Part 2

There is no maddened rush of an angry bull. He stops for an instant with a startled look--surprise, and hurt wonderment, and "what for?" written on his face as plain as man can talk. A baiter inside the ring with a blanket shook out at his side stands just ahead of him. The bull charges the blanket--no danger to the man--the gate is shut, and the baiters with their blankets held out at their sides get the bull more and more into fighting trim.

But the crowd wants blood. So a baiter on a horse, rides up and jabs the bull's shoulder with his spear, and another rider jabs him on the other side. The bull wheels to catch his tormentor, who is out of harm's way on his horse. The bull charges back and forth, from rider to rider, until one of them deliberately reins his blinded horse directly in range of the bull, who rips its entrails out. The rider deftly and easily dismounts; the blinded horse is down, and the bull finishes him with a thrust or two, and the crowd goes mad with "delight." The remaining two riders have played their part, and withdrawn from the ring, and six baiters on foot take up the "sport," and with their blankets draw the bull from the now dead horse. He charges from one to the other, with no more danger to the trained athletes on foot than there would be to a hound after a rabbit.

* * * * *

But the rabbit has a chance for its life--the bull none.

* * * * *

And now another baiter comes with two harpoon spears on handles two feet long decked with ribbons, and tempts the bull to charge him. The bull accepts the challenge, and as he charges the trained baiter side-steps, and, as the bull passes, plants his harpoons in the bull's sides.

Good act! The crowd goes wild again. This sport is kept up for half an hour, till the poor beast's sides are full of barbed spears, and the crowd cries out for blood, more blood, when the lord high executioner steps up with a long, murderous, stiff-bladed sword, about four feet long, and with his blanket tempts the tired bull to lower his head, then he drives the sword to its hilt between the bull's shoulders.

The bull does not drop dead. The matador missed his heart; but with that blade thrust through his body, the bull staggers--braces himself on his four feet. The matador vainly tempts the bull to charge the blanket. The look in the dying bull's eyes would move a heart of stone to pity--he trembles, falls to his knees, drops in a convulsive heap, and dies.

The matador salaams low as he receives the plaudits of the crowd. A team of fine horses, decked in red blankets, is driven on a gallop to the dead bull, a rope is attached to his legs, and the horses gallop out of the arena, snaking the bull in their wake.

The team comes back, and in like theatrical manner the dead horse is snaked off, and the crowd sets up a howl to bring on another bull. Three to five bulls are tortured for an afternoon's "entertainment." They tortured three yesterday, but I was more than satisfied with one, when I left them to their "sport." Carranza's headquarters are at Juarez. He "graced" the bull fight with his presence, and if Huerta had been in Juarez he would probably have been there too.

II

"MISSOURI" AND HIS FALSE TEETH

I labor under a great disadvantage in writing this ship-board letter, en route from San Francisco to Yokohama.

My contract reads that these letters shall tell of personal experiences, and when I discover a new, fresh theme that I am not qualified to tackle, I naturally feel that fate has been unkind to me.

There has recently been discovered a strange malady which attacks travelers at sea. I find competitors in writing travel stuff have me on the hip in this regard. This new malady, in which I know the public must have a breathless interest, is so replete with possibilities from a pencil pusher's standpoint, I more than half suspect that some writers aren't playing fair.

I fear some of them are no more qualified from personal experience to write about it than I am, but they are banging ahead and writing about it anyway, just because it is a new, fresh subject, full of thrilling possibilities for the pen artist, and as for the artist who can draw pictures to illustrate it--honest you'd die laughing, there's so many funny things about it.

The ship's doctor, whom I've interviewed for data, advised me to cut it out; that, like everything new, the writers have already overworked it.

He told me they called it seasickness in the steerage, and _mal de mer_ in first cabin, and that it hits first cabin harder than it does steerage.

I never was strong on fads. The beaten path for me!

