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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy, by
+George W. Peck
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy
+       1899
+
+Author: George W. Peck
+
+Release Date: May 16, 2008 [EBook #25490]
+Last Updated: October 5, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PECK'S UNCLE IKE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+PECK'S UNCLE IKE AND THE RED HEADED BOY
+
+By George W. Peck
+
+Alexander Belford & Co. - 1899
+
+
+[Illustration: cover]
+
+
+[Illustration: frontispiece]
+
+
+[Illustration: titlepage]
+
+
+To the Typical American Boy,
+
+The boy who is not so awfully good, along at first, but just good
+enough; the boy who does not cry when he gets hurt, and goes into all
+the dangerous games there are going, and goes in to win; the boy who
+loves his girl with the same earnestness that he plays football, and
+who takes the hard knocks of work and play until he becomes hardened
+to anything that may come to him in after life; the boy who will
+investigate everything in the way of machinery, even if he gets his
+fingers pinched, and learns how to make the machine that pinched him;
+the boy who, by study, experience, and mixing up with the world, knows
+a little about everything that he will have to deal with when he
+grows up--the all-around boy, that makes the all-around man, ready for
+anything, from praying for his country's prosperity to fighting for its
+honor; the boy who grows up qualified to lead anything, from the german
+at a dance to an army in battle; the boy who can take up a collection
+in church, or take up an artery on a man injured in a railroad accident,
+without losing his nerve; the boy who can ask a blessing if called upon
+to do so, or ask a girl's ugly father for the hand of his daughter in
+marriage, without choking up; the boy who grows up to be a man whom all
+men respect, all women love, and whom everybody wants to see President
+of the United States, this book is respectfully dedicated by
+
+The Author.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+“Here, Uncle Ike, let me give you a nice piece of paper, twisted up
+beautifully, to light your pipe,” said the red-headed boy, as Uncle Ike,
+with his long clay pipe, filled with ill-smelling tobacco, was feeling
+in his vest pocket for a match. “I should think nice white paper would
+be sweeter to light a pipe with than a greasy old match scratched on
+your pants,” and the boy lighted a taper and handed it to the old man.
+
+“No, don't try any new tricks on me,” said Uncle Ike, as he brought out
+a match, from his vest pocket, picked off the shoddy that had collected
+on it in the bottom of his pocket, and hitched his leg around so he
+could scratch it on his trousers leg. “I have tried lighting my pipe
+with paper, and the odor of the paper kills the flavor of this 10-cent
+tobacco. Now, the brimstone on a match, added to the friction of the
+trousers leg, helps the flavor of the tobacco,” and he drew the match
+across his trousers, and lighted his pipe, and as the smoke began to
+fill the room his good old face lighted up as though he had partaken
+of a rich wine. “I like to get a little accustomed to brimstone here
+on this earth, so, if I get on the wrong road when I die, and go where
+brimstone is the only fuel, I won't appear to the neighbors down there
+as though I was a tenderfoot. Wherever I go, I always want to appear as
+though it wasn't my first trip away from home. Ah, children,” said the
+old man, as he blew smoke enough out of his mouth to call out a fire
+department, and laughed till the windows rattled, “there is lots of
+fun in this old world, if your pipe don't go out. Don't miss any fun,
+because when you die you don't know whether there is any fun going on or
+not.”
+
+“I believe, Uncle Ike, that you would have fun anywhere,” said the boy,
+as he thought of the funny stories the old man had told him for many
+years, and listened to the laugh that acted as punctuation marks to all
+of Uncle Ike's remarks. “I would hate to trust you at a funeral. Did you
+ever laugh at a funeral, Uncle?”
+
+“I came mighty near it once,” said the old man, as he put his little
+finger in the pipe and pressed down the ashes, and let the smoke out
+again like the chimney of a factory.
+
+“O, my! why don't they make you use a smoke consumer on that pipe, or
+cause you to use smokeless tobacco?” said the boy, as he coughed till
+the tears came to his eyes. “It looks in this room like burning a tar
+barrel when Dewey sunk the Spanish fleet. But tell us about your funny
+funeral.”
+
+“O, it wasn't so funny,” said the old man, as he stroked the stubble
+on his chin, and a twinkle came all around his eyes. “It was only my
+thoughts that come near breaking up the funeral. There was an old friend
+of mine years ago, a newspaper man, who was the most genial and loving
+soul I ever knew, but he stuttered so you couldn't help laughing to hear
+him. He could write the most beautiful things without stuttering, but
+when he began to talk, and the talk would not come, and he stammered,
+and puckered up his dear face, and finally got the words out, chewed up
+into little pieces, with hyphens between the syllables, you had to
+laugh or die. We were great friends, and used to smoke and tell stories
+together, and pass evenings that I can now recall as the sweetest of my
+life. There were many things in which we were alike. We smoked the same
+kind of tobacco, in clay pipes, and lived on the same street, and, after
+an evening of pleasure, whichever of us was the least wearied with the
+day's work and night of enjoyment walked home with the other. We used
+to talk about the hereafter, and promised each other to see that the
+one that died first should not have a funeral sermon that would give us
+taffy. It was my friend's idea that, if the minister spread it on too
+thick, he would raise up in the coffin and protest. He was not what you
+would call a good Christian, as the world goes, but I would trust him
+to argue with St. Peter about getting inside the gate, because, if his
+stutter ever got St. Peter to laughing, my friend would surely get in.
+Well, he died, and I was one of the bearers at the funeral, with seven
+others of his old friends; and when the minister was picturing the
+virtues of the deceased which he never possessed, one of the bouquets on
+the coffin rolled off on the floor, and I thought of what my friend had
+said about calling the minister down, and in my imagination I could see
+the old fellow raising up in the coffin and stuttering, and puckering
+up his face there on that solemn occasion, and for about ten seconds it
+seemed as though I would split with laughter; but I held it in, and we
+got the good old genius buried all right, but it was a terrible strain
+on my vest buttons,” and the old smoker lighted another match on his
+trousers and started the pipe, which had grown cold as he talked of the
+stuttering remains.
+
+“O, say, Uncle Ike,” said the boy, as he shuddered a little at the idea
+of a stuttering corpse talking back at a minister, “speaking of heaven,
+do you think the men that furnished embalmed beef to the soldiers and
+made them sick in Cuba will get to heaven when they die?”
+
+“That depends a good deal on whether a political pull is any good
+over there,” said Uncle Ike, as he reached for the yellow paper of
+tobacco and filled up the clay pipe again. “_I think a soldier is the
+noblest work of God_. A young man who has got everything just as he
+wants it at home, parents who love him, and perhaps a girl who believes
+he is the dearest man that ever wore a choker collar; who hears that his
+country needs help, and gives up his spring mattress, his happy home,
+his evenings with the dearest girl in the world, gives up baking powder
+biscuits and strawberry shortcake, and enlists to go to Cuba, and sleeps
+on the ground in the mud, gets malaria, and fights on his knees when he
+is too weak to stand up, deserves something better than decayed meat,
+and I believe the people who furnished that stuff for the boys are going
+right straight to hell when they die,” and a look of revenge and horror
+and indignation came over the old man's face that the boy had not seen
+before in all the years he had known his uncle. “No, sir,” said he;
+“the smell of that canned beef will stick to the garments of those who
+prepared it and those who furnished it to those boys; and if one of them
+got into heaven by crawling under the canvas, every angel there would
+hold her nose and make up a face, and they would send for the devil
+with his pitchfork to' throw him out. The verdict of no board of
+investigation is going to be received as a passport to heaven.”
+
+[Illustration: A dog biscuit would have been mince pie 011]
+
+“Why, a dog biscuit would have been mince pie to the soldiers in
+comparison to the stuff the rich beef packers furnished to those young
+noblemen with the kyack uniforms on. To make a little more money, men
+who have millions of dollars to burn, bilked a weak and overworked set
+of officials with incipient paresis and locomotor ataxia in their walk
+and conversation, and sawed on to them stuff that self-respecting pigs
+could not have digested without taking pepsin tablets; and with that
+embalmed and canned outrage on humanity in their stomachs those brave
+men charged in the face of an enemy, and were hungry heroes, loaded with
+decayed beef from a country that produces the finest food in the world.
+Tramps, begging at the back gates of American homes, were living on
+the fat of the land; dogs could gnaw fresh and sweet meat off of bones
+thrown away, and laugh at our soldiers carrying Old Glory to victory
+up hills shelled and bulleted and barbed-wire fenced. A bullet from a
+Spanish gun, entering the stomach of an American soldier, turned black
+when it came in contact with the embalmed beef there, and poisoned the
+brave soldier, and made him die, with thoughts of home, and mother,
+and sweetheart, and his lips closed for the last time, silent as to his
+wrongs, uncomplaining as to the murder committed by the millionaires
+at home. The business of packing meat ought to be combined with the
+undertaking business, so you could order your meat and your coffin from
+the same man. By cracky! Boy, I am so mad when I think of it, that I
+don't want to go to heaven if those people go there. Go out, dears, for
+a minute, for I want to use language that you can't find in the school
+books!” and Uncle Ike got up out of his chair, pale with anger, and
+smashed his pipe on the stone hearth, and a tear rolled down his cheek.
+“Why, Uncle Ike, I didn't mean to make you cry,” said the red-headed
+boy, as he backed out of the room, frightened at the old man.
+
+“Well, never mind, boy; don't worry about your Uncle Ike, because at my
+age, when a man gets mad clear through, he has to have vent, or bust,”
+ and the old fellow laughed as hearty as though he had never been mad
+in his life. “But I have a tender spot for soldiers who go to fight for
+their country, and when they are abused I feel that somebody is guilty
+of treason. I was a soldier in the war between the North and South, and
+have seen soldiers hungry, so hungry that they would take raw corn out
+of the nosebags of mules that were eating it, until a mule would begin
+to kick seven ways for Sunday when he saw a soldier coming; but it
+couldn't be helped, because the government couldn't keep up with the
+soldiers with rations, when they were on the jump night and day. But,
+do you know we had fun all the time we were hungry? There were Irish
+soldiers in my regiment who would keep you good natured when you were
+ready to die. The Irish soldier is so funny and so cheerful that he
+should have good pay. If I was going to raise a regiment, I would have
+one Irish soldier, at least, to every seven other soldiers, and my Irish
+boy would keep them all laughing by his wit, so they would stand any
+hardship. I have seen an Irish boy parch his corn that he had stolen
+from a mule, spread it out on a saddle blanket in four piles, go and ask
+three officers to dine with him, and, when they sat down on the ground
+to eat the parched corn, he wouldn't let them begin the meal until he
+made a welcoming speech, and had the chaplain ask a blessing over the
+corn; and then he would go without his share, and tell funny stories
+until the guests would laugh until they almost choked. The Irish soldier
+is worth his weight in gold in any army, boy, and he is in all
+armies, on one side or the other, and generally on both sides. The only
+objection I have to an Irishman is that he smokes one of these short
+pipes,” and the old man lit up his long clay pipe, and let the boy go
+out to think over the lesson of the morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+Uncle Ike sat and smoked his pipe in silence for a few minutes, blew the
+smoke out in clouds, and looked at it as though searching for something,
+and there was a serious look on his face, as though he was trying to
+fathom some mystery, while the redheaded boy was looking at himself in a
+hand mirror to see if the freckles on his nose were any smaller since
+he had been using some of his mother's toilet powder to remove them.
+Finally Uncle Ike put the bowl of the pipe to his nose and smelled of
+the burning tobacco, turned up his nose and snuffed, and said:
+
+[Illustration: Something the matter with this 'ere terbacker 017]
+
+“There is something the matter with this 'ere terbacker. I suppose the
+terbacker makers have got into a trust, and they don't care how the
+stuff smells. Condemned if I ain't half a mind to quit smoking and break
+up the trust.”
+
+“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” said the red-headed boy, “that I fixed your
+tobacco for you so it would not smell so bad. I put some cinnamon bark
+and wiener skins in it.”
+
+“Well, of all things!” said Uncle Ike, as he emptied the tobacco out of
+the pipe by rapping it on the heel of his boot, and looked sick. “What
+in the name of heaven is wiener skins?”
+
+“Why, it is the envelope that goes around a wiener sausage. Us boys were
+smoking cigarettes one day made of paper and dried dandelion leaves, and
+the boy at the butcher shop said if we would dry some wiener skin and
+cut it up and put it in the cigarette and smoke it, it would make the
+finest flavor, and make us strong. I tried it, and the cigarette smelled
+just like camping out and cooking over a camp-fire, and the next day I
+was so strong ma noticed it. I thought you were getting old, and I would
+make you strong and young again. Don't you notice how different the
+smoke smells since I fixed the tobacco? I was going to put in some red
+pepper pods, but----”
+
+“Here, hold on!” said Uncle Ike. “The butcher has got you mixed up. He
+was giving you a recipe for a Mexican pudding. But don't you ever try
+any experiments on your Uncle Ike any more. I don't want to be made
+strong any more on sausage skins. A gymnasium is good enough for me, and
+it don't smell like burning a negro at the stake. I know anything would
+help the flavor of this terbacker, but I have got used to it, after
+about sixty years burning it under my nose, and, if the trust will
+not water the stock with baled hay or cut cabbage, I will try and pull
+through as it is. So you experiment on yourself, condemn you! I knew it
+was you that had disturbed my terbacker. I can tell by the freckles on
+your face when you have done anything wrong. A boy that is freckled
+has got to be square, or I am right on to him. When you are guilty, the
+freckles on your nose are changeable; one will be yellow, like saffron,
+and another freckle seems pale, and little drops of perspiration appear
+between the freckles; and then several small freckles will combine into
+one, like a trust, and you are given completely away. So remember, as
+long as you wear freckles, if you do anything crooked, there is a sign
+right on your face that tells the tale.”
+
+“Say, Uncle Ike, what is a trust?” asked the redheaded boy, anxious to
+turn the subject away from wiener skins and freckles. “What good does a
+trust do?”
+
+“Well, a trust is one of these things,” said Uncle Ike, as he opened
+a new paper of tobacco, and threw the old paper, that had been treated
+with foreign substances, into the fire, “one of these things that are
+for the benefit of the dear people. You have heard of selling a gold
+brick, haven't you? The man who sells a gold brick has a brass brick
+made with a hole in it, in which he puts some gold, and he lets the jay
+who wants to invest in raw gold test it by putting acid on the place
+where the gold is filled in, and the jay finds that the brick is solid
+gold, and he buys it, after mortgaging his farm to raise the money. The
+man sells the gold brick cheap, because the jay is his friend, and when
+he has got out of the country the jay tries to sell his gold brick for
+eight hundred dollars, and he gets two dollars and eighty cents for
+it. That is one kind of a trust. The trust you mean is a combination of
+several factories, for instance. The promoter gets all the factories in
+one line of business to combine. They pay each factory proprietor more
+than his business is worth, and he is tickled, but they only pay him
+part money, and give him stock in the combine for the balance, and let
+him run his old business, now owned by others, at a good salary, and he
+gets the big head and buys a rubber-tired carriage, and sends his family
+to Europe. Then the trust closes down his factory and throws his men out
+of employment, lowers the price of goods to run out others who have not
+entered the trust, and the people who get goods cheap say a trust is the
+noblest work of God. After the outsiders have been ruined, and the man
+who entered the trust in good faith has spent the money they gave him,
+and tries to sell the stock he received, it has gone down to seven cents
+on a dollar, and the trust buys it in, and he cables his family to come
+home in the steerage of a cattle ship. His old employees have gone
+to the poorhouse or to selling bananas with a cart, and the former
+manufacturer who was happy and prosperous has become poor and shabby,
+and he looks at his closed factory, with its broken windows, and he
+tries to get a position pushing a scraper on the asphalt pavement, and
+if he fails he either jumps off the pier into the lake, or takes a gun
+and goes gunning for the trust promoter who ruined him. And after the
+factory man is drowned, or sent to the penitentiary for murder, the
+stock in the trust takes a bound and is away above par, and he hasn't
+got any of it, and the poor competitors of the trust having been ruined
+and closed up, prices of the goods go up kiting, and the dear people who
+said a trust was the noblest work of God say it is the dumbdest work of
+man, and they pass resolutions to down the trust, while the owners
+of the good stock in the trust stick out their fat stomachs, full of
+champagne and canvasback and terrapin, and laugh at the people till they
+nearly die of apoplexy, and drive bob-tailed horses that live better
+than the people, and carry blanketed dogs on velvet-cushioned carriages,
+that would turn up their noses at good wiener skins worse than I did
+when you loaded my tobacco, you little red-headed rascal,” and Uncle Ike
+drew a long breath, and brought his fist down on the table in anger, as
+he got worked up over the wrongs of the people at the hands of the gold
+brick trusts.
+
+“Gosh,” said the red-headed boy, as his eyes kept opening wider and
+wider when he took in all Uncle Ike had said, “I should think the people
+would have the trusts arrested for breach of promise.”
+
+“What do you know about breach of promise?” said Uncle Ike, coloring up
+and looking foolish. “Who has been telling you about my being arrested
+once for breach of promise? If your mother has told you about that old
+trouble I had, I'll leave this house and go board at a tavern.”
+
+“I never heard anything about it, Uncle Ike, so help me. I never heard
+that you was ever in love.”
+
+“I never was in love,” said the old man, as he loaded up the pipe again,
+“except with my pipe. That affair was a clear case of a dog getting
+stuck on a man, and the owner of the dog thinking she was being loved.
+You see I went to a summer resort years ago, and got acquainted with a
+widow. She was a sweet creature, but I never said a word to her about
+marriage. She had a pug dog, and I petted the dog, and called it to me,
+and, do you know, that dog got so he would follow me, and set on my lap,
+and come to my room, and whine, until I got scared. I talked with the
+widow some, and once I took her and the dog out boat riding, but I never
+gave her any cause to think that I was in love with her. But you ought
+to have seen that dog. He just doted on me. I encouraged it till all the
+guests at the hotel began to notice that I was very dear to the dog, and
+the widow looked on smilingly and encouraged the intimacy. Then I tried
+to drive the dog away from me, but he would curl up at my feet and look
+up at me in such a loving manner that I weakened. Then the widow began
+to hint at her desire to have someone that the dog could look up to and
+love, and it was getting too warm, and I left the summer resort, and was
+sued for breach of promise. Of course I didn't know what the woman or
+the dog would swear to, so I settled for a thousand dollars. The next
+year I called at the summer resort, and found the dog stuck on another
+man, and I know just as well as can be that the widow paid her expenses
+each summer by that dog getting in love with men, and I have never
+looked at a woman twice since.”
