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Peck's Bad Boy Abroad, a fiction by George W. Peck |
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Chapter 10. The Bad Boy Writes Of Ancient And Modern Highwaymen... |
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_ CHAPTER X. The Bad Boy Writes of Ancient and Modern Highwaymen--They Get a Taste of High Life in London and Dad Tells the Story of the Picklemaker's Daughter
Dad asked me tother day what I cared most to see in London, and I told him I wanted to visit Newgate prison, and the places made famous by the bold highwaymen of a century or two ago. He thought I was daffy, but when I told him how I had read "Claude Duval" and "Six-teen-String Jack" and all the highway literature, in the haymow, when dad thought I was weeding the garden, he confessed that he used to hunt those yellow covered books out of the manger when I was not reading them, and that he had read them all himself, when I thought he was studying for his campaign speeches, and so he said he would go with me. So we visited Homestead Heath, where Claude Duval used to ride "Black Bess," and hold up people who traveled at night in post chaises, and we found splendid spots where there had been more highway robbery going on than any place east of Missouri, but I was disgusted when I thought what chumps those old highway robbers were, compared to the American highway robbers and hold up men of the present day. In Claude Duval's time he had a brace of flintlock pistols, which he had to examine the priming every time a victim showed up, and while he was polite when he robbed a duchess, he used to kill people all right, though if they had had cameras at that time the flash from the priming pan would have taken a flash-light picture of the robber, so he could have been identified when he rode off in the night to a roadside inn and filled up on beer, while he counted the ten shillings he had taken from the silk purse of the victim. Why, one of our American gangs that hold up a train, and get an express safe full of greenbacks, and shoots up a mess of railroad hands and passengers with Winchesters and automatic pistols, and blows up cars with dynamite and gets away and has to have a bookkeeper and a cashier to keep their bank accounts straight, could give those old Claude Duvals and Sixteen-String Jacks cards and spades. But civilization, dad says, has done much for the highway robbery business, and he says we in America have arrived at absolute perfection. However, I was much interested in looking over the ground where my first heroes lived and died, and did business, and when we went to the prisons where they were confined, and were shown where Tyburn Tree stood, that so many of them were hung on, tears came to my eyes at the thought that I was on the sacred ground where my heroes croaked, and went to their deaths with smiles on their faces, and polite to the last. The guard who showed us around thought that dad and I were relatives of the deceased highwaymen, and when we went away he said to dad: "Call again, Mr. Duval. Always glad to serve any of the descendants of the heroes. What line of robbery are you in, Mr. Duval?" Dad was mad, but he told the guard he was now on the stock exchange, and so we maintained the reputation of the family. Then we hired horses and took a horse back ride through Rotten Row, where everybody in London that has the price, rides a horse, and no carriages are allowed. Dad was an old cavalry man forty years ago, and he is stuck on his shape when he is on a horse, but he came near breaking up the horse back parade the day we went for the ride. The liveryman gave us two bob-tailed nags, a big one for dad and a small one for me, but they didn't have any army saddle for dad, and he had to ride on one of these little English saddles, such as jockeys ride races on, and dad is so big where he sits on a saddle that you couldn't see the saddle, and I guess they gave dad a hurdle jumper, because when we got right amongst the riders, men and women, his horse began to act up, and some one yelled, "Tally-ho," and that is something about fox hunting, not a coach, and the horse jumped a fence and dad rolled off over the bowsprit and went into a ditch of dirty water. The horse went off across a field, and the policeman fished dad out of the ditch, and run him through a clothes wringer or something, and got him dried out, and sent him to the hotel in an express wagon, and I rode my horse back to the liveryman and told him what happened to dad, and they locked me up in a box stall until somebody found the horse, 'cause they thought dad was a horse thief, and they held me for ransom. But dad came around before night and paid my ransom, and we were released. Dad says Rotten Row is rotten, all right enough, and by ginger it is, 'cause he has not got the smell of that ditch off his clothes yet. Now he has got a new idea, and that is to go to some country where there are bandits, different from the bandits here in London, and be captured and taken to the mountain fastnesses, and held for ransom until our government makes a fuss about it, and sends warships after-us. I tell dad it would be just our luck to have our government fail to try to get us, and the bandits might cut our heads off and stick them on a pole as a warning to people not to travel unless they had a ransom concealed about their clothes. But dad says he is out to see all the sights, and he is going to be ransomed before he gets home, if it takes every dollar our government has got. I think he is going to work the bandit racket when we get to Turkey, but, by ginger, he can leave me at a convent, because I don't want one of those crooked sabers run into me and