Uncle Ike had been having twinges of rheumatism in one of his legs ever since he had the scrap with the Indians, and turned the hose on them and got wet himself, and he sat out on the porch one morning with a blanket over his leg trying to warm it up, smoking his pipe in silence, and wondering why the good Lord arranged things so a good man should grow old, and have pains. The red-headed boy and quite a flock of kids of about his age were sitting on the sidewalk, outside the fence, arguing something in loud voices, and finally he heard them agree to leave it to Uncle Ike, and then they piled over the fence and came up to the porch, and the red-headed boy was the spokesman.
He said: “Say, Uncle Ike, us boys have got a bet and you are to decide it. Isn't it true that the people of Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines are gamblers, and hasn't our government fought them to a standstill to send people there to induce them to stop gambling and to attend to business? Isn't gambling a sin, and is it not our duty as a nation, to teach these ignorant people the wickedness of gambling, bull fighting, cock fighting, and all that?” and the boys sat all around Uncle Ike, waiting for a decision to be handed down, as they say in court.
The old man rapped the bowl of his pipe on the arm of the rocking chair, blew through the stem, made up a face when he got some of the nicotine on his tongue, took a piece off the broom and run through it, blew again, reached for the tobacco bag, filled it up, lighted it, smoked a minute or two in silence, while five pairs of big boys' eyes watched him as though he was a chief justice. He wiggled around a little, to ease his leg, knitted his brow as the pain shot through his leg, almost said damn; then the pain let up, his face cleared off, a smile came over it, he looked at the little statesmen around him, and finally said:
“Well, boys, you must not grow up with the idea that our own beloved country has no faults. Just love it, with all its faults; fight for it, if necessary, but don't get daffy over it. In the countries you speak of, everybody gambles more or less. In this country only a small proportion gamble, and yet the element of chance is something that is very attractive to most people here at home. The other evening your Aunt Almira brought home a beautiful goblet she won at a progressive euchre party of neighbors. How much more of a sin is it for the Cuban woman to win five dollars at monte, and buy a goblet? It is scarcely three years since tickets in Havana lotteries were publicly sold in this country. There is more money lost and won on draw poker in one day in New York than is lost and won in Havana on monte and roulette. You can find almost any gambling game in Chicago or Milwaukee that you can find in the Philippines; and while we do not have bull fighting, we have prize fighting every night in the week, far more brutal. It is the gambling instinct in men and women that keeps the stock exchanges going, and industrial stocks, manipulated by those who control the prices, is tinhorn gambling, as much as pulling faro cards from a silver box in a brace game, where the dealer gets a rake-off, the same as the commission man, who deals the cards in stock or wheat. I don't know whether it is the object of our government to attempt to show the people of these new possessions the wickedness of gambling, and cock fighting, and all that; but if it is, thousands of men who have become bankrupt from gambling here at home could be sent there as object lessons; but the chances are they would put up a job to skin the natives out of their last dollar on some game they did not understand. If gambling is a sin, let he who is without sin throw the first stone into a Porto Rican cock fight. Let the senator who never played draw poker be the first to introduce a resolution to stop gambling in Manila. Let the army general that never sat up all night at a faro bank issue the first order against monte and roulette in Havana. Let the men who furnished embalmed beef for widows' sons, issue edicts against making fresh meat out of live bulls. I can't decide your bet. You better call it a draw,” and the old man looked at the boys as though he wanted to change the subject.
You Better Call It a Draw 147
“Say, boys, Uncle Ike knows more than any man in the world,” said the red-headed boy, “but he argues too much. Let's go and play shinny and call it golf,” and they went off on a gallop, leaving Uncle Ike with his lame leg and his pipe.