+
+“Served them right,” said the boy, who had an idea that Uncle Ike was
+right about everything. “I don't take much stock in girls myself. I am
+mighty glad I haven't got any sister. The boys that have got sisters are
+in hot water all the time, and have to go home with them from parties,
+and carry their rubbers to school when it rains, and fight for them
+if the other boys call them tomboys. Sisters are no good,” and the
+red-headed boy looked smart, as though he had said something Uncle Ike
+would applaud.
+
+“There, that will do,” said Uncle Ike, as he put his hand in the boy's
+hair to warm it. “Don't let me ever hear you say a word against sisters
+again. You don't know anything about sisters. They are great. Let me
+tell you a story. I know a man who is away up in public affairs, at the
+head of his profession in his county, and one the world will hear more
+about some of these days. He was just such a little shrimp as you are,
+when he was a boy. He got out of the high school, and was going to clerk
+in a feed store, when his sister took him one side, one Sunday, and told
+him she wanted him to go to college. He almost fainted away at the idea.
+There wasn't much money in the family to burn on a boy's education, and
+he knew it, and he asked where the money was to come from. This little
+sister of the poor boy said she would furnish the money. She knew that
+he would be one of the great men of the country, if he had a college
+education, and it was arranged for him to go to college, this little
+sister being his backer financially. She had a musical education, and
+began to look for chances to make money. She took scholars in music, and
+was so anxious to make money for this brother to blow in on an education
+that she fairly forced music into all her pupils, working night and day,
+often with her head ready to split open with pain, but every week she
+rounded up money enough to send to that brother at college, and for four
+years there never was a Monday morning that he did not get a postoffice
+order from that sweet girl, and every day a letter of encouragement, and
+advice, and when he graduated a pale girl stood below the platform with
+bright eyes and a feverish cheek, and when he came down off the
+platform with his diploma he grasped her in his arms and said, 'Sister,
+darling,' and kissed her in the presence of five thousand people, and
+she fainted. She had worked as no man works, for four years, and the
+result was a brother, a lawyer, a grand man, who loves that sister as
+though she was an angel from heaven. So, confound you, if I ever hear
+you say a word against sisters again, I will take you across my knee
+and you will think the millennium has come and struck you right on the
+pants,” and Uncle Ike patted the boy on the cheek, and said they had
+better go out and catch a mess of fish.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+“Uncle Ike, did you ever take many degrees in secret societies?” asked
+the red-headed boy, as he saw the old gentleman reading an account of a
+man who was killed during initiation into a lodge, by being spanked with
+a clapboard on which cartridges had been placed.
+
+“About a hundred degrees, I should think, without counting up,” said
+Uncle Ike, as he thought over the different lodges he had belonged to in
+the past fifty years. “What set you to thinking about secret societies?”
+
+“Oh, I thought I would join a few, and have some fun. I read every
+little while about some one being killed while being initiated, and it
+seems to me the death rate is about as great as it is in Cuba or the
+Philippines. Is there much fun in killing a man, Uncle Ike?”
+
+“Well, not much for the man who is killed,” said the old man, as he gave
+the grand hailing sign of distress for the boy to bring him his pipe
+and tobacco. “Accidents will happen, you know. It isn't one man in ten
+thousand that gets killed being initiated.”
+
+“What do people join lodges for, anyway, when they are liable to croak?”
+ said the boy, as he passed the ingredients for a fumigation to the
+uncle. “Don't you think there ought to be laws against initiating, the
+same as clipping horses and cutting their tails off, or cutting off
+clogs' tails and ears? What do the lodges have those funny ceremonies
+for?”
+
+“Well, a fool boy can ask more questions than the oldest man can
+answer,” said Uncle Ike, as he hitched around in his chair, and looked
+mysterious, as he thought of the grips and passwords he once knew. “No,
+there is no occasion for laws against men going up against any game.
+Most men join lodges because they think it is a good thing, and after
+they have taken a few degrees they want all there are, and after awhile
+the degrees keep getting harder, and they think of more to come, and by
+and by they get enough. In most lodges all men are on an equal footing,
+the prince and the pauper are all alike. Occasionally there is a man who
+thinks because he is rich or prominent in some way, that he is smarter
+than the ordinary man in a lodge. Then is the time that the rest try to
+teach him humility, and show him that he is only a poor mortal. It
+does some men good to have their diamonds removed, their good clothes
+replaced by the tattered garments of the tramp, and then let them look
+at themselves and see how little they amount to. In some lodges a man
+is taught a useful lesson by stripping him to the buff and taking a
+clapboard and letting a common laborer maul him until he finds out that
+he is not the whole business. If that were done occasionally by society
+you wouldn't find so many men looking over the common people. It would
+take the starch out of some people to feel that if they put on too
+many airs they would be liable to have a boot hit them any time. Lodges
+sometimes make good men out of the worst material. In some lodges the
+Prince of Wales would have to walk turkey right beside a well-digger,
+and it would do the prince good and not hurt the well-digger. But if I
+was in your place I would not join a lodge yet. Try the Salvation Army
+first,” and Uncle Ike got up and went to the window, and listened to
+the bugle and bass drum and tambourine of the army as it passed on its
+nightly round.
+
+“That Salvation army makes me tired,” said the red-headed boy, as he
+reached for his putty blower. “Going around the streets palming that
+noise off on the public for music, and scaring horses, and taking up a
+collection, and singing out of tune. Say, I'll bet I can blow a chunk
+of putty into that girl's bonnet and make her jump like a box car in
+a collision,” and the boy opened the window and was taking aim at the
+tambourine girl's bonnet when Uncle Ike reached out and took the putty
+blower away from him and said:
+
+[Illustration: It does not take opera music to get people to heaven 027]
+
+“Don't ever worry those poor people, or let any other boy bother them
+when you are around. They are entitled to the respect of all good
+people. It does not take opera music to get people to heaven. Even that
+wretched music they give so freely, may turn some poor wretch from
+the wrong to the right way, and a poor devil who becomes a follower of
+Christ from practicing following the Salvation army is just as welcome
+in heaven as though he went to church with a four-in-hand and listened
+to a heavenly choir that is paid a hundred dollars per. It does not seem
+possible to some rich people that St. Peter is going to extend the glad
+hand to a dockwolloper, and let the rich man stand out in the cold until
+he tells how he used his money on earth, whether to oppress the poor or
+to make them glad. Lots of men are going to be fooled thinking they are
+going to get inside the pearly gates on the strength of their money, but
+some of them may have to be vouched for by a Salvation army lassie. So,
+boy, if you love your old uncle, always respect the religion of every
+soul on earth, and don't fire putty at any girl's bonnet. You hear me?”
+ and the old man patted the boy on the back, and his old face looked
+angelic, through the tobacco smoke cloud.
+
+“Well, Uncle Ike, you are the queerest man I ever saw,” said the
+red-headed boy, as he wiped a tear out of his eye with his shirt sleeve.
+“There is nothing I can do to agree with you, until you have talked to
+me a little. When I feel funny, and want to laugh, you make me cry; and
+when I get serious about something, and get you to talking, you get me
+to laughing. I never agree with you until you have had your say. But
+I agree with you on one thing; you said the other day, when we were
+talking about breach of promise, that you were never in love. That's
+where you and I are alike. It makes me weary to see some boys in love
+with girls, and run around after them, and make themselves laughing
+stock of everybody. If a girl should get in love with me, I would tell
+her to go to thunder, and I would laugh at her, and tell all the boys
+she was silly. There is no good in love. I thought I liked a girl once,
+and gave her a German silver ring that I got off an old china pipe stem;
+and she loved me just a week, and then she shook me because the German
+silver ring corroded on her finger and gave her blood poison. It wasn't
+true love, or she would have stuck to me if she had been obliged to have
+her finger amputated. Bah! I was so discouraged that I will never have
+anything to say to a girl again, and I will grow up to be an old bach
+like you, who never did love anybody but a dog. Isn't that so, Uncle
+Ike?” “Did I say I never loved any woman?” said Uncle Ike, as he looked
+away off, apparently his eyes penetrating the dim past, and a wet spot
+on his cheek that kept getting wetter, and spreading around his face,
+until he wiped it off with one end of his necktie. “Why, boy, don't you
+ever tell your ma, but I have been in love enough to send a man to the
+insane asylum. You think you will never love any girl again, on account
+of that blood poisoning. Why, blood poison is nowhere beside love. Some
+day you will have a girl pass to windward of you, and when cool air of
+heaven blows a breath of her presence toward you, the love microbe will
+enter your system with the odor of violets that comes from her, and
+there is no medicine on earth that will cure you. The first thing you
+know you will follow that girl like a poodle, and if she wants you to
+walk on your hands and knees, and carry her parasol in your mouth, you
+will do it. When she looks at you the perspiration will start out all
+over you, and you will think there is only one pair of eyes in the
+world, that all beautiful eyes have been consolidated into one pair of
+blue ones, and that they are as big as moons. If you touch her hand you
+will feel a thrill go up your arm and down your spine, as you do when
+a four-pound bass strikes your frog when you are fishing. She will see
+that your necktie is on sideways, and she will take hold of it to fix
+it, and you will not breathe for fear she will go away, and when she
+gets you fixed so you will pass in a crowd, you will be paralyzed all
+over, and unable to move, until she beckons you to come along, and
+when you start to walk you will feel all over like your foot is asleep.
+Walking a block or two beside this girl will be to you better than a
+trip to Europe, and a look at her face will seem to you a glimpse
+of heaven, and angels, and you will leave her after the too short
+interview, and you will be glad you are alive, and then you may see her
+riding in a street car with another, and you will want to commit murder.
+When these things occur, boy, you are in love, and you have got it bad.
+You think you don't love anybody, but you will. I have been there, boy,
+and there is no escape without taking to the woods, and love will make a
+trail through the forest, and over glaciers, and catch you if you don't
+watch out. So when love gets into your system, that way, just hold up
+your hands as though a hold-up man had the drop on you with a revolver,
+and let the girl go through you. The only way I escaped was that the
+girl married. Now go away and let me alone, boy, or I shall have to take
+you across my knee,” and the red-headed boy backed out of the room
+and left Uncle Ike, his trembling fingers rattling the yellow paper of
+tobacco, trying to fill his pipe, and as the boy got outdoors and blew
+a charge of putty from his blower at the washwoman bending over the
+wash-tub, he said:
+
+“Well, Uncle Ike hasn't had a picnic all his life.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+“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.”
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+“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.”
+
+[Ilustration: I 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+“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:
+
+[Ilustration: My 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+“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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+“Say, Uncle Ike, don't you think the Fourth of July is sort of played
+out?” asked the red-headed boy, as he came to Uncle Ike's room on the
+morning of the 5th, by appointment, to demonstrate to the old man that
+he had not been quite killed by the celebration of the great day. “It
+seems to me we don't have half as many accidents and fires as we used
+to,” and the boy counted off to the uncle the dozen injuries he had
+received by burns, and dug into his eye with a soiled handkerchief in
+search of some gravel from a torpedo.
+
+“Oh, I don't know,” said Uncle Ike, as he lighted the old pipe and began
+to look over the boy's injuries. “The Fourth is carrying on business at
+the old stand, apparently. Your injuries are in the right places, on
+the left hand, principally, and the gravel is in the left eye. That is
+right. Always keep the right hand and the right eye in good shape, so
+you can sight a gun and pull a trigger, either in shooting ducks or
+Filipinos. You see, our country is growing, and we are celebrating the
+Fourth from Alaska to Porto Rico, and from London to Luzon, so we can't
+celebrate so very much in any one place. I expect by another Fourth
+Queen Victoria will be yelling for the glorious Fourth, Emperor William
+will be touching off dynamite firecrackers, Russia will be eating Roman
+candies, and Aguinaldo will be touching off nigger-chasers and drinking
+red lemonade. This is a great country, boy, and don't you forget it.”
+
+“Well, you may be right,” said the boy, as he poured some witch-hazel on
+a rag around his thumb, “but it looks to me as though the troops in the
+Philippines will be climbing aboard transports protected by the fleet,
+with Aguinaldo slaughtering the boys in the hospitals and looting
+Manila, if the President does not get a move onto himself and send
+another army out there to be victorious some more. The way it is now, we
+shall not have troops enough there to bury the dead. The boys have
+been debating at school the Philippine question, and it was decided
+unanimously that the President is up against a tough proposition, and
+if he does not stop looking at the political side of that war and send
+troops enough to eat up those shirtless soldiers, who can live on six
+grains of rice and two grains of quinine a day, we are going to be
+whipped out of our boots. That's what us boys think.”
+
+“Well, you boys don't want to think too much, or you are liable to have
+brain fever,” said the old man, as he realized that there was mutiny
+brewing among the school children. “What you fellows want the President
+to do? Haven't we whipped the negroes everywhere, and taken village
+after village, and burned them, and--and--chased them--and----”
+
+“Sure!” said the boy, as he saw that his uncle was at a loss to defend
+the policy of his government. “We have had regular foot races with them,
+and burned the huts of the helpless, and taken villages, and then didn't
+have troops to hold them, and when we went out of a village on one
+street, the niggers came in on another, and shot into our pants. We swim
+rivers and take towns with as brave work as ever was done, and become so
+exhausted we have to lay down in the mud and have a fit, and the niggers
+climb trees like monkeys, eat cocoanuts and chatter at us. Say, Uncle
+Ike, do you know us boys are getting tired of this business, and we are
+getting up a petition to the President to get a trained nurse to put
+Alger to sleep and run the war department herself.”
+
+[Illustration: We are going to have the petition 071]
+
+“We are going to have the petition signed by seven million American boys.
+Why, if those niggers could go off in the woods and shoot at a mark for
+a week, and get so they could hit anything, our boys would all be dead
+in a month. The trouble is the niggers just pull up a gun and touch it
+off like a girl does a firecracker. She lights the tip end of the tail
+of a firecracker, and throws it, and you forget all about it, and when
+her firecracker has ceased to interest you, and you don't know where
+it is, it goes off in your coat collar, or down the waistband of your
+pants. A Filipino shoots the way a trained monkey touches off a syphon
+of seltzer water. He knows it will squirt if he touches the thumbpiece,
+but it is as liable to hit him in the face, or wet his feet as anything.
+Some day those niggers will learn how to shoot, and when Funston
+attempts to swim a river he will get a bullet through the head, and
+Lawton and MacArthur, who stand up in plain sight and let them practice
+will wish they hadn't. We boys have decided to support the President
+until he conquers those people, if that is what he is trying to do, but,
+by gosh, if he does not wake up and quit looking pleasant, and seeming
+to hope that Filipino shower is going to blow over, we feel that he will
+wake up some morning and find that a nigger tornado has struck his brave
+boys at Manila, and they will be in the cyclone cellars waiting for
+somebody to come and dig them out. Don't you think so, Uncle Ike?”
+
+“I say, boy,” said Uncle Ike, as he lighted up the pipe, after letting
+it go out while listening to the war talk of the excited boy, “do you
+think you could arrange your affairs so as to leave here by tomorrow
+evening and take the limited for Washington? Would you accept the
+vacancy in the office of secretary of war? I know this offer comes
+sudden to you, and that you will have no time to consult your debating
+society as to whether you ought to accept the position, but when you
+reflect that the country is in a critical situation, and needs a man of
+blood and iron to steer the craft through among the rocks, I feel that
+you cannot refuse. The ideas you express are so near like those that
+General Jackson would express if he were alive, that I feel the country
+would be blessed if you were in a position to brace up the President.
+Now go wash your face, and I will wire the President that you will be
+there day after tomorrow morning. But if you go there thinking, as many
+people seem to think, that the President's backbone is made of banana
+pulp, and that he is not alive to the situation, you will make a
+mistake. There are chumps like you all over this country that wonder
+why they have not been selected to run this country, who think the
+commander-in-chief is running ward politics instead of the affairs of
+the country. Of course, a President gets under obligations to different
+elements in a campaign, and finds it necessary to surround himself with
+a cabinet, a few members of which are not worth powder to blow them
+up, but if they were all weak and vicious on the make, and political
+ciphers, and the President himself is all right, the country will not go
+very far wrong. What you boys want to do is to debate less on questions
+you do not understand, and saw more wood. Let the grown people run
+things a while longer, and you boys prepare to take the burden a quarter
+of a century hence,” and the old man got up and put his arm around the
+boy and felt of his head to see if he could find any soft spot.
+
+“Well, I was only joshin' any way, Uncle Ike,” said the boy, as he put
+both arms around the old man, and felt in his uncle's pistol pocket to
+discover something that was eatable. “But, Uncle Ike, I am serious now.
+I have got in love with a girl, and she is mashed on another boy, and I
+am having more trouble than McKinley. You know that quarter you gave me
+yesterday? I saved 20 cents of it to treat her to ice-cream soda; and
+when I went to find her, she was coming out of the drug store with the
+other boy, and I found out they had been sitting on stools at the soda
+fountain all the forenoon, drinking all the different kinds of soda,
+until he had to hold her down for fear she would go up like a balloon,
+from the soda bubbles that she had concealed about her person. I have
+not decided whether to kill my rival, or go and enlist and go to
+the Philippines and break her heart. What did you do under such
+circumstances, Uncle, when you used to get in love?”
+
+“I used to take castor oil,” said Uncle Ike, as he looked at the
+forlorn-looking boy, “but you don't need to. Just you take off those tan
+shoes and put on black shoes, and change your luck. I never knew it to
+fail, when a boy first put on tan shoes and a high collar. He is bound
+to get in love before night. Take off those shoes, and you can go out
+in the world and look everybody in the face and never get in love. It is
+the same as being vaccinated,” and the old man looked sober and serious,
+and the boy went to work to change his shoes, with a bright hope for the
+future lighting up his face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+“Go away from me! Don't you come any nearer or I will smite you!” said
+Uncle Ike, as the redheaded boy came into the room with his red hair cut
+short with the clippers, a green neglige shirt, with a red necktie, a
+white collar, a tan belt with a nickel buckle, and short trousers with
+golf socks of a plaid pattern that were so loud they would turn out a
+fire department. “I am afraid of you. Who in the world got you to have
+your red hair shingled so it looks like red sand-paper? And who is your
+tailor? Have I got to go down to my grave with the thought that a nephew
+of mine would appear in daylight looking like that? Get me a piece of
+smoked glass, or I shall have cataracts on both eyes,” and the old man
+knocked the ashes and deceased tobacco out of his pipe on his boot heel,
+and dug the stuff out of the bottom of the pipe with a jack-knife.
