Swatty. Ellis Parker Butler
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.
II. MAMIE'S FATHER
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.
Well, a short while before Toady Williams came to our town they had an election to see whether the state was to be prohibition or not, and all the school children