I guess if teachers always knew how lickings were going to turn out they wouldn't lick us fellows so much. I am thinking about Miss Murphy, the one that taught the room me and Swatty and Bony was in, and about the time she was going to lick Swatty. One of the times. There were plenty of others.
You see, me and Swatty and Bony is chums, and we go together mostly, but this was when we was in Miss Murphy's room. She's a good-looker, but she's a tartar, too, when it comes to licking.
The way of it was this: My sister Fan was mushy over Swatty's brother Herb and she didn't care who knew it, because they were engaged, and Fan was fixing up her things to get married in, and she wished I was a girl so I could be her flower girl at the wedding, but she didn't know what she'd do with me. She thought maybe she'd lock me in the cellar, she said, but she didn't mean it. She was always codding me and Swatty. She'd cod us that way, and then she'd give us a dime or something. She was all right, and Swatty thought so too.
So then Fan and Herb had a fight, like girls and fellows always do have; but this was a good one. It was because Herb said maybe Fan would like to have Miss Murphy for a bridesmaid, and Fan got mad because Herb had gone with Miss Murphy once. So then Fan wouldn't forgive Herb. Herb came over and fought for three evenings, and then Swatty brought a note from him to Fan, and I took one from Fan to Herb, and that was the end of it. The note I took had a ring in it, because I could feel it. Then Fan just moped around the house and cried some, and after a while Herb had to go and teach the eighth grade at school, because Professor Martin broke his leg on the ice the janitor ought to have scraped off the steps but didn't. So right away Herb began to get thick with Miss Murphy, but that didn't make any difference to me. As soon as a fellow hasn't got one girl he has another one, anyway, and I didn't blame Herb. I was just sorry for Fan. And I thought Herb was crazy to make up to a school-teacher, especially a tartar like Miss Murphy. She was an awful licker. She'd lick a fellow for anything.
Well, one day me and Swatty was going to school and we was talking at each other the way we always did, and I said he thought he was great, didn't he, because his brother was Miss Murphy's beau, and Miss Muiphy wouldn't lick him when his brother was her beau. I didn't mean anything, I just said it, but Swatty hauled off and hit me one and dared me to say that again. So I said it again, and all the fellows got around and yelled “Fight! Fight!” and I had to fight him. It would have been a pretty good fight if Miss Murphy hadn't come along. She jumped right at us and grabbed us both.
“Who started this fight?” she asked, hopping mad.
“He did,” I said.
“Didn't neither!” said Swatty. “He did.”
“Who struck the first blow?” says Miss Muiphy.
Well, everybody told her Swatty did, which was the truth, and she let me go.
“Just as I thought, you—you little bulldozer,” she said, shaking him. “You've been getting entirely too uppish of late, young man. You think you can take advantage of—of circumstances; but I'll teach you a thing or two. Get into school there, and wash yourself, and see that you are in your seat when the bell rings.”
So Swatty did it. Me and the Bony Highlander stayed out till the bell rung, and then we went in, too, and as we went past Swatty's desk he whispered, “She thinks she's going to lick me, but she ain't.”
“Bet she does, if she said so,” I says; and I bet she would, too. So did the Bony Highlander, because we knew she was the sort that would rather lick a fellow than not.
Well, that was in the morning, and they never lick at noon because the way some fellows wriggle and twist it takes a long time to lick them, and it would use up the noon hour. So they lick after school in the afternoon when there is plenty of time. So me and the Bony Highlander waited for Swatty, and we tried to scare him. We told him we bet Miss Murphy would make him holler, because she licked with a rawhide pony switch and whipped on the legs where the switch would wrap around and sting, but we couldn't get Swatty to even pretend he might holler. He said no teacher in the world could make him holler. We all said it. Or, I don't know whether the Bony Highlander said it or not. He'd never been licked in school. He wasn't the kind that gets licked, somehow. But he was a pretty nice fellow, anyway. We liked him just as well, but not as well as Swatty and me liked each other of course, because me and Swatty was cow-cousins.
Me and Swatty was both raised on the milk of the same cow, but it was Schwartzes' cow, and when I was being raised on it Herb Schwartz used to fetch the milk around, the way Swatty does now. I guess that's how Herb got to know Fan. But the Bony Highlander was just a kid that moved into the neighborhood.