+
+“Well, I had to have my hair cut, because the boys at the picnic filled
+my hair with burdock burrs, and it couldn't be combed out,” said the
+boy, as he took a match and scratched it on top of his head, and lit
+it, while the uncle sniffed at the burned hair. “Aunt Almira cut my
+hair first with a pair of dull shears, to get the burrs out, and then a
+barber cut off all there was left, with these horse-clippers, and I feel
+like a dog that has had his hindquarters clipped to make a lion of him.
+Aunt Almira says I have got a great head. Say, Uncle Ike, did you ever
+examine the bumps on my head? I was at a phrenology lecture once, and
+the feeler could tell all that was going on in a man's head just by the
+bumps. Feel of mine, Uncle, and tell my fortune,” and the red-headed boy
+came up to the old man for examination.
+
+“I am no phrenologist,” said Uncle Ike, as he smoked up and got the boy
+to coughing, “but there are some bumps I know the names of,” and he felt
+all around the boy's head, and looked wise. “This place where there is
+a dent in your head is where the bump of veneration will grow, later, if
+you get in the habit of letting old people have a show, and get up and
+offer them your chair, and run errands for them without expecting them
+to pay you. This place on the back of your head, where there is a bump
+as big as a hickory nut, is what we call the hat rack bump, because you
+can hang your hat on it. The barber ought to have cut a couple of slices
+off that bump with his lawn mower. Here is a bump that shows that you
+are color blind. Be careful, or you will marry a negro girl by mistake.
+As a precaution, when you begin to get in love serious, bring the girl
+to me that I may see if she is white. Here is a soft bump that indicates
+that you will steal-------”
+
+[Illustration: Bump that indicates that you will steal 077]
+
+“Oh, come off,” said the boy, laughing, and removing his head from the
+investigation. “That is where I was struck by a golf ball. You are no
+phrenologist. I know what you are, Uncle Ike; you are a fakir.
+But, say, I was sick last night, after we had that green watermelon for
+dinner, and Aunt Almira said I was troubled with sewer gas, and she gave
+me the peppermint test. Do you think peppermint will detect sewer gas,
+Uncle Ike?”
+
+“I know what you want, boy, you want to get me mad,” said Uncle Ike, as
+he threw his pipe into the grate because it wouldn't draw, and took a
+new one and filled it. “There is no greater fraud on the earth than this
+peppermint test for sewer gas. I had a house to rent, years ago, and was
+ruined by peppermint. When a tenant had anything the matter, from grip
+to corns, the doctor would look wise, snuff around, and say he detected
+sewer gas, and they would call in a health officer and he would put a
+little peppermint oil in somewhere, and go into another room, and when
+he smelled the peppermint he would say it was sewer gas, and send for
+a plumber, and they would begin to plumb, and I had to pay. I had nine
+tenants in two years, and every disease they had was laid to sewer gas,
+and I had to ease up on the rent or stand a lawsuit. When one family had
+triplets, and tried to stand me off on the rent on account of sewer gas,
+I became a walking delegate, and struck, and turned the house into a
+livery stable, and now, do you know, every time I go to collect rent I
+am afraid a horse has got sick, and the livery man will lay it to sewer
+gas. Why, boy, peppermint oil will go through an asphalt pavement. You
+might put peppermint oil on top of the Egyptian pyramids and you could
+smell it in fifteen minutes in Cairo. If anybody ever talks to you about
+sewer gas and peppermint test, call them a liar and charge it to me,”
+ and the old man was so mad the boy's hair began to curl.
+
+“Here, Uncle Ike, what you staring out of the window so for, with your
+eyes sot, like a dying horse, and your body as rigid as a statue?” and
+the boy rushed up to the window and looked out to see what had come over
+the old man.
+
+“Hush, keep still, and don't scare her away,” said Uncle Ike, as he held
+up his hand and motioned the boy to keep still.
+
+“By gosh, if it isn't a woman, Uncle Ike, that has paralyzed you, and
+you always said you didn't care for them any more,” said the red-headed
+boy, as he looked out the window and saw a blonde-haired young woman
+standing on the corner waiting for a street car, and glancing up at
+Uncle Ike through the frowsy hair that was loosely flying about her
+forehead. “And she is a blonde, too, and blondes have gone out of style.
+Didn't you read in the papers that the shows won't hire blondes any
+more, and that nothing but brunettes are in it? It must be pretty tough
+on a blonde to get her hair all fixed fluffy, after years of patient
+coloring, and then find she has gone out of style, and no op'ry will
+hire her to shed blonde hair on the coats of the chorus fellows. Oh,
+Uncle Ike, come away from the window or you will be stolen,” and the boy
+dragged the old man away from the window, handed him his pipe, and said,
+“Smoke up and try to forget it.”
+
+“Forget nothing,” said the old man, as he lit the torch and a smile came
+over his good-natured face. “Don't you worry about blonde girls going
+out of style. These bleached ones, who never were the real thing, may
+go back to their natural, beautiful brunetticism, and when they realize
+how foolish they have been, trying to bunko nature, they will be happier
+than ever, but the natural blonde will never go out of style. She is
+a joy forever. Do you know, when a man gets in love with a girl he
+couldn't tell what the color of her hair was, to save him? He knows all
+about her eyes, and her hands, and her face, but unless he finds a hair
+on his coat he can't tell what is the color of the hair of his beloved.
+Love is like smoking. You may smoke in the dark, and if your pipe goes
+out you smoke right along and don't know the difference. You sit up with
+a girl in the dark and you can't see her, and she may go to sleep, but
+love keeps smoking right along and never seems to go out. When I was
+wounded at the battle of Pea Ridge, and was taken to a young ladies'
+seminary to be doctored and nursed back to life----”
+
+“Oh, do quit, Uncle Ike! If you had been taken wounded to a young
+ladies' seminary, say in 1863, thirty-six years ago, you would have been
+there yet, and your wound would still be paining you, and the girls who
+saved your life would be grown up to be gray-haired old women,” and the
+boy jollied the old man until he blushed. “You must have known a man
+named Ananias in the army. Say, Uncle Ike, you know you wanted me to
+learn a trade, and I have decided that I would like to learn the trade
+of a bishop. I read of the death of a bishop the other day who was worth
+half a million dollars, and now you must tell me how to become a bishop,
+like Newman,” and the boy laughed as though he had got the old man in a
+tight place.
+
+“Well,” said Uncle Ike, after stopping to think a moment, “you might
+do worse. Do you know, boy, that Bishop Newman, who died recently,
+did learn a trade? Well, he did. When he was a boy, he seemed to be a
+no-account sort of a duck, some like you. His parents were poor, and
+lived in the slums of New York. His hair was some the color of yours,
+and he loafed around, and made fun of his old uncle, no doubt, the same
+as you do. He had to do something to help earn the bread and beer for
+the family, and so he went to work stripping tobacco in a factory near
+his home. Somehow he got vaccinated with a desire to learn something,
+and after he had stripped tobacco, and snuffed it, and got some sense in
+his head, he began to learn to read. A girl stripper taught him first to
+read the labels on packages of tobacco, and taught him to spell. Then he
+got a taste for education, and became the smarty of the factory, and
+the boys who could not read called him 'snuff,' because his hair and
+freckles were the color of Scotch snuff. Some white man connected with
+the factory saw that the little rat had stuff in him, and he helped
+him to get an education, and he stripped tobacco daytimes and studied
+nights, and became a preacher, and finally a bishop. So, you smarty,
+if you want to learn the trade of a bishop, strip the wrapper off
+that package of tobacco and fill my pipe. Who knows but Bishop Newman
+stripped the very tobacco I am smoking now?” and the old man puffed and
+laughed at the boy.
+
+“Gosh! it smells old enough to have been stripped when the bishop was a
+boy,” said the red-headed boy, and then he dodged behind a table, while
+Uncle Ike tried to catch him and teach him how to be a bishop.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+Uncle Ike stood with his pipe in his left hand, his thumb pressing the
+tobacco down tight, and with a match in his right hand, just ready to
+scratch it on his leg, when he froze stiff in that position, and never
+moved for five minutes, as he watched the red-headed boy, who had walked
+into the room listlessly, his eyes staring at a picture he held in his
+hand, his face so pale that the freckles looked large and dark, his lips
+white as chalk, his cheeks sunken, his fingers gripping the picture, a
+faded and forlorn pansy in his buttonhole, and his short clipped hair
+standing up straight in rows like red beet tops in a vegetable garden.
+
+“Anybody very dead?” said Uncle Ike, as he drew the match across the
+cloth, put it to his pipe, and began to swell out his cheeks and puff,
+keeping his eye on the boy, through the smoke, who had taken his eyes
+from the picture, drawn a deep sigh, and sat down on the lounge, as
+though he never expected to get up again.
+
+“No, nobody dead,” said the boy, as he laid his head on a sofa pillow,
+closed his eyes, and placed the picture inside his vest. “But I wish
+there was. I wish I was dead.”
+
+“How many times have I told you to put oil on cucumbers, and they
+wouldn't gripe you that way?” said Uncle Ike, as he drew a chair up
+beside the lounge and felt of the boy's pulse, and took his handkerchief
+and wiped the perspiration off his forehead, and finally took the
+picture out of his bosom and looked at it.
+
+[Illustration: She is a nice, warm-looking girl 085]
+
+“She is a nice, warm-looking girl, but you might have the picture on
+your stomach a week, and it wouldn't draw that colic out of you,” and
+Uncle Ike gazed with some admiration on the picture of the beautiful
+girl, whose high forehead, bright eyes, and beautiful chin, showed that
+she had the making of a rare and radiant woman.
+
+“'Tain't colic, and I haven't et no cucumbers,” said the boy, as he
+rolled his eyes up toward the roof of his head. “It's love, that's what
+it is, and I am miserable, and Aunt Almira said you had been in love
+over six hundred times, and could tell me what to do.”
+
+“Well, I like your Aunt Almira's nerve,” said Uncle Ike, as he looked
+half pleased at the accusation. “Of course, I have had some encounters
+with the fair sex, but I have never entirely collapsed, the way you
+have. What's the symptoms? Don't the girl love you?”
+
+“Yes! Gosh, she idolizes me,” said the boy, sitting up, and getting a
+little color in his face.
+
+“Oh, then you don't love her,” said Uncle Ike, probing into the wound.
+
+“It's false,” said the boy, getting on his feet and standing before the
+old man in indignation. “I love the very ground she walks on. Say, when
+I walk a few blocks with her, and can't see her again for a week, I go
+around the other six days and look at the boards she walked on, and it
+makes me mad to see anybody else walking where she did. I want to get
+rich enough to buy all the houses we have walked by, and the street
+cars we have rode in. Love her? Say, you don't know anything about love,
+Uncle Ike. The love you used to have was old style, and didn't strike
+in.”
+
+“Oh, I don't know,” said Uncle Ike, “its all about the same. Was the
+same in Bible times, and will be the same hundreds of years hence,
+when we conquer the Philippines. Same old thing. Nobody invents any new
+symptoms in the love industry. There may be new languages to express
+it in, but it is just plain, every-day love. But if you both love each
+other, what is the use of all this colic?”
+
+“Why, you see, she has to dissemble. That's what she says. She can't go
+with me all the time, and when I see her with anybody else it seems as
+though it would kill me. I know she does not smile at anybody else the
+way she does at me, but the condum fools might think she did, and love
+her. I know if one of those ducks should squeeze her hand, she would
+be mad, and cuff him, but I could squeeze her hand till her fingers
+cracked, and she would enjoy it.”
+
+“I see,” said Uncle Ike, smoking right along. “You are like a man who
+owns the most beautiful diamond in the world, and is not allowed for
+some reason to be known as its owner, but is allowed to wear it only two
+hours a week, and then other people are allowed to wear it. You know it
+is yours, and yet when it is in the possession of others, you don't dare
+go and claim it, and they wear it as though they own it, and people see
+it in their possession and admire it, as it sparkles and throws rays of
+sunshine, and think how lucky is the man who wears it. Isn't that about
+your idea? She is yours, body and soul, but has not been delivered to
+you, eh?”
+
+“Sure! That's it, exactly. What shall I do, Uncle Ike?”
+
+“Shut up!” said the old man; “that is what you want to do. Brace up;
+you have no cause to worry. I can tell by that face of hers. When she is
+going with other boys, as she must, she is thinking of you all the time,
+and wishing your red head was in place of that of the kid who is buying
+ice-cream soda for her. When she walks about the streets she is thinking
+of when you were with her at the same place. And when you are permitted
+to pass an hour with her she will convince you in a minute that you are
+all the world to her, and that the other ducks are not in it. I can
+tell by her eyes, boy, and her mouth, and her whole face, that she is a
+thoroughbred.”
+
+“Well, I swan, Uncle Ike, you are better than a doctor,” and the
+red-headed boy began to hug the old man, and dance around, and kick
+high, and he took the picture and looked at it, and said: “Nobody but a
+chump would doubt that girl,” and the boy suddenly became himself again,
+reassured as to the position he held in the mind of his girl, by a few
+words of kindly advice at the right time, when the boy was on the verge
+of suicide. He laughed and pinched himself to be sure he was awake, and
+then took on a serious look and said: “Uncle Ike, do you think it will
+take two hundred years, honestly, to subjugate the Filipinos, and tame
+them, so that they will eat out of our hands?”
+
+“Well, we ought to do it in half the time the Spaniards have been trying
+and failed,” said the old man, as he slapped a mosquito that was eating
+him. “There, you see that mosquito is dead. No doubt about that, is
+there? But what effect does the death of that mosquito have on the nine
+or ten million of his race that are out here in the woods? This one
+simply got through the screen, and bucked up against a sure thing,
+and his bravery, or gall, got him killed, and I may think I am a hero
+because I killed him. But let me take my gun and go out in the woods, or
+on the marsh, where there are a million mosquitos to one of me, and what
+kind of a life will they let me lead? I should have to be slapping and
+kicking all the time, and couldn't attend to my shooting. It is just so
+with those Filipinos. They will stay in the jungles and breed, and enjoy
+the malaria and the rainy season, and a few will go around the camps and
+sing their songs, and keep the soldiers awake, and bite and poison
+them, and shoot and stab, and when the soldiers chase them they will
+go farther into the jungle, harass the flanks of the boys that are
+discouraged, and when another year is gone there will be more Filipinos
+than there are now, better armed, and hating the Americans worse than
+ever.. We may take towns, hold them if we have troops enough, and start
+a new graveyard at every place we try to hold, and when we give it up
+and go away, the human mosquitos will return buzzing and biting, and
+they will dig up the remains of some mother's boy, just to get the
+gold filling out of his teeth. If the war keeps on a few hundred years,
+instead of one large cemetery at Manila, that can be watched and kept
+a sacred spot, we shall have hundreds of small graveyards all over the
+archipelago, where the boys in blue that are buried will find it mighty
+lonesome when we take the living soldiers away. No, boy, it will not
+take two hundred years to subdue the Filipinos. That is, we will not be
+working at the job that long, because we are not built that way. If we
+find we have got into a hornet's nest, and that the hornets don't
+have any honey, anyway, and that we don't need hornets in our regular
+business, somebody in authority will be apt to know when we have got
+enough, and we will probably shake the dice with some nation that is
+so addicted to gambling that it had as soon shake dice for hornets as
+anything, and we will let them play loaded dice on us, and shake sixes,
+and we will turn up deuces and trays, and let them win the condemned
+mess of hornets that didn't give honey, and that have nothing but
+stings, and wish whoever wins the hornets much joy. Understand me, boy,
+I am not saying anything against the policy of our administration, if it
+has got one, and I will hold up my hands and root for the army as long
+as it is in the game, and will encourage the President all I can to do
+what he thinks is right, but I shall always feel that Spain sold him a
+gold brick for 20,000,000 plunks, and that he has not yet found out that
+it is made of brass. I know the tobacco trust, and the cordage trust,
+and lots of other trusts that are interested, are trying to make him
+believe that the gold brick he bought is good stuff, and that he must
+protect it, or some other nation will get it away from him, but you wait
+until that Scotch-Irish blood of the President begins to boil, when he
+finds out that he has been bunkoed, and he will get those trust magnates
+together some day, and he will get pale around the gills, and mad as a
+wet hen, and he will say that he has heard about all the funeral dirges
+on the longdistance telephone from Manila that he wants to hear, and
+that the wails of the mourning mothers of the dying boys are keeping him
+awake nights, and that he has got about enough, trying to put bells
+on the Filipino wildcats, and that they can take the whole Philippine
+archipelago and go plum to hades with it, for he is going to stop the
+death rate, and get those boys home and set them to plowing corn.”
+
+“Oh, Uncle Ike, don't get excited. I only wanted to change the subject
+from my own troubles to the troubles of our country,” and he went out
+singing, “There's Only One Girl in All This World for Me,” while Uncle
+Ike took off his collar and wiped the perspiration off his neck, and
+fanned himself awhile, and then lit his pipe, smoked a spell, and
+finally said: “Well, it is none of my condum business, anyway, I
+s'pose.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+Uncle Ike was sitting in his room with a bath robe on, and his great,
+big, bare feet in a tub of hot water, in which some dry mustard had been
+sifted, and on a table beside him was a pitcher of hot lemonade, which
+he was trying to drink, as it got cool enough to go down his neck
+without scorching his throat. His head was hot, and he had evidently
+taken a severe cold, and occasionally he would groan, when he moved his
+body, and place his hand to the small of his back. His pipe and tobacco
+were far away on the mantel, though he could smell them, and the odor so
+satisfying to him when he was well, almost made him sick, and when the
+red-headed boy came in the room the first thing the old man said was:
+
+“Take that dum pipe and terbacker out of the room, and put it in the
+woodshed. Your Uncle Ike ain't enjoyin' his terbacker very well,”
+ and the old fellow made up a face, and looked as though he was on a
+steamboat excursion in rough weather. The boy took the pipe by the tail,
+and the tobacco paper in his other hand, and went out, and soon returned
+with a heavy blanket coat on, a pair of felt boots, and a toboggan
+knit-cap, and a pair of yarn mittens on, though it was late in July, and
+the weather was quite hot. Uncle Ike looked at him in wonder, as though
+he was not sure but it was winter, and he was so ill as not to know that
+summer and fall had passed without his knowing it.