Uncle Ike sat and thought for an hour or more, on the porch, occasionally moving his rheumatic leg so it hurt him worse than it did before he moved it, and then he wondered what in the deuce he had moved it for. He thought of his experience as a gambler, since the boys had talked about gambling. He thought of the time he went to a State fair, when he was a boy, right fresh off the farm, with his white shirt his mother had sat up the night before to iron for him, his ready-made black frock-coat that the sun had faded out on the shoulders, the old brown slouch hat he had traded another one for with a lightning rod peddler, his shoes blacked with stove blacking, instead of being greased, as usual. He thought how a gambler at the State fair picked him out for a greeny before he had fairly got through the gate, and wondered how the gambler could have known he was so green without being told, and yet he carried a sign of greenness, from the faded and sunburned hair of his head to the sole of his stove-blacking shoes. He thought how the gambler got him to bet that he could find the pea in the shell, and how he had been so confident that he could find it that he had bet his whole month's wages, and when the gambler had taken it, and wound it around a wad he had, and put it in his vest pocket, he remembered, here sitting on the porch with his rheumatic leg, how mad he was when the gambler who had ruined him, shouted, “Next gentleman, now! Roll up, tumble up, any way to get up!” As he sat there waiting for the boys to come back and be company for him, he thought how destitute he was when the gambler had taken his money, how he was twenty miles from home, with only 20 cents in his pocket, and he sat down on a chicken coop, and ate 10 cents' worth of the hardest-hearted pie that ever was, and the tears came to his eyes, and the great crowd at the fair all mixed up with the horses and cattle, and he wandered about like a crazy person, all the afternoon, and at night started to walk home, with the balance of his wealth invested in gingerbread that stuck in his throat as he walked along the road in the dust, and he drank at all the wells he passed, until before he got home the peaches he had eaten before he gambled, combined with the corrugated iron pie, and the gingerbread and the various waters, gave him a case of cholera morbus big enough for a grown person, and when he got home along toward morning he wanted to die, and rather thought he would. Then he began to wonder if that gambler ever prospered, and whether he wound up his career in the penitentiary, or in politics, when he saw a big dust down the road, where the boys had gone, and presently the whole crowd came on a run, barefooted, and the first to arrive hit Uncle Ike on the arm and said, “Tag; you're it,” and they all laid down on the grass and panted, and accused each other of shoving, and not running fair. After they had got so they could breathe easy, and each had taken a lot of green apples out of his shirt, and were biting into them and looking sorry they did so, the red-headed boy said:
“Uncle Ike, we have been talking it over, and have decided that some day you are to take us down to Pullman, the town founded by George Pullman. We have read a book about the town, and all about the philanthropist who laid it out, and made a little Utopia—I think that's the word—for the laboring men in his employ, where they have little brick houses made to fit a family, with gas and water. The book says he was a regular father to them, and we want to see a place where everybody is happy and contented. Will you take us there some time, Uncle Ike? Isn't Pullman the greatest and happiest man in the world?”
“Look a here,” said Uncle Ike, as he got up and tried his lame leg, and found the pain was gone, and walked down on the lawn where the boys were rolling in the grass, and sat down on a lawn chair; “when you read a book of fairy stories, you want to look at the date. That book was written a dozen years ago to advertise Pullman cars. It is out of date.”
“Well, isn't the town there, and are not the laboring people happy, and singing praises to the great and good Mr. Pullman, and showering blessings on his family, and helping to make a heaven upon earth of the town he built for them?”
“I thought you boys were up to the times,” said the old man, as he lighted up his pipe, and crossed his legs so the lame one was on top, “but you are back numbers. You read too much algebra, English history and fables. Why, Pullman has been dead for years, both the man and the town. I guess I'll have to educate you a little in American history, that you don't get in the ward school. Pullman was a carpenter who worked with a jack plane, and a saw, and things. It is said he took advantage of some ideas another man forgot to patent, got the ideas patented, and the result was the sleeping car. He made money by the barrel, and when the callouses and blood blisters were off his hands, and they became soft, he began to blow in money, and made people acquainted with the fact that he was too rich for words. He still looked like a carpenter, but smelled like a rose garden, for he learned to take a bath every few minutes and perfume himself, so the old-fashioned perspiration that had been so healthy for him would not be noticed. He hunted dollars as a pointer dog hunts chickens, and finally he got so much money he could not count it, and he hired men who were good at figures to count it for him. Then his brain took a day off and studied out Pullman, and he built it on the prairie. His idea was all right, only that he couldn't get over the idea that he must have a big percentage on his outlay, in rents. He wanted his men to be happy, but he wanted them to pay big prices. Another thing he wanted was for them not to think, but to let him do all the thinking. For a few years they were happy, but they kept getting in debt; he cut down on wages, but kept rents up, and the price of gas and water never went down. If they did not like it they could go somewhere else, and leave some of the furniture to square up, if they were behind in rent, but usually the bookkeeper took it out of the wages. Then they traded at his stores, attended his theater, and he got most all the velvet. They stood it as long as possible, and asked for more wages, and more work, and his agents—Pullman was never there himself, he had an island in the St. Lawrence, and residences everywhere except at his Utopia—told them to hush up and go to work, and be mighty quick about it, or he would fire them bodily out of the town. Then they struck, and wanted to arbitrate, but Pullman telegraphed that there was nothing to arbitrate, and then the Utopia became a Tophet, which it had resembled for some time. Everything was closed up, men saw their children hungry, and they were moved away by charity to new places, where they might get some work. The cold-blooded proposition that is not popular with American citizens was that if men would get on their knees, apologize, and beg, the authorities would see what could be done for them. Men became desperate, troops were sent to guard the premises and to jab with bayonets these happy workmen that did not move along fast enough. Pullman himself stayed at his island, or at the seashore, and the men who had dared to think without a dog license were growing thinner, and by and by nearly all were gone; others took their places, but the old town was not what it used to be. Workmen preferred to live miles away, in attics, or anywhere, in preference to the Pullman cottages. Then, one morning Pullman died, quick action, at his house and millionaire neighbors buried him. Few flowers were sent by the old laborers. His boys, twins, had developed a partiality for jags, and having been cut off with little money in his will, they have wandered around, from one drunk cure to another, marrying occasionally, and otherwise enjoying themselves, until their poor mother was almost crazy, and the Pullman works are run by men who happened to be in on the ground floor, but who don't care much about the laboring man. No, sir,” said the old man, warming up to the subject, “I will not take you kids to Pullman. I had rather take you to a cemetery, or visit the homes of the cliff dwellers of Mexico. Now, go wash up for dinner. You get me to talking, and I forget all about, my rheumatism, and my dinner, and everything,” and the old man started for the house, and the boys looked at each other as though they had learned something not in the school books.