His name wasn't really Bony Highlander, but we called him that because when he was reading a piece of poetry out of the Reader in school, and ought to have said “bonny Highlander,” he said “bony Highlander.” But we mostly called him Bony for short, like we called Schwartzy Swatty for short. He was all right, but he never started to do things; he just went along when we did them, and waited on the outside of the fence, and things like that.
Well, we waited on the corner for Swatty that afternoon until the bell rung but he didn't come, so we went along, and he was at school already, and after he had stayed in to be licked and Miss Murphy let him out, he told us why he went early. He knew where she kept her rawhide, in the closet at the end of the room on the shelf where the chalk boxes were, and he went early at noon and took his pocket-knife and cut the rawhide into little pieces about an inch long. He laid them all out on the shelf in a row, and he said he nearly died laughing when she went to pick it up and it was all in pieces. So Miss Murphy went to get another rawhide from another teacher, but everybody had gone home, and she told Swatty she would tend to him to-morrow.
“I'd rather have been licked to-day and then I'd be done with it,” I said, but Swatty didn't say so.
“If you've got a licking,” he said, “you've got it, and you can't ever un-get it, but I ain't ever going to get this one. I'll run away first.”
“Ah, I bet you get it to-morrow,” I said, and the Bony Highlander said so too.
“Bet I don't!” said Swatty. So we made a bet. I bet him my clay pipe against a nigger-shooter rubber he had.
So the next day was when we'd know, and at noon Swatty came over to my barn to get some oilcloth we had in the barn to put in his pants so the licking wouldn't hurt so much, and I guessed I would win the bet. But he couldn't fix the oilcloth so it would do any good and let him sit down. He thought Miss Murphy would be onto it if he couldn't sit down. So he gave that up. So we went to school.
When school was nearly out Swatty got up and started to walk down his aisle and up the next, like he was going out for a drink, but Miss Murphy, who was doing an example on the blackboard for the B class, turned around and saw him.
“Where are you going?” she asked, like tacks in a bottle.
“Just to get a drink,” said Swatty.
“You take your seat this instant!” said Miss Murphy, and when she said it, Swatty started to run; but she got there first and headed him off and grabbed him by the arm. He kicked at her shins, but she gave him a shake that made him see stars and marched him back to the end of the room. I thought she was going to take him to his seat, but she didn't.
Our schoolhouse has four rooms on a floor—two in front and two in back—and the hall comes in the middle, but it don't run all the way from front to back. In the middle in front on the second floor there is a little room with some books in it, and they call it the library room.
It has a window and three doors—one into the hall and one into our room, and one into the room across the hall. So Miss Murphy yanked Swatty into that room and locked all three doors. So she had him safe until she got ready to lick him. Then she was going to unlock the door and bring him out and do a good job, because she had a new rawhide all ready. I guess she made up her mind she'd lick him until he hollered that time.
So Swatty waited until school was out. Then he had to wait until Miss Murphy got rid of the ones she had kept in to write their names five hundred times, and things like that, but he didn't wait. He opened the window and looked out, and right below him was the peak roof of the porch. It wasn't very big, and it was slated, and if he slipped he'd 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 I got on Swatty's timber and let mine go, which was all right because the timbers would just go around and around in the eddy. But Bony wouldn't get on with us, because he was afraid the timber would sink.
It got along to about five o'clock, and Bony said we had better go home. He was always the first to want to go home. He told Swatty that Swatty would be late going for his cow if he didn't start right away, but Swatty said he didn't care if the old cow never got home. He said it wouldn't hurt the old cow to wait a while, anyway. So we started to paddle around the eddy again, and that time we got almost too far out, I guess, and the end of the timber stuck out beyond the eddy into the swift water.
“Back her up! Quick!” Swatty yelled, and we both tried to back her with our board paddles, but it was too late. The swift water caught her on the side and swung her right out into the current. Gee, but she went! Right away she was half a block away from Bony and I began to cry, for there was no telling where she'd stop. You couldn't expect her to stop this side of St. Louis or New Orleans. So I began to cry, and I stooped down and hung onto the timber with both arms. It was all I could think of to do. But Swatty let on he wasn't scared at all. He tried to paddle toward shore, but there was so v much driftwood and stuff floating that he couldn't do it.
“Aw, shut up! Don't be a cry-baby!” he yelled at me. “This ain't nothing. Grab your paddle, and we'll paddle out to the Tow Head and we'll be all right.”
