“. . . I ain't a good boy,” says George Mellish, twelve-year-old hero of The Fool Killer. “Never was and never will be, and that’s for a fact. Some folks has thought I was bad, and some not so downright terrible, but nobody has never accused me of being outright good.”
But it appeared to George that what his foster parents wanted was some kind of angel like what you read about in Sunday school stories, so, after one licking too many, he ran away.
The time was shortly after the Civil War, the place was rural America, so naturally George started West to seek his fortune. But strange people and strange events kept him from getting there: Dirty Jim Jelliman, who hadn’t done a thing he didn’t want to since his wife died; Blessing Angelina Fanshawe, who warned George she might pick his eyes out with a fork; Milo Bogardus, who had borrowed his name from a dead man after he was wounded in the war and forgot everything that had gone before.
And the Fool Killer, too. Because once George heard the story of that great big fellow who went round with a chopper for chopping fools, he couldn’t get him out of his mind, or decide whether he was a tale or real.
. . . Especially not after the camp-meeting preacher was murdered on the same night that George got saved.
Quote: 12-year-old George Mellish, tired of beatings for both real and fancied misdeeds at the hands of his foster parents, runs away from home by hopping a freight train and lands somewhere east of the Mississippi River. The first person he meets is Dirty Jim Helliman who lives in a fantastically filthy hovel and with whom George feels a kindred spirit, both having "suffered" at the hands of a clean woman. It is (really dirty) Dirty Jim that tells George of the mythical, eight-foot bogey man called "The Fool Killer." George gets sick and Dirty Jim takes him to town where Mrs.Ova Faversham takes charge of the feverish boy. When Blessing Angeline, Mrs. Faversham's 10-year-old daughter, tells George that her mother intends to return him to his foster parents, George hits the road again. He meets Milo Bogardus, a young Civil War veteran, who has been robbed of his memory by a war wound, and is as lost in his own way as George. They come upon a camp meeting, where the fanatical Reverend Spotts is conducting a revivalist meeting and during the religious frenzy, George blacks out. He comes to and is alone, and is unaware that the Reverend has been murdered, and starts in his search to find Milo. He finds a home with the Dodds, small town store keepers. When, at supper, Dodds makes mention of the murder of the Reverend Spotts, George blurts out that "The Fool Killer done it" and tells them the legend as told to him by Dirty Jim. That evening, while George lies in bed, a shadow appears at his window. It is the figure of a tall, gaunt apparition, ax in hand ready to strike---"The Fool Killer!"
