Page:Rootabaga Pigeons by Carl Sandburg.pdf/147

 anybody asks you who I am tell them I am the King of the Paper Sacks." And one little peanut flipped up one time in the King's face and asked, "Say it again—who do you think you are?" And it made the King so bitter in his feelings he reached out his hand and with a sweep and a swoop he swept fifty pink and purple peanuts into a paper sack and cried out, "A nickel a sack, a nickel a sack." And he threw them into a trash pile of tin cans.

When I went away he shook hands with me and said, "Good-by, Jesse James, you old buzzer, if anybody asks you tell them you saw the King of the Paper Sacks where he lives.

When I went away from the palace, the doors and the window sills, the corners of the roofs and the eave troughs where the rain runs off, they were all full of pink and purple peanuts standing in their overshoes washing their faces, stitching handkerchiefs, calling good-by to me, good-by and come again, good-by and