The Tow Head is the big island in the river below town, but more to this side of the river than to the other side. It is shaped like a horseshoe, with the two ends down-stream. Me and Swatty knew it pretty well because sometimes we used to row down there. It was all trees except a strip of sand on each side, and in low water there used to be a sandbar below it. It looked like a good idea to get to the Tow Head if we could; but I was afraid to sit up so I just stayed the way I was. But Swatty paddled like a good fellow. I guess the current helped him some. In low water there are two channels, one on each side of the Tow Head, but when the river is on a rampage it don't care anything about channels—it just goes. But it kind of bends below town and I guess that helped Swatty.
He kept yelling at me not to be a 'fraid-cat and to paddle, but I didn't dare. So he paddled, and pretty soon I saw he was going to hit the Tow Head all right. That made me feel better and I kind of raised up on my hands and stopped crying, but when I looked I was scared worse than ever. It looked as if the Tow Head was coming up-stream like a big packet at full tilt. It didn't look as if we were floating down to it, but as if it was tearing up-stream toward us, and it was coming lickety-split. At its nose, where the water hit it, the river reared up in a big yellow wave, like the bow wave of a ship, and was cut into foam and spray where it hit the trees and then rushed away on either side like mad. So I saw Swatty had made a mistake in trying to land on the Tow Head.
There wasn't really any Tow Head to land on. The river was way up in the branches of the trees, and I guess the water was ten feet deep all over the Tow Head, or deeper, and rushing through the trees like it was crazy. But we didn't have time to think much about it. We just had time to be scared, and to see the old Tow Head come rushing and foaming at us, and then it sort of nabbed us, like a cat nabs a mouse. It was all a big swosh of water noises and a big swosh of tree branches being slashed by the water, and then me and Swatty was splashed all over, and the bridge timber banged into two trees and stuck. Swatty went off the timber like a stone out of a nigger-shooter, but I hung on. I've got a black and blue spot inside my leg yet, where it hit the edge of the timber. Right away the water began to surge over the timber like a giant pushing against me, and I saw I couldn't hang on there very long, so I reached up and grabbed a branch of one of the trees and hoisted myself up and got up in the tree. And there was Swatty! He wasn't in my tree, but he was in the tree next below mine.
“Garsh!” he said, and that was all he said right then. So I began to cry. It would make anybody cry to be there, up in a tree, with the whole Mississippi River rushing along under him, so near he could stick his toes down into it. It's an awful thing to think about. You can sit in a tree and look at a creek run under you and you don't care, but when the Mississippi is on a tear it is different. It's the biggest and strongest thing in the world, and there was all of it rushing along right under us, and the tree sort of waving back and forth.
So I cried.
“Aw, shut up!” Swatty said. “What are you crying about?”
Well, I guess we were in a pretty bad fix—worse than we thought we were. No boat there ever was could get at us where we were. No boat could come at that Tow Head the way we did and last a minute, because it would smash against the trees. And even if anybody knew where we were they couldn't get to us. Even if the strongest men in town tried to row a boat up-stream from below the Tow Head they couldn't get to us, because they couldn't row among the trees on it. So I cried.
“Shut up!” Swatty yelled at me. “Ain't it bad enough without you bellering?”
So there we were.
When Bony saw us go out into the river he sat on his timber with his mouth open, and he couldn't even holler—he was so scared—and then he just paddled for shore and jumped off his timber and ran. He didn't know where he was running—he was just running away from there. He was scared stiff. When he come to, he was halfway home, and blubbering and panting, and then he sat down on a horse block and didn't know what to do. He thought we were drowned, sure. So he thought the best thing to do would be to not say anything about it. He was afraid. First he thought he would go home and act as if he had been at school and just stayed out playing a while, and not do anything else about it and let folks find out anyway they could; and then he thought that Mrs. Schwartz would miss Swatty when it was time to fetch the cow, and that she would come over to his house to see if Swatty was there, and he didn't know what else. So he thought he would go over to Swatty's house first and sort of keep Mrs. Schwartz from doing anything like that. So he went. He forgot he was in his bare feet, or that he had ever had shoes and stockings.
When he got to Swatty's house Mrs. Schwartz was on the front terrace in her calico dress and with a birch switch in her hand, looking for Swatty, because Swatty knew what time the cow ought to be fetched home. Bony went up to the steps.
