Judge — March 1937 — page 28: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE LIARS CLUB By O. C. HULETT THE OTHER DAY I dropped in at Zeb Whittaker's store, and The Liars Club was at it again, a half-dozen of them, sittin’ around the stove in back, and missing the coalhod as often as they hit it. “You fellers talk about hunting,” re- marked Eben Doolittle, “years back I trapped a couple of wild cats over in the Knobs, and the Milwaukee zoo wanted ‘em, so I didn’t kill ‘em right off. Been sorry ever since that I didn’t, because while I was dickering with the zoo, the two of ‘em got into a fight. One jumped on t'uther’s back and then the one un. derneath got out and jumped on his back, and so on, ‘til the last I seed of ‘em, they was higher than the windmill, and still goin’ till they got out of sight.” “And that was the last you saw of “em?” asked Zeb. “Yeah,” replied Eben, “but they must have kept fight on goin’ up, ‘cause the cat hair fell constant fer three days after I lost sight of ’em.” “If you had been as fast as my nephew Hugo, you could have caught them wild cats “fore they got off the ground,” de. clared Zeb Whittaker. “Hugo set out to be a barber, and he studied at the trade for three years. Then Bill Fowler who he had been working for, decided to try him out. He took Hugo over to the ball park, gave him a razor, turned loose a rabbit and told Hugo to shave it. “Well, gentlemen, Hugo took after that rabbit, and the first time round the ae he lathered its face and stropped his razor. The second time around, he shaved the easy side, but to shave the other side he had to run backward. At that, he would have made it all right, but he stumbled over second base just as he took the last lick with his razor, and nicked Mr. Rabbit, so Bill wouldn't give him a job. “That made Hugo mad, so he went over to the blacksmith shop and got a job.” : “Could he make the grade there, Zeb?" I wanted to know. “Make the grade,” snorted Zeb. “Why old Si Pennypacker phoned in one day; wanted his horse shod in a terrible hur. ry; said to get things all ready. Hugo got ready, but it was around the Fourth of July and just as Si hit town, some fool kid shot off a cannon cracker and Si's paces started to run away. What did lugo do? He went to work when the runaway shot past the shop, pulled off the old shoes, and shod all four feet before the horse crossed the railroad track, two blocks down the street!”" Was my face red! 26 “And that ain’t all,” Doc Barker told me. “Zeb's nephew Hugo was not only fast, on top of that he was an ingenious cuss. He took the job of papering our church one time. It was fifty feet up and down the sidewalls, so what does Hugo do, but rig up a rubber mat and lay it on the floor along one wall. Then he got up on his plattorm, pasted his paper, stuck one end to the wall and jumped off. He stuck the paper to the wall and smoothed it out as he was falling, hit the rubber mat and bounded back up onto the platform to repeat the performance.” “Yeah, Hugo was good all right, and he thought he was some checker player ‘til that feller from over in the Knobs beat the socks off him,” remarked Eben Doolittle. “Well, you fellows framed Nephew Hugo when you imported that hill-hop. rt," retorted Zeb, defending the fam. ily honor. “Lew Bowser, from Lyons told me afterward that this guy often sat down in front of a mirror with half a checkerboard in front of him, and beat his reflection. What's more, Lew tells me that more than once his reflection has got disgusted, and walked out on him in the middle of a game.” “They called that fellow ‘Big’ Hol- low, didn’t they?” asked Doc Barker. “That's him,” says Eben. “Well,” says Doc, “I hear he's got a law suit on his hands.” “How come?” Zeb wanted to know. “Well, the land is mighty rolling over in them Knobs,” Doc told him, “and ‘Big’ Hollow has got the rollingest piece of all. It's so rolling that two weeks ago it rolled plumb over onto his neighbor's farm. The neighbor is suing him because it is smothering his wheat, and if ‘Big’ don’t roll his farm back where it be- longs pretty soon, it looks like he would lose the suit.” “I don’t know as that feller has a suit at all,” drawled Eben, “land is mighty rich out there in the Knobs, and T'll bet, give it a chance, his wheat would grow right through that other farm. Bill Jenks, over beyond Lyons, had a cousin visiting him one time. Feller had a wooden leg, and Bill's bottom-land was so rich that what with him going out every night to get the cows, his wooden leg sprouted limbs before he'd been there a week.” “That's laying it on kind of thick, Eben,” remonstrated Zeb. “That ain’t nothin’,” retorted Eben eas- ily. “When that feller’s wooden leg wore out, he came visiting Bill again. And do you know what he did? He just took a willow stick with a crotch in it for a crutch, hobbled out into the pasture, and that land was so rich it growed him a new ‘limb’ in a couple of hours.” “That's all very interesting” remarked Doc, “but rich land isn’t everything. Last year the crows ate up all of Bill's corn.” “Why didn’t he put up scarecrows?” Eben wanted to know. “He did” chuckled Doc, “but Bill's so goshawful homely the first time he showed up in the cornfield the scare. crows got scared and ran away.” And that one scared me away, too! “Look, they're real!” comicbooks.com