It was the first cool and bracing morning since the extreme heat of the summer, and Uncle Ike had begun to feel like going duck shooting. He could almost smell duck feathers in the air, and he had put on an old dead-grass colored sweater, with a high collar that rubbed against his unshaven neck, and he had got out his gun to wipe it for the hundredth time since he laid it away at the close of the last season. He looked it over and petted it, and finally sat down in a rocking chair, with the gun between his knees and a few cartridges in his hand that he had found in the pocket of his sweater; and he got to thinking of the days that he had passed, in the last half century, shooting ducks, and hoping that the clock of time could be turned back, in his case, and that he might be permitted to enjoy many years more of the sport that had given' him so much enjoyment, and contributed so greatly to his health and hardness of muscle. He was cocking the old gun and letting down the hammers in a contemplative mood, and occasionally aiming at a fly on the opposite wall, as though it was a cluck, when, the door opened and the red-headed boy, accompanied by eight other boys, armed to the teeth with such weapons as they could find, marched in and formed a line on the opposite side of the room, and at the command, “Present arms!” given by the red-headed captain, they saluted Uncle Ike. He arose from the rocking chair, placed his shotgun at a “carry,” and acknowledged the salute, and said:
“If that horse pistol that No. 2 soldier has got pointed at my stomach is loaded, I want to declare that this war is over, and you can go to the cook and get your discharges, and fill out your blanks for pensions. But now, what does this all mean? Why this martial array? Why do you break in on a peaceful man this way, a man who does not believe in shedding human gore, so early in the morning?”
We Came to Offer You the Position of Colonel 157
“Uncle Ike,” said the red-headed boy, stepping one pace to the front, and saluting with a piece of lath, “we came to offer you the position of colonel of our regiment. We have thought over all the men who have been suggested as leaders, and have concluded that you are the jim dandy, and we want you to accept.”
“Well, this takes me entirely by surprise;” said Uncle Ike, as he laid the shotgun on the table; “I certainly have not sought this office. But I cannot accept the trust until I know what is the object of the organization. Who do you propose to fight?”
“We are organized to fight the French, both with weapons and by the boycott,” said the leader, swelling out his chest, and each red hair sticking up straight. “We have watched the trial of Dreyfus, and the outrage of his conviction without a particle of testimony against him, has just made us sick, and we are forming a regiment to fight Frenchmen wherever we find them. We had the first battle at daylight this morning, when a French milkman drove along, and we threw eggs at him, and his horse run away and spilled four cans of milk. We are for blood, or milk, or any old thing that Frenchmen deal in. We will not drink any French champagne, and have decided not to visit the Paris Exposition.”
“Well, I swow! you have got it up your noses pretty bad, haven't you?” said the old man as he ordered the platoon to sit down on the floor and go into camp. “It is pretty tough, the way the French treated Dreyfus, but how are you going to make your boycott work?”
“We are going to petition the President to cut off supplies for the Paris Exposition, withdraw from participation in it, and we are going to ask all the people that were intending to go to Paris to stay away.”
“I see, I see,” said Uncle Ike, feeling in the pocket of his old sweater, and finding a handful of leaves, twigs and plug tobacco that had accumulated there for years. “How many Jew boys have you got enlisted in your army? You know this Dreyfus trouble is a fight on the Jews, not only in France, but of the whole world. You ought to have a whole regiment of Jew boys. How many have you got?”
“Well, we haven't got any yet, but a whole lot of them are going to think about it, and ask their parents if they can join,” said the captain.