“Do you want me to fetch the cow home, Mrs. Schwartz?” he asked.
“What for should you fetch the cow home?” said Mrs. Schwartz, as angry as could be.
“I thought maybe Swatty was late, and I didn't want to keep you waiting,” he said.
“For why should you think he was late?” Mrs. Schwartz asked. She always talked in a funny way, because she was German.
“I thought maybe he was playing down at the river,” said Bony. “Lots of boys were playing down there to-day.”
“So!” said Mrs. Schwartz. “And he sends you home to get his cow, yes? He could get his own cows. I wait for him.”
So then Bony didn't know what to say. He stood around. And after a while he said:
“Maybe he won't come home to get the cows.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Schwartz. “Maybe he's drowned,” said Bony. “Maybe him and Georgie went down to the river and—and—”
So then he began to cry, and the first thing anybody knew he had me and Swatty drowned and our bodies floating down to St. Louis or New Orleans, and Mrs. Schwartz wringing her hands and hollering for Herb. So Herb come out on the porch, and Bony told him me and Swatty had floated away on a bridge timber and got drowned, and Herb got Mr. Schwartz out of the house, and then he come over to my house to tell my father, and my father and mother and Fan and all the Schwartzes and a lot of neighbors all went running down to the levee, and took the Bony Highlander with them to show them where we had got drowned from. So that was why Bony didn't go home, and why he got licked when he did get home.
By that time it wasn't dark but it was getting dark. Me and Swatty just hung onto our trees, and that was all we could do; but all our folks and most everybody in town got down to the levee, because Tim Mulligan at the waterworks pump-house blew the alarm whistle. The firemen all came, too, with their hose carts and ladder trucks, but most of the folks just went around saying it was too bad, but that it was hopeless. Even the mayor said it was hopeless. You see, nobody knew we were on Tow Head. They thought we were drowned in the river, like Bony said. So there wasn't anything to do, because it was too hopeless to do anything. The only thing to do was to wait until the river fell, in a couple of weeks or so, and then maybe they'd find what was left of me and Swatty down-river, where we'd be washed up, if we ever was.
Well, that was what everybody thought. My mother cried, and Mrs. Schwartz cried, and I guess most of the women cried, and the men looked mighty sober, and said what a pity it was so hopeless; but what could they do? Everybody was sober or crying, I guess, except Fan, and I guess she'd been so mad at Herb she just couldn't be anything but mad. She was so full of mad that it had to come out, so while everybody was crying and all she just flew up in the air and went over and gave Herb a good raking.
“Well!” she says. “And you call yourself a man! Do you mean to stand around here like a bump on a log and do nothing?” she says. “I'm glad I found out in time what a helpless ninny you are,” or something like that. She gave it to him good, I tell you! “This trash,” she says—meaning the mayor and the firemen and the city council and everybody—“I don't expect anything else from, but I once thought you had some gump.” Or something like that. So Herb got red.
“Very well,” he says, like a man ready to jump off the high school roof, “if you say so, I'll take a skiff and go out upon the river. You can't call me a 'fraid-cat, Fan. You'll never call me that.” Or something like that, he said.
“Skiff indeed!” says Fan. “You'd have a nice picnic with a skiff, wouldn't you? Have some sense, Herbert Schwartz. What good is that ferryboat doing, tied up here?”
Well, that was what they done. At first Captain Hewitt didn't want to take the ferryboat out. He said it was hopeless, and that she was an old rotten hull, and that a log would go through her like a needle, and she'd sink, and she couldn't make headway up-stream against such a flood, and a lot more, but with all the folks in town there he couldn't keep that up long; so he went aboard and fired up, and sent up-town for Jerry Mason, who was the regular fireman. By that time it was dark enough for anybody, so Mr. Higgins, the steamboat agent, went and got the two flambeaux he uses when steamboats unload at night, and everybody that had a porch lantern with a reflector got that, and they put them all on the ferryboat. Flambeaux are big iron baskets on iron poles, and the poles are pointed at the bottom so they can be jabbed into the ground or a floor or anything. You fill the baskets with tar and wood and light them. So when that was all ready most of the firemen got aboard with their hooks, off the hook and ladder trucks, and a lot of other men got aboard with pike poles and grapple hooks, and Herb went up in the pilot house with Captain Hewitt, and they set out to find our bodies.
