Peck's Sunshine: Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun,; Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
General
Peck's Sunshine: Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun,; Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882
Peck, George W. (George Wilbur)
American wit and humor
If a nitro-glycerine bomb had exploded there could not have been more
commotion. The express man rushed forward, and was going to climb over
into the tender of the engine, the baggage man started for the emigrant
car to see if there was anybody from the place in Germany that his hired
girl came from, and Cornes happened to think that he had not collected
fare from an Indian that got on at Greenfield with a lot of muskrat
skins. In less than four seconds the corpse and parrot were the sole
occupants of the car. The three train men and a brakeman met in the
emigrant car and looked at each other.
They never said a word for about two minutes, when Fred opened the ball.
He said there was no use of being scared, if the man was dead he was not
dangerous, and if he was alive the four of them could whip him, if he
undertook to run things. What they were in duty bound to do was to let
him out. No man could enjoy life screwed down in a sarcophagus like
that.
“Now,” says Cornes, “there is a doctor from Milwaukee in the sleeper.
I will go and ask him to come in the baggage car, and you fellows go in
and pull the trunks off that coffin, and we will take a screw driver
and a can-opener and give the man air. That's doing as a fellow would be
done by.”
So he went and got the doctor and told him he had got a case for him.
He wanted him to practice on a dead man. The doctor put on his pants and
overcoat, and went with Fred. As they came into the baggage car the boys
were lifting a big trunk off the coffin, when the voice said:
“Go easy. Glory hallelujah!”
Then they all turned pale again, but all took hold of the baggage and
worked with a will, while the doctor held a screw driver he had fished
out of a tool box.
The doctor said the man was evidently alive, but the chances were that
he might die from suffocation before they could unscrew all the screws
of the outside box and the coffin, and he said he didn't know but the
best way would be to take an ax and break it open.
Fred said that was his idea, and he was just going for the ax when the
brakeman moved the water barrel, tipped over the parrot cage, and the
parrot shook himself and looked mad and said. “There, butterfingers!
Polly wants a cracker.”
Cornes had just come up with the axe, and was about to tell the brakeman
to chop the box, when the parrot spoke.
“Well, by-----,” said the baggageman. The doctor laughed, the brakeman
looked out the door to see how the weather was, and the conductor said,
“I knew it was a parrot all the time, but you fellows were so anxious to
chop into the box that I was going to let you. I never saw a lot of men
with so much curiosity.” Then they all united in trying to bribe the
doctor not to tell the story in Milwaukee.
GOT IN THE WRONG PEW.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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