esse James had drawn a bead on him.

"O, you go and chase yourself. That is not small pox Pa has got. He had
a fight with a nest of hornets," said the boy.

"Hornets! Well, I'll be cussed," remarked the grocery man, as he put up
the butter tryer, and handed the boy a slice of rotten muskmelon. "How
in the world did he get into a nest of hornets? I hope you did not have
anything to do with it."

The boy buried his face in the melon, until he looked as though a yellow
gash had been cut from his mouth to his ears, and after swallowing
the melon, he said: "Well, Pa says I was responsible, and he says that
settles it, and I can go my way and he will go his. He said he was
willing to overlook everything I had done to make his life unbearable,
but steering him onto a nest of hornets, and then getting drunk, was too
much, and I can go."

"What, you haven't been drunk," says the grocery man, "Great heavens,
that will kill your poor old father."

"O, I guess it won't kill him very much. He has been getting drunk for
twenty years, and he says he is healthier to-day than he ever was, since
his liver has got to working again. You see, Monday was a regular Indian
summer day, and Pa said he would take me and my chum out in the woods
to gather hickory nuts, if we would be good. I said I would, and my
chum said he would, and we got a couple of bags and went away out to
Wauwatosa, in the woods. We clubbed the trees and got more nuts than
anybody, and had a lunch, and Pa was just enjoying his relidgin first
rate. While Pa was taking a nap under a tree, my chum and me looked
around and found a hornets' nest on the lower limb of the tree we were
sitting under, and my chum said it would be a good joke to get a pole
and run it into the hornet's nest, and then run. Honest, I didn't think
about Pa being under the tree, and I went into a field and got a hop
pole, and put the small end up into the nest, and gouged the nest a
couple of times, and when the boss hornet came out of the hole and
looked sassy, and then looked back in the hole and whistled to the other
hornets to come out and have a circus, and they began to come out, my
chum and me run and climbed over a fence, and got behind a pile of hop
poles that was stacked up."

[Illustration: Helen Damnation p079]

"I guess the hornets saw my Pa just as quick as they got out of the nest,
cause pretty soon we heard Pa call to 'Helen Damnation,' or some woman
we didn't know, and then he to