“What is the matter with your Aunt Almira this morning?” asked Uncle Ike of the red-headed boy, as he came out into the garden with a sling-shot, and began to shoot birdshot at the little cucumbers that were beginning to grow away from the pickle vine, as the boy called the cucumber tree.
“She's turned nigger,” said the boy, turning his sling-shot at an Italian yelling strawberries. “Wait till I hit that dago on the side of the nose, and you will hear a noise that will remind you of Garibaldi crossing the Rubicon.”
“Garibaldi never crossed the Rubicon, and you couldn't hit that Italian count on the nose in a week, and if you did he would chase you with a knife, and tree you in the cellar under the kindling wood, and if I interfered he would gash me in the stomach and claim protection from his government, and a war would only be averted between this country and Italy by an apology from the President, saluting the Italian flag by our navy, and an indemnity paid to your dago friend, enough to support him in luxury the balance of his life. So be careful with your birdshot. But, about your Aunt Almira; she was yelling for help this morning, and didn't come down to breakfast.”
“Well, sir,” said the boy, respectfully, as he sheathed his trusty sling-shot in his pistol pocket, after the dago had felt a shot strike his hat, and he looked around at the boy with the whites of his eyes glassy and his earrings shaking with wrath, “It was all on account of the innocentest mistake that aunty is ill this morning. You see, every night she puts cold cream all over her face, and on her hands clear up above her wrists, to make herself soft. Last night she forgot it until she had got in bed and the light was put out, and then she yelled to me to bring the little tin box out of the bathroom, and I was busy studying my algebra and I made a mistake and got the shoe dressing, that paste that they put on patent leather shoes. Well, Aunt Almira put it on generous, and rubbed it in nice. I didn't know I had made a mistake until this morning, but I couldn't sleep a wink all night thinking how funny aunty would look in the morning.”
“Hold on,” said Uncle Ike, “don't prevaricate. You did it on purpose, and knew it all right, and let that poor lady sleep the sleep of innocence, blacker than the ace of spades. Say, if you was mine I would have a continuous performance right here now,” and Uncle Ike run his tongue a couple of times around a dry cigar a friend had given him, and licked the wrapper so it would hold in the shoddy filling. “Don't interrupt the speaker,” said the boy, as he handed Uncle Ike a match to touch off the Roman candle. “If you had seen Aunt Almira, just after she had yelled murder the third time this morning, you would not scold me. She woke up, and the first thing that attracted her attention was her hands, and she thought she had gone to bed with her long black kid party gloves on, and she tried to pull them off. When she couldn't get them off, she raised up in bed and looked at herself in a mirror, and that was the time she yelled, and I went in the room to help her. Well, sir, she hadn't missed a 'place on her face, neck and arms, and the paste shone just like patent leather. I said, aunty, you can go into the nigger show business, and she said, what is it, and I said, I give it up for I am no end man.”
Wanted Me to Send For a Doctor 035
“Then she yelled again. Oh, dear, I was never so sorry for a high-born lady in my life, but to encourage her I told her I read of a white woman in Alabama that turned black in a single night, and the niggers would never have anything to say to her, because she was a hoodoo, and wasn't in their class, and then she yelled again and wanted me to send for a doctor, and I told her there wasn't any negro doctor in town, and what she wanted was to send for a scrubwoman, and then I showed her the box of shoe paste and told her she had got in the wrong box, and she laid it to me and shooed me out of the room like I was a hen, and she has been all the forenoon trying to wash that shoe paste off, but it will have to wear off, 'cause it is fast colors, and aunty has got to go to a heathen meeting at the church to-night, and she will have to send regrets. Don't you think women are awful careless about their toilets?” and the boy rubbed his red hair with a piece of sand-paper, because some one had told him sand-paper would take the red out of his hair.
“Do you know,” said Uncle Ike, as the cigar swelled up in the center and began to curl on the end, and he threw it to the hens, and watched a rooster pick at it and make up a face, “if I was your aunt I would skin you alive? If you were a little older, we would ship you on a naval vessel, where you couldn't get ashore once a year, and you could get punished every day.”
“I wouldn't go in the navy, unless I could be Dewey. Dewey has a snap. Every day I read how he has ordered some man thrown overboard. The other day a Filipino shoemaker brought him a pair of shoes and charged him two dollars more for them than he agreed to, and Dewey turned to a coxswain, or a belaying pin, or something, and told them to throw the man overboard. Uncle Ike, do you think Dewey throws everybody overboard that the papers say he does?”
