“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:
“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 negro,” 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 negro show business, and she said, what is it, and I said, I give it up for I am no end man.”
“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 negroes 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—”
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