"Well, we were justified in going for the Turks. They are the worst heathens on the face of the globe, outside of the Chinese."
"The Chinese ought to be our friends in this war, for we did so much for them when the other nations were after them. But England, Russia and the Japanese have bought her, body and soul, and now she is against us with all the rest."
"But we'll win out—we must win out!"
"Right you are! The Stars and Stripes forever!"
The conversation recorded above took place one spring morning of the year 1936.
For two years the United States—that vast territory which now embraces all of North America, from the Isthmus of Panama to Hudson Bay, and takes in all of the West Indies, Hawaii, the Philippines, and half a dozen other islands of the sea, as well as a corner of China and another corner of Japan—had been at peace with the world. We say peace. What we mean is, there was no war, but war talk was on every tongue.
In the past twenty-five years the country had prospered immensely. We now numbered over a hundred million of inhabitants, and nearly all of these were well-to-do and had money in the bank.
Jefferson McKinley Adams was President, and had been for six years, and under him were a standing army of five hundred thousand men, and a navy of five hundred of the best warships which human ingenuity could devise.
Many of the best of the warships had been turned out at the Standard Ship Yard at Bridgeport, which, up to a year before, had been under the personal supervision of Commodore David Pelham, the father of Oscar Pelham, just introduced. David Pelham had been a retired veteran of the Civil and the Spanish-American wars, and had followed his beloved wife to her grave, leaving Oscar alone in the world.
Oscar Pelham was a young man of nearly twenty, well-built and strong, with piercing black eyes and curly black hair.