CHAPTER XIII. THE BOY WHO WAS NOT AFRAID.

When Jack emerged from his enforced retirement of the week, it was with an aristocratic complexion, a fine sense of rectitude, and a powerful conviction that in spite of his unsavory reputation having had additional light cast upon it by the burning stable, there still was something worth living for, and that the something aforesaid was nice little Mattie Barker. The bouquet she had sent him had been carefully preserved throughout the week, though it had not always been easy to secrete it on the approach of his mother and father. Why he should have hidden it from them he could not have told, for they would have assumed that he had culled it himself, and they were more than glad on account of the new regard for flowers he had shown since his sickness; but it made Jack feel very manly to hide that bouquet, to imagine that it would be removed if discovered, and to think of the desperate deeds he would do rather than have it torn from him.

In spite of love, however, the boy felt somewhat as a discharged criminal is supposed to feel. He did not know where to go, or what to do. The prohibition of the society of other boys had been strengthened by new and stringent clauses. Jack could not very well seek out girls to play with, unless he chose to run the risk of being laughed at, and being suspected of fickleness by nice little Mattie Barker. His recent conversations with his mother had not been of a variety of which he wanted more, his father was pleasant enough of speech—when not pre-occupied—but he would persist in affixing a moral or a warning to every sentence he spoke, and though Jack felt sure that no person living had a higher regard for moral applications than himself, he did not care to have them in everything. His father liked butter, as was proper enough, but did he mix it with everything he put in his mouth—cake, coffee, fruit, etc.? Jack rather thought not.

Perhaps the doctor had never heard of the pope's bull against the comet and its impotence, or he might have evolved a moral application for his own use, in the matter of prohibiting Jack from associating with other boys. No matter how earnestly the world, in the time of the pope alluded to, expressed its objections to associating with comets, the comet came right along as straight as a due deference to solar control would allow. And the order of seclusion imposed upon Jack did not make him any the less yearned after by his late playmates. It began to be noticed, by boys of observing habits, that the youth of Doveton were falling into ruts, and showing no inclination to depart from them; that there was nothing particular to do; that the procession of games, each according to its season, was lapsing into irregularity; that nobody got up anything new, and the only plausible reason seemed to be the absence of Jack. In a general convention of boys it was agreed, with but two dissenting voices—those of the jugged loafer and the buttonless Pinkshaw twin—that what society needed was to have Jack resume his place in it, and the two dissenters were informed that if they didn't make the vote unanimous they would find it advisable to move to the next town.

Then it was informally resolved that Jack's father was an old hog, and a protest from lame Joey Wilson, who declared that during his own illness, which had made him lame, the doctor had been just lovely to him, only made it more inexcusable that the doctor should not be better to Jack. To such a pitch of indignation did the feeling against the doctor arise, that after the nine o'clock evening bell broke up the convention, the braver and more close-tongued boys expressed their disapprobation of the doctor's course by building a rail fence, some forty lengths long, around the doctor's front gate, carrying the rails from a pasture a square away. To remove this fence, and replace the rails in their rightful positions, required all of Jack's time during the following week, noting which fact the boys doubted whether their operation against the doctor had been a positive success, while Jack himself perceived, as he perspired, that even sympathy has its penalties.

But he adhered manfully to his good resolutions. As the time for the next Puttytop demonstration approached, he determined that he would leave all his delightful devices to the friend who suggested them to him, while to Matt, who one day sneaked to the fence and asked when that new torpedo blower could be had, Jack tragically exclaimed, "Get thee behind me, Satan." To be sure, he said it before he had taken time to ponder upon the advisability of saying it, and the instant it escaped his lips he wished he had only thought it instead of uttering it; but none of this reconsideration had any effect upon Matt, for on receipt of the unexpected reply, he had bestowed just one frightened look upon Jack and then taken to his heels, and remained invisible to Jack through all subsequent days until he received an apologetic note, after which confidence was restored by supplementary proceedings at the front gate.