“Well, I wouldn't like to contradict a newspaper,” said Uncle Ike, as he thought the matter over. “It has seemed to me for some time that Dewey had a habit of throwing people overboard that would be liable to get him into trouble when he gets home, if the habit sticks to him. For that reason I would suggest that the house that is to be presented to him at Washington be a one-story house, so he could throw people that did not please him out of a window and not kill them too dead. When he gets home and settled down, it is likely he will be called upon by Mark Hanna, General Alger and others, and they will be very apt to give Dewey advice as to how he ought to conduct himself, and what he ought to say; and if he had an office in the top of a ten-story building, the janitor or the policeman in the street would be finding the remains of some of those visitors flattened out on the sidewalk so they would have to be scraped up with a caseknife. Throwing people overboard in Manila bay, and in a ten-story flagship in Washington, is going to be different.”
“Well, boy,” said Uncle Ike, as the two wandered around the garden, looking at the things grow, “there is a sign that tomato cans are ripe, and you go and get one and I will hold this big, fat angleworm,” and he put his cane in front of a four-inch worm, which shortened up and swelled out as big as a lead pencil. “I want just a quart of those worms in cold storage, and tomorrow we will go fishing. Don't you like to go out in the woods, by a stream, and hook an angleworm on to a hook, in scallops, so he will look just as though he was defying the fish, and throw it in, and wait till you get a nibble, and feel the electric current run up your arm, and then the fish yanks a little, and you can't refrain, hardly, from jerking, but you know he hasn't got hold enough yet, and you make a supreme effort to control your nerves, and by and by he takes it way down his neck, and you know he is your meat, and you pull, and the electricity just gives you a shock, and——”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy, interrupting the old man, “it feels just like going home with a girl from a party, and she accidentally touches you, and it goes all up and down you, and he swallows the bait, and you pull him out and have to take a jackknife and cut the hook out of his gills, and the angleworm is all chewed up, and when she looks at you as you bid her goodnight and says it was kind of you to see her home, and puts out her hand to shake you, you feel as though there was only one girl in the whole world, and when you start to go home you have to blow your fingers to keep them warm, and pry your fingers apart, but I don't like to scale 'em and clean 'em, but when they are fried in butter with bread crumbs, and you have baked potatoes, gosh, say, but you can't sleep all night from thinking maybe the next party you go to some other boy will ask her if he can't see her home, but I like bullheads better than sunfish, don't you, Uncle Ike?” and the boy went on filling his tomato can with worms.
“I have just one favor to ask,” said Uncle Ike, as he puckered up his mouth in a smile, then laughed so loud that it sounded like raking a stick along a picket fence, “and that is that you don't mix your fish up that way. When the subject is girls, stick to girls, and when it is fish, stay by the fish. I know there is a great deal of similarity in the way they bite, but when you get them well hooked the result is all the same, and they have to come into the basket, whether it is a fish or a girl. The way a girl acts reminds me a good deal of a black bass. You throw your hook, nicely baited with a fat angleworm, into the water near the bass, and you think he will make a hop, skip, and jump for it, but he looks the other way, swims around the worm, and pays no attention to it, but if he sees another bass pointing toward the worm he sticks up the top fin on his back, and turns sideways, and looks mad, and seems to say, 'I'll tend to this worm myself, and you go away,' and the bass finally goes up and snuffs at the worm, and turns up his nose, and goes away, as though it was no particular interest to him, but he turns around and keeps his eye on it, though, and after awhile you think you will pull the worm out, because the bass isn't very hungry, anyway, and just as you go to pull it up there is a disturbance in the water, and the bass that had seemed to close its eyes for a nice quiet nap, makes a six-foot jump, swallows the hook, worm, and eight inches of the line, kicks up his heels, and starts for the bottom of the river, and you think you have caught onto a yearling calf, and the reel sings and burns your fingers, and the bass jumps out of the water and tries to shake the hook out of his mouth, and you work hard, and act carefully, for fear you will lose him, and you try to figure how much he weighs, and whether you will have him fried or baked, and whether you will invite a neighbor to dinner, who is always joking you about never catching any fish, and then you get him up near you, and he is tired out, and you think you never saw such a nice bass, and that it weighs at least six pounds, and just as you are reaching out with the landing net, to take him in, he gives one kick, chews off the line, you fall over backwards, and the bass disappears with a parting flop of the tail, and a man who is fishing a little ways off asks you what you had on your hook, and you say that it was nothing but a confounded dogfish, anyway, and you wind up your reel and go home, and you are so mad and hot that the leaves on the trees curl up and turn yellow like late in the fall. Many a girl has acted just that way, and finally chewed off the line, and let the man fall with a dull thud, and after he has got over it he says to those who have watched the angling that she was not much account, anyway, but all the time he knows by the feeling of goneness inside of him that he lies like a Spaniard,” and Uncle Ike tied a handkerchief over the tomato can to keep the worms in, and said to the boy, “Now, if you can get up at four o'clock in the morning we will go and get a fine mess.”
