United States or Taiwan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. They imagined Dutchy's humiliation, when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant, nobody there to applaud.
"It's your end, Colonel, that generates the heat, and Dutchy's end that does the burning." "There's poorer wit than yours, Dennie, out of the insane asylums. I'll shtow that away in me mind an' fire it off in the Boord the nexht time I make a speech. If I had your brains, lad, I'd a made more out av 'em than you have." "You've done well enough with your own," said Dennie.
It may be a little late for night before last, but it's just the shank of the evenin' for to-night. Well, it took me six weeks and two days to go broke. I didn't know sic em, about minin'; and before long I KNEW that I didn't 'know sic 'em. Most all day I poked around them mountains -not like our'n too much timber to be comfortable. At night I got to droppin' in at Dutchy's.
Already all the glass of the show windows had been broken, and from within there came guttural cries of alarm and anger. "It's Dutchy's place!" cried Dick Mercer. "He's a German, and they're trying to smash his place up!" "Halt!" cried Franklin. He gathered the scouts about him. "This won't do," he said, angry spots of color showing on his cheek bones.
I would thrust it through the bars, train it on Dutchy's chest, and wait. As the crisis approached he would begin swaying back and forth. I followed this swaying with the broom, for there was no telling when he would take that dreadful forward pitch. But when he did, I was there with the broom, catching him and easing him down.
He heard Wilder telling his story of his purchase of a quart of whisky, "an' he owned it was blockade," and a long and detailed account of "the Dutchy's" resistance to arrest, in which the ferocity of his behavior would have been creditable to a bloodthirsty villain driven to desperate straits. A voice asked him if he had anything to say, and he heard himself repeating once again, "I am guilty."
Of course I never questioned for a moment that the storm was on Dutchy's account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high; the lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me; for it convinced me that if Dutchy, with all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf, for I must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy, no matter how hard I might try.
"There ain't no Henry Smith," says he. I let that soak in about six inches. "But there's a Buck Canon," I pleads. "Please say there's a Buck Canon." "Oh, yes, there's a Buck Canon," he allows. "Nice limestone formation make good hard water." "Well, you're a marvel," says I. We walked together down to Dutchy's saloon. We stopped outside.
"I stays wid him an' he drills me an' makes me scrub, hully gee, how he do make me wash meself, Bill! An' there's one sojer-man, th' Cap'n, he give me these togs, he did, an' he tol' Old G. A. R. to lem'me eat along wid him over ter Dutchy's Res'traunt," nodding toward a cheap eating-house at the corner, "an' he'd stand fer it.
He hesitated, looking about him; but whether his search was for more pie or for moral support he did not say. Truth to tell, there was plenty of both. He reached for another pie and another knife, and he grinned his wide grin at Irish, who had just come up. "Dutchy's trying to run a whizzer," he remarked, cutting a defiant gash clean across the second pie. "What do yuh know about that?"
Word Of The Day