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 vil-lage 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, "Hen-nerey 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 truth-ful 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, quiet-like, 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.
