it?"

"Say, Uncle Ike, I surrender. I don't want to preach. Where can a man
enlist as a pirate? The pirate business appeals to me," and the boy got
up and took his golf club to go out.

"Yes, you have many qualifications that would come in handy as a
pirate, and I will use my influence to get you into politics, you young
heathen," and the old man gave the red-headed boy a poke in the ribs
with his big hard thumb, and they separated for the day, the old man to
smoke and dream, and the boy to have fun and get tired and hungry.

CHAPTER XX.

Uncle Ike did not get up very early, on account of a little pain in
one of his hind legs, as he expressed it, a rheumatic pain that he had
almost come to believe, as the pension agent had often suggested, was
caused by his service in the army thirty-five years ago. The pension
agent, who desired to have the honor of securing a pension for the old
man, had asked him to try and remember if he was not exposed to a sudden
draft, some time in the army, which might have caused him to take cold,
and thus sow the seeds of rheumatism in his system, which had lain
dormant all these years and finally appeared in his legs. The old man
had thought it over, and remembered hundreds of occasions when he was
soaked through with icy water, and had slept on the wet ground, and gone
hungry and taken cold, but he realized that he had taken no more colds
in the army than he had at home, and he could not see how he could swear
that a chill he received thirty-five years ago could have anything to
do with his present aches, and though he knew thousands of the old boys
were receiving pensions, that were no worse off than he was, he had told
the pension agent that he need not apply for a pension for his pain in
the knee. He said he felt that he might just as well apply for a pension
on account of inheriting rheumatism from an uncle who fought in the
Mexican war, and he would wait until the government did not insist on a
veteran having such an abnormal memory about sneezing during the war, as
a basis for pension claims, and when it got so a pension would come to
a soldier by simply looking up his record, and examining his physical
condition, he would take a pension. The old man had heard a peculiar
clicking down in the sitting room, all the morning, while he was
dressing, and he wondered what it was. As he limped into the sitting
room, with his dressing-gown on, and began to round up his shaving
utensil