“Besides, father could not be burdened with a girl,” she confessed to Tom Swift. “He should have no responsibilities upon his mind but the recovery of his own health. That Raddiker! He told us just enough to stir us all up and add to our worriments. He told us how father might be aided to health, but he does not point out the way for us to bring it about. I declare, Tom, neither mother nor I has the first idea of what we ought to do!” CHAPTER VII A GOOD DEAL ON HIS MIND Tom came around by the slaughter house at the railroad switch, on the far edge of Shopton, on his way home from the Nestor house. He knew several of the men who worked there, and he wanted something that could only be supplied in the vicinity of the town at that place. “Pigs’ bladders? The land sake! What for, Mister Tom?” demanded Harry M’Connel, the man the young inventor asked. “You ain’t makin’ no contraption for to make pigs fly, are you, now? The price of pork has gone up high enough already.” “I’m not so sure that the bladders may not help me scheme out something that will aid man to fly,” laughed Tom Swift. “You shall have the bladders,” declared M’Connel. “But I never mean to go up in one of them flying machines myself. Still and all, there’s some folks I’d just as lief would go scootin’ skyward as not, and I hope if they do they never come down again,” added the slaughter-house man, grumblingly. He went outside, selected a pair of good-sized pigs’ bladders, washed them, and brought them back to the young inventor. Tom thanked him and went home with the bladders. When a little boy he used to get these bladders for balloons. He blew them up now in the same way, tied them, and hung them out of his bedroom window to dry, warning Rad and Koku to let them alone. “Master make great medicine with them,” the giant declared to Rad Sampson. “Make wonder! Whoo!” “Yo’ make me sick—whoo!” muttered old Rad. “What kind of med’cine you think can be made out o’ a pig’s bladder, big man? You is sho’-nuff crazy.” But Koku remembered what the magicians and medicine men did with such receptacles in his own country and shook his head. He held Tom Swift quite as able to make black magic as any medicine man who ran half naked in the wilds. “You see!” he declared earnestly. “Master make big noise. Do wunnerful thing. Mighty smart.” “Which _you_ isn’t,” declared Eradicate with scorn. “I dunno what Mist’ Swift and Mars’ Tom wants yo’ round yere for, anyway. Yo’ ain’t a smitch o’ good, as I can see. Yo’ ain’t even to be trusted to peel spuds. I haf to peel de peels after you.” “Koku great chief. He cannot do woman’s work.” “Hey!” cried old Rad. “Since you got dat checkered suit out West dere, whar Mars’ Tom took his electric engine, dere ain’t been any holdin’ yo’. Makes yo’ too uppity to wear good clo’es. A breech-clout an’ a string of beads is de best yo’ knowed about dressin’ ’fore yo’ come here.”