I am also under contract to write about the folks I meet. Now there's a subject worth while,--folks. You'll strike them on shipboard. I'm pretty close to one chap so soon. He is on a business trip to China. He is from some place in Missouri--he's from Missouri all right.

I understand he has dealt largely in horses. It's his first trip to Japan and China, and he seems to cling to me, and I have much of his life's history. The first thing I noticed about him was his beautiful teeth--as fine a set of teeth as I ever saw in a man's mouth. The first meal after sailing he got up and left the table abruptly, and I missed him till the next meal, when again he left the table--seemed to be in trouble.

The next time I saw him was at dinner, and I was shocked! He had lost two teeth on one side and three on the other--upper teeth. It made a great difference in his personal appearance--but he seemed to enjoy that meal without any break.

After dinner, on deck, away from anyone else, I commiserated him on the loss of those teeth--felt well enough acquainted--you can make better time getting acquainted on shipboard than anywhere else.

I asked him why he had to sacrifice those teeth; that they looked like fine teeth. Was it really necessary to have them out? Hadn't he taken a chance in having the ship's doctor play dentist? And then he poured out his whole soul to me about those teeth.

"Mr. Allen," he said, "the ship's doctor didn't take them out. I haven't lost them. I'm wearing them in my coat pocket. Those teeth were artificial, Mr. Allen."

"You see," he continued,--it seemed as if he just wanted to talk about those teeth, now that he was started,--"You see, Mr. Allen, I got those teeth to please my wife. I didn't really need them, only for looks. I've got all the rest of my teeth, except those side ones.

"Wife said it was all right while I was home where my friends all knew me--were used to me; but in taking this trip among strangers, I really ought to have those gaps filled in. So I went to a toothsmith, and he shod me up with some new teeth. He talked about bridges, and scaffolding, and roofing, and one thing and another, and owing to the situation he found in his explorations, 'a partial plate,' as he called it, he thought was the best way out.

"When he connected me with those teeth, it felt just like it looks to nail a shoe on a horse. I felt as a colt must feel when it's first hitched up with bit and bridle.

"'Do you mean to tell me,' I asked that dentist, 'that I've got to go through life with that in my mouth?'

"'Oh, no,' he said, 'this is only a partial plate. Some day you'll lose all your teeth and will have to have a double set, upper and lower. Then you _will_ feel as if you were somebody else--this is only a little trouble. You'll get used to this partial plate and not mind it a bit. They look dandy. Just take a peek at yourself. You look ten years younger. You just stick to them for a couple of days and you'll be all right.'

"I went home feeling that the bloom of youth was all rubbed off--felt as if I had a billiard ball in my mouth.

"My wife was delighted, and gave me that same josh the dentist handed me--said I looked ten years younger.

"I felt forty years older, and told her so--and when it came to eating, everything tasted just alike--and all bad.

"I stood it for six hours, and gave up. I went to take them out and got scared. I couldn't get them out. Then I was sure the dentist had nailed them in.

"I called him up and asked him would he go to his office? Told him I was in trouble. When I got there I found him waiting for me.

"He wanted to know where they hurt.

"I told him, 'All over.' That the joy and jounce and bounce of life had all left me. He had filled me full of woe and sadness. That my shoes pinched, my hair pulled, and my collar choked me.

"'Take 'em out, doctor, take 'em out,' I sobbed. 'I don't believe they were made for me. I think you've made a mistake and got some other fellow's teeth in my mouth. I think these teeth were made for a very large man with a very large mouth,' I said.

"He pried me loose from the work of his hands, and took the artificial part of me into his den, put it on his anvil, and ran it over his buzz saw and through his planer, and brought it back to me, and said, 'Open up,' just as if I were a horse; and he bitted and bridled me for another race.