+
+“What you got them sliding-down-hill clothes on for, in July?” said the
+old man, as he put one puckered-up bare foot on the other, in the water,
+and sozzled them around in the mustard in the bottom of the tub. “You
+will have me sunstruck yet, if you wear those clothes around here. What
+is up, anyway?”
+
+[Illustration: A lot of us boys are going to the Klondike 093]
+
+“A lot of us boys are going to the Klondike,” said the red-headed boy,
+as he took a big hunting knife out of a sheath, “and I came in to see
+if you would grubstake me. We have been reading about the millions of
+dollars in gold nuggets and dust, that is being brought out, and we are
+going to have some of the gold. Want your corns cut?” said the boy, as
+he sharpened the knife on Uncle Ike's boot that lay on the floor.
+
+“You ducks have been reading about the gold that has been brought out,
+but you forgot to read about the corpses that stayed in the Klondike,
+didn't you?” said the old man as he took a drink of the hot lemonade,
+and pulled the bathrobe around his hind legs. “You tell the boys you are
+not going, and that Uncle Ike will not grubstake you. Tell them you have
+found out that for every dollar in gold that comes out of the mines,
+a hundred dollars is spent to find it. Tell them that not one man in a
+hundred that goes there ever sees anything yellow, except the janders.
+Tell them that seven out of ten men either freeze to death, or die of
+disease, or starve to death, and that every trail in Alaska is marked
+with graves of just such fools as you boys. Tell them that they can make
+more money selling picture books at a blind asylum, or tin trumpets at
+a deaf and dumb school, than they could by digging gold in the Klondike,
+and that you are going to stay home. Now take off that uniform and get
+down on your knees and rub my feet dry,” and the old man drew one foot
+out of the tub and rested it on the edge, while the boy took a Turkish
+towel that looked like a piece of tripe, and began polishing the foot,
+like a bootblack.
+
+“Gosh, but one of your feet would make about six the size of my girl's
+feet,” said the boy, as he fixed the old man up, and helped him onto a
+lounge, where he stretched out and went to sleep. For an hour the boy
+watched the old man, and listened to his snore, and finally he got a
+gutta-percha bug out of his fishing tackle, and when Uncle Ike woke up
+and began to stretch the boy said: “Uncle Ike, I have saved your life.
+This kissing bug was just ready to pounce, on you, and poison you, when
+I grabbed it and killed it. See!” and he held up the bug.
+
+“Yes, I see,” said Uncle Ike, as he rubbed his eyes, and looked at the
+kissing bug. “You examine it close, right by the tail, and you will find
+a trout hook. I used to catch a great many trout with that bug,” and
+Uncle Ike got up and stretched his limbs, and found that his cold was
+gone, and he was well enough, and he dressed himself and began to act
+natural, and after the boy had looked him over, and marveled at the
+sudden cure, he said:
+
+“Uncle Ike, you have deceived me. I thought you was on your last legs,
+and I was going to have a serious talk with you. Heretofore, when I have
+tried to talk serious with you, you have turned everything into fun, but
+now I want a serious opinion from you. What would you think of my going
+out on a farm and learning to be a farmer? I ride by farms and see
+farmers and boys at work, or lying in the shade, or drinking out of a
+jug, or sitting on loads of hay, or riding a horse plowing corn, and it
+seems to me they have an easy life, and they must make money; and if I
+can't enlist to fight Filipinos, nor go to the Klondike, I want to be
+a farmer. What do you think, Uncle Ike?” and the boy looked up into the
+old man's face appealingly.
+
+“Well, bring back that pipe and terbacker, and I will tell you all
+about farming, for I was brung up on a farm till I was busted.” The boy
+brought in the smoke consumer, and after the old man had puffed a few
+times, and found it did not make him sick, he continued: “In the first
+place, you are getting too old to learn farming. When city people have
+a call to farm it, they buy a farm, put up a windmill, get plumbers
+out from town, put in a bathtub with hot and cold water, and buy some
+carriages with high backs, and go in for enjoyment, regardless of the
+price of country produce. They put in hammocks and lawn tennis, and
+the young people wear knickerbockers and white canvas dresses, and roll
+their pants up, and all that. There is no money in farming that way.
+Now, you have got your city habits formed; you don't get up in the
+morning till after 7, and you have to take a bath, and have fresh
+underclothes frequently. You would want to lay in the shade too much and
+ride on the hay. Did it ever occur to you that before you could ride on
+the hay it has to be cut, and cured, and cocked up, and raked around?
+It takes a whole lot of backaches to get a load of hay ready for you to
+ride on. Now, you are going on 20 years old. If you had been born on a
+farm, you would be just about ready to quit it and come to town to learn
+something else. You would have a stomach full of farming, for you would
+have worked about twelve years, day and night; your hands would be
+muscular, and you would have callouses inside of them. You go out on a
+farm now, at your age, and when you get the first blister on your hands
+you want to send for a doctor, and you throw up the job and come back on
+my hands. Suppose you started out next Monday morning to learn to be a
+farmer. Let me make out a programme for you. You would go to bed Sunday
+night at 9 o'clock, and lay awake thinking of the glory of a farmer's
+life, and at 3 a. m. you would go to sleep, and at 4 you would hear the
+door to the attic open, and a voice that would sound like an auctioneer
+would yell to you to come down and get to work. You couldn't argue the
+case with the farmer, as you do with me when I try to get you up early
+to go fishing; and you would get up and put on a pair of cowhide shoes,
+brown overalls, a hickory shirt with bed-ticking suspenders, and you
+would go out into a barnyard that smelled like fury, and milk nine or
+fifteen cows on an empty stomach; and while another hired man was taking
+the milk to a creamery, you would see that it was not daylight yet, but
+you would go in the kitchen and eat a slice of pork, and hurry about it,
+and then you would curry off the horses, and help hitch the team to a
+reaper; and just as it was getting light enough to see things, you would
+go out to a wheat field, and, after the old man had cut two or three
+swaths around the field, several of you would turn in to bind up the
+bundles. They would show you how, and then they would see that you did
+your share of work.
+
+“You would hustle for about four hours, and you would be so hungry it
+wouldn't be safe for a dog to come around you, and you would drink warm
+water out of a jug till your stomach ached, and you would wonder if it
+was not almost supper time, and if you looked at your watch you would
+find it was only about 9 o'clock in the morning, with three more solid
+hours of work before dinner time. When the horn blew for dinner you
+would just be able to climb on one of the horses to ride to the house,
+and the harness would take the skin off your elbows. When you got to
+the house you would want to lay down and die, but you would have to pull
+water up in buckets to water the horses, and go up in the hay mow and
+throw down hay and carry oats to them, and when you went in to dinner
+you would feel as though you could eat a ten course banquet, but you
+would find that it was washing day, and they didn't do any cooking, and
+you would eat a bowl of bread and milk, and chew about a bushel of young
+onions, and when you were filled up and wanted to lie down and go to
+sleep, and die, the old man would tell you to hustle out and hitch up
+that team, and you would be so lame you couldn't ride on top of a hard
+farm harness, and you would walk to the field, your heavy shoes wearing
+the skin off your ankles, and the old machine would begin to stutter and
+rattle, and you would go to work binding bundles at 1 o'clock and work
+till dark, because it looked as though it was going to rain, and when
+you got the chores done, milked the cows, bedded down the horses,
+carried in wood to the kitchen and a few things like that, and they told
+you supper was ready, you would say you would rather go to bed than eat,
+and you would go up in the attic and fall on the bed, and go to sleep
+and dream of your Uncle Ike. Do you know where I would find you next?
+You would come into town on an early freight train Tuesday morning, and
+show up about breakfast time, and you would hunt the bathtub, and if
+any man ever talked farming to you again, you would be sassy to him. No,
+boy, the city man or boy is not intended for a farmer, but the farmer
+boy is intended for the city, when he gets enough of the farm. About so
+much farming has got to be done, but it will be done by those who are
+brought up to it, and who know that every minute has got to be used
+to produce something, that the appetite must be satisfied easily and
+cheaply, and that everything on the farm must be of marketable value,
+and nothing must be bought that can be dispensed with, and that
+everybody must work or give a good reason for not working. The pleasure
+of farming is largely in anticipation. The big crops and big prices
+are always coming next year. You would be about as good at farming as
+I would at preaching,” and Uncle Ike gradually ceased speaking, like an
+old clock that is running down, and ticking slower and slower, and then
+he fell asleep in his chair, and the red-headed boy sat and thought of
+what had been said, and looked at his hands as though he expected to
+find a blister, and smelled of them to see if he had actually been
+milking cows, and then he rolled over on the lounge and went to sleep,
+and the two snored a match.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+[Illustration: I heard a rumor about you yesterday 101]
+
+“Uncle Ike, I heard a rumor about you yesterday that tickled me almost
+to death,” said the red-headed boy, as he came into the old gentleman's
+room while he was shaving, and the boy took the lather brush and worked
+it up and down in the cup until the lather run over the side, and he had
+lather enough on hand to shave half the men in town.
+
+“What was it?” said the old man, as he puckered his mouth on one side,
+and opened it so he could shave around the corner of his mouth. “Nothing
+disreputable, is it; nothing to bring disgrace on the family?” and he
+wiped the razor on a piece of newspaper, and stropped it on his hand,
+as he looked in the mirror to see if there were any new wrinkles in his
+face.
+
+“Well, I don't know as it would disgrace us so very much, if you looked
+out for yourself, and didn't steal,” said the boy, as he began to
+sharpen his knife on Uncle Ike's razor strop. “There is a rumor among
+the boys that you may be nominated for President, and a lot of us boys
+got together and took a vote, when we were in swimming, and you were
+elected unanimously. I am to be the boss who deals out the offices, and
+all the boys are going to have a soft snap. Before the thing goes
+any further the boys wanted me to see you, and have you promise that
+anything I promised should be good, see?”
+
+“Uncle Ike, I heard a rumor about you yesterday that tickled me most to
+death.”
+
+“Well, you are a dum nice lot of politicians, to work up this boom for
+me, without my consent,” and the old man put up his razor, and began
+to wash the lather off his face, and while he was rubbing his red and
+laughing face with a towel, he said: “If I am elected President, and
+I want you to understand that I have not yet consented to take the
+nomination, I would, the first thing I did, have all my relatives either
+sent to jail, or confined in various asylums of one kind or another. I
+think I would send you to a home for the feeble-minded.”
+
+“What's the matter with relatives?” said the boy, as he took the razor,
+and searched around on his lip for some hairs, and finally got hold of
+one, and the razor pulled it so hard the tears came in his eyes; “seems
+to me a President with all his relatives in jail would be looked upon as
+a disgrace to society.”
+
+“Well, I wouldn't care,” said the old man, as he struggled to make
+a fourteen-inch collar button on to a sixteen-inch shirt, and nearly
+choked himself before he found out he had got the boy's collar by
+mistake. “I have watched this President business a good many years, and
+have concluded that the most of the trouble a President has is through
+fool relatives. Look at Grant. You couldn't throw a stone in Washington
+without hitting a relative, and they got into more scrapes, and dragged
+Grant into more disgrace, and fool schemes, than anything. There wasn't
+offices enough for all of them, and some had to live in other ways,
+which didn't help Ulysses very much. Harrison never had any pleasure
+until he had an operation performed on his son to remove his talking
+utensils. That boy would be interviewed and jollied, and he would tell
+more things that were not so, about pa's policy, than the President
+could stand. But a brother is the worst relative a President can have,
+if he is a half-way lawyer. A President cannot kill a brother that is
+older than he is, and can't prevent his being retained, and can't keep
+his brother's fingers out of all the contracts, and his being attorney
+for contractors, and can't tell him to keep away from the White House,
+and don't dare to tell his brother not to go around looking wise, as
+though he was running the whole administration. No, sir; there ought to
+be a law that when a man is elected President, all male relatives
+that are old enough to talk, should have their mouths sewed up, and be
+compelled to put on gloves that are fastened with a time lock, so they
+couldn't get their hands into anything that would bring disgrace on
+the chief magistrate. Now, if you boys want me for President, with this
+understanding, that you shall all keep away from me after the 4th of
+March, and never let anybody know that you ever heard of me, and that
+you will never write me even a postal card, why, you can go ahead
+with your boom,” and the old man tied his necktie so it looked like a
+scrambled egg, and he and the boy went in to breakfast, the boy opening
+the outside door and whistling a weird whistle, which brought three boys
+up on the porch, when he said to them:
+
+“By the way, that presidential boom for Uncle Ike is off. Don't let the
+gang do another thing. He is a lobster,” and the boys went out into the
+world looking for another candidate, followed by a dog that jumped up
+and down in front of them as though he could lead them to a presidential
+candidate or a wood-chuck hole mighty quick.
+
+“Speaking of dogs,” said Uncle Ike, as he and the boy sat down to
+breakfast, and the other boys went out on the street to wait for the
+red-headed boy to finish eating, “where you boys going?”
+
+“Just going to follow the dog,” said the warm-haired proposition, as he
+kicked because the melon was not ripe. “Did you ever drown out a gopher,
+Uncle Ike?”
+
+“Bet your life,” said Uncle Ike, as he dished out enough food for the
+boy to have fed an orphan asylum. “Oh, I had a dog once that knew more
+than an alderman. Do you know, boy, that a dog is the best thing a boy
+can associate with? A boy never does anything very mean, if he has a dog
+that loves him. Many a time I have been just about ready to do a mean
+trick, when the dog would sit down in front of me, and look up into my
+eyes in an appealing way, and raise up one ear at a time and drop it,
+and raise the other, and he would jump up on me and lick my hand, and
+seem to say, 'Don't,' and, by gosh! I didn't. Say, if a mean boy has a
+dog that loves him, the dog is better than he is, and the boy is careful
+about doing mean things, for fear he will shame the dog. I don't suppose
+a dog will get to heaven, but, if his master goes to heaven, the dog is
+mighty likely to lay down on the outside of the pearly gates, and just
+starve to death, waiting to hear the familiar whistle of his master,
+who is enjoying himself inside. Now, let's go out on the porch while I
+smoke;” and the old man led the way, and lighted up the old churn, and
+puffed away a while, and the boy was in a hurry to get away with the
+other boys; and finally the boys came up on the porch, and the dog went
+up to Uncle Ike and licked his hand, as though he knew the old man was
+a friend of dogs and boys. “What's this scar on his nose? Woodchuck bite
+him?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said one of the boys. “And this one on the under lip?” said
+the old man. “Looks like a gopher had took a bite out of that lip.”
+
+“That's what it was,” said another boy, and they all laughed to think
+that a dignified old man like Uncle Ike could tell all about the scars
+on a cheap dog. “Well, boys, I won't detain you if you are going out to
+exercise the dog on woodchucks or gophers. But let me tell you this,”
+ and he puffed quite a little while on the pipe, and seemed to be harking
+away back to the bark of the dog friend of his boyhood, and the boys
+could almost see the dirt flying out of an old-time woodchuck hole
+as the dog of Uncle Ike's memory was digging and biting at roots, and
+snarling at a woodchuck that was safe enough away down below the ground.
+“Let me tell you something. You want to play fair with the dog. A
+dog has got more sense than some men. He can tell a loafer, after one
+wood-chuck hunt. The boy who gets interested when the clog is digging
+out a woodchuck, gets down on his knees and pushes the dirt away, and
+pats the dog, and encourages him, and when he comes to a root, takes his
+knife and cuts it away, is the thoroughbred that the dog will tie to;
+but the boy who sits in the shade and sicks the dog on, and don't help,
+but bets they don't get the woodchuck, and when the dog and his working
+partner pulls the woodchuck out, gets up out of the shade and begins to
+talk about how we got the woodchuck, is the loafer. He is the kind of
+fellow who will encourage others to enlist and go to war, in later life,
+while he stays home and kicks about the way the war is conducted, and
+shaves mortgages on the homes of soldiers, and forecloses them. That
+kind of a boy will be the one who will lie in the shade when he grows
+up, and not work in the sun. Didn't you ever see a dog half-way down a
+woodchuck hole, kicking dirt into the bosom of the boy's pants who is
+backing him, suddenly back out of the hole, wag his tail and wink his
+eyes, full of dirt, at the boy who is working the hole with him, and
+then run out his tongue and loll, and look at the fellows who are
+sitting around waiting for the last act, in the shade, and say to them,
+as plain as a dog can talk, 'You fellows make me tired. Why don't you
+get some style about you, and come in on this game on the ground floor?'
+and then he gets rested a little, and you say, 'dig him out,' and he
+swallows a big sigh at their laziness, and goes down in the hole and
+digs and growls so the lazy boys think he has forgotten that they are
+deadheads in the enterprise, but the dog does not forget.”
+
+“Well, I swow, if your Uncle Ike ain't away up in G on woodchuck
+hunting,” said one of the neighbor boys as they all sat around the old
+man, with their eyes wide open. “How about drowning out a gopher?”
+
+“Same thing, exactly,” said Uncle Ike, as he filled up the pipe again,
+and lit it, and run a broom straw through the stem, to give it air. “The
+dog watches the hole, and keeps tab on the boys who carry water. You
+have got to keep the water going down the gopher hole, and you got to
+work like sixty. Gophers know better than to have holes too near the
+water, and the dog knows what boy flunks after he carries one pail of
+water, and says, 'Oh, darn a gopher anyway; I hain't lost no gopher,'
+and goes and sits down and lets the other boys carry water. The dog
+knows that the boy who keeps carrying water and pouring it in the hole
+is the thoroughbred, and that the quitter has got a streak of yellow in
+him. When the hole is filled up with water, and the gopher comes to the
+surface, and the dog grabs for it, and the boy who took off his clothes
+and carried water also grabs, and either the dog or the boy gets bit,
+usually the boy, the dog knows that the boy who worked with him on that
+gopher hole has got the making of a good business man in him. A business
+or professional career, boys, is just like digging out a woodchuck, or
+drowning out a gopher, and the fellows who help the dog when they are
+boys, are the ones who are mighty apt to get the business woodchuck when
+they grow up. I will bet you ten dollars that if you pick out the most
+successful business man in town, and go look at his left thumb nail, you
+will find a scar on it where a half-drowned gopher bit him, because he
+was at the hole at the right time. Now, go and have fun, and be sure and
+play fair with the dog,” and Uncle Ike took down a broom and shook it at
+them as they scattered down the street, the dog barking joyously.
