Peck's Bad Boy Abroad Part 5

If we get dad out of this we are going to put a muzzle on him. Well, if anyone asks you if I am having much of a time abroad, you can tell them the particulars.

P. S.--We got dad out for $20 and costs, and he says he will blow Paris up before night. We are going up to the top of the Eiffel tower this afternoon, to count our money, as dad da.s.scnt take out his pocketbook anywhere on the ground for fear of being robbed.

Yours full of frogs.

Hennery.

CHAPTER XII.

The Bad Boy's Second Letter from Paris--Dad Poses as a Mormon Bishop and Has to Be Rescued--They Climb the Eiffel Tower and the Old Man Gets Converted.

Paris, France.--Old Pardner in Crime: I got your letter, telling me about the political campaign that is raging at home, and when I read it to dad he wanted to go right out and fill up on campaign whisky and yell for his presidential candidate, but he couldn't find any whisky, so he has not tried to carry any precincts of Paris for our standard-bearer.

There is something queer about the liquor here. There is no regular campaign beverage. At home you can select a drink that is appropriate for any stage of a campaign. When the nominations are first made you are not excited and beer and cheese sandwiches seem to fit the case A little later, when the orators begin to come out into the open and shake their hair, you take c.o.c.ktails and your eyes begin to resemble those of a caged rat, and you are ready to quarrel with an opponent. The next stage in the campaign is the whisky stage, and when you have got plenty of it the campaign may be said to be open, and you wear black eyes and lose your teeth, and you swear strange oaths and smell of kerosene, and only sleep in the morning. Then election comes and if your side wins you drink all kinds of things at once for a week, shout hoa.r.s.ely and then go to the Keeley cure, but if your party loses you stay home and take a course of treatment for nervous prostration and say you will never mix up in another campaign.

Here in France it is different. The people have nervous prostration to start on, start a campaign on champagne, wind up on absinthe, and after the votes are counted go to an insane asylum. I do not know what first got dad to drink absinthe and I don't know what it is, but it looks like soap suds, tastes like seed cookies and smells like vermifuge. But it gets there just the same and the result of drinking it is about the same as the result of drinking anything in France--it makes you want to hug somebody.

At home when a man gets full of whisky, he wants to hug the man he drinks with and weep on his collar, and then hit him on the head with a bottle; but here every kind of drink puts the drinker in condition to want to hug. Dad says he never knew he had a brain until he learned to drink absinthe, but now he can close his eyes and see things worse than any mince pie nightmare, and when we go out among people he never sees a man at all, but when a woman pa.s.ses along, dad's eyes begin to take turns winking at them and it is all I can do to keep him from proposing marriage to every woman he sees.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Badge on dad's breast, with the word "Bishop" 153]

I thought I would break him of this woman foolishness, so I told everybody dad was a Mormon bishop, and had a grand palace at Salt Lake City, and owned millions of gold mines and tabernacles and wanted to marry a thousand women and take them to Utah and place them at the head of homes of their own, and he would just call once or twice a week and leave bags of gold for his wives to spend. A newspaper reporter, that could talk English, wrote a piece for a paper about dad wanting to marry a whole lot and he said life in Utah was better than a Turkish harem, cause the wives of a Mormon bishop did not have to be locked up and watched by unix, but could flirt and blow in money and go out to dances and have just as much fun as though they lived in Newport, and had got divorces from millionaires, and he said any woman who wanted to marry a Mormon bishop could meet dad on the bullyvard near a certain monument, on a certain day. I was on to it, with the reporter, and we hired a carriage and went to the bullyvard, just at the time the newspaper said and I put a big red badge on dad's breast, with the word "Bishop" on it, and dad had been drinking absinthe and he thought the badge was a kind of sign of n.o.bility. Well, you'd adide to see the bunch of women that were there to meet dad. "What's the matter here?" said dad, as he saw the crowd of women, looking like they were there in answer to an advertis.e.m.e.nt for nurses. I told dad to stand up in the carriage, like Dowie does in Chicago, and hold out his hands and say: "Bless you, my children," and when dad got up to bless them, the reporter and I got out of the carriage, and the reporter, which could talk French, said for all the women who wanted to be Mormon wives to get into the carriage with the bishop and be sealed for life.