"I wrestled with those teeth for a week before I left for this trip. I kept them in different places--in the bathroom, on top of my chiffonier, and in my pocket. Not all the while, you understand. I got so I could take them out myself, and I alternated them between the place where they made me look ten years younger, and those places I've mentioned; and when I didn't have them in, my wife was giving me Hail Columbia. Said I didn't have as much sand as a Chippy bird; acted as if I were the only person who had ever had to learn to wear false teeth.

"I made a few more trips to the dentist, to ask him if he was dead sure he hadn't got me breaking in some other fellow's teeth; and if he would plane them down a little here and there.

"He growled considerable. Said he'd get them too loose, and then I'd be having trouble the other way.

"Well, I got so I could wear those teeth and think of something else at the same time; and then I started for San Francisco to catch this ship. I can't understand it at all; but somehow or other, those teeth have shrunk. They began to shrink as soon as I struck the Pullman, and when I got aboard this ship the blamed things had shrunk some more. They got so they would drop on me while eating. I'd be going along all right, when all of a sudden, with a mouth-full of victuals, I'd find myself chewing those false teeth with my other teeth. I felt like a cannibal chewing a corpse. I felt like a ghoul robbing a graveyard. It was worse than the neck of a chicken, that any man who has kept house for twenty years or so, knows all about. After you've helped all the rest, all that's left for you is the neck, don't you know?"

"Missouri" had me crying; but I gave three emphatic and sympathetic nods. I've kept house for more than twenty years, and I'm a connoisseur myself on that part of the fowl--and the gizzard.

"Well," "Missouri" continued, "I felt like a Fiji Islander before the missionaries taught them to love their enemies, but not to eat them. So I'm wearing those teeth in my coat pocket.

"I may not look so young, but I don't feel so like a blithering savage. I hate to go home without a full set of teeth, though.

"How are the Japanese on dentistry, Mr. Allen? Do you suppose I could get fixed up over there?"

I told him I didn't know about their dentistry, but that they were clever little beggars. That they were strong on tea and tooth brushes.

"Tea, teeth, and tooth brushes," "Missouri" said, in a speculative and hopeful tone. "Now maybe so, maybe so," and we parted for the night.

"Missouri" is not a half bad sort, and, anyway, his teeth story is different than a yarn on seasickness.

III

WONG LEE--THE HUMAN BELLOWS

This is a fine, large ship--Japanese line.

I don't call to mind any line of ships I have not sailed on prior to this voyage in my chasing up and down the world in search of a "meal ticket," and pleasure; but this is my first voyage on a Japanese liner, and I'm simply delighted with it.

It contrasts delightfully with a ship I sailed on, on one of my former trips across the Pacific.

That boat was all right, too. Good ship, good service--particularly good service--Chinese help; and anyone who has ever sailed with Chinese crews, waiters and room boys, knows what that means--nothing better in that line. I had a fine stateroom and a good room boy--that boy was a treasure.

I cottoned to that boy the minute he grabbed my baggage at the wharf, and blandly said, "You blong my," as he led me to my stateroom.

There was an obnoxious sign in that stateroom which read: "No Smoking in Staterooms." I settled for the long voyage, hung a coat over that sign, and lit up.

Wong Lee flagged me with a word of warning: "No can slmoke stlate room. Slmoke loom, can do."

"Wong," I said, "how fashion you talkee so? 'No can slmoke stlate loom!' No tlouble slmoke stlate loom. Can slmoke stlate loom easy, see?"

If anyone tells you the Chinese can't see a joke, tell them to guess again. Wong saw that little one--saw it through a cloud of smoke, at that. Wong shut my stateroom door, like a boy in the buttery stealing jam, and said: "Lofficers findee out. They flobid."

"All right, Wong, I won't tell them if you don't," I said. And Wong didn't--Wong certainly didn't betray me.

The further we sailed the more I became attached to the boy--he took such excellent care of me--I got so I really loved that boy.

All Wong's other duties seemed easy compared to his efforts, in my behalf, to see that my slight and harmless infraction of the ship's rules should not be discovered. If I dropped a little ash, Wong was on hand to brush it up. A tell-tale cigar stub, carelessly left--Wong was there to whisk it out of sight with: "Lofficers may come insplection any time. No can tell when."

