One of Remington’s distinctions between orators and officers is worth recording. He had been recently visiting General Chaffee and more recently listening to Mr. Bourke Cockran and Mr. William J. Bryan. Indian fashion, he was half acting the manner of all three and feeling inwardly for his answer. “This is it,” he said; “Chaffee tells you to do a thing like this; he looks out from under his eyebrows with his head down; the orator throws his head up and looks out from under his eyelids. The soldier menaces—the orator hypnotizes.”
Remington kept near the ground in all his thinking. The superstructure of things, the embellishment of ideas, the amplification of systems, had small attraction for him. He had a passion for the roots, for the explanations, for the causes. His speech was laconic. If his friends had known the sign language he would generally have used it. His own vocabulary was small, vital, and picturesque, singularly free from slang, but strongly colored with military terms and phrases. He was a good listener and a good laugher. Like the disappearing Carson River, an adequate joke flowing through his system would rise again with recurrent and unexpected irruptions of reflected sunshine. He had also the quality of being humorous himself, and the flavor of his humor was Western, fresh, and wholesome.
One evening he strolled, astonished and abashed, into our half-lighted dining-room, where, unknown to him, a dinner party was in progress. After his own dinner he had come “across lots” for a cigar and our usual argumentative salvation of mankind. The introductions being over, a lady purring at the great man in knickerbockers and herculean stockings asked:
“Did you ride your bicycle, Mr. Remington?”
“Ride it? Ha-ha! Why the blankety-blanked thing wouldn’t let me walk with it.”
From a photograph by Sarony, owned by E. W. Kemble
FREDERIC REMINGTON
Mrs. Remington had a liking and a capacity for philosophic study. Some of the modern phases had her attention, and one of them which she felt would be useful she pressed upon Remington’s notice. His hospitality to the idea was more tolerant than acquisitive, and at times he may have really doubted its potency; but if he had any criticism it was never spoken, and perhaps never implied. One morning during that period, however, his man Tim brought me a brief note, which read as follows:
Dear Tommy: