him to go along with the show, and preach every Sunday.

The preacher said he couldn't join the show, but he traveled around a
good deal and he would probably be in the same town with the show
several times during the summer and he would drop in on them
occasionally and keep them straight.

Pa was watching the crowd for the sailor who prescribed cayenne pepper
for yellow fever, and when he saw the sailor come up to the minister,
with tears in his eyes, and say: "Parson, I has been a bad man and
killed a man once, but he was a Portuguese sailor, and he had the drop
on me, the same as you did on Big Ike at the opening of these
proceedings, and I had to kill him. And I begs the pardon of this old
gentleman for lying to him." And then pa shook hands with the sailor and
the parson, and the parson put his blue gun down his trousers leg, and
said: "By the way, the bulldog you were going to let take a lunch off
me, is he all right?"

Then the parson and the girl went away, and the boys carried out the
melodeon, and the quarantine was declared off. After dinner the boys
took down the tents and put them on the train that Sunday afternoon,
singing decent songs as they pulled up the stakes and rolled up the
canvas, and on the train, late in the night, we could hear "Old Hundred"
being sung as the cars ran through the pennyrial district of Indiana.



CHAPTER VIII