“Mess of bass or girls?”.said the boy, as he looked up at the old man with a twinkle in his eye. “Bass, by gosh!” said Uncle Ike.
“Here, what you up to, you young heathen?” said Uncle Ike, as a pair of small boxing gloves, about as big as goslings, struck him in the solar plexus and all the way down his stomach, and he noticed a red streak rushing about the room, side-stepping and clucking. “You are a nice looking Sunday-school scholar, you are, dancing around as though you were in the prize ring. Who taught you that foolishness, and what are you trying to do?” and the old man cornered the red-headed boy between the bookcase and the center-table, and took him across his knee, and fanned his trousers with a hand as big as a canvas ham, until he said he threw up the sponge.
“Well, I'll tell you,” said the red-headed boy, as the old man let him up and he felt of his trousers to see if they were warm, “I am going into the prize-fighting business, and Aunt Almira, who is studying for the stage, is teaching me to box. Gee, but she can give you a blow with her left across the ear that will make you think Jeffries has put on a shirt-waist, and a turquoise ring, and she and I are going to form a combination and make a barrel of money. Say, Aunt Almira has got so she can kick clear up to the gas jet, and she wants to play Juliet. I am going to play Jeffries to her Juliet.”
“Oh, you and your aunt have got things all mixed up. She does not have to kick to play Juliet. And you can't box well enough to get into the kindergarten class of prize fighters. What you want to fight for anyway? Better go and study your Sunday-school lesson.”
“I don't know,” said the boy, as he tied on a boxing glove by taking the string in his teeth, “there is more money in prize fighting than anything, and Jeffries was a nice Sunday-school boy, and his father is a preacher, and he said the Lord was on the side of Jim in the fight that knocked out Fitzsimmons. Do you believe, Uncle Ike, that the Lord was in the ring there at Coney Island, seconding Jeffries, and that the prayers of Jeffries' preacher father had anything to do with Fitzsimmons getting it right and left in the slats and on the jaw?”
“No! No! No!” said Uncle Ike, as he shuddered with disgust at the thought that the good Lord should be mixed up in such things just to make newspaper sensations. “There is not much going on that the Lord is not an eye-witness of, but when it comes to being on one side or the other of a prize fight He has got other business of more importance. He watches even a sparrow's fall, but it is mighty doubtful in my mind whether he paid any attention as to which of the two prize-fighting brutes failed to get up in ten seconds. Boxing is all right, and I believe in it, and want all boys to learn how to do it, in order that they may protect themselves, or protect a weak person from assault, but it ought to stop there. Men who fight each other for money ought to be classed with bulldogs, wear muzzles and a dog license, and be shunned by all decent people,” and the old man lit his pipe with deliberation and smoked a long time in silence.
“But they make money, don't they?” said the boy, who thought that making money was the chief end of man. “Think of making thirty thousand dollars in one night!”
“Yes, and think of the train robbers who make a hundred thousand dollars a night,” said the old man; “and what good did any money made by train robbing or prize fighting ever do anybody? The men who make money that way, blow it in for something that does them no good, and when they come to die you have to take up a collection to bury them. Don't be a prize fighter or a train robber if you can help it, boy, and don't ever get the idea that the Lord is sitting up nights holding pool tickets on a prize fight.”