It wasn't my uneasiness at fear of being found out that robbed me of some of the pleasures of the trip, but an anxious fear that Wong, 'round whom the tendrils of my heart's affections were gaining strength each day as we neared the mystic land of the rising sun--my great fear was that before we landed at Yokohama, Wong would surely burst in his efforts to keep the smoke in my stateroom blown out of the port-hole.

Now this ship is different. No silly rules that drive a man out of his room onto the deck, or the smoking room, when he feels like drawing a little inspiration from the weed that cheers but don't inebriate--I like this ship.

"Land ho!" Hawaii in the distance.

IV

HAWAII--AND THE FISHERMAN WHO'D SIGN THE PLEDGE

"Under the setting sun, in the Mid-Pacific, lie the Islands of the Hawaiian group, which present to the traveler or home-seeker more alluring features than are combined in any other country in the world. Nowhere else are such pictures of sea and sky and plain and mountain, such magnificence of landscape, such bright sunshine and tempering breeze, such fragrant foliage, such brilliant colorings in bush and tree, such dazzling moonlight.

"With a climate world-excelling for its equableness, these happy islands afford a refuge for those who would escape the rigors of cold or heat encountered in the temperate zones; an entertaining resort for the pleasure-seeker, an almost virgin field of research for the scientist, a sanitarium for the ill, weary or overwrought. For the man who would build a home where conditions of life are most nearly ideal, and where nature works with man and not against him, Hawaii smiles a radiant welcome.

"It is withal an entrancing land, these mid-sea dots, for the combination of tropical sunshine and sea breeze produces a climate which can be compared to nothing on any mainland, and by reason of peculiar situation, to that of no other island group. Hawaii has a temperature which varies not more than 10 degrees through the day, and which has an utmost range during the year from 85 degrees to 55 degrees. Sweltering heat or biting cold are unknown, sunstroke is a mythical name for an unthought thing, a frost-bite is heard of no more than a polar bear.

"Conjure up a memory of the most perfect May day, when sunshine, soft airs and fragrance of buds and smiling Nature combine to make the heart glad, multiply it by 365, and the result is the climate of Hawaii. The sky, with the blue of the Riviera and the brilliance of a sea-shell, is seldom perfectly clear. Ever the fleecy white clouds blowing over the sea form masses of lace-like broidery across the blue vault, adding to the natural beauty, and when gilded or rouged by sunrise or sunset make the heavens a miracle of color.

"And, as in Nature's bounty the climate was made close to perfection, so the good dame continued her work and gave to the land such features as would make not alone a happy home for man, but as well a pleasure ground: for there are mountains and valleys, bays and cataracts, cliffs and beaches in varied form and peculiar beauty, foliage rich in color and rare in fragrance, flowers of unusual form and hue, and all without a poisonous herb or vine, or a dangerous reptile or animal. To fit the paradise was sent a race of people stalwart in size, hospitable, merry, and music-loving. The door is always open and over its lintel is '_Aloha_,' which means 'Welcome.' All are given cordial greeting on the summer shores of the Evening Isles, and nowhere else may be found so many joys and such new lease of life as under Hawaii's smiling skies.

"More prominent than any other cause for this condition of affairs is the fact that Hawaii is windswept throughout the year. The northeast trades bring with them new vitality, and make of Hawaii a paradise where life is pleasure all the year round. From out of the frozen north, picking from the blossoming whitecaps the fragrant and sustaining ozone, sweeping across the breakers to caress the land, comes the constant northeast trade-wind. It is not a strong, harsh blow at all, rather a fanning breeze--Nature's punkah. The average velocity for the year is but eight miles per hour. The mission of the trade-wind is a beneficent one always. Cyclones or hurricanes in Hawaii are unknown."

