Page:Tom Beauling (1901).pdf/91

 "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."

The mud-colored raft with the twin turrets was the only vessel there which meant business. There was fighting in the Philippines, and she was going to get back to it just as soon as the weeds could be scraped off her; and after that she had an ambitious design of finding, all by herself, some island that nobody wanted, calling the inhabitants rebels (for the benefit of the press at home), and afterward annexing them to the United States in the interest of the Republican candidate for President, with much destruction of seaboard villages and a decimation of the native population.

A sick white man dragged himself out of the Rohilla's smoking-room—an isolated dog-kennel aft, ornamented by two potted palms, a photograph of a famous Japanese actor, and a colored photograph of an infamous geisha—supported himself by two anemic-looking hands against the rail, and took in the prospect through eyes whose whites were yellow, and which could not open to their full