Well, sir, you'd a thought it was a remnant sale! More than a dozen got into the carriage with dad, and about 400 couldn't get in, but when the scared driver started up the horses, they all followed the carriage, and then the mounted police surrounded the whole bunch and moved them off towards the police station, and dad under the wagonload of females, each one trying to get the nearest to him, so as to be his favorite wife.

It got noised around that a foreign potent-ate had been arrested with his whole harem for conduct unbecoming to a potent-ate, and so when we got to the jail dad had to be rescued from his wives, and they were driven into a side street by the police, and dad was locked up to save his life. The reporter and I went to the jail to get him out, but we had to buy a new suit of clothes for him, as everything was torn off him in the Mormon rush.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dad was a sight when we found him in jail 155]

Dad was a sight when we found him in jail, and he thought his bones were broken, and he wanted to know what was the cause of his sudden popularity with the fair s.e.x, and I told him it all came from his looking so confounded distinguished, and his flirting with women. He said he would swear he never looked at one of those women in a tone of voice that would deceive a Sunday school teacher, and he felt as though he was being misunderstood in France. We told him the only way to get out of jail was to say he was a crowned head from Oshkosh, traveling incog, and when he began to stand on his dignity and demand that a messenger be sent for the president of France, to apologize for the treatment he had received, the jailer and police begged his pardon and we dressed him up in his new clothes and got him out, and we went to the Eiffel tower to get some fresh air.

I suppose you have seen pictures of the Eiffel tower, on the advertis.e.m.e.nts of breakfast food in your grocery, but you can form no idea of the height and magnificence of the tower by studying advertis.e.m.e.nts. You may think that the pictures you see of world events on your cans of baked beans and maple syrup and soap, give you the benefit of foreign travel, but it does not. You have got to see the real thing or you are not fit to even talk about what you think you have seen. You remember that Ferris wheel at the Chicago world's fair, and how we thought it was the greatest thing ever made of steel, so high that it made us dizzy to look to the top of it, and when we went up on the wheel we thought we could see the world, from Alaska to South Africa, and we marveled at the work of man and prayed that we be permitted to get down off that wheel alive, and not be spilled down through the rarified Chicago atmosphere and flattened on the pavement so thin we would have to be sc.r.a.ped up off the pavement with a case knife, like a buckwheat cake that sticks to the griddle.

You remember, old man, how you cried when our sentence to ride in the Ferris wheel expired, and the jailer of the wheel opened the cell and let us out, and you said no one would ever get you to ride again on anything that you couldn't jump out of if it balked, or you got wheels in your head and chunks of things came up to your Adam's apple and choked you. Well, cross my heart, if that Ferris wheel, that looked so big to us, would make a main spring for the Eiffel tower. The tower is higher than a kite, and when you get near it and try to look up to the top, you think it is a joke, and that really no one actually goes up to the top of it. You see some flies up around the top of it, and when the guide tells you the flies crawling around there are men and women, you think the guide has been drinking.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Flies crawling around there are men and women 157]

But dad and I and the guide paid our money, got into an elevator and began to go up. After the thing had been going up awhile dad said he wouldn't go up more than a mile or so at first, and asked the man to let him off at the 3,000-foot level, but the elevator man said dad had got to take all the degrees and dad said: "Let her went," and after an hour or so we got to the top.

Gee! but I thought dad would fall dead right there, when he looked off at Paris and the world beyond. The flies we had seen at the top before starting had changed to human beings, all looking pale and scared, and the human beings on the ground had changed into flies and bugs, for all you could see of a man on the ground was his feet with a flattened plug hat someway fastened on the ankles, and a woman looked like a spoonful of raspberry jam dropped on the pavement, or a splash of current jelly moving on the ground in a mysterious way. I do not know as the Eiffel tower was intended to act as a Keeley cure, but of the 50 people who went up with us, half of them were so full their back teeth were floating, including dad and the guide, but when we got to the top and they got a view of the awful height to which we had come, it seemed as though every man got sober at once, and their tongues seemed to cleave to the roof of their mouths. All they could do was to look off at the city and the view in the distance, and choke up, and look sorry about something.