“Yes, they will think about it, but they won't join,” said the old man, reaching for his pipe, and lighting up for a talk. “The Jews are the most patient, peaceful people in the world. They come the nearest to acting on the theory of the Golden Rule, of any class of people, and they are about the only people that will turn the other cheek, when hit on the jaw. They have been assailed for thousands of years, until they look upon being ostracised and trodden upon as one of the things they must expect, and they don't kick half as much as they ought to. If they had the enthusiasm and the fighting qualities of the Irish, they would take blackthorn clubs and mow a swath through France wide enough for an army to march over. Why don't you fellows wait until the Jews map out a plan of campaign, and then follow them? It is no dead sure thing that if the people of other countries boycotted France, that they would not ruin more Jews than Frenchmen, as the Jews are in business that the Exposition will make or break, while the French just sit around and drink absinthe and shout 'viva la armee!' Don't you see you may ruin the very people you want to help? Then, stop and think of another thing. It is not many months ago that a Jew cadet at West Point was hazed and abused and ostracised by the other cadets, and had his life made such a burden that he had to resign and go home, heart-broken to a heart-broken mother. That was almost as bad as the Dreyfus case as far as it went. How can the President boycott France for abusing Jews when our own army officers, that are to be, have shown a meanness that will size up pretty fairly with the French army devils. I'll tell you, boys, what you do. Let your sympathy go out to Dreyfus, and all his people, but don't go off half-cocked. Wait until the representative Jews of this country decide what it is their duty to do in this case, and then join them, and help them, whether it is to fight or to pray. If they conclude to sit down, and look sorry, and turn the other cheek, and be swatted some more, you be sorry also. If they decide to get on their ears, and fight, with money, or guns, or boycott, you do as you like about helping them out. But if you read, in a day or two, that France has borrowed a few more millions of Rothschild, to pay off these officers who have persecuted Dreyfus, you can make up your minds that it is a good deal like our politics here at home, mighty badly mixed. Now you go and get me a wash basin of hot soft water, and some rags, and I will clean this gun, and you disband your army, and appoint a good Jew for colonel, and when he says the affair is ripe for a fight you can spiel,” and the old man took the gun apart and prepared to clean it.
“Atten-shun!” shouted the red-headed boy to his army, and each soldier jumped up off the carpet and stood erect as possible. “I will now disband you, and deliver my farewell address.” Then he whispered to Uncle Ike, and the old man handed him a half dollar, when the captain gave the money to a boy who seemed to be second in command, and added, “Go and buy you some ice-cream soda, and be prepared to respond to the call to arms at a minute's notice. If France does not pardon Dreyfus, and I can get a lot of Jew boys to join us, we won't do a thing to France. Break ranks! Git!” and the boys went outdoors and made a rush for a soda fountain.
“Now, Uncle Ike,” said the boy, as he watched his army going clown the street, “I have got a favor to ask of you. I want you to give me music lessons.”
“Well, I'll be bunkoed,” said Uncle Ike, as he began to pull the sweater off over his head. “I can't sing anything but 'Marching Through Georgia.' What you want music lessons for?”
“Well, sir, I'll tell you, if you won't laugh at me,” said the boy, blushing. “You see, my girl has got back from the seashore, where she has been taking salt-water baths. She was too fresh, but she is salty enough now, and her face and arms are tanned just like these Russia leather moccasins. You couldn't tell her from an Indian, only she doesn't smell like buckskin. She has been taking lessons all summer at a conservatory of music, and she can sing away up so high that when she strikes a high note and gargles on it, it makes your hair raise right up, and bristle, it is so full of electricity. She has got a tenor voice that——”
“Hold on, hold on, you have got all mixed up,” said the old man. “She does not gargle. That is called warbling, or trilling, or trolling, or something. And no girl has a tenor voice. She must be a soprano.”
“Well, that's what I want to take music lessons for, so I can talk with her intelligently about her music. Why, last night we were at a party, and I turned the music while she played and sang, and I got the wrong page, and got her all tangled up, and when she got through, and the people were telling her how beautiful she sang, I told her she had the most beautiful bass voice I ever saw, and she was so mad she wouldn't speak to me, so I want you to teach me which is tenor, and which is baritone, and which is that other thing, you know, Uncle Ike.”
“Yes, I think I do,” said the old man as he turned his head away to keep from laughing. “You want to learn to be a he Patti, in four easy lessons. Why, you couldn't learn enough about music to be in her class in fourteen years. What you want to do is to look wise, and applaud when anybody gets through singing, and say bravo, and beautiful, and all that, but not give yourself away by commenting on the technique, see?”
“Stopper! Backerup! What is technique on a girl, Uncle Ike?” asked the red-headed boy, as his eyes stuck out like peeled onions. “I have been around girls ever since I was big enough to go home alone after seeing them home, without being afraid of spooks, but I hope to die if I ever saw a technique.”
“The technique,” said Uncle Ike, looking wise, “is what we musicians call the—the—get there, Eli. You know when a girl is singing, and gets away up on a high note, and keeps getting it down finer all the time, until it is not much bigger than a cambric needle, and she draws in a whole lot of air, and just fools with that wee bit of a note, and draws it out fine like a silk thread, and keeps letting go of it a little at a time until it seems as though it was a mile long, and the audience stops talking and eating candy, and just holds its breath, and listens for her to bite it off, and she wiggles with it, and catches another breath when it is keeping right on, and it seems so sweet and smooth that you can almost see angels hovering around up in the roof, and she stands there with her beautiful eyes shining like stars, and her face wreathed in smiles, and that little note keeps paying out like a silk fish line with a four-pound bass running away with the bait, and the audience gets red in the face for not breathing, and when everybody thinks she is going to keep on all night, or bust and fill the house with little notes that smell of violets, she wakes up, raises her voice two or three degrees higher, and finds a note that is more beautiful still, but which is as rare as the bloom of a century plant, so rare and radiant that she can't keep it long without spoiling, and just as you feel like dying in your tracks and going, to heaven where they sing that way all the time, she shakes that note into little showers of crystal musical snowflakes, and then raises her voice one note higher just for a second, and backs away with a low bow and a sweet smile, and the audience is dumb for a minute, and when it comes to, and she has almost gone behind the scenes, everybody cheers, and waves handkerchiefs, and stands up and yells until she comes back and does it over again, that is technique.”