“Uncle Ike, why didn't you go to the circus the other night? We had more fun, and lemonade, and peanuts, and the clown was so funny,” said the boy; “and they had a fight, and a circus man threw a man out of the tent; and a woman rode on a horse with those great, wide skirts, and rosin on her feet and everywhere, so she would stick on, and——”
“Oh, don't tell me,” said Uncle Ike, as he ran a broom straw into his pipe stem to open up the pores; “I was brought up among circuses, and used to sit up all night and go out on the road to meet the old wagon show coming to town. Did you ever go away out five or six miles, in the night, to meet a circus, and get tired, and lay down by the road and go to sleep, and have the dew on the grass wet your bare feet and trousers clear up to your waistband, and suddenly have the other boys wake you up, and there was a fog so you couldn't see far, and suddenly about daylight you hear a noise like a hog that gets frightened and says 'Woof!' and there coming out of the fog right on to you is the elephant, looking larger than a house, and you keep still for fear of scaring him, and he passes on and then the camels come, and the cages, and the sleepy drivers letting the six horses go as they please, and the wagons with the tents, and the performers sleeping on the bundles, and the band wagon with all the musicians asleep, and the lions and tigers don't say anything; and you never do anything except keep your eyes bulging out till they get by, and then you realize you are six miles from home, and you follow the procession into town, and when you get home your parents take you across a chair and pet you with a press board for being out all night, until you are so blistered that you cannot sit down on a seat at the circus in the afternoon. Oh, I have been there, boy, barefooted and bareheaded, with a hickory shirt on open clear down, and torn trousers opened clear up. Lemonade never tastes like it does at a circus, sawdust never smells the same anywhere else, and nothing in the whole world smells like a circus,” and the old man's face lighted up as though the recollection had made him young again.
“Did you ever see a fight at a circus, Uncle Ike?” asked the red-headed boy, who seemed to have been more impressed with the fight he had seen than with the performance.
“See a circus fight?” said Uncle Ike. “Gosh, I was right in the midst of a circus fight, where several people were killed, and the whole town was a hospital for a month. See that scar on top of my head,” and the old man pointed with pride to a place on his head that looked as though a mule had kicked him. “I was a deputy constable the day Levi J. North's old circus, menagerie and troupe of Indians showed in the old town where I lived.”
Grabbed a Circus Man by the Arm 047
“Some country boys got in a muss with a side-show barker and they got to fighting, and some Irish railroad graders heard the row, and they rushed in with spades and picks' and clubs, and some gentleman said, 'Hey, Rheube,' and the circus men came rushing out, and I came up with a tin star, and said, 'In the name of the state I command the peace,' and I grabbed a circus man by the arm, and an Irishman named Gibbons said, 'to hell wid 'em,' and then a box car or something struck me on the head, and I laid down, and three hundred circus men and about the same number of countrymen and railroad hands walked on me, and they fought for an hour, and when the people got me home and I woke up the circus had been gone a week, and they had buried those who died, and a whole lot were in jail, and my head didn't get down so I could get my hat on before late in the fall.”
“I grabbed a circus man by the arm.”
“Did you resign as constable?” asked the redheaded boy, and he looked at Uncle Ike with awe, as he would at a hero of a hundred battles.
“Did I? That's the first thing I did when I came to, and I have never looked at a tin star on a deputy since without a shudder, and I have never let an admiring public force any office on to me to this day. One day in a public office was enough for your Uncle Ike, but I would like to go to a circus once more and listen to those old jokes of the clown, which were so old that we boys knew them by heart sixty years ago,” and Uncle Ike lighted his pipe again, and tried to laugh at one of the old jokes.
“Uncle Ike, I've got a scheme to get rich, and I will take you into partnership with me,” said the redheaded boy, as Uncle Ike began to cool off from his circus story. “You go in with me and furnish the money, and I will buy a lot of hens, and fix up the back yard with lath, and just let the hens lay eggs and raise chickens, and we will sell them. I have figured it all up, and by starting with ten hens and two roosters, and let them go ahead and attend to business, in twenty years we would have seventeen million nine hundred and sixty-one fowls, which at 10 cents a pound about Thanksgiving time would amount to——”
“There, there, come off,” said Uncle Ike, as he lit up the old pipe again, and got his thinker a'thinking. “I know what you want. You want to get me in on the ground floor, I have been in more things on the ground floor than anybody, but there was always another fellow in the cellar. You are figuring hens the way you do compound interest, but you are away off. Life is too short to wait for compound interest on a dollar to make a fellow rich, and cutting coupons off a hen is just the same. I started a hen ranch fifty years ago, on the same theory, and went broke. There is no way to make money on hens except to turn them loose on a farm, and have a woman with an apron over her head hunt eggs, and sell them as quick as they are laid, before a hen has a chance to get the fever to set. You open a hen ranch in the back yard, and your hens will lay like thunder, when eggs are four cents a dozen, but when eggs are two shillings a dozen you might take a hen by the neck and shake her and you couldn't get an egg. When eggs are high, hens just wander around as though they did not care whether school kept or not, and they kick up a dust and lallygag, and get some disease, and eat all the stuff you can buy for them, and they will make such a noise the neighbors will set dogs on them, and the roosters will get on strike and send walking delegates around to keep hens from laying, and then when eggs get so cheap they are not good enough to throw at jay actors, the whole poultry yard will begin to work overtime, and you have eggs to spare. If the hens increased as you predict in your prospectus to me, it would take all the money in town to buy food for them, and if you attempted to realize on your hens to keep from bankruptcy, everybody would quit eating chicken and go to eating mutton, and there you are. I decline to invest in a hen ranch right here now, and if you try to inveigle me into it I shall have you arrested as a gold-brick swindler,” and Uncle Ike patted the red-headed boy on the shoulder and ran a great hard thumb into his ribs.
