I didn’t feel very comfortable in my mind the rest of that day, thinking about what was going to happen to me at night, but all the same I was going to go through with it, and I says to myself that if any kid got _too_ fresh when I was parading, I’d have something to say to him the next time I caught him. I hain’t much for fighting, but, all the same, I hain’t the kind to put up with more than I can stand. A good-natured fellow ought to fight about once a year just to show folks he hain’t too good-natured. That night I waited till half past seven, and then I sneaked sister’s baby-cab and down-town I went. The band was just coming out of the Firemen’s Hall and forming a circle in the square when I got there. Mark and Tallow and Binney were sitting on the railing of the town pump, waiting, and I trundled past them without so much as looking. I pretended I didn’t see them at all, and pushed the cab right around the band. For a while nobody noticed me because the band was trying to get up steam. That’s the kind of a band we have. Our band is what you could call home made. The cornet-player had some lessons, so they made him leader, but the rest of the fellows just bought horns and went out back of the barn where nobody could heave things at them, and _learned_. My! when they was learning but Wicksville was an unhealthy place early in the morning and at night. Everywhere you turned there was a fellow sitting with his eyes shut and his cheeks puffed out, trying to make a noise on a barytone or an alto or a trombone. Mostly for the first week they couldn’t make any noise at all, except now and then by accident, and that noise would be the worst kind of a _blatt_ you ever heard. It got so bad, after a while, that the Town Board give orders nobody should practise on a horn in the corporate limits before five in the morning and after nine at night.