Peck's Bad Boy Abroad

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neck when the door opened, and that he was not an entry in a dog show, and he wanted a kennel all to himself, and asked for dog biscuit. Gee, but that guard was mad, and he gave dad a look that started the train going. I whispered to dad to get out his revolver, because the other passengers looked like hold up men, and he took his revolver out of his satchel and put it in his pistol pocket, and looked fierce, and the woman began to act faint, while the passengers seemed to be preparing to jump on dad if he got violent. When the train stopped at the first station I got out and told the guard that the old gentleman in there was from Helena, Montana, and that he had a reputation from St. Paul to Portland, and then I held up both hands the way train robbers make passengers hold up their hands. When I went back in the car dad was talking to the woman about her resembling a woman he used to know in the states, and he was just going to ask her how long she had been so beautiful, when the guard came to the side door and called the woman out into another stall, and then one of the passengers pulled out a pair of handcuffs and told dad he might as well surrender, because he was a Scotland yard detective and had spotted dad as an American embezzler, and if he drew that gun he had in his pocket there would be a dead Yankee in about four minutes. Well, I thought dad had nerve before, but he beat the band, right there. He unbuttoned his overcoat and put his finger on a Grand Army button in his buttonhole, and said, "Gentlemen, I am an American citizen, visiting the crowned heads of the old world, with credentials from the President of the United States, and day after tomorrow I have a date

estions. I told the boys dad was Andrew Carnegie, and that he was giving away millions of dollars, so when dad got to the gate of the beautiful H'astor place, the boys yelled Andrew Carnegie, and a flunkey flunked the gate open and dad and I went in, and walked up to the house. Astor was on the veranda, smoking a Missouri corn cob pipe, and drinking American beer, and seemed to be wishing he was back home in America. Dad marched right up to the veranda, like a veteran soldier, and Astor could see dad was an American by the dandruff on his coat collar, and Astor said, "You are an American citizen and you are welcome. Once I was like you, and didn't care a continental dam for anybody, but in a moment of passion I renounced my country, swore allegiance to this blawsted country, and everybody hates me here, and I don't dare go home to collect my rent for fear I will be quarantined at Ellis Island and sent back to England as an undesirable emigrant who has committed a crime, and is not welcome in the land where I was born. Old man, have a glass of Milwaukee beer and let's talk of your home and my birthplace, and forget that there is such a country as England." Dad sat down on the porch, and I went out on the lawn chasing peacocks and treeing guinea hens, and setting dogs on the swans, until a butler or a duke or something took me by the collar and shook me till my teeth got loose, and he took me back to the veranda and sat me down on the bottom step so hard my hair raised right up stiff, like a porcupine. Then I listened to dad and Astor talk about America, and I never saw a man who seemed to be so ashamed that he was a brevet Englishman, as he did. He said he had so much money that it made his headache to hear the interest accumulate, nights, when he couldn't sleep, and yet he had no more enjoyment than Dreyfus did on Devil's Island. He had

r and tipped beer bottles on the veranda and more than forty servants came, and I told dad to come on, and we got outside the gate, ahead of the police, and got a cab and drove quicker than scat to the hotel, and I ast dad what he thought it was that went off, and he said "You can search me," but he said

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