“Well, sir, my girl has got a technique just like that. She can sing the socks right off of——”
“Oh, hold on; don't work any of your slang into this musical discussion. When you want to know anything about music, or falling in love, or farming, come to your Uncle Ike. Office hours from 9 a. m. to 4 p. m. No cure no pay. If you are not satisfied your money will be cheerfully refunded,” and the old man got an oil can and begun to oil the old shotgun, while the boy started to sing “Killarney” in a bass voice, and Uncle Ike drew the gun on him and said: “If you are looking for trouble, sing in that buzz-saw voice in my presence. I could murder a person that sang like that.”
Uncle Ike was leaning over the gate late in the afternoon, waiting for the red-headed boy and some of his chums to come back from the State fair. He had gone to the fair with them, and gone around to look at the stock with them, and had staked them for admission to all the side shows, and when they had come out of the last side show, and were hungry, he had bought a mess of hot wiener sausages for them, and while they were eating them somebody yelled that the balloon was going to go up, and the boys grabbed their wieners and run across the fair grounds, losing Uncle Ike; and being tired, and not caring to see a young girl go up a mile in the air, and come down with a parachute, with a good prospect of flattening herself on the hard ground, he had concluded to go home before the crowd rushed for the cars, and here he was at the gate waiting for the boys, saddened because a pickpocket had taken his watch and a big seal fob that had been in the family almost a hundred years. As he waited for the boys to come back he smoked hard, and wondered what a pickpocket wanted to fool an old man for, a man who would divide his money with any one out of luck, and he wondered what they could get on that poor old silver watch, that never kept time that could be relied on, and a tear came to his eye as he thought of some jeweler melting up that old fob that his father and grandfather used to wear before him, and he wondered if the boys would guy him for having his pocket picked, he, who had mixed up with the world for half a century and never been touched. It was almost dark when the red-headed boy and his partners in crime, came down the sidewalk, so tired their shoes interfered, and they stubbed their toes on the holes in the walk, even.
“Well, I s'pose you ducks spent every cent you had and had to walk five miles from the fair ground,” said Uncle Ike, as he opened the gate and let them fall inside and drop on the grass, their shoes covered with dust, and their clothes the same. He invited them in to supper, but the peanuts, the popcorn, the waffles, the lemonade, the cider and the wieners had been plenty for them, and it did not seem as though they ever wanted to eat a mouthful again.
“Where is your fob and watch?” said the redheaded boy, as he noticed that the big stomach of the old man carried no ornament.
“Well, I decided this afternoon that it did not become a man of my age to be wearing gaudy jewelry,” said Uncle Ike, “and hereafter you have got to take your uncle just as he is, without any ornaments. The watch never did keep time much, and I have had enough of guessing whether it was 1 o'clock or 3.”
“Never going to wear it any more?” asked the red-headed boy, with a twinkle in his eye.
“No, I guess not,” said Uncle Ike, as he heaved a sigh.
“Then I guess we can draw cuts for the old rattle-box,” said the boy, as he pulled the watch and fob out of his pants pocket.
Where Did You Get That Watch 167
“Here! where did you get that watch?” said Uncle Ike, in excitement. “I thought a pickpocket on the trolley car got it, and I was hot. Say, that is one of the best watches in this town. Where did you find it? Did the police get the man?”
“Oh, police nothin',” said the boy. “Say, Uncle Ike, you were the easiest mark on the fair ground. There you stood, looking up at the kites, with your hands behind your back, like a jay from way back, and I knew somebody would get your watch; so I just reached up and took it, and left you standing there. I wanted to teach you a lesson. Don't ever wear your jewelry at a fair. Here's your old ticker. Sounds as though it had palpitation of the heart,” and the boy handed it to the old man.
“Well, by gum! To think I should live all these years, and go through what I have, and then have an amateur pickpocket take me for a Reuben, and go through me! But how did you like the great agricultural display?”
“Oh, I don't know,” said the boy, taking off his shoes and emptying the sand out. “It seems to me the farmers ought to be encouraged. I wonder how many hundred dollars it cost to hire that girl to go up in a balloon; and what good could that exhibition do the farmers? If that girl's parachute hadn't parachuted at the proper time, and she had come down and been killed, wouldn't the people have been so horrified they would never go to another fair, and couldn't the state have been sued for damages for hiring her to kill herself?”
