“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.