I couldn't help thinking of what sort of a pulp a man would be if he fell off the top of the tower and struck a fat woman on the pavement, cause it seemed to me you couldn't tell which was fat woman and which was man. I never saw such a change in a man as there was in dad, after he got his second wind and got his voice working. He looked like a man who had made up his mind to lead a different life and begin right there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He took out a five-dollar bill 159]

There was a Salvation Army man and woman in the crowd and dad went up to them. He took out a five-dollar bill and put it in the tambourine of the la.s.sie, and said to the man and woman: "Now, look a here, I want to join your church, and if you have got the facilities for giving me the degrees, you can sign me as a Christian right now. I have been a bad man, and never thought I needed the benefits of religious training, but since I got up here, so near Heaven, in an elevator which I will bet $10 will break and kill us all before we get down to Paris, I want you to prepare me for the hereafter quick."

Some of the other fellows laughed at dad, and the Salvation Army people looked as though dad was drunk, but he continued: "You can laugh and be jammed, but I'll never leave this place until I am a pious man, and you Salvation Army people have got to enlist me in your army, for I am scared plum to death. Go ahead and convert me, while we wait." The Salvation Army captain put his hand on dad's head, the girl held out the tambourine for another contribution, and dad felt a sweet peace come over him, and we went down in the elevator and took a hack to the hotel, and dad's lips worked as though in pain.

H.

CHAPTER XIII.

The Bad Boy's Dad and a Man from Dakota Frame Up a Scheme to Break the Bank, But They Go Broke--The Party in Trouble.

Monte Carlo.--Dear Uncle: I blush to write the name, Monte Carlo, at the head of a letter to anyone that is a Christian, or who believes in honesty and decency, and earning a living by the sweat of one's brow, for this place is the limit. If I should write anybody a letter from South Clark street, Chicago, the recipient would know I had gone wrong, and was located in the midst of a bad element, and the inference would be that I was the worst fakir, robber, hold-up man or a.s.sa.s.sin in the bunch.

The inference you must draw from the heading of this letter is that dad and I have taken all the degree of badness and are now winding up our career by taking the last degree, before pa.s.sing in our chips and committing suicide. Do you know what this place is, old man? Monaco is a princ.i.p.ality, about six miles square, ruled by a prince, and the whole business of the country, for it is a "country" the same as though it had a king, is gambling. They have all the different kinds of gambling, from chuck-a-luck at two bits to roulette at a million dollars a minute. What started dad to come to Monte Carlo is more than I know, unless it was a new American he has got acquainted with, a fellow from North Dakota, that dad met at a sort of dance that he did not take me to. It seems there is a place in Paris where they go to see men and women dance--one of those dances where they kick so high that their feet hit the gas fixtures.

Well, all I know about it is that one Wednesday night dad said he felt as though it was his duty to go to prayer meeting, so he could say when he got home that in all the frivolities of a trip abroad, even in wicked Paris, he never neglected his church duties. I never was stuck on going to prayer meeting, so dad let me stay at the hotel and play pool with the cash register boy in the barroom, and dad took a hymn book and went out, looking pious as I ever saw him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dance, like they had seen the people dance at the show 164]

My, what a difference there was in dad in the morning. I woke up about daylight, and dad came into the room with a strange man, with spinach on his chin, and they began to dance, like they had seen the people dance at the show where they had pa.s.sed the evening. They were undressed, except their underclothes, which wore these combination suits, so when a man gets into them he is sealed up like a bologna, and he has to have help when he wants to get out to take a bath, and he has to have an outsider b.u.t.ton him in with a b.u.t.ton hook. Gee, I would rather be a sausage and done with it! Well, dad and this man from Dakota kicked high until dad caught by the ankle on a gas bracket, and the strange man got me up out of bed to help unloosen dad and get him down before he was black in the face. Finally we got dad down and then the two old codgers began to discuss a proposition to go to Monte Carlo to break the bank.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A system of gambling 162]

The Dakota man agreed that Americans had no right to be spending their own money doing Europe, when their genius was equal to the task of acquiring the money of the less intelligent foreigners. He said they could go to Monte Carlo and by a system of gambling which he had used successfully in the Black Hills they could carry away all the money they could pile into sacks. The man said he would guarantee to break the bank if dad would put his money against the Dakota man's experience as a gambler, and they would divide the proceeds equally. Dad bit like a ba.s.s. He said he had always had an element of adventure in his make-up, and had always liked to take chances, and from what he had heard of the fabulous sums won and lost at Monte Carlo he could see that if a syndicate could be formed that would win most of the time, he could see that there was more money in it than in any manufacturing enterprise, and he was willing to finance the scheme.