+
+“I speak for carrying the water to drown out the gopher!” yelled the
+red-headed boy.
+
+“Me, too!” shouted the other boys in chorus, as they disappeared from
+sight, and Uncle Ike listened until they were out of hearing, and then
+he limped down to the gate and looked up the road toward the country,
+but all he could see was a cloud of dust with a dog in it, and he walked
+back to the house sadly, and as he lifted the lame leg upon the porch,
+and took his hat, he said:
+
+“Blamed if I don't hitch up the mare and drive out there where those
+boys have gone. I'll bet I know woodchuck holes and gopher holes them
+kids never would find if they had a whole passel of dogs,” and he went
+out to the barn and pretty soon Aunt Almira heard him yell, “Whoa, gosh
+darn ye, take in that bit!” and she put on her sunbonnet and went out to
+the barn to see if he had actually gone crazy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+“What you scratching yourself on the chest for?” said Uncle Ike, as the
+red-headed boy stood with one hand inside his vest, digging as though
+his life depended on his doing a good job. “Is there anything the matter
+with you that soap and water will not cure?” and the old man punched the
+boy in the ribs with a great big, hard thumb, as big as a banana.
+
+“Uncle Ike, how long will a porous plaster stay on, and isn't there
+any way to stop its itching? I have had one on for seventeen days and
+nights, and it seems to be getting worse all the time,” said the boy, as
+he dug away at his chest.
+
+“Good heavens, take it off quick!” said Uncle Ike, as he laid his
+lighted pipe down on the table, on a nice, clean cloth, and the
+ashes and fire spilled out, and burned a hole in it. “You will die of
+mortification. Those plasters are only intended to be used as posters
+for a day or two. What in the name of common sense have you worn it
+seventeen days for? Let's rip it off.”
+
+“No, I have got to wear it eighteen days more,” said the boy, with a
+look of resignation. “Now, don't laugh, Uncle Ike, will you? You see my
+girl has gone to the seashore to be gone five weeks, and she gave me a
+tintype and told me to wear it next my heart till she got back, and I
+thought I could get it nearer my heart by putting it right against the
+skin, and putting a porous plaster over it, and by gum, I can feel her
+on my heart every minute. Now don't laugh, Uncle.”
+
+[Illustration: Here, this plaster has got to be removed 111]
+
+“Well, I guess not,” said Uncle Ike, as he put out the fire on the
+table-cloth, and smoked a little while to settle his thoughts. “Here,
+this plaster has got to be removed before the fatal day of her return,
+or you will be holding down a job as a red-headed angel. Now, open your
+shirt,” and the old man reached in and got a corner of the plaster, and
+gave a jerk that caused every hair on the boy's head to raise up and
+crack like a whiplash, while the tintype of the girl, covered with
+crude India rubber and medicated glue, dropped on the floor, and the boy
+turned pale and yelled bloody murder. “Now, don't ever do that again.
+A picture in your inside pocket is near enough to the heart for all
+practical purposes. Next, you will be swallowing her picture in the hope
+that it will lodge near your heart. Now I got something serious to talk
+with you about. One of the park policemen was here this morning looking
+for you. He said some of you boys just raised merry hades at the park
+concert last night. What did you do?”
+
+“Just flushed quails,” said the boy, as he buttoned his shirt, and gave
+the sore spot a parting dig. “We played we were hunting quail, and we
+had more fun than you ever saw.”
+
+“There are no quail in the park,” said Uncle Ike, as he looked curiously
+at the boy through the smoke.
+
+“Here, this plaster has got to be removed before the fatal day of her
+return,” and puffed until his cheeks sank in, and the tears came to his
+eyes. “What is this quail fable, anyway?”
+
+“You see,” said the boy, as he took a piece of ice out of the water
+pitcher and held it in his bosom, where the plaster came off, “when
+there is an evening concert at the park, the boys and girls go off in
+couples and sit under the trees in the dark, or on the grass, where no
+one can see them very well, and they take hold of hands and put their
+arms around each other, and all the time they are scared for fear they
+will be caught, and ordered to quit. Well, us boys go around in the
+dark, and when we see a couple in that way, one boy comes to a point,
+like a dog, another boy walks up to the couple and flushes them, and as
+they get up quick to go somewhere else, I blow up a paper bag and bust
+it, and they start off on a run. Say, Uncle Ike, it is fun. We chased
+one couple clear to the lake.”
+
+“You did, did you, you little imp?” said the old man, as his sympathies
+were aroused for the young people who were disturbed at a critical time.
+“Don't let me ever hear of your flushing any more couples, or I'll flush
+you the first time I catch you with your girl. How would you like to be
+flushed? The parks are the only places many young people have to talk
+love to each other, and it is cruel to disturb them by bursting paper
+bags in their vicinity. If I was mayor I would build a thousand little
+summer houses in the parks, just big enough for a poor young couple to
+sit in, and talk over the future, and I would set policemen to watch out
+that nobody disturbed them, and if one of you ducks come along, I would
+have you thrown in the lake. The idea of a boy who is in love the way
+you pretend to be, having no charity for others, makes me sick, I'll bet
+none of those you flushed last night had it so bad they had tintypes
+of the girls glued on their hearts with a porous plaster. Bah! you
+meddler!” and the old man stamped his foot on the floor, and the boy
+looked ashamed.
+
+“Well, that's the last time I will mix in another fellow's love affair,”
+ said the boy, as he climbed up on Uncle Ike's knee.
+
+“Now, I want to talk to you seriously,” said the boy, as he looked up
+into Uncle Ike's round, smooth, red and smiling face. “Us boys have been
+reading about the serious condition of our country, when its wealthy
+citizens are leaving it and going abroad to live. Do you think, uncle,
+that William Waldorf Astor's deserting this country, and joining
+England, is going to cause this country to fail up in business? In case
+of war with England, do you think he would fight this country?”
+
+“Well, you kids can borrow more trouble about this poor old country of
+ours than the men who own it can borrow. Astor! Why, boy, his deserting
+his country will have about as much effect as it would for that man
+working in the street to pack up his household goods and move to
+Indiana. Do you suppose this state would tip up sideways if he should
+quit running that scraper and move out of the state? Not much. The
+Astors have been rich so long that they are un-American. It is not the
+natural condition of an American to be rich. When a man gets too rich,
+he is worried as to what to do with his money. There is no great
+enjoyment that the very rich can have in this country that the poor
+cannot have a little of. The first thing a very rich man acquires is a
+bad stomach. He becomes too lazy to' take exercise, and lets a hired man
+take exercise for him. He looks at his money, and thinks of his stomach.
+In Astor's case there was nothing in this country that he could enjoy,
+not even sleep. Nobody respected him any more than they did every other
+honest man. Only a few toadies would act toward him as though he was a
+world's wonder, on account of his wealth. People with souls, and health,
+and good nature, in the West, got rich as he, and went to New York, and
+knew how to spend money and have fun, and do good with it; and Astor
+couldn't understand it. He wanted to be considered the only, but he
+never had learned how to blow in money to make others happy. If he gave
+to the poor, an agent did it for him, and squeezed it, and made a
+memorandum and showed it to him once a year, and he frowned, and his
+stomach ached, and he took a pill, and sighed. I suppose two girls from
+California, daughters of an old Roman of the mines and the railroads,
+who died too soon, a senator with a soul, taught Astor how to do good
+with money, and maybe scared him out of the country. Those girls seemed
+to, know where there was a chance for suffering among the poor, and they
+kept people in their employ on the run to get to places before the bread
+was all gone, until half a million of the people that only knew there
+was an Astor by the signs on buildings for rent, knew these Fair girls
+by sight, and worshiped them as they passed. The girls are married now,
+but they give just the same, and wherever they are in the world there is
+the crowd, and there is the love of those who believe them angels. Astor
+could not find any one to love him for any good he ever did that did not
+have rent or interest as the object, and he went away where a man is
+respected in a half-way manner, in proportion to the money he spends on
+royalty, in imitating royalty, and he will run a race there, and get
+tired of it; and some day, if he lives, he will come back to this
+country in the steerage, as his ancestors did, and take out his first
+papers and vote, and maybe he will be happy. The only way for a rich man
+to be very happy is to find avenues for getting his congested wealth off
+his mind, where it will cause some one who is poor and suffering to look
+up to him, and say that riches have not spoiled him. But to inherit
+money and go through life letting it accumulate, and not finding any
+avenue where it can leak out and be caught in the apron of a needy soul,
+is tough. No, you boys need not worry about the desertion of Astor. If
+we have a war with Great Britain, you would find Astor taking a night
+trip across the channel, and France would draw him in the lottery. One
+foreigner who landed in this country the day Astor sailed away, will be
+of more value in peace or war than Astor could be if he had remained.”
+
+“Gosh!” said the boy, as he got up out of Uncle Ike's lap, “if you
+are not a comfort! Between that porous plaster, and Astor's going to
+England, and my girl at the seashore, I was about down with nervous
+prostration, but I am all right now,” and the redheaded boy went out to
+round up the gang and tell them the country was all safe enough, as long
+as they had Uncle Ike to run it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+“Well, you are a sight!” said Uncle Ike, as the red-headed boy came in
+the room, all out of breath, his shirt unbuttoned and his hair wet and
+dripping, and his face so clean that it was noticeable. “Why don't you
+make your toilet before you come into a gentleman's room? Where you
+been, anyway?”
+
+“Been in swimming at the old swimming hole,” said the boy, as he
+finished buttoning his shirt, and sat down to put on his shoes and
+stockings, which he had carried in his hat. “Had more fun than a barrel
+of monkeys. Stole the clothes of a boy, and left him a paper flour sack
+to go home in. Wait a minute and you will see him go by,” and the boy
+rushed to the window and yelled to Uncle Ike to come and see the fun.
+
+[Illustration: Nothing on but a flour sack 119]
+
+Presently a boy came down the street from toward the river with nothing
+on but a flour sack. He had cut holes in the bottom to put his feet
+through, and pulled it up to his body, and the upper part covered
+his chest to the arms, which were bare and sunburned, and the boy was
+marching along the street as unconcerned as possible, while all who saw
+him were laughing.
+
+“What did you do that for?” said Uncle Ike, as he called to the boy to
+come in.
+
+“Just for a joke,” said the red-headed boy, laughing, and jollying the
+boy dressed in the flour sack, as he came in at Uncle Ike's invitation.
+
+“Well, that is a good enough joke for two,” said Uncle Ike. “Now take
+off your clothes and change with this boy, and put on the flour sack
+yourself,” and he superintended the change, until the other boy had on a
+full suit of clothes, and the red-headed boy had on the flour sack. “Now
+I want you to go to the grocery and get me a paper of tobacco.”
+
+“O, gosh, I don't want to go out in the street with this flour sack on.
+Some dog will chase me, and the people will make fun of me,” said the
+boy, with an entirely new view of a practical joke.
+
+“But you go all the same,” said Uncle Ike, taking down a leather strap
+that he sharpened his razor on, and driving the boy outdoors. “Bring
+back this boy's clothes, also,” and he sat down and waited for the boy
+to return. He came back after awhile with the tobacco and the clothes,
+followed by a lot of other boys, and after the two had changed clothes,
+and all had enjoyed a good laugh, Uncle Ike said: “Boys, playing
+practical jokes is a good deal like jumping on a man when he is down.
+You will notice that the weaker boy always has the joke played on him.
+Boys always combine against the weak boy. The boy that can whip any of
+you never has to wear a flour sack home from the swimming hole, does he?
+Any joke that you can take turns at having played on you is fair, but
+when you combine against the weak, you become a monopoly, or a trust.
+When I was a boy we used to tie the clothes of the biggest and meanest
+boy in knots, and if he couldn't take a joke we all turned in and mauled
+him. After this, if there is to be any jokes, let the biggest boy take
+his turn first, and then I don't care how soon the others take their
+dose, but this trust business has got to be broke up,” and Uncle Ike
+patted the boys, on the head and said they could go and have all the fun
+they wanted to.
+
+“Speaking of trusts, Uncle Ike, I thought you said, a spell ago, that
+the trusts would be brought up with a round turn,” said the red-headed
+boy, reading, as he glanced at a heading in a morning paper, “but here
+is an article says that a thousand million billion dollars have been
+invested in trusts in New Jersey, and the manager of one of the biggest
+trusts says nobody can do anything to stop them. He says: 'What are you
+going to do about it?'”
+
+“Well,” said Uncle Ike, as he filled the air with strong tobacco smoke,
+and his eyes snapped like they did when he was mad, “you wait. I am
+older than you are. I remember when old Bill Tweed, the great robber of
+New York, who had stolen millions of dollars from the city, and was in
+his greatest power, became arrogant, and asked the people what they were
+going to do about it. When people think they are invincible they always
+ask what anybody is going to do about it. When a bully steps on the foot
+of a quiet and inoffensive man, purposely to get into a row, he looks
+at his victim in an impudent manner and says, 'What are you going to do
+about it?' and the victim gets up deliberately and thrashes the ground
+with the bully. The people got mad at Tweed when he said that, and they
+chased him over the world, and landed him in the penitentiary, where
+he died. That will be the fate of some of these trust magnates. The
+foundation of the trust is corruption. Its trade mark was uttered years
+ago by a great railroad man who said, 'The public be d----d.' That
+expression is in the mind of every man connected with a trust. He turns
+the thumbscrews on the public, raises prices, and if they complain,
+he says, 'What are you going to do about it?' and if anybody says the
+public cannot stand it, they say 'the public be blessed,' or the other
+thing. Now, wait. The public will be making laws, and the first law
+that is made will be one that sends a man to the penitentiary who robs
+through a trust. If three men combine to rob it is a conspiracy. If
+a hundred or a thousand combine to rob seventy million people, it is
+treason. You wait, boys, and you will hear a noise one of these days
+when the people speak, and you will hear trust magnates who fail to
+get across the ocean before the tornado of public indignation strikes,
+begging for mercy. Now, gosh blast you, run away. You have got me to
+talking again,” and Uncle Ike lighted his pipe and shut up like a clam,
+while the boys went out looking for trouble.
+
+Uncle Ike had been dozing and smoking, and fixing his fishing tackle,
+and oiling his gun, and whistling, and trying to sing, all alone, for
+an hour, after the boys had gone out to have fun, and when he saw them
+coming in the gate, two of them carrying a big striped watermelon, and
+the others watching that it did not fall on the ground, he was rather
+glad the boys had come back, and he opened the door and went out on the
+porch and met them.
+
+“S-h-h!” said the red-headed boy, as Uncle Ike thumped the melon with
+his hard old middle finger, to see if it was ripe. “Don't say a word.
+Let's get it inside the house, quick, and you carve it, Uncle,” and they
+brought it in and laid it on the table, and the boys looked down the
+street as though they were expecting some one.
+
+“We never used to ask any questions when I was a boy, when a melon
+suddenly showed up, and nobody knew from whence it came,” said Uncle
+Ike, as he put both hands on the melon and pressed down upon it, and
+listened to it crack. “Do you know, if a person takes potatoes, or baled
+hay, that does not belong to him, it is stealing, but if a melon elopes
+with a boy, or several boys, the melon is always considered guilty of
+contributory negligence,” and the old man laughed and winked at the
+boys. “But a house is no place to eat a melon in, and a knife is not
+good enough to cut a melon. Now, you fetch that melon out in the garden,
+by the cucumber vines, and I will show you the conditions that should
+surround a melon barbecue,” and the old man led the way to the garden,
+followed by the boys, and he got them seated around in the dirt, with
+the growing corn on one side, a patch of sunflowers on another, a
+crabapple tree on one side, giving a little shade where they sat, and
+the alley fence on the other. The boys were anxious to begin, and each
+produced a toad-stabber, but Uncle Ike told them to put away the knives,
+and said:
+
+“The only way to eat a melon is to break it by putting your knee on it,
+and taking the chunks and running your face right down into it. A nigger
+is the only natural melon eater. There,” said he, as he crushed the
+brittle melon rind into a dozen pieces, and spread it open, red, and
+juicy, and glorious. “Now 'fall in,' as we used to say in the army,”
+ and the boys each grabbed a piece and began to eat and drink out of the
+rind, the juice smearing their faces and running down on their shirt
+bosoms, and Uncle Ike taking a piece of the core in his hands and trying
+to eat as fast as the boys did, the red and sticky juice trickling
+through his fingers, and the pulp painting pictures around his dear old
+mouth, and up his cheeks to his ears, while he tried to tell them of
+a day during the war when he was on the skirmish line going through a
+melon patch, and how the order came to lie down, and every last soldier
+dropped beside a melon, broke it with his bayonet, and filled himself,
+while the bullets whistled, and how they were all sick afterwards, and
+had to go to the rear because the people who owned the melons had put
+croton oil in them.
+
+“Gosh, but this is great!” said the red-headed boy, as he stopped eating
+long enough to loosen his belt.
+
+“You bet!” said one of the other boys; “Uncle Ike is a James dandy,”
+ and he looked up and bowed to a boy with an apron on, who came into the
+garden with a piece of paper in his hand, which he handed to Uncle Ike.
+
+“What is this, a telegram?” says Uncle Ike, as he takes it with his
+sticky fingers and feels for his glasses.
+
+“No, it is the bill for the melon----50 cents,” said the grocer's boy.
+
+“Bunkoed, by gosh!” says Uncle Ike, as he looks around at the laughing
+boys who have played it on him.
+
+“Don't ever ask where a melon comes from,” said the red-headed boy.
+
+“Sawed a gold brick on me, you young bunko-steerers,” says Uncle Ike,
+as he wipes his hands on some mustard and feels in his pocket for the
+change; “but it was worth it, by ginger,” and he pays for the melon,
+they all go in the house and wash the melon off their hands and faces,
+the old man lights his pipe and says: “Boys, come around here to-morrow
+and play this trick on Aunt Almira, and I'll set up the root beer.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+“Say, where you been all day?” asked Uncle Ike of the red-headed boy, as
+he showed up late in the afternoon, chewing a gob of gum so big that
+it made his ear ache. “Here, I've been waiting all day for you, with
+so many things on my mind to tell you about that I have had to make
+memorandums,” and the old man took out his knife and shaved some tobacco
+off a plug, rolled it in his hands and scraped it into the pipe, and
+lit up for a long talk.