“Say, Uncle Ike, did you see this in the paper about fifty ambulances being lost, on the way to Tampa, Florida, last year?” said the red-headed boy, as Uncle Ike sat in an armchair, with his feet on the center-table, his head down on his bosom, his pipe gone out, yet hanging sideways out of the corner of his mouth, and the ashes spilled all over his shirt bosom. “Seventeen carloads of ambulances that started all right for Tampa, never showed up, and the government is writing everywhere to have them looked up. Wouldn't that skin you?” and the boy stood up beside Uncle Ike, took his pipe out of his mouth, filled it again, brushed the ashes off his shirt, and handed him a lighted wax match that he had found somewhere. Uncle Ike put the match to his pipe, took a few whiffs, stuck up his nose, threw the match into the fireplace, and said:
“Where did you get that tallow match? Gosh, I had just as soon light my pipe with kerosene oil. Always give me a plain, old-fashioned brimstone match, if you love me, and keep out of my sight these cigarette matches, that smell like a candle that has been blown out when it needed snuffing.” And the old man began to wake up, as the tobacco smoke went searching through his hair and up to the ceiling. “And so the government lost fifty ambulances in transit, eh? Well, they will be searching the returned soldiers next, to see if the boys got away with them, and never think of looking up the contractors, who probably never shipped them at all. It must be that the boys got tired of embalmed beef, and ate the ambulances. When a man is hungry you take a slice of nice, fresh ambulance, and broil it over the coals, with plenty of seasoning, and a soldier could sustain life on it. The government must be crippled for ambulances, and I think we better get up a subscription to buy some more. An ambulance famine is a terrible thing, and I have my opinion of a soldier who will steal an ambulance. When I was in the army, I remember that at the battle of Stone River we——”
“Oh, Uncle Ike, please don't tell me any of your terrible army experiences,” said the boy, as he remembered that he had heard his uncle tell of being in at least a hundred battles, when the history of the family showed that the old man was only south during the war for about six months, and he brought home a blacksnake whip as a souvenir, and it was believed that he had worked in the quartermaster's department, driving mules. “Let us talk about something enjoyable this beautiful day. How would you like to be out on a lake, or river, today, in a boat, drifting around, and forgetting everything, and having fun?”
“I don't want any drifting around in mine,” said Uncle Ike, as he got up from his chair, limped a little on his rheumatic leg, and went to the window and looked out, and wished he were young again. “Don't you ever drift when you are out in a boat. You just take the oars and pull, somewhere, it don't make any difference where, as long as you pull. Row against the current, and against the wind, and bend your back, and make the boat jump, but don't drift. If you get in the habit of drifting when you are a boy, you will drift when you are a man, and not pull against the stream. The drifting boy becomes a drifting business man, who sits still and lets those who row get away from him. The drifting lawyer sits and drifts, and waits, and sighs because people do not find out that he is great. He wears out pants instead of shoe leather. When you see a man the seat of whose pants are shiny and almost worn through, while his shoes are not worn, except on the heels, where he puts them on the table, and waits and dreams, you can make up your mind that he drifted instead of rowed, when he was a boy, out in a boat. The merchant who goes to his store late in the morning, and sits around awhile, and leaves early in the afternoon, and only shows enterprise in being cross to the clerk who lets a customer escape with car fare to get home, is a drifter, who stands still in his mercantile boat while his neighbors who row, and push, and paddle, are running away from him. The boy who drifts never catches the right girl. He drifts in to call on her, and drifts through the evening, and nothing has been done, and when she begins to yawn, he drifts away. She stands this drifting sort of love-making as long as she can, and by and by there comes along a boy who rows, and he keeps her awake, and they go off on a spin on their wheels, and they can't drift on wheels if they try, because they have got to keep pushing, and before he knows it the drifting boy finds that the boy who rows is miles ahead with the girl, and all the drifting boy can do is to yawn and say, 'Just my dumbed luck.' Dogs that just drift and lay in the shade, and loll, never amount to anything. The dog that digs out the woodchuck does not drift; he digs and barks, and saws wood, and by and by he has the woodchuck by the pants, and shakes the daylights out of him. He might lay by the woodchuck hole and drift all day, and the woodchuck would just stay in the hole and laugh at the dog. The pointer dog that stays under the wagon never comes to a point on chickens, and the duck dog that stays on the shore and waits for the dead duck to drift in, is not worth the dog biscuit he eats.