The great Puttytop demonstration was effected without disturbance, but there were some signs of despondency manifested by those interested in the local ticket, which Puttytop helped and was helped by, for the Germans, incensed by the treatment which Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel had received, made their grievance an affair of nationality, and went over bodily to the Baggs faction. As the few last days of the campaign approached, Jack's patriotic spirit began to chafe at inaction, and he finally became excited to the pitch of asking his father whether he might not take part in the great and final Baggs torchlight procession. The doctor was astonished by the temerity of this request, but he was himself a Baggs man, Doveton was too far from any great city for politics to have become exclusively rowdyish, the marshals of the procession were nearly all church members, Jack had been quiet for a long time, so the doctor gave his assent, taking the precaution, however, to make a personal appeal to each marshal to keep an eye on the boy.

Jack was overjoyed, and proceeded at once to make a transparency and covered it with stirring mottoes. Then he made another, a very fine one it was, too, which he embellished with the inscription, "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again," and this he presented to Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel. But Nuderkopf intimated that he had had enough of politics to last him until the next campaign, so he used the sympathetic transparency to shield a plant of late tomatoes from the frost, and when Jack learned this he confided to Matt that he washed his hands of that ungrateful Dutchman, then and forever.

Somehow Jack had frequent and imperative needs to consult other boys before the night of the procession, but each time he asked the permission of his father, and made known the subjects of the conversation desired, until the doctor began to believe that Jack was really trying to do right. As for the subjects of consultation with the boys, they ranged all the way from lights for transparencies to the particular style and succession of hoots to be uttered on passing Puttytop headquarters. Upon this last-named affair Jack bestowed a great deal of time, and, finally, having gone to Matt's for something, and found nearly all the boys in the Bolton barn, he conducted a rehearsal with such success that within five seconds after the first note had sounded, the Bolton horse had started back in wild affright, snapped his halter-strap, and bumped the side of the barn behind him so forcibly that he was stiff for a month afterward.

When the procession finally formed, Jack's transparency was the observed of all observers. On one side he had acknowledged his youth, but warned the opposition against despising it by the inscription, "Little, but Oh, My!" On the second face of the transparency, Mephistopheles, all in red, laid a gaunt hand, black, upon an ungainly individual in blue. Lest the meaning of this painting might seem doubtful to the general gaze, the name of Mr. Puttytop appeared under the blue personage. A third side was ornamented with the portrait of the opposition candidate, and it must have been a good one, for Jack had cut it from a Puttytop poster which had been tacked to his father's new stable. In this picture the adapter proved himself to be not without genius, for over the whole of that portion of the candidate's cranium which had been devoted to hair, Jack had affixed real putty, fastening it in place with pins, their heads enlarged with red sealing wax and their points bent inside the canvas. The effect of this work of art, when it came under a light from the outside, was that of a bald-headed man, upon whose scalp a bad case of smallpox had concentrated its energies. On the fourth and last side there was a palpable allusion to the bibulous habits of which Puttytop had been accused by the managers of the Baggs faction, for the ornament was a sketch of a declivity, beginning at an upper corner and drooping downward almost to the opposite corner; on the top of this began a series of red spots which increased in size, number, and intensity of tint until they culminated in the general deep red at the base; under all this was the inscription, "His Nose."

Many were the stones and imprecations hurled at this chef d'?uvre as the procession moved through the streets, and all of Jack's strength of mind and body was required to enable the young man to manage his temper and hold his transparency upright. It would hardly be safe to say that the doctor, who viewed the procession from a corner, entirely approved of his son's taste, but the boy's upright bearing pleased the old gentleman, and as one of the marshals, who was also Jack's Sunday-school teacher, rode very close behind Jack, the doctor went home feeling that his boy was in safe hands.

