"They seem to be hating us pretty well just now," said a man in the corner, whose voice sounded familiar to Sam. He turned and recognized the commercial traveler of the day before.
"They're welcome to hate us," answered Jackson, "and when it comes to a matter of hating I shouldn't think much of us if we couldn't make 'em hate us as much in a year as the Castalians could in three hundred. They're a blamed slow lot and we ain't. That's all there is of it. What do you think, Captain?"
"I fear," said Sam, "that they don't quite understand the great blessings we're conferring on them."
"What blessings?" asked the drummer.
"Why," said Sam, "liberty and independence—no, I don't mean independence exactly, but liberty and freedom."
"Then why don't we leave them alone instead of fighting them?"
"What an idee!" exclaimed Tucker. "They don't know what liberty is, and we must teach 'em if we have to blow their brains out."
"You're too hard on 'em, Tucker," drawled Mr. Jackson. "We mustn't expect too much from pore savages who live in a country so hot that they can't progress like we do." Here Mr. Jackson took off his hat and wiped the beads of perspiration from his brow with a red bandanna handkerchief. "Don't expect too much from cannibals that have their brains half roasted by the tropical sun."
"That's a fact!" said some one in the throng.
"Yes," said Jackson, crossing his legs on a level well above his head, "them pore critters need our civilization, that's what they need," and he dexterously squirted a mouthful of tobacco juice on the white-hot stove, where it sizzled and gradually evaporated. "We must make real men of 'em. We must give 'em our strength and vigor and intelligence. They're a dirty lot of lazy beggars, that's the long and short of it, and we must turn 'em into gentlemen like us!"