+
+“I been working,” said the boy, as he took some pieces of chocolate
+out of his pocket and offered them to his uncle. “I am working for a
+syndicate, and have got a soft snap, with all the money I can spend,”
+ and the boy shook the pennies in his pocket so they sounded like
+emptying a collection plate.
+
+“Working for a syndicate, a-hem!” said the old man. “A syndicate is a
+great thing, if you are the syndicate, but if you work for it you get
+left, that's all. Now tell me about it. What you doing for a syndicate,
+and who furnishes you the money to spend? Tell me, so I can see whether
+it is honest. Somehow I can't feel that a syndicate means any good to a
+boy.”
+
+“It is this way, Uncle Ike,” said the boy, as he threw away his gum
+and took another stick out of his pocket, and chewed it until he fairly
+drooled, “you know these slot machines in the depots and hotels, where
+people put in a penny and pull out a knob and get a stick of gum or a
+chocolate, or some peppermint drops. Well, the syndicate wants a boy
+to go around and put in pennies, and get the prizes, when people are
+looking on, so as to get them interested, so they will put in pennies,
+see?”
+
+“Sure! You are a sort of capper for a gum bunko game, eh? Rope in the
+people and get them next to a good thing,” said Uncle Ike, looking at
+the boy over his glasses. “What particular talent does this new business
+bring to the front? Do you make speeches to the people, encouraging
+them to invest their hard-earned pennies in your great scheme for the
+amelioration of the condition of the down-trodden, or what do you do?
+Tell me how the thing works.”
+
+“Why, my work is all pantomime. The man who hired me said I had a face
+that was worth a fortune. I go up to a slot machine, and act as though
+I never saw such a thing before. Then I monkey around, and seem to be
+puzzled, and my face looks serious, and the people in the depot waiting
+for trains gather around and watch me, and when the jays are all ripe,
+ready to pick, I put a penny in the slot, draw out a stick of gum, put
+it in my mouth, and then I smile one of those broad smiles, like this,
+and the people begin to put in pennies, and they surround the machine,
+and money just flows in, until their train goes, when another crowd
+comes in and I work them on the chocolate slot, and just blow in pennies
+belonging to the syndicate that owns the machines. Oh, it's a great
+snap, Uncle Ike. You ought to go into it,” and the boy threw away his
+gum and went to eating chocolate.
+
+“Is that so? My face would be my fortune, too, would it?” said Uncle
+Ike, who was beginning to show that he was mad. “And what salary does
+the syndicate pay you for your valuable services as a piece of human fly
+paper?”
+
+“O, they don't pay me any salary,” said the boy, as he took out a
+handful of syndicate pennies and poured them from one hand into another,
+to show the old man that he had wealth. “I don't ask anything for my
+services. I just get pay in fun, and have all the gum, and chocolate,
+and lemon drops that I can eat. The man told me it would be an
+experience that would be valuable to me in after life, being in the eye
+of the public, leading the people. He said this would be the making of
+me, and open up a career that would astonish my friends. Don't you think
+so, Uncle? Can't you see a change in me since I went to work for the
+syndicate?”
+
+“Well, I don't know but I do,” said Uncle Ike, as he pondered over the
+remarks of the boy. “You begin to look more bilious, probably on account
+of the chocolate you have eaten, to deceive the people at the depot into
+the idea that it is good stuff. And perhaps this experience will be the
+opening of a career. If you can, by your actions, cause strangers to run
+up against a slot machine, I don't see why you couldn't, in time, be a
+pretty good capper for a three-card monte game, where you could pick
+out the right card, and the jay loses his money. If this is the kind of
+business you have selected for a career, it will not be long before you
+will be in demand as a bunko-steerer. You would be invaluable, with
+that innocent face of yours, in roping in strangers to a robbers' roost,
+where they would be fleeced and thrown down stairs on their necks.
+With about two days more experience on a slot machine, some gold-brick
+swindler will come along and raise the syndicate out on your salary,
+and put you on the road selling gold bricks. Starting in business as a
+fakir, you will rise to become a barker for a sideshow, graduate into
+bunko and gold bricks, and if you are not sent to the penitentiary,
+there is a great opening for you as a promoter of a trust in the air we
+breathe. We shall have to part company. My reputation is dear to me.
+I have never turned a jack from the bottom when I had one to go in
+seven-up, and to associate with a boy who will rope people to buy
+mouldy gum, and be an advance agent of prosperity as recorded on a slot
+machine, is too much, and I bid you good-bye. I have loved you, but
+it was because you were innocent and tried to do the fair thing,
+but--good-bye,” and the old man laid down his pipe, picked up his hat
+and started for the door.
+
+“Hold on, Uncle Ike,” said the boy, taking the handful of pennies out of
+his pocket and laying them on the table, “I didn't know it was so bad. I
+won't do it any more. Come back, please.”
+
+“Well, I got to go downtown,” said the old man, “and I will be back in
+an hour. In the meantime you write out a letter of resignation to the
+syndicate. Say that you find a diet of decayed chocolate and glucose
+candy is sapping the foundation of your manhood, and that your Uncle Ike
+has offered you a position on the staff of a gold-brick syndicate,” and
+the old man went out, leaving the boy to write his resignation.
+
+“Well, how is my decoy duck, and has he sent in his resignation?” said
+the old man, as he came in a little later and found writing material and
+pennies on the table, and the boy lying on the lounge looking pale and
+sick. “What is this? Sick the first time you have to resign an office?
+That won't do. You never will make a politician if you can't write out a
+resignation without having it go to your head,” and the old man sat down
+by the boy and found that he was as sick as a horse, his face white, and
+cold perspiration on his upper lip among the red hairs, and on his brow
+among the freckles. The boy's bosom was heaving, and his stomach was
+clearly the seat of the disease, and suddenly the boy rushed out of the
+room, into, the bathroom, and there was a noise such as is frequently
+heard on steamboat excursions. The old man thought it was the chocolate
+and gum that had made the boy sick, until he looked at his pipe on the
+table, which was smoking, although he had been away an hour or more.
+
+[Illustration: Been trying to smoke the old man's pipe, eh 129]
+
+“Been trying to smoke the old man's pipe, eh?” said he, as the boy
+staggered out of the bathroom so weak he could hardly stand, “Well, that
+plug tobacco in the pipe is a little strong for a bunko-steerer, but I
+suppose you thought if you were going to be a business man, and leave
+me, you ought to take with you some of my bad habits. Let me fill the
+pipe with some of this mild switchman's delight, and you try that,” and
+he brought the pipe near to the boy.
+
+“Take it away, take it away,” said a weak voice, coming from under a
+pillow on the lounge. “Oh, Uncle Ike, I will never touch a pipe again.
+You look so happy when you are smoking that I thought I would like to
+learn, so I lit the pipe, and drew on it, and the smoke wouldn't come,
+and I drew in my breath whole length, as I do when I dive off a spring
+board, and the whole inside of the pipe came into my mouth, and I
+swallowed the whole business, and pretty soon it felt as though a
+pin-wheel had been touched off inside of me, and the sparks flew out of
+my nose, and the smoke came out of my ears, and they turned on the water
+in my eyes, and my mouth puckered up and acted salivated, like I had
+eaten choke-cherries, and pretty soon the pin-wheel in my stomach began
+to run down, and I thought I was going to stop celebrating, when the
+pin-wheel seemed to touch off a nigger-chaser, and it went to fizzing
+all around inside of me, up into my lungs, and down around my liver, and
+it called at all my vital parts and registered its name, and when the
+nigger-chaser seemed to be dying it touched off an internal skyrocket,
+and s-i-z-boom--that was when I went in the bathroom, 'cause I was
+afraid of the stick. Say, Uncle Ike, does anyone ever die from smoking
+plug tobacco?”
+
+“Oh, yes, about half of them die, when they smoke it the first time.
+When their eyes roll up, like yours, and they cease to be hungry, and
+feel as though they had rather lie clown than stand up, they don't last
+very long,” and the old man looked serious, and reached for his pipe and
+a match, and said: “Any last message you want to send to anybody; any
+touching good-bye? If you do, whisper it to me, and I will write your
+dying statement.”
+
+“Don't light that dum pipe!” said the boy, rolling over and looking
+like a seasick ghost, as Uncle Ike was about to scratch a match on his
+trousers. “Here is the address of my girl. Write to her that I am dead.
+That I died thinking of her, and smelling of plug tobacco. Put it in
+that I died of appendicitis, or something fashionable, and say that
+eight doctors performed eight operations on me, but peritonitis had set
+in, and there was no use, but that they cut a swath in me big enough to
+drive an automobile through. I had rather she would think of me as dying
+a heroic death, than dying smoking plug tobacco. And, say, Uncle Ike,
+after you have written her, don't make a mistake and send my resignation
+to the syndicate to her. O, God! but it is hard to die so young,” and
+the boy went to sleep on the lounge, and Uncle Ike went to taking the
+kinks out of a fish line, knowing that when the boy woke up he wouldn't
+be dead worth a cent. About half an hour later the boy rolled over,
+opened his big eyes, sat up, and stared around, and Uncle Ike said:
+
+“Now, you go in the bath-room and wash your face in cold water, and
+you will be all right,” and the boy did so, and came back with almost a
+smile on his face, and he looked at the papers on the table, and said:
+
+“Uncle Ike, you didn't send that appendicitis story to my girl, did you?
+Gosh, but I am all right now, and I am not going to die.”
+
+“No, I didn't send it; but next time I will, by ginger,” and the old man
+laughed. “Here, have a smoke on me,” but the boy went out in the open
+air and kicked himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+It was a beautiful, hot, sunny morning, and after breakfast Uncle Ike
+came out on the porch in his shirt sleeves, and with a pair of old
+hunting shoes on, and his shirt sleeves rolled up, showing the sleeves
+of a red flannel undershirt, a kind he always wore, winter and summer.
+He leaned against the post of the porch, lit his pipe, and looked away
+toward the hazy, hot horizon, and thought of old days that had been
+brought to his mind the day before, when he saw the parade of a Wild
+West show. The old man was a '49er, who went across the plains for gold
+when the country was young, and the yells of the Indians had made him
+nervous, as they did half a century ago. He had staked the red-headed
+boy and several of his chums to go to the show, and was waiting for
+them to show up and report. He stepped down on the lawn and took up the
+nozzle of a sprinkler and turned it on a lilac bush, when suddenly
+there was a yell that was unmistakably that of a Comanche Indian; and he
+stopped and looked at the bush, and could plainly see a moccasin and
+a leg with buckskin fringe on it, and he knew the boys were laying for
+him, to scalp him and have fun with him; so he held the nozzle as his
+only protection against the bloodthirsty band of savages, headed by
+Chief Red Head, his nephew, but a bad Indian when off the reservation.
+From behind an evergreen tree down by the gate there came a
+blood-curdling yell, which was evidently from the throat of “Watermelon
+Jim,” a neighbor's boy, while from the wild cucumber vine on the south
+porch came a noise like that of a pack of wolves breakfasting on a fawn.
+
+“Surrender!” shouted a damp voice from behind the lilac bush, where the
+hose was turned. “Surrender, or we burn down your ranch over your head!”
+ and a painted Indian, with red, short hair showing under the feather,
+crawled toward a rosebush, where it was dry.
+
+“Never!” said Uncle Ike, as he bit the stem of his pipe, and smiled at
+the boys who were peeking out from behind the different hiding places.
+“Your Uncle Ike often dies, but he never surrenders,” and he cocked the
+nozzle of the lawn sprinkler, and stood ready for the attack.
+
+The red-headed Indian lit a parlor match and held it aloft, which was
+apparently a smoke signal, for an Indian behind the porch appeared and
+suddenly a swish was heard in the air, and a piece of clothesline with a
+noose in it came near going over Uncle Ike's head; so near that it broke
+his clay pipe, leaving the stem between his lips.
+
+“Ah, ha! You will, will you? Vamoose!” said Uncle Ike, as he turned the
+hose on the Indian with the lasso, and drove him behind the porch with
+water dripping down his calico shirt, taking the color out. Then an
+Indian near the gate began to fire blank cartridges with a toy pistol
+and Uncle Ike put his elbow up in front of his face, as he said
+afterward, to save his beauty, and Uncle Ike started toward that Indian,
+dragging the hose, and shouting, “Take to the chaparral, condemn you, or
+I will drown you out like a gopher!”
+
+[Illustration: Take to the chaparral, condemn you 137]
+
+For a moment there was an ominous silence. The Indians had withdrawn
+behind the currant bushes, but Uncle Ike knew enough of Indian warfare
+to know that the silence was only temporary. Suddenly there was a
+blazing and crackling, and a big smoke from the back of the house, and
+it seemed the redskins had set fire to the house, the hired girl yelled
+fire and murder, and came out with a pail of water, while the chief
+yelled “Charge!” and in a minute Uncle Ike was surrounded by the tribe,
+his legs tied with the clothesline, though he fought with the garden
+hose until there was not a dry rag on one of the boys or himself.
+
+“Burn him at the stake!” shouted a little shrimp who carries papers
+every afternoon, after school, as he wiped the red paint off his cheek
+on to his bare arm, and shook water out of his trousers leg.
+
+“No, let's hold him for a ransom,” said the redheaded boy. “Aunt Almira
+will give us enough to buy a melon, and make us a pail of lemonade, if
+we let this gray-haired old settler off without scalping him.”
+
+“Chief, spare me, please,” said Uncle Ike, as he sat up in a puddle
+of water on the battle ground, with his legs tied. “I am the mother of
+eleven orphan children. O, spare me! and don't walk on that pipe of mine
+on the grass there, with your moccasins. I will compromise this thing
+myself, and pay the ransom. Here is a dollar. Go and buy melons, and we
+will have a big feed right here. But what was the fire behind the house,
+and is it put out?”
+
+“The ransom is agreed to,” said the red-headed boy, as he took off his
+string of feathers, and gave a yell, hitting his lips with the back
+of his hand so it would “gargle,” “and the fire is out. We put some
+kerosene on an empty beer case, that was all.” So Uncle Ike handed over
+the dollar, and was released, while a boy who had washed his paint off
+was sent to a grocery after a melon. Then they wiped the mud off Uncle
+Ike, and all went upon the porch, a new pipe of peace was provided, and
+they talked about the Wild West show of the night before, while Uncle
+Ike did the most of the smoking of the pipe of peace, though he wiped
+the stem once and handed it to the red-headed chief to take a whiff,
+but the chief, after his experience with plug tobacco cholera a few days
+before, declined with thanks.
+
+“What interested you most at the show?” said Uncle Ike, puffing away, as
+he sat on the floor of the porch, and leaned his back against one of
+the posts. “When you go to a show you always want to get your mind on
+something that makes an impression on you.”
+
+“Well, sir,” said the boy who had worked the lasso on Uncle Ike, “the
+way these Mexicans handled the lariat struck me the hardest, only they
+look so darned lazy. They just wait for a horse to get in the right
+place, and then pull up. I would like to see them chase something, and
+catch it by the leg, that was trying to get away. But the Cossacks! O,
+my! couldn't they ride, standing up, or dragging on the ground with one
+foot in the stirrup. Gosh! if Russia turned about a million of those
+Cossacks loose on China, they wouldn't do a thing to John Chinaman.”
+
+“The Indians got me,” said another boy, as he took off a moccasin and
+hung it up in the sun to dry, after his fight to the death with Uncle
+Ike's waterworks. “I would like to be an Indian, or a squaw, and never
+have anything to do but travel with a show, and yell. They just have a
+soft snap, dressing up in feathers, and paint, and buckskin, and living
+on the fat of the land, and yelling ki-yi! in a falsetto voice.”
+
+“Oh, I don't know,” said the red-headed boy, “what struck me as the most
+exciting was the battle of San Juan hill. Say, did you see our boys just
+walk right up to the Spaniards, in the face of a perfect hailstorm of
+blank cartridges, with a gatling gun stuttering smokeless powder, and
+the boys in blue firing volleys, and the rough riders walking on foot,
+and the Spaniards just falling back, and pretty soon we went right over
+them, and down came the Spanish flag, and then the Stars and Stripes
+went up, and there was where I yelled so the roof ripped. But what made
+me cry was to see Old Glory and the British flag get together, every
+little while, and float side by side, and seem to be grown together as
+one flag, and everybody seemed glad. What you think about things, Uncle
+Ike? Don't sit there and smoke up, all the time, but tell us what you
+think about the American and British flags waving together so much
+lately. Are you in favor of an alliance? Do you want to be an assistant
+Englishman, Uncle Ike?”
+
+“Well, I don't want to be quoted much on this business,” said Uncle Ike,
+as he looked around at the boys, who were listening intently. “I have
+watched the course of England and all the countries, for over, fifty
+years, in their relations with this country, and the only friendship
+England ever showed to us was in the last war. They did us good, no
+doubt, and I trust I am grateful, as becomes a good citizen. It was like
+a big boy and little boy fighting. The big boy can whip if he is not
+interfered with, but a lot of boys are standing around, ready to mix in
+to help the little fellow. They are ready to trip up the big fellow,
+so the little one can jump on him, and they are getting ready to throw
+stones at him, and kick him on the shins. Then a big bully that they are
+all afraid to tackle, comes along and says: 'This little fellow picked
+on the big fellow, and kept nagging him till he had to fight or run. Now
+the little fool has got to take his medicine, and you fellows mustn't
+mix in, or you got me to fight. Just keep hands off, that's all.' That's
+all there was to it, but it came in mighty handy, and we appreciate it,
+but there is too much grand stand play about an alliance. In other wars
+with England, Germans and French and Poles have fought with us, and for
+us, and yet we have never felt like having an alliance with them. Do you
+ever take much stock in Russia, boys? Don't ever forget Russia. During
+our war between the North and South, we were once in a tight place.
+England and other countries were about to recognize the Southern
+Confederacy, and England was doing everything possible to break us up,
+furnishing privateers, and harboring confederate gunboats, and making it
+warm for us. Boys, your Uncle Abraham Lincoln was perspiring a good
+deal those days. They say he couldn't wear a collar, he sweat so. It
+was believed that England and several other countries were going to
+simultaneously recognize the Confederacy, and maybe turn in and fight
+us. Warships from other countries were hovering around our southern
+coast, and our soldiers were feeling pretty blue, the cabinet never
+smiled, and nobody laughed out loud except Uncle Abe, and even his laugh
+seemed to have a hollow, croupy sound. One day, when the strain was
+the greatest, and everybody felt as though there was a funeral in the
+family, and there were funerals in most families, a flock of warships
+flying the flag of Russia, steamed by Sandy Hook, and up to New York,
+saluted the forts and the Stars and Stripes all along up to the Battery.
