“Lie still,” Remington commanded; “you and I don’t know how to do that. Let him make his raft. If we capsize, I’ll throttle him and take it from him.”
Some months later, on learning of the incident, I tried to discuss the moral phase of it with him; but he brushed my hypocrisy aside with the remark: “Why, Davis alone was worth a dozen sea-cooks. I don’t have to talk of myself.”
His experiences in Cuba were scarcely more supportable than this unpropitious start. The heat was terrible, the transportation bad, and his physical condition poor. He suffered. Growling over it all, long afterward he said to me:
“From now on I mean to paint fruits and flowers. Then if I’m ordered to the scene of action I can go fearlessly.”
Until his increasing weight made it hard to find a mount, he liked to ride. He had no fear of any horse, and among men he had a man’s courage; but he had an unreasonable fear of dogs. Once, on the occasion of a men’s dinner in the early days of the bicycle’s popularity, Kemble had made a souvenir caricature for each guest. The card at Remington’s plate represented Frederic in the costume of a bronco buster, with chaps, sombrero, and guns, riding a bicycle—a look of terror on his face. The bicycle was bucking half-way over the road, frightened at a little cotton dog on four wooden wheels. Nobody laughed more heartily over the card than Remington, and for years it had a place of honor in his studio.
The waning of his great strength was a more sensitive subject with him than his increasing weight, which produced the condition. Gradually in our Sunday walks, the hills grew steeper for him. His favorite ruse for disguising the strain on him was to stop occasionally and survey the landscape:
“Look there, Tommy, how that land lies. I could put a company of men back of that stone wall and hold it against a thousand until they flanked me.”
As with the Southern gentleman who used to look out of the window after passing the decanter to his guest, it was the part of friendship on these occasions to multiply details of the supposititious fortifications until the commander regained his wind.
One Sunday morning in those later days I went with him to the office of an osteopathic physician who was treating him. The osteopath was a slight man and not tall. Remington, lying face downward on the operating-table, presented a skyline so much higher than that of the average patient that the doctor standing on the floor lacked the angle of pressure necessary to his treatment. The doctor therefore mounted a chair, from which he stepped to the table, and finally sat astride of Remington, applying his full weight to the manipulation which he was giving to the spinal column.