



Produced by Judith Boss





DANNY'S OWN STORY

By Don Marquis


                              TO
                            MY WIFE




CHAPTER I


HOW I come not to have a last name is a question that has always had
more or less aggervation mixed up with it. I might of had one jest
as well as not if Old Hank Walters hadn't been so all-fired, infernal
bull-headed about things in gineral, and his wife Elmira a blame sight
worse, and both of em ready to row at a minute's notice and stick to it
forevermore.

Hank, he was considerable of a lusher. One Saturday night, when he come
home from the village in his usual fix, he stumbled over a basket that
was setting on his front steps. Then he got up and drawed back his foot
unsteady to kick it plumb into kingdom come. Jest then he hearn Elmira
opening the door behind him, and he turned his head sudden. But the kick
was already started into the air, and when he turns he can't stop it.
And so Hank gets twisted and falls down and steps on himself. That
basket lets out a yowl.

"It's kittens," says Hank, still setting down and staring at that there
basket. All of which, you understand, I am a-telling you from hearsay,
as the lawyers always asts you in court.

Elmira, she sings out:

"Kittens, nothing! It's a baby!"

And she opens the basket and looks in and it was me.

"Hennerey Walters," she says--picking me up, and shaking me at him like
I was a crime, "Hennerey Walters, where did you get this here baby?" She
always calls him Hennerey when she is getting ready to give him fits.

Hank, he scratches his head, for he's kind o' confuddled, and thinks
mebby he really has brought this basket with him. He tries to think of
all the places he has been that night. But he can't think of any place
but Bill Nolan's saloon. So he says:

"Elmira, honest, I ain't had but one drink all day." And then he kind o'
rouses up a little bit, and gets surprised and says:

"That a BABY you got there, Elmira?" And then he says, dignified: "So
fur as that's consarned, Elmira, where did YOU get that there baby?"

She looks at him, and she sees he don't really know where I come from.
Old Hank mostly was truthful when lickered up, fur that matter, and she
knowed it, fur he couldn't think up no lies excepting a gineral denial
when intoxicated up to the gills.

Elmira looks into the basket. They was one of them long rubber tubes
stringing out of a bottle that was in it, and I had been sucking that
bottle when interrupted. And they wasn't nothing else in that basket but
a big thick shawl which had been wrapped all around me, and Elmira
often wore it to meeting afterward. She goes inside and she looks at
the bottle and me by the light, and Old Hank, he comes stumbling in
afterward and sets down in a chair and waits to get Hail Columbia for
coming home in that shape, so's he can row back agin, like they done
every Saturday night.

Blowed in the glass of the bottle was the name: "Daniel, Dunne and
Company." Anybody but them two old ignoramuses could of told right off
that that didn't have nothing to do with me, but was jest the company
that made them kind of bottles. But she reads it out loud three or four
times, and then she says:

"His name is Daniel Dunne," she says.

"And Company," says Hank, feeling right quarrelsome.

"COMPANY hain't no name," says she.

"WHY hain't it, I'd like to know?" says Hank. "I knowed a man oncet
whose name was Farmer, and if a farmer's a name why ain't a company a
name too?"

"His name is Daniel Dunne," says Elmira, quietlike, but not dodging a
row, neither.

"AND COMPANY," says Hank, getting onto his feet, like he always done
when he seen trouble coming. When Old Hank was full of licker he knowed
jest the ways to aggervate her the worst.

She might of banged him one the same as usual, and got her own eye
blacked also, the same as usual; but jest then I lets out another big
yowl, and she give me some milk.

I guess the only reason they ever kep' me at first was so they could
quarrel about my name. They'd lived together a good many years and
quarrelled about everything else under the sun, and was running out of
subjects. A new subject kind o' briskened things up fur a while.

But finally they went too far with it one time. I was about