A Ball Players Career | Page 5

hundred
thrashings for every one that was given me. I know now that I fully
deserved all that I received, and more, too. My father was certainly in
those days a most patient man. I have recorded the fact elsewhere that I
was as averse to work as I was to study, and I had a way of avoiding it
at times that was peculiarly my own.
While I was still a boy in Marshalltown and before I had graduated (?)
from either the State University or the college of Notre Dame, my
father kept a hotel known as the Anson House. The old gentleman was
at that tune the possessor of a silver watch, and to own that watch was
the height of my ambition. Time and again I begged him to give it to
me, but he had turned a deaf ear to my importunities.
In the back yard of the hotel one day when I had been begging him for
the gift harder than usual, there stood a huge pile of wood that needed
splitting, and looking at this he remarked, that I could earn the watch if

I chose by doing the task. He was about to take a journey at the time
and I asked him if he really meant it. He replied that he did, and started
away.
I don't think he had any more idea of my doing the task than he had of
my flying. I had some ideas of my own on the subject, however, and he
was scarcely out of sight before I began to put them into execution. The
larder of the hotel was well stocked, and cookies and doughnuts were
as good a currency as gold and silver among boys of my acquaintance.
This being the case it dawned upon my mind that I could sublet the
contract, a plan than I was not long in putting into practice.
Many hands make quick work, and it was not long before I had a little
army of boys at work demolishing that wood pile. The chunks that
were too big and hard to split we placed on the bottom, then placed the
split wood over them. The task was accomplished long before the old
gentleman's return, and when on the night of his arrival I took him out
and showed him that such was the case he looked a bit astonished. He
handed over the watch, though, and for some days afterwards as I
strutted about town with it in my pocket I fancied it was as big as the
town clock and wondered that everybody that I met in my travels did
not stop to ask me the time of day.
It was some time afterwards that my father discovered that the job had
been shirked by me, and paid for with the cakes and cookies taken from
his own larder, but it was then too late to say anything and I guess, if
the truth were known, he chuckled to himself over the manner in which
lie had been outwitted.
The old gentleman seldom became very angry with me, no matter what
sort of a scrape I might have gotten into, and the only time that he
really gave me a good dressing down that I remember was when I had
traded during his absence from home his prize gun for a Llewellyn
setter. When he returned and found what I had done he was as mad as a
hornet, but quieted down after I had told him that he had better go
hunting with her before making so much fuss. This he did and was so
pleased with the dog's behavior that he forgave me for the trick that I
had played him. That the dog was worth more than the gun, the sequel

proved.
A man by the name of Dwight who lived down in the bottoms had
given his boy instructions to kill a black-and-tan dog if he found it in
the vicinity of his sheep. The lad, who did not know one dog from
another, killed the setter and then the old gentleman boiled over again.
He demanded pay for the dog, which was refused. Then he sued, and a
jury awarded him damages to the amount of two hundred dollars, all of
which goes to prove that I was even then a pretty good judge of dogs,
although I had not been blessed with a bench show experience.
I may state right here that my father and I were more like a couple of
chums at school together than like father and son. We fished together,
shot together, played ball together, poker together and I regret to say
that we fought together. In the early days I got rather the worst of these
arguments,