nd myself a rapt listener: wondering at this man of genius,
who could work with his creative brush all day long and talk with the
eloquence of a learned Doctor of Divinity half the night.

During the time we were stationed at Davids Island, Mr. Remington and
Jack made a trip to the Southwest, where they shot the peccary (wild
hog) in Texas and afterwards blue quail and other game in Mexico.
Artist and soldier, they got on famously together notwithstanding the
difference in their ages.

And now he was going to try his hand at a novel, a real romance. We
talked a good deal about the little Indian boy, and I got to love White
Weasel long before he appeared in print as John Ermine. The book came
out after we had left New Rochelle--but I received a copy from him, and
wrote him my opinion of it, which was one of unstinted praise. But it
did not surprise me to learn that he did not consider it a success from
a financial point of view.

"You see," he said a year afterwards, "that sort of thing does not
interest the public. What they want,"--here he began to mimic some funny
old East Side person, and both hands gesticulating--"is a back yard and
a cabbage patch and a cook stove and babies' clothes drying beside it,
you see, Mattie," he said. "They don't want to know anything about the
Indian or the half-breed, or what he thinks or believes." And then he
went off into one of his irresistible tirades combining ridicule and
abuse of the reading public, in language such as only Frederic Remington
could use before women and still retain his dignity. "Well, Frederic," I
said, "I will try to recollect that, when I write my experiences of Army
Life."

In writing him my opinion of his book the year before, I had said, "In
fact, I am in love with John Ermine." The following Christmas he sent me
the accompanying card.

Now the book was dramatized and produced, with Hackett as John Ermine,
at the Globe Theatre in September of 1902--the hottest weather ever on
record in Boston at that season. Of course seats were reserved for us;
we were living at Nantucket that year, and we set sail at noon to see
the great production. We snatched a bite of supper at a near-by hotel in
Boston and hurried to the theatre, but being late, had some difficulty
in getting our seats.

The curtain was up and there sat Hackett, not with long yellow hair
(which was the salient point in the half-breed scout) but rather
well-groomed, looking more like a parlor I