“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.