“Oh, maybe,” said the old man, winding up his watch a lot ahead, and holding it to his ears to see if it had heart disease, as the boy had intimated. “But, you see, people have got to be amused. It has got so there is not the inspiration in looking at vegetables that there used to be, and the patchwork quilt does not draw like a house afire. The farmers are not going to blow in money to exhibit things for a blue ribbon, and the wealthy people who have fancy stock take the premiums and advertise their business. Money is paid for exhibits that more properly belong to the circus and the vaudeville, that ought to be paid in premiums to farmers who raise things. We hire a balloonist, believing that she will fall and kill herself before the season is over. We take the chance that she will kill herself at our fair, but if she does not, and is killed at some cheap fair, somewhere else, we feel that we are abused, and have been trifled with. What interested you the most at the fair?” asked the old man.
“The wieners,” said the boys, all at once. And the red-headed boy added: “When a feller is so hungry his eyes look straight ahead, and he can't turn them in the sockets, there is nothing like a hot wiener to start things moving, and the man who invented wieners ought to have a chromo. By gosh, I am going to bed,” and the boys all started for their resting places, while Uncle Ike felt of his stomach where the fob rested, and looked as happy as though he had never been robbed.
“Come on, Mr. Train-robber,” said Uncle Ike the next morning, as the boy showed up in the breakfast room, and the old man held up his hands as he supposed passengers did when train-robbers attacked a train. “Go through me, condemn you, and take every last dollar I have got. I have brought you up to be an honest boy, and you turn out to be a pickpocket, and rob me of my watch. Oh, I tell you, no old bachelor ever had so much trouble bringing up a boy as I have. Now, I expect you will graduate in burglary, bunko, and politics, won't you?” and the old man looked at the laughing boy with such pride that the boy knew he was only fooling.
“No, if I went into burglary and kindred industries, I could never find such easy marks to practice on as dear old Uncle Ike,” and the boy put his arms around the old man and asked him what time it was, and the Uncle grabbed his fob as though he was not sure whether it was there or not. “Now, let's eat breakfast,” and they sat down together, and Aunt Almira poured the coffee, while Uncle Ike looked over the morning paper.
“You can disband your army, and let them go back to the paths of peace, for Dreyfus has been pardoned,” said the old man. “I knew that they would pardon that man.”
“Now, wouldn't that kill you,” said the boy, as he sampled two or three pieces of canteloupe to find one to his taste. “That breaks up my scheme to fight the French. Uncle Ike, I have about made up my mind to lead a different life and become a minister, and preach, and go to sociables, and just have a dandy time. Say, it's a snap to be a minister, and only have to preach an hour Sunday, and have all the week to go fishing and hunting. What denomination would you advise me to become a minister of?”
“Well,” said Uncle Ike, as he dropped a few lumps of sugar into his coffee, and looked at the boy across the table, “from the color of your hair, and your constant talk about falling in love every time you see a pretty girl, and the manner in which you take up a collection every time you see me anywhere, I should say you would make a pretty fair Mormon. Yes, if I was in your place I would preach Mormonism, as your experience in taking things out of people's pockets, in the way of watches, would come handy, and you are so confounded freckled you would have to have wives sealed to you or they would not stay. A minister has got to be pretty condemned good-looking, nowadays, to hold a job in a fashionable church.”
“But the minister business is easy, ain't it? They don't have to work, anyway,” and the boy looked at Uncle Ike as though life expected an opinion that was sound.
“If you took a job preaching,” said the old man, whirling around from the table, and sitting down in his old armchair, and lighting his pipe, “you wouldn't have any, soft snap. Do you know anything about what a minister has to do? Let's take one week out of the life of a regular minister. He starts in on Monday morning by having a woman call at the parsonage, a woman dressed poorly, and whose pained face makes his heart ache, and she tells him a tale of woe, and he goes to his wife and gets a basket of stuff out of the kitchen to give her, a kitchen not stocked any too well, and sends her home with immediate relief, and then goes out to hunt up the relief committee of his church to give the woman permanent relief. He comes back after a while and finds other callers, some to have him make a diagnosis of their souls, over which they are worrying, another to have him help get a son out of the police station, who used to belong to the Sunday-school, and one man wants him to preach a funeral sermon in the afternoon. He gets out of the police station in time for the funeral, and they make him go clear to the cemetery, and stop at the house with the mourners on the way back, and he gets a cold dinner that night, and has to call on several sick friends that evening, and one of them is so nearly gone that he remains with him to the last, and gets home at midnight. The other days of the week are the same, only more so, and in addition he has to run a prayer meeting, several society meetings, a sociable, settle a quarrel in the choir, and bring two members of the church together who have not spoken to each other for months, attend a ministers' meeting and map out a plan of campaign against the old boy, run out into the country to preach a little for a neighboring preacher who is sick, or off on a vacation, attend a missionary meeting, marry a few couples, and prepare two sermons for Sunday forenoon and evening, sermons that are new, and on texts that have not been preached on before. One night in the week he can get on his slippers and sit in the library, and the other nights he is running from one place to another to make a lot of other people happier, and he has more sickness at home than any man in his congregation, and he works harder than the man who digs in the sewer, and half the time the people kick on his salary and wonder why he doesn't do more, and say he looks so dressed up it can't be possible he has much to do, and when he gets worn down to the bone, and his cheeks are sunken, and his voice fails, and his step is not so active, they saw him off on to some country church that never did pay a minister enough to live on, and he never kicks, but just keeps on praying for them until he kicks the bucket, when he ought to give them a piece of his mind. How do you like it?”
