"Where ignorance is bliss," says he, "it is folly to be wise. But all
the same, I'm going to take your education in hand and make you drink of
life's Peruvian springs." Or some spring like that it was.
And the doctor, he done it. Looey said it wouldn't be no use learning to
read. He'd done a lot of reading, he said, and it never helped him none.
All he ever read showed him this feller Hamlet was right, he said, when
he wrote Shakespeare's works, and they wasn't much use in anything,
without you had a lot o' money. And they wasn't no chancet to get that
with all these here trusts around gobbling up everything and stomping
the poor man into the dirt, and they was lots of times he wisht he was
a Injun sure enough, and not jest a medical one, fur then he'd be a
free man and the bosses and the trusts and the railroads and the robber
tariff couldn't touch him. And then he shut up, and didn't say nothing
fur a hull hour, except oncet he laughed.
Fur Doctor Kirby, he says, winking at me: "Looey, here, is a nihilist."
"Is he," says I, "what's that?" And the doctor tells me about how they
blow up dukes and czars and them foreign high-mucky-mucks with dynamite.
Which is when Looey laughed.
Well, we jogged along at a pretty good gait fur several hours, and we
stayed that night at a Swede's place, which the doctor paid him fur
everything in medicine, only it took a long time to make the bargain,
fur them Swedes is always careful not to get cheated, and hasn't many
diseases. And the next night we showed in a little town, and done right
well, and took in considerable money. We stayed there three days and
bought a tent and a sheet-iron stove and some skillets and things and
some provisions, and a suit of duds for me.
Well, we went on, and we kept going on, and they was bully times. We'd
ease up careful toward a town, and pick us out a place on the edge,
where the hosses could graze along the side of the road; and most
ginerally by a piece of woods not fur from that town, and nigh a crick,
if we could. Then we'd set up our tent. After we had everything fixed,
I'd put on my Injun clothes and Looey his'n, and we'd drive through the
main store street of the town at a purty good lick, me a-holt of the
reins, and the doctor all togged out in his best clothes, and Looey
doing a Injun dance in the midst of the wagon. I'd pull up the hosses
sudden in front of the post-office or the depot platform or the hotel,
and the people would come crowding around, and the doctor he'd make a
little talk from the wagon, and tell everybody they would be a free show
that night on that corner, and fur everybody to come to it. And then
we'd drive back to camp, lickitysplit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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