“No, boy, whatever you do in this world, don't drift around, but row as though you were going after the doctor,” and the old man turned from the window and put his arm around the red-headed boy, and hugged him until he heard something rattle in the boy's side pocket, and the boy pulled out a box with the cover off, and a white powder scattered over his clothes. “What is that powder?” asked the old uncle.
“That is some of this foot-ease that I saw advertised in the paper. Aunt Almira likes pigs' feet, and she says they lay hard on her stomach; so I got some foot-ease and sprinkled a little on her pigs' feet for lunch, and she ate it all right. Say, don't you think it is nice to be trying to do kind acts for your auntie?”
“Yes; but if she ever finds out about that pigs' foot ease, she will make you think your trousers are warmer than your hair. You strike me as being a boy that resembles a tornado. No one knows when you are going to become dangerous, or where you are going to strike. You and a tornado are a good deal like a cross-eyed man; you don't strike where you look as though you were aiming, and suddenly you strike where you are not looking, and where nobody is looking for you to strike. Nature must have been in a curious mood when she produced cross-eyed men, red-headed boys and tornadoes. What do you think ought to be done to Nature for giving me a redheaded boy to bring up, eh, you rascal?” and the old man chucked the boy under the chin, as though he wasn't half as mad at Nature as he pretended to be.
“Uncle Ike, do you think a tornado could be broken up, when it got all ready to tear a town to pieces, by shooting into it with a cannon, as the scientific people say?” said the boy, climbing up into the old man's lap, and slyly putting a handful of peanut shucks down under the waistband of his uncle's trousers.
“Well, I don't know,” said Uncle Ike, as he wiggled around a little when the first peanut shuck got down near the small of his back. “These scientific people make me weary, talking about preventing tornadoes by firing cannon into the funnel-shaped clouds. Why don't they do it? If a tornado came up, you would find these cannon sharps in a cellar somewhere. They are a passel of condemned theorists, and they want someone else to take sight over a cannon at an approaching tornado, while the sharps look through a peep-hole and see how it is going to work. You might have a million cannon loaded ready for tornadoes, and when one came up it would come so quick nobody would think of the cannon, and everybody would dig out for a place of safety. Not one artilleryman in a million could hit a tornado in a vital part. Do these people think tornadoes are going around with a target tied on them, for experts to shoot cannon balls at? A tornado is like one of these Fourth of July nigger-chasers, that you touch off and it starts somewhere and changes its mind and turns around and goes sideways, and when it finds a girl looking the other way it everlastingly makes for her and runs into her pantalets when she would swear it was pointed the other way. No, I am something of a sportsman myself, and can shoot a gun some, but if I had a cannon in each hand loaded for elephants, and I should see a tornado going the other way, I would drop both guns and crawl into a hole, and the tornado would probably turn around and pick up the guns and fire them into the hole I was in. That's the kind of an insect a tornado is, and don't you ever fool with one. A tornado is worse than a battle. I remember when we were at the battle of Gettysburg——”
“Oh, for Heaven's sake, Uncle Ike, what have I done that you should fight that war all over again every time I try to have a quiet talk with you?” and the boy stuffed his fingers in his ears, and got up off the old man's lap, and the uncle got up and walked around, and when the peanut shells began to work down his legs, and scratch his skin, and he found his foot asleep from holding the big boy in his lap, the old man thought he was stricken with paralysis, and he sat down again, and called the boy to him and said, in a trembling voice:
Y Boy, You Are Going to Lose Your Uncle Ike 057
“My boy, you are going to lose your Uncle Ike. I feel that the end is coming, and before I go to the beautiful beyond I want to say a few serious words to you. It is coming as I had hoped. The disease begins at my feet, and will work up gradually, paralyzing my limbs, then my body, and lastly my brain will be seized by the destroyer, and then it will all be over with your Uncle Ike. Remove my shoes, my boy, and I will tell you a story. When we scaled the perpendicular wall at Lookout Mountain, in the face of the Confederate guns, and——”
“Can this be death?” said the boy, as he took off one of the old man's shoes and emptied out a handful of peanut shucks, and laughed loud and long.
