the skiff,” he said, “we’d be all right. We’d get in the skiff and row out to the middle of the river and lay flat in it, and nobody would see us. We could float down the river as far as we wanted to and hide in a cane-brake or somewhere. Or maybe, we’d row up the Missouri and hide in the Rocky Mountains. If they got after us we could turn bandits or something.”
“You could,” I said, “but I couldn’t.”
“I forgot you’d got religion,” he said. “You’d have to start a ranch. But we can’t do that, because Bony went off with the skiff.”
What we decided was that nobody would be apt to find the dead man that day. Maybe they’d never find him. Unless somebody like us happened to go into the old shanty boat he might never get found, and then, the next spring, when the Mississippi had her spring flood, or that same fall, if the water got high enough, we could come up and float the old shanty boat out of the mud and take her out in the river and sink her. We talked over a lot of things, and the more we talked the more it didn’t seem so bad. It looked as if we had a chance not to get hung, after all.
I wanted to cut across the cornfield to the hill and go home that way, so that if anybody saw us they’d think we had been up in the woods and not near the shanty boat, but Swatty said that wouldn’t do because our footprints would show in the cornfield, and detectives would trace us by them if they started out to find who murdered the man. He said it would be more innocent to go right down the railroad track, and if anybody asked us anything to say we hadn’t been as far up as the shanty boat, and that Bony had got a stomach ache or something and gone home first with the boat. So we did that. We walked down the track. We talked about the murder all the time, and the more we talked the surer we were nobody would think we did it.
Well, we got to my gate all right, and Swatty and me crossed our hearts we wouldn’t say anything about killing the man, and I tried to think how I’d act so nobody at home would think anything different than they always did, and I went into the house. It was pretty late. They were eating supper. So I went in and sat down, and Father scolded me a little for being late, like he does nearly every day, and then he said something else.
“Son,” he said, “after supper you’ll get that target rifle of yours and turn it over to me.”
Well, I almost jumped out of my skin, I was so scared.
“Now, you needn’t begin any of that,” he said. “I mean what I say. Do you know who was shot today?”
I was so scared I couldn’t swallow my piece of meat. I choked on it.
“No, sir!” I said, pretty weakly.
“Well, Benny Judge shot his little sister,” said my father. “Only by the greatest luck she wasn’t killed. As it is she has a bullet in her arm. Now, mind! I want that rifle.”
Well, I was glad and I was scared stiff, too.
I had left the target rifle on the rocks up by the shanty boat. I began to shake again because I knew somebody would find the target rifle and it had my initials on it, and when they found the dead man they would know I killed him. I guess my teeth chattered. Anyway I couldn’t think of anything at all. I just wished I was dead, because after supper Father would want the rifle, and I didn’t have it, and some one would find it and I would be hung.
Then Mother saw me shake, and she said, “What’s the matter? Are you cold?”
“Y-y-yes’m,” I said. Well, it wasn’t a lie. I was sort of cold.
“Father, the poor child is sick,” Mother said. “See him chatter his teeth.”
So Father looked at me. “Malaria,” he said. So he asked me if I had been up to the Slough, because he had been reading in a magazine about Slough mosquitoes biting you and giving you malaria. I didn’t know what to say. It didn’t look good to say I had been up there so near the old shanty boat, and I didn’t like to lie about it, because I was on probation for getting religion. So I didn’t say anything. I just shivered and chattered my teeth.
“Huh!” my father said. “I knew well enough something was the matter with that boy when he got religion. He’s had this malaria spell coming on. Put him to bed and give him a big dose of quinine.” And then he said to me, “Just let me catch you up near that Slough again, understand? Get to bed, and quick! This family is just one thing after another!”
I got to bed pretty quick and Mother gave me one of the big capsules. She heated the scorched blanket at the kitchen stove and wrapped me up in it and put all the bed covers she could find on top of me. I started to sweat right away. So she said, “If you want anything I’ll leave the door open and you can call me,” and she went down again. She told Father she guessed I was pretty sick because I looked like it, and all he said was, “Huh! boys!” And I guessed he was right, and I made up my mind to live a better and truer life, but I kept thinking of the man we had killed. I never sweat so much in my life.
All at once the doorbell rang and I sat right up in bed. I thought the police had come for me. But it wasn’t the police; it was something just as bad – almost. It was old Higgins, the skiff man. He was talking to Father. He asked him if I had got home all right. So Father said I had, and I was sick and in bed. Then old Higgins said, “Well, I don’t know what to make of it. Nobody brought my skiff back. Your boy and two other boys hired it off of me, and when it got late and they didn’t bring it back I got frightened. You ask him where he left my skiff, and if they lost it somebody’s got to pay me back for it.” Well, I was mighty scared. I guessed Bony had been so scared he had upset the skiff and got drowned, and maybe me and Swatty would get hung for that, too, though we did throw rocks at Bony to try to get him to come back. But, anyway, me and Swatty would have to tell why Bony had gone off in the skiff alone, and then they would know everything, and take us to jail and hang us. I crawled down under the covers and pretended to be asleep, but it wasn’t any use, because Father shook me by the shoulder.
