CHAPTER XVII.
The Bad Boy and the Groceryman Illustrate the Russia-Japanese War—The Bad Boy Tells About Dad's Efforts to Raise Hair by the “Sunshine” Method.
The old groceryman had a war map spread out on the counter, and for an hour he had stood up in front of it, reading a morning paper, with his thumb on Port Arthur, his fingers covering the positions occupied by the Japanese and Russian forces in Manchuria, and his face working worse than the face of the Czar eating a caviar sandwich and ordering troops to the far east, at the same time shying at dynamite bombs of nihilists. There was a crash in front of the grocery and the old man jumped behind a barrel, thinking Port Arthur had been blown up, and the Russian fleet torpedoed.
“Hello, Matsuma, you young monkey,” said the old man, as the bad boy burst the door open and rushed in with a shovel at shoulder arms, and came to “present arms” in front of the old man, who came from behind the barrel and acknowledged the salute. “Say, now honest did you put that chunk of ice in the stove the day you skipped out last?”
“Sure Mike!” said the boy, as he ran the shovel under the cat that was sleeping by the stove, and tossed her into a barrel of dried apples. “I wanted to demonstrate to you, old Michaelovitski, the condition of things at Vladivostok, where you candle-eating Russians are bottled up in the ice, and where we Japanese are going to make you put on your skates and get away to Siberia. What are you doing with the map of the seat of war?”
{Illustration: Came to Present Arms.}
“Oh, I was only trying to figure out the plan of campaign, and find out where the Japanese would go to when they are licked,” said the old man. “This thing is worrying me. I want to see Russia win, and I think our government ought to send to them all the embalmed beef we had left from the war with Spain, but if we did you monkey Japanese would capture it, and have a military funeral over it, and go on eating fish and rice. When this country was in trouble, in 1864, the Russians sent a fleet of warships to New York and notified all Europe to stand back and look pleasant, and by the great horn spoons, I am going to stand by Russia or bust. I would like to be over there at Port Arthur and witness an explosion of a torpedo under something. Egad, but I glory in the smell of gunpowder. Now, say, here is Port Arthur, by this barrel of dried apples, and there is Mushapata, by the ax handle barrel, see?”
“Well, you and I are just alike,” said the boy. “Let's have a sham battle, right here in the grocery. Get down that can of powder.”