“Well, by gum!” said Uncle Ike, “peanuts instead of paralysis,” and he jumped up and kicked high with the lately paralyzed legs; “now, I haven't eaten peanuts in a week, and I suppose those shucks have been in my clothes all this time. I am not going to die. Go dig some worms and I will show you the liveliest corpse that ever caught a mess of bullheads,” and the boy dropped the shoe and went out winking and laughing as though he was having plenty of fun, and Uncle Ike went to a mirror and looked at himself to see if he was really alive.
“You are a nice-looking duck,” said Uncle Ike, as the red-headed boy came into the sitting-room with a black' eye and a scratch across his nose, and one thumb tied up in a rag, but looking as well, otherwise, as could be expected. “What you been doing? Run over by a trolley car or anything?”
“Nope,” said the boy, as he looked in the mirror to see how his eye was coloring, with all the pride of a man who is coloring a meerschaum; “I just had a fight. Licked a boy, that's all,” and he put his hand to his head, where a lock of his red hair had been pulled out.
“You look as though you had licked a boy,” said the old man taking a good look at the blue spot around the boy's eye. “I suppose he is telling his folks how he licked you, too. My experience has been that in these boys' fights you can't tell which licks until you hear both stories. What was it about, anyway?”
“He lied about you, Uncle Ike, and I choked him until he said 'peunk,' and then I let him up, but he wouldn't apologize, and said he would leave it to you, if what he said was true or not, and here he comes now,” and the red-headed boy opened the door and ushered in a boy about his own size, with two black eyes and a piece peeled off his cheek, and one arm in a sling.
“Which is Jeffries?” asked Uncle Ike, as he filled his pipe, and looked over the two companions who had been scrapping.
Which is Jeffries 63
“He is Jeffries,” said the visitor, “and I am Fitzsimmons, but I want to have another go at him, unless we leave it to arbitration,” and the boy looked at the red-headed boy with blood in his eye, and at Uncle Ike with a look of no particular admiration.
“Well, what was the cause of the row?” said Uncle Ike, as he took a chair between the two boys, lit his pipe, and smiled as he saw the marks of combat on their persons.
“He said you used to be a drunkard, Uncle Ike, and had been to the Keeley cure, and I called him a liar, and then we mixed up.”
“That's about the size of it,” said the other boy; “now, which was right?”
Uncle Ike smoked up and filled the room so it looked like camping out and cooking over a fire made of wet wood, and thought a long time, and looked very serious, and the red-headed boy could see they were in for a talk. Finally the old man said:
“Boys, you are both right and both wrong, and I'll tell you all about it. I never was a drunkard, and never drank much, but I have been to the cure all the same. It was this way: I had a friend who was one of the best men that ever lived, only he got a habit of drinking too much, and no one seemed able to reason with him. He wouldn't take advice from his own mother, his wife, or me, or anybody. He was just going to the devil on a gallop, and it was only a question of a year or two when he would die. I loved that man like a brother, but he would get mad the minute I spoke of his drinking, and I quit talking to him, though I wanted to save him. I have smoked dog-leg tobacco many a night till after midnight, trying to study a way to save the only man in the world that I ever actually loved, and I finally got it down fine. I began to act as though I was half drunk whenever I saw my friend, spilled whisky on my coat sleeves, and acted disreputable, and got a few good fellows to talk with him about what a confounded wreck I was getting to be; and he actually got to pitying me, and finally got disgusted with me; and one day he said to me that I was a disgrace, and was making more different kinds of a fool of myself than any drunkard he ever met. I got mad at him, and told him to attend to his own business and left him. Then the boys got to telling him that the only way to save me was to get me to go to a cure; and, do you know, that good fellow that I would have given the world to save, came to me and urged me to, take the cure; and at first I was indignant that he should interfere in my affairs, and finally he said he would go if I would. Then we struck a bargain, and went to Dwight, and took the medicine. The boys had told the doctors the story, and they only gave me one shot in the arm; but that came near killing me, because it almost broke me of using tobacco. Well, I remained there ten days, and, while they were pretending to cure me, they were curing my friend sure enough, putting the gold cure into his system with injections and drinks, while I didn't get anything but ginger ale; and when we were discharged cured, I was the happiest man in the world, except my friend, who was happier. He was not only cured himself, and an honor to his family, but he thought he had saved me from a drunkard's grave. That's the story, boys, and now you get up and shake hands, and don't fight any more over your Uncle Ike,” and the old man patted them both on the head, and they shook hands and laughed at each other's black eyes. As the red-headed boy showed his late antagonist to the door, he turned to his uncle and said:
“Uncle Ike, if you have ever held up a railroad train, or robbed a bank, or stolen horses, or done anything that would cause you to be arrested, I beg of you to tell me of it now, so if anybody abuses you in my presence I won't get into a fight every time,” and the boy put his arm around his Uncle Ike and hugged him, and added, “You were a thoroughbred when you bilked that friend of yours to take the cure.”