“Say, Uncle Ike, I surrender. I don't want to preach. Where can a man enlist as a pirate? The pirate business appeals to me,” and the boy got up and took his golf club to go out.
“Yes, you have many qualifications that would come in handy as a pirate, and I will use my influence to get you into politics, you young heathen,” and the old man gave the red-headed boy a poke in the ribs with his big hard thumb, and they separated for the day, the old man to smoke and dream, and the boy to have fun and get tired and hungry.
Uncle Ike did not get up very early, on account of a little pain in one of his hind legs, as he expressed it, a rheumatic pain that he had almost come to believe, as the pension agent had often suggested, was caused by his service in the army thirty-five years ago. The pension agent, who desired to have the honor of securing a pension for the old man, had asked him to try and remember if he was not exposed to a sudden draft, some time in the army, which might have caused him to take cold, and thus sow the seeds of rheumatism in his system, which had lain dormant all these years and finally appeared in his legs. The old man had thought it over, and remembered hundreds of occasions when he was soaked through with icy water, and had slept on the wet ground, and gone hungry and taken cold, but he realized that he had taken no more colds in the army than he had at home, and he could not see how he could swear that a chill he received thirty-five years ago could have anything to do with his present aches, and though he knew thousands of the old boys were receiving pensions, that were no worse off than he was, he had told the pension agent that he need not apply for a pension for his pain in the knee. He said he felt that he might just as well apply for a pension on account of inheriting rheumatism from an uncle who fought in the Mexican war, and he would wait until the government did not insist on a veteran having such an abnormal memory about sneezing during the war, as a basis for pension claims, and when it got so a pension would come to a soldier by simply looking up his record, and examining his physical condition, he would take a pension. The old man had heard a peculiar clicking down in the sitting room, all the morning, while he was dressing, and he wondered what it was. As he limped into the sitting room, with his dressing-gown on, and began to round up his shaving utensils, preparatory to his morning shave, he found the red-headed boy in his night shirt, sitting at a table with an old telegraph instrument that looked as though it had been picked out of a scrap-pile, and the boy was ticking away for dear life, his hair standing on end, his brow corrugated, and his eyes glaring.
What Dum Foolishness You Got on Hand Now 177
“What dum foolishness you got on hand now?” asked the old man, as he set a cup of hot water on the mantel, and began to mix up the lather. “What you ticking away on that contrivance for, and looking wise?”
“This is a telegraph office,” said the boy, as he stopped operations long enough to draw his cold bare feet up under him, and pulled his night shirt down to cover his knees. “I am learning to telegraph, and am going into training for president of a railroad. Did you see in the papers the other day that Mr. Earling was elected president of a railroad, and did you know that he started in as a telegraph operator and a poor boy, with hair the color of tow? They used to call him Tow-Head.”
“Yes, I read about that,” said Uncle Ike, as he looked in the glass to see if the lather was all right on his face, and began to strop his razor. “I knew that boy when he was telegraphing. But he knew what all those sounds meant. You just keep ticking away, and don't know one tick from another.”
“Yes, I do,” said the boy, as he smashed away at the key. “That long sound, and the short one, and the one about half as long as the long one—that spells d-a-m, dam.”
“Well, what do you commence your education spelling out cuss words for?” asked the old man, as he raked the razor down one side of his face, pulling his mouth around to one side so it looked like the mouth of a red-horse fish. “Anybody would think you were in training for one of these railroad superintendents who swear at the men so their hair will stand, and then swear at them because they don't get their hair cut. The railroad presidents and general managers nowadays don't swear a blue streak, and keep the men guessing whether they will get discharged for talking back. This man Earling never swore a half a string in his life, and in thirty years of railroading he never spoke a cross word to a living soul, and his brow was never corrugated as much as yours has been spelling out that word dam. Got any idea what railroad you will be president of?” and the old man wiped his razor, stropped it on the palm of his hand, put it in a case, and went to a washbowl to wash the soap off his face.
