rists, and they want
someone else to take sight over a cannon at an approaching tornado,
while the sharps look through a peep-hole and see how it is going to
work. You might have a million cannon loaded ready for tornadoes,
and when one came up it would come so quick nobody would think of the
cannon, and everybody would dig out for a place of safety. Not one
artilleryman in a million could hit a tornado in a vital part. Do these
people think tornadoes are going around with a target tied on them, for
experts to shoot cannon balls at? A tornado is like one of these Fourth
of July nigger-chasers, that you touch off and it starts somewhere and
changes its mind and turns around and goes sideways, and when it finds a
girl looking the other way it everlastingly makes for her and runs into
her pantalets when she would swear it was pointed the other way. No, I
am something of a sportsman myself, and can shoot a gun some, but if
I had a cannon in each hand loaded for elephants, and I should see a
tornado going the other way, I would drop both guns and crawl into a
hole, and the tornado would probably turn around and pick up the guns
and fire them into the hole I was in. That's the kind of an insect a
tornado is, and don't you ever fool with one. A tornado is worse than a
battle. I remember when we were at the battle of Gettysburg----"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, Uncle Ike, what have I done that you should
fight that war all over again every time I try to have a quiet talk with
you?" and the boy stuffed his fingers in his ears, and got up off the
old man's lap, and the uncle got up and walked around, and when the
peanut shells began to work down his legs, and scratch his skin, and he
found his foot asleep from holding the big boy in his lap, the old
man thought he was stricken with paralysis, and he sat down again, and
called the boy to him and said, in a trembling voice:

[Ilustration: My boy, you are going to lose your Uncle Ike 057]

"My boy, you are going to lose your Uncle Ike. I feel that the end is
coming, and before I go to the beautiful beyond I want to say a few
serious words to you. It is coming as I had hoped. The disease begins at
my feet, and will work up gradually, paralyzing my limbs, then my body,
and lastly my brain will be seized by the destroyer, and then it will
all be over with your Uncle Ike. Remove my shoes, my boy, and I will
tell you a story. When we scaled the perpendicular wall at Lookout
Mountain, in th