“Oh, I don't know,” said Uncle Ike, “that reminds me of the battle of Chickamauga. When Bragg's forces were——”
“Fire! Fire!” yelled the red-headed boy, and he rushed out of doors and left the old man talking to his pipe.
“Has that battle of Chickamauga been fought out to a finish yet?” said the red-headed boy, as he stuck his head in the door after the imaginary fire alarm that he had created to escape Uncle Ike's war history, “for if it is ended I want to come in, but I can't stand gore, and your war stories are so full of blood that you must have had to swim in it.”
“Oh, you don't know a hero when you see one,” said the old man, as he straightened up and saluted the boy in a military manner, only that he used his left hand instead of his right hand.
“Well, I'll tell you,” said the boy as he got inside the room and stood with his hand on the door knob, ready to escape if Uncle Ike got excited. “You old veterans make me sick. I have heard nothing for fifteen years except war talk, old war talk, back number war talk, about how you old fellows put down the rebellion, and suffered, and fought, and all that rot. Why, I heard a bugler who enlisted for the Spanish war, and who only got as far as Jacksonville, say that you fellows that put down the rebellion in 1864 were just a mob, and that you didn't have any fighting, and that the Southern people were only fooling you, and that you didn't suffer like the Spanish war heroes did, and that you just had a picnic from start to finish. The bugler said he wouldn't ask any better fun than to fight the way you fellows did, when you had all you wanted to eat, good beds to sleep on, and servants to carry your guns, and cook for you. The bugler said you fellows all get pensions just for making an excursion through the Southern resorts, while the heroes of the Spanish war, who fought a foreign country to a standstill, and went without food, and got malaria, are without pensions, and just existing on the record they made fighting for their country——” and the boy stopped nagging the old man when he noticed that Uncle Ike was turning blue in the face, and choking to keep down his wrath.
“Where is this heroic bugler of the Spanish war?” said Uncle Ike, trying to be calm, but actually frothing at the mouth. “Bring him here, and let me hear him say these things, condemn him, and I will take him across my knee and I will knock the wind out of him, so that he can never gather enough in his carcass to blow another bugle. Why, confound him, he is a liar. The war of the rebellion was a war, not a country schuetzenfest, with a chance to go home every night and sleep in a feather bed, and get a Turkish bath. The whole Spanish war, except what the navy did, was not equal to an outpost skirmish in '63. Of course, the rough riders and the weary walkers did a nice job going up San Juan hill, but we had a thousand such fights in the rebellion. After that skirmish there was nothing done by the army at Santiago, but to sit down in the mud and wait for the Spaniards to eat their last cracker, and kill their last dog and eat it, and then surrender. Ask that bugler to tell you where he found, in his glorious career as a wind instrument in the Spanish war, any Grants, Shermans, Sheridans, Logans, Pap Thomases, McClellans, Kilpatricks, Custers, McPhersons, Braggs, and hundreds of such heroes. What has the bugler got to show for his war? Shafter! And Alger! And all of them quarreling over the little bone of victory that was not big enough for a meal for our old generals of the war of the rebellion. And he talks about our pensions, the young kid. He probably wears corsets. Why, we didn't get pensions until we got so old we couldn't get up alone. His gang of Jacksonville heroes will probably get pensions when they are old enough. Bring that bugler in here some day, and don't let him know what he is going to run up against, and I will give you a dollar, and I will let you see me dust the carpet with him,” and the old man sat down and fanned himself, while the boy looked scared for fear Uncle Ike was going to have a fit. “Why, at the battle of Pea Ridge, when a minie ball struck me, when I was on the firing line——”
“Keno,” said the red-headed boy, as he went through the window head first, and over the picket fence on his stomach, and disappeared down the street.