“Give my love to forty or fifty of your wives,” said the cowboy as he sheathed his knife. “Take that from your little Hennery,” says I as I lit a giant firecracker and threw it down near him, where it exploded like a bomb. And then as we went along through the air we watched him loosen himself from the chair and strike out for the shore, swearing in negro dialect that he would eat us yet, without salt, and then we got out of sight of the lake, laughing at our escape and wondering where we would land.
“Take That from Your Little Hennery.”
We sailed along for a couple of hours, and passed over villages of natives, but Pa said he would not take chances on another nigger king, but would run the ship towards the coast as long as the gas held out, and on we went until after midday, when the gas bag began to flap as though the gas was escaping, and Pa acted nearly crazy, because we were over a dense jungle, filled with wild animals, and not a thing to eat.
After two o’clock P. M. we sighted a clearing ahead, with nice modern houses, and as we got nearer we could see herds of Jersey cattle, and girafs, and horses and elephants, and the queerest mixture of wild life and civilization, and the nearer we got the more it looked like a Yankee settlement, and when Pa saw some automobiles and a tennis court, with men, women and children playing tennis and riding around in gasoline and steam autos, and a creamery and a wind mill and an ice house, he said that was the place he was looking for, and he pointed the airship for the clearing, and told the cowboy to get the anchor ready.
The people on the plantation saw the airship and quit playing tennis, the autos pointed towards where we were going to land, and when we threw out the anchor and came down to the ground and made a landing right on the golf links near the tennis court, we were soon surrounded by twenty or thirty men, women and children, and Pa got out and took off his hat and made a bow that would have captured any people of any nationality.
Pa was going to speak to the people in French or German, but a man in riding breeches came up and in the purest English said, “I beg pardon, but is this Mr. Roosevelt?” and Pa said, “Not on your life, but just as good a man all right.”
The man said he was expecting Mr. Roosevelt but not until after the 4th of March, but he didn’t know but what he had come a little ahead of schedule time. Pa said he was a Roosevelt man all right, though he’d always been a Democrat, and that he was an American.
“But what are you doing in Africa?” said the man who seemed to be the leading citizen. “O!” said Pa, as he lit a cigarette, “I have been taking in a large part of Africa, and just dropped down to see if you had any news of the election in the United States.”
The man said he was an American too, and lived in Michigan when at home, but he came out here for his wife’s health, and opened up a little ranch. He said Taft was elected all right, and Pa said he thought it would come out that way, and then the man asked us into the house, and the others crowded around our airship, and before long the cowboy was riding a polo pony, and I was playing tennis with some boys about as big as me, and Pa was drinking highballs and club soda, and as the rum went down and we sat around a regular dining table, eating off of regular dishes, with knives and forks, and listening to people talk our language, and laugh right out loud, the first experience of the kind we had enjoyed in six months, and we thought how only a few hours before we were with a tribe of canniballs, billed to be eaten at sundown, we thought how small the world was, and joined in the prayer offered by the host.