But me and Swatty wasn't bodies yet, we was still folks. We were feeling a little bit better, too, because Swatty found out that the tree he was in was a slippery elm tree, and he peeled off some slippery elm bark and chewed it, and he tossed some over to me, and I chewed that. So we wondered how long a fellow could live on slippery elm bark, and if Swatty would have the tree peeled clean before the river went down. If he did we'd starve to death; but Swatty said that, as the water went down, more and more of the tree trunk would be above water and we could peel it and eat it. So we both felt better, only there was a dead something had caught in the tree branches and when the wind changed it didn't smell very good. It smelled worse than that, even. So about then we began to see the lights come out on shore, and pretty soon we saw the big, smoky light the flambeaux made. We thought it was a bonfire on shore up at town.
Well, I guess we'd have been bodies before anybody got to us, anyway, if we hadn't had some bad luck. Me and Swatty was there in our trees chewing away at slippery elm when all at once something big and black come slamming down onto the point of the Tow Head. It looked like a house, but I guess it was only a cow shed or something like that, that had got floated off the river bottoms by the flood. It came all of a sudden, and before we knew what had happened it hit the Tow Head point and banged into the tree I was on, and the water began to rush over it, and then all at once the tree I was on began to give. It began to topple. It went slow at first and then it went quicker, and it fell over against the tree Swatty was in, and the shed came bumping after it, and then Swatty's tree keeled over, too, and me and Swatty went down under, and the shed come grating over us—right over our heads and pushing our trees down into the water.
All I ever knew was that the next thing I knew I was slammed up against the side of the shed by the water and pushed against it like a big hand was pushing me, and I was fighting to get more out of the water, and then the shed sort of melted and went to pieces and I was holding onto a board and going down with the current between the trees of the Tow Head. Sometimes the board hit a tree, and sometimes it didn't, but I thought I was all over with, anyway, and then right ahead of me I saw the water rushing and roaring up against something.
I didn't know what it was, but it was a log raft the mill folks had put in behind the Tow Head so it wouldn't get washed away. It was in the inside of the horseshoe, and all across the front of it was driftwood and trash and old boards and everything, and that was what the water was splashing against, and before I knew it I was slammed up against it—me and my board. And what I slammed up against was the bridge timber I had been on before, or one like it. If I had slammed up against where it was just bark and driftwood I would have clawed at it a while and then gone under, I guess; but I crawled onto the timber and just lay there and tried to get the water out of my nose. It looked like half a mile of driftwood was jammed in between me and the log raft—jammed in and pushed together the way a flood can jam it and push it.
Well, that timber wasn't any place to be. The water rushed against it and over it, so I was getting ducked all the time, and I put out my hand and tried the drift stuff, but it didn't seem like it would hold me up, but there was one board that was on top of the stuff, and I tried that. I slid over onto it and it seemed all right, so I edged along it, and when I got to the end of the board the drift stuff seemed firmer and I got on my stomach and edged out onto it. It was firm enough, but not very firm, but on my stomach that way I covered a good deal of it at a time, and I sort of wiggled along, and the more I wiggled the firmer it got. It had to, with all the river pushing it, and the driftwood back of it pushing too.
So it took me about an hour to get to the log raft, and when I got to the edge logs, that are chained together, I was all scratched and sore and I just sat down and cried, because I knew Swatty was dead.
And all at once he said, “Hello, Georgie!” and there he was, crawling along the logs toward me. He said he went under when the tree fell over, and that he went under all the driftwood and come up through a hole in the raft. Maybe he did. There were holes enough in the raft. But I didn't get there that way.
Anyway, there he was, and that made me feel a lot better, and we crawled around the edge of the raft, because we wanted to get to the lower side.
Swatty said maybe we could push a log under the outside chain of logs and paddle to shore on it, but I wasn't going to do it. Only I wanted to see him do it if he did it. So we got to the lower edge of the raft, where it stuck out below the Tow Head, and just then along came the ferryboat. She was back-paddling and going as slow as she could, and she looked like an excursion with all the porch lamps and the flambeaux. So me and Swatty hollered, but I guess they saw us before we hollered. Everybody came over on our side and that tipped the ferry over a little, and a lot of the men threw ropes at us and held out their pike poles, and me and Swatty grabbed them and they yanked us aboard. So then she whistled five times and waited and whistled five times again, and so on, because that was the signal they was to make if they found our bodies, and they had found them, but they were alive yet. So then Herb made the captain whistle long and steady without stopping, so maybe they'd know we were alive yet. But nobody knew it, because nobody thought we would be.