+It seemed as though those battleships never would stop coming. They
+lined up all around New York, and their guns pointed toward the sea, and
+every Russian on board acted as though he was loaded for bear. The news
+went to Washington that night, and they say Uncle Abe had night sweats.
+The next morning a Russian admiral, who had gone over to Washington on a
+night train, called to pay his respects to the President, and presented
+him with a document in the Russian language, which had to be interpreted
+by the Russian minister. When it was interpreted they say old Abe danced
+a highland fling, and hugged the Russians and danced all hands around.
+That document has never been published, but it was to the effect that
+the Russian fleet was at the disposal of the President of the United
+States, to fight any country on the face of God's green earth that
+attempted to mix in. See? It was not long before other nations
+discovered that Russia had sent her fleet to stay, and every Russian on
+every vessel acted as though he was spoiling for a fight, and seemed to
+say to the world, 'Come on, condemn you!' And nobody ever came along to
+fight. And Uncle Abe began to be in a laughing mood, and you know the
+rest, if you have read up about the war. Nobody has ever suggested an
+alliance with Russia, and yet we are under more obligations to that old
+Czar than to anybody. In fact, we don't want an alliance with anybody.
+We want the friendship of all. If I have any more love for one country
+than another, I do not know which it is, only when I see a Russian, even
+one of those Cossacks that rode so well, I feel like taking him by the
+hand and telling him, when he goes home, to go up to the Winter palace
+and give my love to the Czar, because I always have before me the
+picture of that Russian fleet in New York harbor, when things were hot.
+England has done a similar favor during this last war, and if we had
+another war, and the newspapers would quit nagging him, you would find
+the young emperor of Germany doing something for us equally as good. So,
+boys, don't get stuck on one country, but give them all a chance to be
+good to us.”
+
+“Gosh, Uncle Ike, I never heard anything about that Russian fleet,” said
+the red-headed boy. “England can go plum to thunder. I thought England
+was the only country that was ever even polite to us.”
+
+“Come on, boys, let's go and play Cossack,” said one of the Indians, and
+they went rolling over the picket fence on their stomachs, leaving Uncle
+Ike to go and put on some dry clothes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+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?”
+
+[Illustration: 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.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+Uncle Ike was out in the front yard in the early morning, in his shirt
+sleeves, with no collar on, an old pair of rubber boots to keep the dew
+from wetting his feet, and he was helping the Indian summer haze all he
+could, by smoking the clay pipe and blowing the smoke up among the red
+and yellow leaves of autumn, and as he kicked the beautiful leaves on
+the lawn into piles he thought what foolish people they were who claimed
+last week that winter had come, because it was a little chilly, when
+he could have told them, by half a century's experience, that the most
+beautiful part of the year was to come, the Indian summer, the lazy days
+when you want to shoot snipe, and eat grapes, and have appendicitis.
+The red-headed boy came out yawning, half awake, and raised his arms and
+stretched until it seemed that he would break his back.
+
+“You remind me of Indian summer,” said the old man, as he stepped on the
+boy's bare foot with his soft rubber boot.
+
+“Oh, I don't know,” said the boy, as he let out a secret school society
+yell at some boys across the street, which brought them all over-into
+the yard, as though there was a dog fight on. “Uncle Ike, you remind me
+of Father Time, after he has been to a barber and got shaved, with your
+smooth old laughing face. Why do I remind you of Indian summer?”
+
+“Well, your red hair resembles the frosted leaf of the maple tree, your
+brown freckles look like the dead and dying leaves of the oak, your
+unwashed chalky face looks like the leaves of the ash, your sparkling
+eyes like the dewy diamonds on the grass, and your sleepy look as you
+just come from your bed makes me think of the hazy atmosphere that the
+Indians loved so well. What all you boys around here for so early in the
+morning, anyway, disturbing your Uncle Ike when he wants to think?” and
+he grabbed half a dozen boys and piled them up in a heap on the grass,
+and put one of his big rubber boots on the top one, and held them down,
+squirming like a lot of angleworms in a tomato can.
+
+[Illustration: Squirming like a lot of angleworms 185]
+
+The red-headed boy took Uncle Ike by the suspenders and pulled him off
+the boys, and then they all grabbed his legs and threw him down and sat
+on him, breaking his pipe, and pulling off his rubber boots and making
+him yell, “Enough!” before they would let him up, but he laughed and
+spanked them with a leg of a rubber boot, and finally they all sat down
+on the porch, panting, and Uncle Ike was the youngest boy in the gang,
+apparently.
+
+“Come to order,” said the red-headed boy, and every boy took off his
+hat, and braced back against the side of the house, and Uncle Ike looked
+on, wondering what was coming next. “We have met, gentlemen,” said the
+red-headed boy, “to make arrangements to nominate Dewey for President.
+We have watched the manner in which the people have received him at New
+York and Washington; have noticed his modesty and level-headedness, and
+us boys, Uncle Ike, have decided that Dewey shall be the next President.
+If any person has got anything to say why he should not be President,
+let him speak now, or forever after hold his peace. It is up to you,
+Uncle Ike, and this assemblage would like to hear a few casual remarks
+from you, before breakfast, on this subject. Now, boys, hurrah for Uncle
+Ike, the jolliest old scrapper in the business. Now, give the yell, 'Who
+are we! who are we! we are the kids for old Dewe-e--siz! boom! yah!'”
+ and the boys yelled until Uncle Ike had to respond.
+
+“Well, you condum heathen can settle more public questions here on this
+porch than all the political parties,” said the old man, as he fixed a
+broken suspender with a nail, and came up to the boys with one rubber
+boot in his hand, and reached for a new pipe on the window sill, loaded
+it, and lit it for a talk. “You ought to have better sense than to think
+of Dewey placing himself in the hands of the politicians, and going into
+politics, where he will have to be cat-hauled by all the disreputable
+critters in the country. Look at Grant! When he got out of the war he
+was just like Dewey, and would be alive today if he had not got into the
+hands of the politicians. Dewey can sit down in Washington as he is,
+and have more power for good than any President, and he will be proud of
+himself and his country. If he went into politics he would be betrayed,
+and made responsible for all the stealing and mistakes of those under
+him, and in a little while he would hate himself, and would like to get
+all the politicians into a Spanish ship and turn the Olympia loose on
+them.”
+
+“Yes, but nobody could say anything against Dewey,” said the red-headed
+boy, interrupting Uncle Ike. “All he would have to do would be to
+appoint a cabinet of admirals, and give all the other offices to the
+midshipmen and jackies, and send army officers abroad as ministers and
+things. The people would lynch a man that said anything against Dewey.”
+
+“They couldn't say anything against, him, could they?” said Uncle Ike,
+pulling on the rubber boot. “Well, you are an amateur in politics. Do
+you know what they would do if Dewey were nominated? They would prove
+that he murdered a man in Vermont in 1852, in cold blood, and produce
+the corpse. They would swear that he was the inventor of the wooden
+nutmeg, and that he had six wives living, and that he was in cahoots
+with Aguinaldo, and that he didn't sink the Spanish fleet, but that it
+got waterlogged and went down without a shot being fired. They would
+claim that he was the originator of the process of boiling maple roots
+and putting the juice into glucose, and selling it for pure Vermont
+maple syrup. They would claim that the reception he received at the
+hands of the American people was a put-up job; that he paid all the
+expenses himself, out of money he stole from the government, and that
+all the cheering was done by hired claquers, who were all promised an
+office when he was elected. And then if he was elected, every man that
+knew him before he went to Manila would claim to have been the making of
+him, and want to be in the cabinet, and every man that has shook hands
+with him since, would expect the best office at his disposal, and if
+they didn't get the offices they would prove that he was responsible
+for the embalmed beef scandal, and that he was in partnership with Capt.
+Carter in robbing the government, and ought to be in jail. Oh, you can't
+tell me anything about politics, and if I could see Dewey I would tell
+him to say nothing but 'nixy' to every proposition to mix him up.
+Now, all you boys come in to breakfast,” and the old man tossed the boys
+toward the dining room door as though they were footballs.
+
+“Well, Uncle Ike, you have punctured our tire again. Every time we get
+a scheme to save the country, you come in with your condumed talky-talk,
+and throw us in the air. Guess you will have to take the nomination
+yourself, and run on a platform of seven words, 'Here's to the boys,
+God bless 'em,'” and the red-headed boy got under Uncle Ike's arm, and
+the gang went in to breakfast, Uncle Ike trying to argue against being
+nominated, and having to go to the White House with a lot of tough boys
+making life a burden to him, when he would have to get married, for no
+President is a success as a bachelor, as Cleveland found out. As Uncle
+Ike got the boys all around the table, he bent his head and reverently
+asked a blessing--something he had never done before in the presence of
+the red-headed boy, and when the meal was over and the boys had all
+gone away, except the warm-haired one, and Uncle Ike had begun to smoke
+again, the boy said to him:
+
+“Uncle Ike, I did not know that you belonged to any church.”
+
+“Well, I don't,” said Uncle Ike, as he got up and looked out of the
+window, and blew smoke at a fly that was buzzing on the glass.
+
+“Then how could you ask a blessing, and expect that it will be heard? I
+supposed a person had to be initiated in a church, and be sworn in, and
+given the password, and take the degrees, before he was ordained to ask
+a blessing,” said the boy.
+
+“No, that is not necessary,” the old man said. “Now, you haven't got
+much religion, and never jined, but you give thanks to the Lord quite
+often. When you are happy, and enjoying yourself, and smile and
+laugh, you are unconsciously thanking the Ruler for making things so
+comfortable. All pleasure is made possible by a higher power, and all
+you got to do is to feel grateful, same as you would to me if I gave you
+a dollar, and there you are. You just be square, and do business on the
+golden rule plan, and you have got a heap more religion than some people
+who are Matting about all the time. I just thought I would paralyze you
+kids by showing you that I was all wool, and wanted the Lord to keep tab
+on us, and know that we appreciated good health, and all that. Now, you
+go to school, and don't say anything to that blue-eyed teacher of yours
+that you have nominated me for President. I don't want to get girls
+after me, thinking they will be mistress of the White House,” and the
+old man took his gun and went down into the marsh looking for snipe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+Uncle Ike had been reading the morning paper, as he sat before the grate
+fire, in the sitting room, while the red-headed boy was using a slate
+and pencil trying to figure out something to make it match the answer
+as given in the arithmetic, and having guessed the answer right he was
+drawing a picture of Uncle Ike and his pipe, and occasionally wetting
+his finger in his mouth and rubbing out some feature of the old man that
+didn't suit. He had the old man pictured in a football costume of padded
+trousers, nose guard, ear guard, knee pads, and all the different things
+used in football, and when he showed the picture to Uncle Ike, that old
+citizen sighed, though he looked a bit pleased that he should be the
+study of so eminent an artist. Uncle Ike had been reading that there was
+to be a football game that afternoon, between the State university
+and Beloit college, and he wanted to go like a dog, but he had abused
+football so much that he was ashamed to speak of going.
+
+“I hope you are not interested in that disreputable game,” said
+Uncle Ike, knocking the ashes out of his pipe on the andirons of the
+fireplace. “I hope you don't want to go and see respectable boys maimed
+and killed, and knocked down and dragged out, and sandbagged, and
+brained. I have seen a bull fight in Mexico, but I never want to see
+anything as bloody as a football game,” and the old man winked to
+himself, and filled the pipe.
+
+“Oh, what you giving me?” said the boy, jumping up in indignation.
+“Football is no worse than the old-fashioned pullaway you used to play.
+I am going to see this game through a knothole in the fence I rented
+from a boy who has the knothole concession at the baseball park.”
+
+“No, you don't,” said Uncle Ike, “you will go in the gate like a
+gentleman. No nephew of mine is going to grow up and be a knothole
+audience. You get two or three of your chums and come around here
+about 2 o'clock, and I will go with you, and stand between you and the
+sluggers, and see this game out. I don't want to go, and detest the
+game, but I will go to please you,” and the old man looked wise and
+fatherly.
+
+“Oh, you don't want to go, like the way the woman kept tavern in
+Michigan,” said the boy, as he edged toward the door.
+
+“How was it that the woman kept the hotel in Michigan?” he asked,
+looking mad.
+
+“Like hades,” said the boy, “only the man who told me about it said she
+kept tavern like h----l, but I wouldn't say that in the presence of my
+dear old uncle,”, and the boy slipped out ahead of a slipper that was
+kicked at him by the laughing old man.
+
+So in the afternoon Uncle Ike, the red-headed boy and two chums appeared
+at the gate, the old man plunked down two dollars with a chuckle, asked
+if he could smoke his pipe in there, and was told that he could smoke a
+factory chimney if he wanted to, and they went in and got seats on the
+bleachers, and as they sat down the old man said it was almost exactly
+like the bull ring in Mexico. The boys explained to him that the red
+ribbons were university colors and the yellow belonged to Beloit, and he
+must choose which side he would root for. As the red matched his flannel
+underwear and his flushed face, he said he was for the university,
+and then the boys explained the game, about carrying the ball, getting
+touchdowns, kicking goal, and half-back and quarter-back, and when the
+teams came in and the crowd yelled, Uncle Ike felt hurt, because it
+made so much noise, and people acted crazy. Uncle Ike looked the players
+over, and he said that big fellow from Beloit was John L. Sullivan in
+disguise, and wanted him ruled off. The play began, the ball shot out
+behind the crowd, a man grabbed it and started to run, when someone
+grabbed him by the legs and he went down, with the whole crowd on top of
+him. Uncle Ike raised up on his feet and waved his pipe, and when one
+of the men did not get up and they brought water and tried to bring him
+back to life, he shouted: “That is murder. I saw that fellow with the
+black socks strike him with a hatchet. Police!” but someone behind him
+yelled to him to sit down, and the red-headed boy pulled his coat tail,
+he sat down, and the game went on, but Uncle Ike was mad, because the
+dead boy was playing as lively as anybody.
+
+Then a man got the ball and started on a run down the field, with the
+whole crowd after him, and finally they got him down and Uncle Ike stood
+up again and said: “Stop the game. I saw a fellow trip him up, and pound
+him with a billy, and stab him. Say, boys, he's dead, sure. Where's the
+police? Ain't there no ambulance here? Kill the umpire!” he shouted,
+remembering that he was an old baseball fan.
+
+[Illustration: Where's the police 195]
+
+“Oh, don't worry, Uncle Ike, they are all right,” said the boy, waving
+a long piece of red ribbon, as the two bands tried to play a “Hot Time”
+ and a waltz at the same time. “Now watch the kangaroo kick off,” and as
+he kicked the ball the whole length of the field the old man simply sat
+still and said:
+
+“Gee whiz, but that was a corker. U-rah-u-rah!” and the only way to stop
+him was to feed him peanuts.
+
+From an enemy of football the old man was rapidly becoming its friend.
+When the men came together at first, and went down in a heap, legs
+flying in all directions, and noises like heavy blows coming to him, he
+would swear he saw a man strike another with a mallet, but later in the
+game he said it served the man right, and he ought to have been hit with
+an ax, and before the game was over he was so interested that he got
+down off the bleachers, leaned over the railing and yelled at the''
+combatants to eat 'em up, and when the game was over he rushed into the
+field, hugging the players, and saying that it was the greatest thing
+that ever was, and offering to act as one of the bearers to the funeral,
+if anybody had been killed, and when the boys got him out of the grounds
+he took up the whole sidewalk, waving his ribbons, tied on his cane,
+shouting the university yell till he frothed at the mouth, and on the
+way home he took the boys into a store and bought them a new football,
+and insisted that they come into the front yard and play a game every
+morning, and offered to have the shrubbery cut down to give them room.
+As they got home, and the other boys had gone away, the red-headed boy
+said:
+
+“Uncle Ike, you have disgraced the whole family. You went to the
+football game under protest, a quiet, inoffensive citizen, ostensibly to
+take care of us boys, and the first jump out of the box you got crazy,
+and we had a terrible time to get you home. I don't suppose you remember
+what you did do out there. Do you remember of putting your arm around a
+strange lady, and hugging her, and telling her to yell? Her husband is
+looking for you with a gun. Do you remember of grabbing a young woman
+sitting in front of you, just as they made a touchdown, pulling her head
+over into your lap, and patting her cheeks with your great big hands,
+and telling her she ought to marry a football player? Her brother
+is coming up street now with a baseball club. I suppose you have no
+recollection of jumping up and sitting down in the lap of a woman in the
+seat behind you, throwing your arms around her, and telling her she was
+a darling, and squeezing her till you broke her corset. She says you
+offered her marriage, and her lawyer will be here in the morning to find
+out what you are going to do about it. I think you better be examined by
+doctors to see if you are not getting nutty, and let them send you to a
+sanitarium,” and the boy sighed, and looked at the old man as though his
+heart was broken.
+
+“Say, did I do any of those things?” asked Uncle Ike, as he got up
+and looked out of the window, and then locked the door, and acted
+frightened. “Well, I'll be dumbed! I recollect the woman in front of me,
+and the one behind, but I pledge you my word that I did not know that
+I hugged anybody. I am willing to apologize, but I'll be condemned if
+I marry any of 'em, and I'm not crazy. That confounded game got me all
+mixed up, and I may have acted different from what I would ordinarily,
+but it was not my intention to propose to any female.”
+
+“But say, Uncle Ike, what did you think of the game as a means of
+building up muscle, pluck, push, get there, and general usefulness?”
+ asked the boy.