But the final disposing of the procession did not conclude Jack's patriotic duties. A large paper balloon, inscribed "Baggs Forever, One and Inseparable," was to be sent up by the boys. This was to be placed in the heavens by means of heated air, to be provided by a burning sponge saturated with alcohol, and hanging on a wire which was stretched across the open mouth of the balloon. The boy who had been charged with procuring the alcohol had dishonestly spent the money for powder and shot with which to go hunting, but he had made good the deficiency by stealing his mother's bottle of cooking brandy. It burned to a charm, the balloon soared gracefully aloft amid a loud chorus of "Ah!" and then the boy who held the bottle and who knew the liquor by its smell, remarked that it was a pity not to put the remaining contents where they would do the most good. The motion was seconded by one or two bad boys who were not unacquainted with liquor, and the bottle was passed from mouth to mouth, Jack being the fourth who received it.

"I don't drink," said he, holding the bottle and wondering whether it would be best to empty it on the ground.

"You're afraid to," said one of the drinkers, to whom Jack had been held up, to the extreme pitch of exasperation, as a good temperance boy.

"Of course he's afraid," said another bad boy.

The mere smell of the brandy made Jack shudder, but this was as nothing to the trembling caused by the charge of fear. Afraid? well, he was afraid—of being laughed at, so he placed the bottle to his lips. He did not know anything about the quantity to drink, except that when he drank water out of a bottle as he frequently did when out after berries in summer, he usually took about a dozen swallows, so he swallowed industriously until one of the bad boys who had not drunk complained that none was being left for the others. Then it seemed to him that he had been swallowing the whole of a great conflagration, and that he would cough himself to death, if, indeed, he did not die of the uncontrollable trembling that agitated his frame.

During the long-drawn moment in which this new misery was being experienced by Jack, most of the remaining boys had been vociferating discordantly about something, and when Jack regained some little control over himself he saw that the balloon was the cause of their agitation; it had lost its balance, perhaps from too much of the brandy getting to its head, and in turning sideways it had caught fire and begun to fall. It caused a beautiful though dissolving view, and soon there was nothing remaining but the sponge, which was coming down as brightly and apparently as swiftly as a meteor. Everybody ran to see where it fell, and although the sponge was making considerably the best time, it had by far the greater distance to travel, so the boys had nearly reached it when it tumbled into the well-stocked pig pen of Shantz, the butcher, where it was received with all the hubbub which the appearance of so unusual a visitor could warrant. The spectacle of a brightly-blazing sponge in a small enclosure, with a dozen hogs squealing at it, was one which commended itself to the boys by its utter novelty, but when the proprietor of the establishment opened his own back door, and descended the yard with a club, the scene became suddenly devoid of interest, and the place which knew the boys but now, knew them no more that evening. The boys afterward agreed, while talking the matter over, that any sensible man would first have cast the dangerous visitor from the pen. But Shantz had seen so much of juvenile mischief that whenever he saw a boy near the scene of any irregularity, he thought more of preventing future trouble than of curing that which existed, so he left the pigs to take care of the sponge, and gave chase to the boys.

Jack did his best to keep up with his companions, but he had never in his life suspected our quiet old globe of such unstable ways as she indulged in during that short run. The world tipped to one side until Jack was certain that he would roll over to his left in a moment and slide straight down hill to the Atlantic Ocean, which was five hundred miles away. Then the world tipped the other way, and Jack felt himself going, going, going, until he felt sure that in a minute or two he would be caught and impaled on some lofty peak of the Rocky Mountains, more than a thousand miles to the right. Then all the stars of heaven forsook their orbits and dashed about each other in a manner which made Jack too giddy to look at them, so he looked straight before him at the steeple of the Presbyterian Church, just in time to see it dissolve itself into two steeples, which trembled awhile and then indulged in a mad strife to see which should overtop the other. The antics which Hoccamine's store indulged in were very dangerous to a brick structure which had been erected by contract, as that had. Then Jack seemed to be treading on air, a league at a step, yet unable to approach any nearer to his companions.

Suddenly his collar tightened, though he could not imagine why; then the judgment-day seemed surely to come, for stars and steeples and stores all mixed themselves in utter confusion, and Jack fell backward some thousands of miles, apparently, and the last sensation he experienced was of seeing a giant about a mile high, but of a face, form and voice identical with those of Shantz the butcher, and the giant raised a club, which was certainly the trunk of the largest of the California big trees, and——