Well, the old ferry let out so much steam whistling she couldn't go up-stream. I guess she couldn't anyway. So they ran her into the shore just where she was and tied her to a big tree, and when we got to the road there was Mother and Father and Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz in a livery rig, because they had followed the boat all the way down. And Fan was in the rig, too. So they all pawed me and Swatty over and saw how bad we was scratched and all, and said we was suffering from exhaustion, but we wasn't. We was only played out.
So then Herbert said, “All right!” and started to go away, and Fan said, “Herbert!”
“What is it?” he said.
“I want you to ride up-town with us,” she said.
“No,” he said, “I'll go back and help Captain Hewitt get the boat in shape. I guess I've done enough to show you I 've some gump.”
“But I want you to come,” Fan says. “I want to talk to you.”
So he came. Him and Fan sat on the front seat and drove and talked, and I guess their talk was all right, because they fixed everything up. And that was where Miss Murphy got left. Just because she wanted to lick Swatty she lost her beau. That's why I say I guess if teachers always knew how their lickings were going to turn out they wouldn't lick us fellows so much. Not when the fellow is the brother of their beau, anyway.
I guess this is a good time to tell about Mamie Little, because now you know who me and Swatty and Bony are. Mamie Little was my girl, only she didn't know it. Nobody knew it but me. It was a secret I had. That's the way a fellow has a girl at first: she's a secret and she don't know she's his girl. Sometimes she don't never get to know it and the fellow has to get another girl. But while he “has” her the fellow knows it, and it makes him feel bashful and uncomfortable and frightened when she is near by and it is pretty bully.
The reason I picked out Mamie Little for my girl was because she had the nicest eyes and nicest hair of any girl I ever saw and the way she swished her dress when she walked. She lived across the street from my house and mostly played with my sister Lucy. So when I played with Lucy I could play with Mamie Little, too, and nobody would think it was because she was my girl. They would think I was just playing with my sister.
Mamie Little had been my girl a good while like that, with nobody knowing it but me, and I guessed that pretty soon it would be time for me to fight Swatty or somebody about her and have her for my real girl, if she didn't mind; but just then Toady Williams came to town and he picked out Mamie Little to be his girl and didn't care who knew it. And Mamie Little didn't care who knew it.
Toady was a new kid in town, because his father had come to Riverbank to start a store. We never said Toady could be one of our crowd and we never wanted him to be, but he just joined on because he felt like it. That's the kind of boy he was. He thought anybody would be tickled to death to have him be around with them. He wasn't a fat boy, but he was a plump one, and his breeches always fit him so close they were like the skin on a horse; when he wrinkled they wrinkled. He wore shoes in summer. He looked all the time like company come to visit, and I guess that was one reason we didn't care for him much.
The reason we called him Toady was because of his eyes. They popped out like a frog's eyes, sort of like brown marbles, and the more he talked the more they popped out. When he talked he couldn't do anything else but talk. Swatty could lie on his stomach and chew an apple and play mumblety-peg and kick a hole in the sod with one toe and talk, all at one time, but Toady couldn't. He had to sit up straight and pop his eyes out. When he got started talking you could cut in and say, “Was your grandmother a monkey?” and he'd say, “Yes,” as if he hadn't heard, and go right on talking. He wouldn't fight, like me and Swatty, and sometimes Bony, would. If you thought it was time to have a fight with him and pitched into him he would bend down and turn his back and let you mailer him until you got through. But, mostly, he would talk somehow so you wouldn't want to fight him. That's no way for a boy to talk. It's the way girls talk. Or preachers.
Toady didn't get Mamie Little for his girl the right way. He never said she wasn't his girl, he just said she was. The right way is that when the other fellows find out he has a girl they holler at him: “Mamie Little is Georgie's girl! Mamie Little is Georgie's girl!” And he has to get mad and fight them about it to prove it's a lie, but after he has fought enough to prove she isn't his girl, why, then she is his girl and he can have her for his girl and nobody hollers it at him. So then she is the one he chooses to kiss when they play “Post-Office” or “Copenhagen” at parties, and if he's got anything to give her he gives it to her, like snail shells or a better slate pencil than she has, and such things. So it's pretty nice, and you feel pretty good about it and are glad she's your girl.