“Well, I thought I would start in on some narrow-gauge railroad, and work up gradually for a year or two, and finally take charge of one of those Eastern roads, where I can have a private car, and travel all over the country for nothing. As quick as I get this telegraph business down fine I shall apply for a position of train dispatcher, and then jump right along up. Uncle Ike, you will never have to pay a cent on my railroad. I will have a caboose fixed up for you, with guns and dogs, and you can hunt and fish all your life, with a nigger to cook for you, and a porter to put on your bait, and another nigger chambermaid to make up your bed, and I will wire them from the general office to sidetrack you, and pick you up, and all that.”
“Is that so?” said the old man, as he stood rubbing his face with a crash towel till it shone like a boiled lobster. “You are hurrying your railroad career mighty fast, and if you are not careful you will replace Chauncey Depew before you get long pants on. Now, you go get your clothes on and come to breakfast, and after breakfast I will tell you something.” The boy dropped the key, after ticking to the imaginary general office not to disturb him with any messages for half an hour, as he was going to be busy on an important matter, and he went to his room and soon appeared at the breakfast table, and after the breakfast was over, and the old man had lighted his pipe, the boy said:
“Now, Uncle Ike, tell me all you know about railroading in one easy lesson, for I have to go to a directors' meeting at ten, and then we are going out to look over the right of way,” and the boy ticked off a message to have his special car ready at eleven-thirty, stocked for a trip over the line.
“I see you are getting well along in your railroad career, and like nine out of ten boys who want to be railroad men, you are beginning at the private car instead of the gravel train, issuing general orders instead of working in the ranks,” and the old man smoked up and thought a long time, and continued: “The successful railroad man begins at the bottom, and learns the first lesson well. Do you know how long this man Earling has been getting where he is today? Thirty-five years. More than the average age of man. The successful railroad man, if he begins telegraphing, gets so he can send or receive anything, with his eyes shut, and never makes a mistake. After a long time he gets a measly country station, where he does all kinds of work, and he is satisfied. He goes to work to increase the business of that station, to clean up around the depot, and please all the customers, as though he was going to live there all his life. He never thinks he is going to be a high official, but just makes the best of the present. Some day he is awfully surprised to be given a better station, and he hates to leave, and maybe sheds a tear as he parts with the friends he has made there. But he goes to his new place and improves it, and gets in with a new, pushing class of people, and begins to grow. He maybe works there ten years, and his work shows so the officials recognize it, and he never makes a mistake in his telegraphing, and some day they call him into headquarters during a rush, to help the train dispatcher, and then he has to move into the city and watch trains on thousands of miles of road, to see that they don't get together, as train dispatcher. He thinks that position is good enough, and he hopes they will let him alone in it, but some day he assists the superintendent, and he is so well posted they are all surprised. They wonder how that station agent got to knowing all the men on the road, and how much a train of freight cars weigh, and how many cents per mile each loaded car earns for the company, and what cars ought to go to the shops for repairs, and how many new cars will have to be bought to handle the crops on his division. The 'old man,' as the president is always called, gets to leaning on this always good-natured, promoted, station agent, who is so modest he wouldn't offer a suggestion unless asked his opinion, and when asked gives it so intelligently that you could set your watch by it, as the boys say. He is always sober, never sleepy, and whether figuring on the wheat crop of Dakota to a carload, or wearing rubber boots and dining on sausage and bread for a couple of days fixing up a washout, he is always calm and smiling, and every man works as though his own house was afire, till the washout is repaired and the first train pulls over. When the rich, fat, gouty directors come around, once a year, to take an account of stock, and see the property at work, they see the modest man, and by and by he is taken off his feet by a promotion that almost makes him dizzy. Other railroads see that he is all wool, and they try to steal him away, but he says he has got used to his old man, and he knows every spike in the system, and there are gray hairs beginning to come around his ears, and he guesses he will not go away and have to make new acquaintances, and he remains with the road where he learned to tick, as you are ticking, and one day he is at the head of it. But if you examine into the head of the man who gets up from station agent to president, you will find that there is brain there and no cut feed. Another station agent might get the bighead the first time he was promoted, and they would have to promote him backward, on that account, but it would be because there was excelsior in his head, instead of brain, and he would be mad and jealous, and say mean things about those who got promoted, and stayed promoted. Now, let me give you a pointer. Don't train for general manager or president of a road. Train for the thing you are going to get first, whether it is operator or brakeman, and when you have mastered the details of that place, learn something about the next above. It is like going up a ladder; you have got to go up one step at a time, and get your foot on the step so it will stay, then go up another step. If you attempt to step from the ground to the top of the ladder, you are going to split your pants from Genesis to Revelations, and come down on your neck, and show your nakedness to those who have watched you try to climb too fast, and they will laugh at you. Now, go on with your condum ticking, but tick out something besides d—a—m, dam,” and the old man went out to see if there had been any frost the night before, with an idea that if there was he would shoot a few teal duck, and cure his rheumatism that way, instead of putting on liniment.