The Dakota man fairly hugged dad, and he told dad in confidence that they two could divide up money enough to make them richer than they ever dreamed of, and all the morning they discussed the plan, and made a list of things they would need to get away with the money. They provided themselves with canvas sacks to carry away the gold, and dad drew all his money out of the bank, and that evening we took a train for Monte Carlo. All the way here dad and his new friend chuckled over the sensation they would make among the gamblers, and I became real interested in the scheme. There was to be some fun besides the winning of the money, because they talked of going out in the park and on the terraces when they were tired of winning money, and seeing the poor devils who had gone broke commit suicide, as that is said to be one of the features of the place.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Seeing the poor devils who had gone broke 166]

Well, we got a suite of rooms and the first day we looked over the place, and ate free banquets and saw how the people dressed, and just looked prosperous and showed money on the slightest provocation, and got the hang of things. Dad was to go in the big gambling room in the afternoon with his pockets fairly dropsical with money, and the Dakota man was to do the betting, and dad was to hold one of the canvas bags, and when it was full we were to take it to our room, and quit gambling for awhile, to give the bank a chance to raise more money. Dad insisted that his partner should lose a small bet once in awhile, so the bank should not get on to the fact that we had a cinch.

After luncheon we entered the big gambling room, in full-dress suits, and, by gosh! it was like a king's reception. There were hundreds of men and women, dressed for a party, and it did not seem like a gambling h.e.l.l, except that there were, piles of gold as big as stoves, on all the tables, and the guests were provided with silver rakes, with long handles, to rake in the money. Dad said in a whisper to the Dakota man: "What is the use of taking the trouble to run a gold mine, and get all dirtied up digging dirty nuggets, when you can get nice, clean gold, all coined, ready to spend, by betting right?" And then dad turned to me and he said; "Hennery, don't let the sight of this wealth make you avaricious. Don't be purse-proud when you find that your poor father, after years of struggle against adversity, and the machinations of designing men, has got next to the Pierpont Morgan cla.s.s and has money to buy railroads. Don't get excited when we begin to bag the money, but just act as though it was a regular thing with us to salt down our gold for winter, the same as we do our pork."

A count, or a duke, gave us nice seats, and rakes to haul in the money; a countess, with a low-necked dress, winked at dad when he reached into his pistol pocket and brought out a roll of bills and handed them to the Dakota man, who bought $500 worth of red chips, and when the man looked the roulette table over and put about a pint of chips on the red, dad choked up so he was almost black in the face, and began to perspire so I had to wipe my face with a handkerchief; the gambler rolled the wheel and when the ball stopped on the red, and dad did the raking and raked in a quart of chips, and dad shook hands with the Dakota man and said: "Pard, we have got 'em on the run," and reached for his sack to put in the first installment of acquired wealth, and the low-necked countess smiled a ravishing smile on dad, and dad looked as though he owned a brewery, and the Dakota man twisted his chin whiskers and acted like he was sorry for the Monte Carlo bank, I just got so faint with joy that I almost cried.

To think we had skinned along as economically as possible all our lives, and never made much money, and now, through this Dakota genius, and this Monte Carlo opportunity, we had wealth raking in by the bushel, made me feel great, and I wondered why more people had not found out this faraway place, where people could become rich and prosperous in a day, if they had the nerve. I tell you, old man, it was great, and I was going to cable you to sell out your grocery for what you could get at forced sale and come here with the money, gamble and become a millionaire.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Reach into another pocket and dig up another roll 171]

Monte Carlo (the next day).--My Dear Uncle Ezra: I do not know how to write you the sequel to this tragedy. After our Dakota partner, with the Black Hills system of beating a roulette game, had won the first bet, he never guessed the right color again, and dad had no more use for the rake. Every time he bet and lost, he would reach out to dad for more money, and dad would reach into another pocket and dig up another roll, and the countess would laugh and dad had to act as though he enjoyed losing money.

It was about dark when dad had fished up the last hundred dollars and it was gone before dad could wink back to the countess, then the Dakota man looked at dad for more, and dad shook his head and said it was all off, and they looked it each other a minute, and then we all three got up and went out in the park to see the people who had gone broke commit suicide, but there was not a revolver shot and dad and the Dakota man sat down on a seat and I looked at the moon.

He would reach out to Dad for more money, and Dad would reach into another pocket and dig up another roll.