* * * * *

I didn't write the above. That is a piece of pure plagiarism on my part. I snitched it from a folder put out by the Hawaiian Promotion Society.

The first time I saw that folder I got hold of it on shipboard a few hours before reaching Honolulu the first time I came here, years ago. I read it through and smiled like Noah's neighbors when he allowed there was going to be a wet spell--and got off the ship and "did" Honolulu.

I kept on smiling, albeit not cynically.

No living man can adequately describe the beauties of these islands. I just wandered around in a daze until I found myself on top of one of their mountains, and when I took it all in I felt as if I'd burst if I didn't say something, and I began apostrophizing Hawaii in a rapturous rhapsody.

I felt a good deal better after that, but as I was pressed for time I had to leave the islands and hike along; or I thought I had to. I did, at least.

But that rhapsody stands. The islands are still here, and as lovely as ever.

What I can't understand is, that there are only 191,000 inhabitants on these islands, with room for several times that many; and something over a billion in the rest of the world. I don't know why I'm not living here myself, and for the life of me I don't know why I leave them--my ultimate aim has been to get to Heaven.

I can only account for it on one theory: I own a house and lot and some land in Central New York, and I'm so busy shoveling snow outdoors and coal indoors from some time in November to some time in April, and during May and June getting some stuff started, hoping it won't get nipped by the late frosts, and working it along before September frost gets it--in the meantime saving it from more bugs than a fellow, if he saves his crop, can take time to learn the names of--what with hustling that stuff through between frosts and saving it from pests, and planning the while to be in shape to get some coal to keep from freezing to death the coming winter--a fellow tied up like that can't come to Hawaii to live. I suppose that billion or so who are not living in the Hawaiian Islands are all fixed in some such a way.

But I feel a little sore at that Hawaiian booster. He didn't tell about the fish they have here. There is an aquarium in Naples, Italy, said to be the finest in the world. I've been through that Naples aquarium several times, and it is a drab affair compared with the aquarium here at Honolulu. In the Honolulu aquarium may be seen fish of odd shapes and so brilliantly and beautifully colored that no artist could show these colors with paint and brush. There is the Humuhumu for instance. A fish six or seven inches long. It has bright green fins, and a stripe of jet black starting in a narrow band at the top of its back, broadening out diagonally around its body. On its side, set in the band of black, is a bright red spot. Rearwards of the black band its body is a bright red, and forward of the band the body is bright red shading off to white. Its tail is striped, red, yellow and black. Somewhat bass-shaped, its eyes are not in its head, but set on top of its back.

A man not knowing such a fish existed, if he were fishing in one of our ponds in New York State, if he should pull up a Humuhumu, he would stop fishing. He certainly would. And he wouldn't stop to land it, either. Just one look at that fish and he'd yell and drop fish, line and pole right back in the pond, and hunt up the chairman of the temperance movement in his town and sign the pledge.

Then there is the Lae-Nihi. A fish about eight inches long, all blue. You can't know how bright and beautiful blue can be until you see a Lae-Nihi swimming in the water. Dozens of other odd-shaped fish, wonderfully marked in brilliant variegated patterns, are in the aquarium.

The government at Washington has made colored plates showing the shapes, markings, and giving the names of these fish, and attempting to show the colorings. Anyone looking at the colored prints and not knowing of these wonderful fish would say, "Preposterous! No such colored fish exist!" But the cold fact is, those colored prints but faintly portray the brilliant colors of the fish as they are seen in life.

With all this, you'd think they ought not to be anything but happy in Hawaii. You wouldn't expect to find kickers on the islands.

But the truth is, they are in a blue funk. They think that the islands are going to the bow-wows financially, because of the tariff legislation on sugar. I tell them to brace up and advertise the islands as more than the biggest show on earth; and, in place of begging for settlers, to pass out the word that the truly good may come, for a satisfactory consideration; and that the chances are they will have standing room only, and won't know what to do with their money.