turned around like a corkscrew. Dad says I can stay in a harem while he goes to the mountains with the bandits, and I don't know as I care, as they say a harem is the most interesting place in Turkey. You know the pictures we have studied in the old grocery, where a whole bunch of beautiful women are practicing using soap in a marble bath. Well, don't you say anything to ma about it, but dad has got his foot in it clear up to the top button. It isn't anything scandalous, though there is a woman at the bottom of it. You see, we used to know a girl that left home to go out into the world and earn her own living. She elocuted some at private parties and sanitariums, to entertain people that were daffy, and were on the verge of getting permanent bats in their belfry, and after a few years she got on the stage, and made a bunch of money, and went abroad. And then she had married a titled person, and everybody supposed she was a duchess, or a countess, and ma wanted us to inquire about her when we got over here. Ma didn't want us to go and hunt her up to board with her, or anything, but just to get a glimpse of high life, and see if our poor little friend was doing herself proud in her new station in life. Gee, but dad found her, and she ain't any more of a duchess than I am. Her husband is a younger son of a titled person, but there isn't money enough in the whole family to wad a gun, and our poor girl is working in a shop, or store, selling corsets to support a lazy, drunken husband and a whole mess of children, and while she is seven removes from a duchess, she does not rank with the woman who washes her mother's clothes at home. Gosh, but dad was hot when he found her, and after she told him about her situation in life he gave her a yellow-backed fifty-dollar bill, and came back to the hotel mad, and wanted to pack up and go somewhere else, where he didn't know any titled-persons. That night a couple of dukes came around to the hotel to sell dad some stock in a diamond mine in South Africa, and they got to talking about how English society held over our crude American society, until dad got an addition to the mad he had when he called on our girl, and when one of the dukes said America was being helped socially by the marriage of American women to titled persons, dad got a hot box, like a stalled freight train. Says dad, says he: "You Johnnies are a lot of confidence men, who live only to rope in rich American girls, so you can marry them and have their dads lift the mortgages on your ancestral estates, and put on tin roofs in place of the mortgages, 'cause a mortgage will not shed rain, and you get their money and spend it on other women." One of the dukes turned red like a lobster, and I think he is a lobster, anyway, and he was going to make dad stop talking, but the duke didn't know dad, and he continued. Says dad, says he: "I know a rich old man in the States, who made ten million dollars on pickles, or breakfast food, and he had a daughter that was so homely they couldn't keep a clock going in the house. "She came over here and got exposed to a duke, and she had never been vaccinated, and the first her father knew she caught the duke, and came; home, and he followed her. Say, he didn't know enough to pound sand, and the old man got several doctors for her, but they couldn't break up the duke fever, and finally the old pickle citizen asked him how much the mortgage was, and how much they could live on, and he bought her the duke, and sent them off, and the duke covered his castle with building paper, so it would hold water, and they set up housekeeping with a hundred servants. Then the duke wanted a racing stable, after the baby came, and the old pickle man went over to see the baby, and it looked so much like the old man that he invested in a racing stable, and the servants bowed low to the old man and called him 'Your 'ighness,' and that settled the old pickle person, and he fell into the trap of building a townhouse in London. "Then he went home and made some more pickles, and the daughter cabled him to come right over, as they had been invited to entertain the king and a lot of other face cards in the pack. And the old man thought it would be great to get in the king row himself, so he shoveled a lot of big bills into some packing trunks and went over to fix up for the king. The castle had to be redecorated for about six miles, up one corridor and down the other, but Old Pickles stood the raise, because he thought it would be worth the money to be on terms of intimacy with a king. "Then when it was all ready, and the old man was going to stand at the front door and welcome the king, they made him go to his room, back about a half a mile in the rear of the castle, and for two weeks old Pickles had his meals brought to his room, and when it was over, and his sentence had expired, he was let out, and all he saw of the grand entertainment to the crowned heads was a ravine full of empty wine bottles, a case of jimjams for a son-in-law, a case of nervous prostration for a daughter, and hydrophobia for himself. My old pickle friend has got, at this date, three million good pickle dollars invested in your d--d island, and all he has to show for it is a sick daughter, neglected by a featherhead of a husband, who will only speak to old pickles when he wants more money, and a grandchild that may die teething at any time. You are a nice lot of ducks to talk to me about your English society being better than our American civilization. You get," and dad drove the dukes out. I think they are going to have dad arrested for treason. But don't tell ma, 'cause she may think treason serious. Yours, Hennery. _ |
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