Sam accepted the offered chair, altho he would have preferred a situation a little less torrid.
"Gentlemen, this is Captain Jinks," said the old man, determined to get all the credit he could from his acquaintance with Sam. "Captain, this is my friend, Mr. Jackson."
Mr. Jackson was a tall, thin, narrow-chested man with no shoulders, a rounded back, and a gray, tobacco-stained mustache. His face was covered with pimples, and a huge quid of tobacco was concealed under his cheek. He was sitting on a chair tipped back rather beyond the danger-point, and his feet rested on the rim which projected from the stove half-way up. He made no effort to rise, but slowly extended a grimy, clammy hand which Sam pressed with some hesitation.
"Glad to make your acquaintance, Captain," he drawled in a half-cracked voice that suggested damaged lungs and vocal organs. "Shake hands with Mr. Tucker."
Mr. Tucker, a little, old, red-faced man on the other side of the stove, advanced and went through the ceremony suggested.
"We were just a-talking about them Cubapinos," explained Reddy. "The idee of them fellers a-pitching into us after all we've done for 'em. It's outrageous. They're only monkeys anyway, and they ought to be shot, every mother's son on 'em. Haven't we freed 'em from the cruel Castalians that they've been hating so for three hundred years?"
"They seem to be hating us pretty well just now," said a man in the corner, whose voice sounded familiar to Sam. He turned and recognized the commercial traveler of the day before.
"They're welcome to hate us," answered Jackson, "and when it comes to a matter of hating I shouldn't think much of us if we couldn't make 'em hate us as much in a year as the Castalians could in three hundred. They're a blamed slow lot and we ain't. That's all there is of it. What do you think, Captain?"
"I fear," said Sam, "that they don't quite understand the great blessings we're conferring on them."
"Why," said Sam, "liberty and independence--no, I don't mean independence exactly, but liberty and freedom."
"Then why don't we leave them alone instead of fighting them?"
"What an idee!" exclaimed Tucker. "They don't know what liberty is, and we must teach 'em if we have to blow their brains out."