+
+“Greatest thing I ever saw,” said Uncle Ike, as he looked out of the
+window, to see if any females he might have hugged in his excitement
+were out there waiting for him. “Say, I saw young fellows in that game
+that I used to know, who would cry if taken across their father's knee,
+and beg for mercy, and they would rush into the most dangerous position,
+and if knocked silly they would smile, never groan, and suck a swallow
+of water out of a sponge, and go in for another knockdown. That game
+will make men of the weak boys, and cause them to be afraid of nothing
+that walks. The boy who pushes, and tackles, and runs through a
+wilderness of other boys who are trying to down him, and get his pigskin
+away, will become the pushing business man who will go through the line
+of business progress, and make a touchdown in his enterprise, and he
+will kick a commercial or professional goal, over the heads of all
+competitors. Life is only a football game, after all. Every man in
+business who is worth his salt is a pusher, a shover, a tackier, a
+punter, or half-back, and the unsuccessful ones are the ones who carry
+the water to bring the business players to, when they become overheated,
+and do the yelling and hurrahing when the pushing business man in the
+football game of life makes a touchdown. It is these rough players that
+become the rough riders when war comes to the country, and they rush
+the ball up San Juan hill in the face of the Spanish tacklers, and the
+interference of barbed wire and other things. War is a football game
+also, and the recruiting officers are not looking for the weak sisters
+who can't push and shove, and fight, and fall over each other, and
+when wounded laugh and say it is nothing serious. A country that has a
+majority of its boys growing up to fight on the football field for fun,
+has no cause to fear any war that may come to it, for if they will fight
+like that in good nature, to uphold the colors of their college, what
+will they do to uphold 'Old Glory,' which comprises the dearest colors
+in all the world? Yes, boy, you can go on playing football, and if you
+are injured your Uncle Ike will pay all the expenses, and sit up nights
+with you, but you better not take me to any more games, for the first
+thing you know I will be bringing home here more wives than that Utah
+congressman has got. Now, go rest up, and next week I will take you to
+see President McKinley, at the hotel here, and you will see him throw
+his arms around me and say, 'Hello, Uncle Ike!' I used to know him when
+he wasn't President,” and Uncle Ike dismissed the boy, and sat by the
+window till dark, looking out to see if anybody was coming to claim his
+hand in marriage, and wondering if he did make as big a fool of himself
+at the football game as the boys said he did.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+It was Sunday afternoon, and Uncle Ike had been to church with the
+red-headed boy, and they had listened to a sermon on patriotism, and the
+minister had expressed himself on the subject of the Philippines, and
+the duty the President owed to civilization to keep on killing those
+negroes until they learned better than to kick at having a strange race
+of people boss them around, and Uncle Ike had walked home along the
+bank of the lake, and breathed the free air that was his because his
+ancestors had conquered it from England, and he couldn't help having a
+little sympathy for those Filipinos who had been bought from a country
+that didn't own them, by a country that had no use for them, and wished
+it could get rid of them honorably, without hurting the political party
+that was acting as overseer over them. He didn't want to seem disloyal
+to a country that he loved and had fought to preserve, but when he
+thought of those poor, ignorant people, trying to learn what freedom
+meant, and what there was in it for them, studying the constitution
+of the United States to find out how to be good and great, and dodging
+bullets, he felt as though he wished he knew just what the Savior of Man
+would do in the matter if He had been elected President. He had left
+the red-headed boy at Sunday-school, and now they were both back home,
+waiting for the dinner bell to ring. The boy was studying some pamphlet
+he had brought home, and looking mighty serious.
+
+“Any great problem been presented to you at Sunday-school that you are
+unable to solve?” said Uncle Ike, as he walked by the boy and tried to
+stroke the corrugated lines out of his forehead, and patted him on the
+head. “For if there is anything you are in doubt about, all you got to
+do is to let your Uncle Ike be umpire, and he will straighten it out for
+you.”
+
+“Thank you, awfully,” said the boy, as he dropped his book, walked up
+to the old man, and looked him squarely in the face. “You are the man I
+have been looking for. Uncle Ike, suppose a man should haul off, without
+provocation, and smash you on the side of the face, a regular stinger,
+that would jar your head until you could see stars, what would you do?”
+
+[Illustration: I would give him one on the nose with my left hand 203]
+
+“Oh, say, that is an easy one,” said the old man, as he filled the pipe
+and lighted it, and threw the match in the grate. “Do you know what I
+would do? I would give him one on the nose with my left hand, and when
+he was off his guard I would paste him one under the ear, or on the
+point of the jaw, and then I would stand over him and count ten, and if
+he came to, I would give him some more, and when he had got enough, I
+would say to him: 'Now, when you feel that way again, and want to enjoy
+yourself, you come right to me, for I don't have any too much exercise,
+anyway.' But why do you ask? You knew all the time what I would do if a
+man hit me,” and the old man walked around the room as though he would
+like to see someone hit him.
+
+“That's what I feared,” said the boy, as the twinkles played around his
+eyes. “You see, among the verses in the Sunday-school lesson was this
+one, 'If they smite you on one cheek, turn the other cheek, also,' and
+I thought I would like to get the opinion of an expert as to how to go
+about it, to turn the other cheek the right way.”
+
+“Say, here, you don't take advantage of an old man that way,” said Uncle
+Ike, as the boy began laughing. “When you ask questions like that you
+want to read the verse first, and give a man a chance. 'Course, if they
+smite you on one cheek, you want to do just what the Bible says. Some
+of you kids make me tired,” and the old man wished dinner was ready, so
+they could change the subject.
+
+“I told my teacher I didn't see how a fellow could turn the other cheek,
+also, and maintain his standing in society, but she said it was the way
+to do, and then the Sunday-school superintendent came along, and she
+asked him about it. He belongs to the athletic club of the Y. M. C. A.,
+and I have seen him box with soft gloves, and he said it was right to
+turn the other cheek, but I noticed he smiled, and then the minister
+visited our class, and the teacher asked him to impress on us boys the
+idea of turning the other cheek. He looked pious, and said you must
+turn the other cheek when smote, as it showed a meek and forgiving
+disposition, but I know the minister is a boxer, also, and I heard that
+he almost jarred the head off a tramp last summer for sassing him, so
+I am worried as to what it is best to do, in a case of smoting. The
+teacher, you know her, the pretty girl that let you hold her hand so
+long at the picnic, when you was introduced to her, and you told her you
+used to know her mother when she was a girl, and used to go with her,
+and all that rot, she told me I better talk it over with you, Uncle Ike,
+and see what you thought about it. So you honestly think it is best for
+a boy to grow up letting people get in the habit of smiting, so to see
+him turn his other cheek, and get another bat on that cheek, eh? Don't
+you think a boy that takes that kind of medicine, without making up
+a face, ought to say, 'Thank you, ever so much,' and always wear
+pinafores, and stay in the kindergarten, and if he ever grows up and
+goes into business he better become a he-milliner, or a manicure, say?
+It's up to you, now, Uncle Ike, and I am ready to listen, and to follow
+your advice, and be a boy or a girl, just as you say, but I don't
+know any girl in my set that would let anybody smite her much, without
+pulling hair a little, at least.”
+
+Uncle Ike had been thinking pretty hard, as the boy talked, had let his
+pipe go out, and his face had taken on a serious look, a look also of
+pride as he listened to the boy, but he was trying to think how to steer
+him right on that turning the other cheek also business. He fumbled for
+the tobacco bag, and as he emptied some tobacco into the pipe, his hand
+was unsteady, and he spilled a good deal on the floor, and he had to
+scratch two or three matches on his pants before he could get one that
+wouldn't break off, or go out. Finally he got the pipe lighted, and he
+puffed a long time, and looked at himself in the big mirror over the
+mantel, to see if he was looking his best, and finally he said:
+
+“I'll tell you, my boy, I don't think they are turning the other cheek
+also when smote, as much as they used to. The theory is all right, and
+if everybody would do so, there would not be any trouble, and all would
+be peace. I suppose that verse in the Bible was written when the Jews
+were trying to get along without having scraps all the time. There
+were people there, Jew-baiters, I suppose, who just laid for them, and
+knowing them to be opposed to a fight, they would smash them, and on the
+advice of leaders they would turn the other cheek, and go home with a
+black eye. I don't suppose I could write a Bible half as good as the old
+one, but I think if that verse had been changed a little, so the Jews
+would have stood up for their rights, and everlastingly lambasted
+anybody that came around jarring them on the cheeks, and been brought up
+to fight their way through, from Jerusalem to France, things would have
+been different. But, as I say, things have changed a good deal since
+Bible times. I think, now, if I was a boy, growing up to take my place
+in the business world, I might try to forget that verse, or think of it
+as we do of the Golden Rule, or the 'love one another' verse. You may
+try as hard as you like and you can't love your neighbor as yourself,
+unless he, or she, as the case may be, is a lovable person, and loves
+back. There can be no arbitrary rules that will bind you against what
+you think is right. Suppose your neighbor is a horsethief, or a liar,
+who belongs to another political party, and backbites, and steals your
+wood, and kicks your dog, and puts up jobs on you, how you going to love
+that neighbor as yourself? Two or three thousand years ago maybe these
+things would have been all right, when they didn't have any newspapers,
+and trolley cars, and there was no business except selling fish, and no
+money but coppers. I'll tell you how I shall bring up my boys, when
+I have any, and that is to keep their cheeks away from the smoter who
+smotes. Be on your guard, and if a boy tries to smite you on one cheek,
+you duck, and side-step, and smile at him, and keep your hands up so
+if he makes a feint to smite you on one cheek, just stand him off, and
+maybe he will think that you are onto his smiting on the cheek business
+yourself, and are no chicken, that is going to keep cheeks for other
+people to smite, and he may quit, and you can laugh over it, and
+consider the incident closed. But if he gets gay, and it seems to be his
+day to smite cheeks, and he acts as though he had picked you out for a
+soft mark, and rushes in to do you up, if I ever hear of your running,
+or putting your hands down, and letting him biff you, one, two, on both
+cheeks, and you come home here crying, with the nosebleed, and your eye
+blacked, and you haven't done a thing to that cheek smiter, I will warm
+your jacket so you will think there is a hornets' nest in it, hear
+me?” and the old man looked cross and sassy. “No, sir; you just let him
+search for your cheeks, and if he won't quit, you finally give him your
+left in the neck, and side-step, and keep out of his way, and if he
+wants more, find a place where there is an opening, and jab him until
+he quits looking for cheeks to smite, and other cheeks to turn also. I
+don't know as it is right, but turning the other cheek also has gone out
+of style, and nobody is doing it that has got any gravel in their crop.
+Don't let me ever catch you fighting, that is, bringing on a fight, but
+don't you ever let anybody use you to practice that verse on, because
+your minister or your Sunday-school superintendent wouldn't allow
+anybody to smite them without getting hurt.”
+
+“Well, I like that,” said the boy, getting up and starting for the
+dining room. “I will do just as you say, Uncle Ike, and try to avoid
+trouble. But what shall I tell that blue-eyed teacher you advised
+me--the one, you know, that you was so sweet on at the picnic?”
+
+“Oh, tell her I told you to try and grow up to be a regular
+thoroughbred, like your Uncle Ike, and only turn the other cheek to
+girls, see! And tell her I never squeezed anybody's hand at a picnic,
+unless they commenced it, by gosh!” and the old man took the red-headed
+boy in his arms and carried him bodily into the dining room, and there
+was a smile on his good old face that was good to look upon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+Uncle Ike had met with a misfortune that troubled him, and he was
+smoking and trying to think of some way to explain the affair. All his
+life he had been an all-around sport, and cluck shooting had been his
+hobby. He had prided himself that he could ride any boat that an Indian
+could, and bragged that he had never got his feet wet in his forty years
+as a duck shooter; but this morning he had gone out in a boat, before
+anybody was up about the house, and when he was not looking, a wave
+tipped the boat up on one side, filled it with water, and had gone down
+with him before he could say Jack Robinson, and he had floundered around
+in mud and water up to his armpits, singing “A life on the ocean wave,”
+ and yelling for somebody to come and tie him loose.
+
+[Illustration: A life on the ocean wave 211]
+
+A neighbor had come with a boat, and dragged him ashore, and he had
+taken off his wet clothes, hung them on the fence to dry, put on some
+dry clothes, and he was smoking his pipe and wringing the water out
+of his wet pants, when the red-headed boy came out to inquire into the
+marine disaster.
+
+“Getting your washing out pretty early in the morning, Uncle Ike,” said
+the boy, as he lifted a wet sweater off the fence, and took some wet
+cartridges out of the pockets. “Is it healthy to go in swimming with so
+many clothes on? How did this thing happen, anyway?”
+
+“Now, don't get gay,” said Uncle Ike, “and I will tell you. It was
+blowing a hurricane, and the wind took the boat up in the air about ten
+feet, and it dove down head first, and what could I do but get out?
+A cramp took me in the leg, and I stood on t'other leg, but I wasn't
+afraid. I didn't yell, but just said to a man who was about half a mile
+away, says I, 'Kindly assist me to land,' and he took me by the shirt
+collar and escorted me to the shore.”
+
+“I see,” said the boy; “you whispered to him, when he was half a mile
+away, but did not yell for help. Oh, you're a mark, trying to make
+believe you are young enough to enjoy sport. Say, you ought to have a
+shawl strap on you, so your rescuer can have something to take hold of;
+and if I were in your place, I would get the dimensions of Noah's ark,
+and have one made to fit me. You better buy your ducks, and stay on
+land. But now that the Prodigal Uncle has got back, I am going out to
+kill a fatted calf, and we will have a calf banquet. Say, Uncle Ike,
+did you ever read about the Prodigal Son? We had it in our Sunday-school
+lesson last Sunday. They didn't do a thing to him, did they?”
+
+“Yes, I have read about the Prodigal Son, and I give it to you
+straight--he was the greatest chump mentioned in the Bible, and
+sometimes I think you are a dead ringer for him!” and the old man laughed
+at the boy.
+
+“Oh, I don't know,” said the boy, as he poured some water out of Uncle
+Ike's rubber boots, that hung on the fence; “you and Noah size up about
+right. If you had been running that ark, you would have spilled the
+whole outfit, and nobody ever would have got ashore. But that Prodigal
+Son makes me tired. He was a regular jay. He run away from home, and got
+in with a terrible crowd, and they pulled his leg for all the money
+he had. They steered him up against barrel houses, and filled him with
+liquor that would burn a hole in a copper kettle, got him mixed up with
+queer women, and he painted the towns red; and when his money was all
+gone, they kicked him out with a case of indigestion and a head on him
+that hurt so he could not wink without thinking there was an earthquake.
+Say, Uncle Ike, do you know that fellow had some sense after all? When
+he found that all his new-found friends wanted was his money, and to
+help him spend it, and that they shook him when it was gone, he had a
+right to be disgusted with the world; and if he had been like some of
+our present day prodigals, he would have turned tramp, or held up
+a train, or stolen a horse and been lynched; but he just tumbled to
+himself and took the first job that came along, herding hogs, but he
+didn't live high. He worked for his board and furnished his own husks.
+Do you know, I can't help thinking the man that hired Prod. to drive
+hogs was in a trust, and made all the money there was in the deal. But
+he was repaid for all his suffering. When he thought of the old folks at
+home, and drew his wages and started back, without clothes enough on him
+to wad a gun, thinking maybe they would stick up their noses and say he
+smelled bad, and quarantine him, and make him take a bath, but, instead
+of doing so, they just fell on his neck and wept, and set up a calf
+lunch for him, he must have thought the world was worth living in. Uncle
+Ike, were you ever a prodigal son?” and the boy turned over the wet
+clothes so the sun would dry the other side.
+
+“Yes, sir, I have been a prodigal son, and every boy who goes away from
+home to make his own living is a prodigal son, in a way,” and he and
+the boy sat down under a tree, the one to talk and the other to listen.
+“When a boy decides to leave the old roof tree at home to go out into
+the world, it is most always against the wishes of his parents; but he
+argues with them, and finally prevails on them to let him go. It is what
+he amounts to after he gets away that makes him either a prodigal or a
+thoroughbred. If a boy goes into bad company, and thinks the world is
+made to spend unearned money in, instead of to earn money in and save
+it, it is only a matter of time when he comes back home a prodigal son,
+either alive and needing a doctor and a mother's care, or he comes in
+a box to be buried, his father to pay the express charges. On the other
+hand, if he gets a job, doing something, anything, masters the business,
+and becomes a valuable citizen, maybe in time at the head of his
+profession or business, some day he comes home to the old folks, and
+there are smiles instead of tears, a brass band instead of the singing
+by the funeral choir, and he pays the mortgage on the old homestead,
+instead of having his father pay express charges on the remains. That
+is the difference. All boys can be prodigals if they have the prodigal
+bacillus in their systems when they go out into the world; but if they
+have the get-there-Eli microbe concealed in their pajamas when they go
+away, they can laugh at the traps and nets that are thrown out to catch
+them, stand off the alleged friends who try to induce them to go
+into the red paint business, use the red liquor to rub on bruises and
+strained muscles on the outside, instead of taking it internally to
+build fires that never quench. Which kind of a prodigal nephew you want
+to be--one who comes home with a suit of clothes and a bank account, the
+glow of health on your cheek, and a love of life and all that goes with
+it; or a prodigal with a blanket, a haversack full of husks that the
+hogs won't eat, all the diseases that are going in the set you have
+moved in, and a desire to die on the doorstep of the old home before
+they can cook the calf? Which you want to be, boy?”
+
+“I'll tell you, Uncle Ike,” said the boy, laying his head in the old
+man's lap, as they sat under the tree; “I am going to be the kind of
+a prodigal who comes home with the good health, and the money, and the
+appetite for calf; and when you are old, Uncle Ike, you sha'n't get wet
+any more, for I will buy you a duck boat that can't be tipped over with
+jackscrews, that you can't break with an ax, and that has air chambers
+in both ends, so it couldn't be sunk if loaded with railroad iron; and
+I will buy you a pump gun that will shoot ducks without your aiming it,
+and you shall have a picnic as long as you live. That is the kind of
+prodigal nephew I am going to be”; and the old man stroked the red hair
+on the head that lay in his lap, and the tears stole down his cheeks as
+he thought what a difference there was in prodigals. He thought of his
+own prodigal days, when he went out from the home roof tree to make his
+way in the world; how he worked on a farm from long before daylight in
+the morning, till all the rest had gone to bed, and his back ached so
+he could not sleep; how he jumped the farm when he found his wages
+decreased as the work became harder and the weather colder, and he went
+into the city and worked at many different trades, and finally became
+a printer, and grew up to be an editor, made money and went back home a
+grown man, with a moustache that actually had to be combed; and how the
+girls that would not speak to him when he was a dirty, freckled boy,
+wanted to give parties in his honor, and how he shook them; and now he
+regretted, old bachelor that he was, that he had not allowed them to
+entertain him, so he might have picked out the best one of them for his
+wife; and he sighed, and got up and wrung some more water out of his
+wet clothes hanging on the fence, and wondered how in the world he could
+have allowed himself to be tipped over in a boat, and if he actually did
+make a fool of himself when he was there in the water, wishing he hadn't
+gone hunting at all.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy, by
+George W. Peck
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