I'm paying for my passage and her room in
the hold--every square and cubic foot.' 'Guess he knocked down the fare to
himself; but I paid. I paid. I wasn't going to deadhead along o' _that_
crowd of Pentecostal sweepings. 'Twould have hoodooed my gun for all time.
That was the way I regarded the proposition. No, Sir, they were not pretty
company.
"When we struck Pretoria I had a hell-and-a-half of a time trying to
interest the Dutch vote in my gun an' her potentialities. The bottom was
out of things rather much just about that time. Kruger was praying some
and stealing some, and the Hollander lot was singing, 'If you haven't any
money you needn't come round,' Nobody was spending his dough on anything
except tickets to Europe. We were both grossly neglected. When I think how
I used to give performances in the public streets with dummy cartridges,
filling the hopper and turning the handle till the sweat dropped off me, I
blush, Sir. I've made her to do her stunts before Kaffirs--naked sons of
Ham--in Commissioner Street, trying to get a holt somewhere.
"Did I talk? I despise exaggeration--'tain't American or scientific--but
as true as I'm sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy
Roosevelt's Western tour was a maiden's sigh compared to my advertising
work.
"'Long in the spring I was rescued by a commandant called Van Zyl--a big,
fleshy man with a lame leg.
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