



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 two years
old then and he was still calling me Company and her calling me Dunne.
This time he hits her a lick that lays her out and likes to kill her,
and it gets him scared. But she gets around agin after a while, and they
both see it has went too fur that time, and so they makes up.

"Elmira, I give in," says Hank. "His name is Dunne."

"No," says she, tender-like, "you was right, Hank. His name is Company."
So they pretty near got into another row over that. But they finally
made it up between em I didn't have no last name, and they'd jest call
me Danny. Which they both done faithful ever after, as agreed.

Old Hank, he was a blacksmith, and he used to lamm me considerable, him
and his wife not having any kids of their own to lick. He lammed me when
he was drunk, and he whaled me when he was sober. I never helt it up
agin him much, neither, not fur a good many years, because he got me
used to it young, and I hadn't never knowed nothing else. Hank's wife,
Elmira, she used to lick him jest about as often as he licked her, and
boss him jest as much. So he fell back on me. A man has jest naturally
got to have something to cuss around and boss, so's to keep himself
from finding out he don't amount to nothing. Leastways, most men is like
that. And Hank, he didn't amount to much; and he kind o' knowed it, way
down deep in his inmost gizzards, and it were a comfort to him to have
me around.

But they was one thing he never sot no store by, and I got along now to
where I hold that up agin him more'n all the lickings he ever done. That
was book learning. He never had none himself, and he was sot agin it,
and he never made me get none, and if I'd ever asted him for any he'd
of whaled me fur that. Hank's wife, Elmira, had married beneath her, and
everybody in our town had come to see it, and used to sympathize with
her about it when Hank wasn't around. She'd tell em, yes, it was so.
Back in Elmira, New York, from which her father and mother come to our
part of Illinoise in the early days, her father had kep' a hotel,
and they was stylish kind o' folks. When she was born her mother was
homesick fur all that style and fur York State ways, and so she named
her Elmira.

But when she married Hank, he had considerable land. His father had left
it to him, but it was all swamp land, and so Hank's father, he hunted
more'n he far