KEY WEST, January 2nd, 1897.
[DEAR FAMILY:]
I have learned here that the first quality needed to make
a great filibuster is Patience, it is not courage, or
resources or a knowledge of the Cuban Coast line, it is
patience. Anybody can run a boat into a dark bayou and dump
rifles on the beach and scurry away to sea again but only
heroes can sit for a month on a hotel porch or at the end of a
wharf, and wait. That is all we do and that is my life at Key
West. I get up and half dress and take a plunge in the bay
and then dress fully and have a greasy breakfast and then
light a huge Key West cigar, price three cents and sit on the
hotel porch with my feet on a rail — Nothing happens after
that except getting one's boots polished as the two industries
of this place are blacking boots and driving cabs. I have two
boys to black mine at the same time every morning and pay the
one who does his the better of the two — It generally ends in
a fight so that affords diversion — Then a man comes along,
any man, and says, "Remmington's looking for you" and I get up
and look for Remington. There is only a triangle of streets
where one can find him and I call at "Josh" Curry's first and
then at Pendleton's News Store and read all the back numbers
of the Police Gazette for the hundredth time and then
call here at the Custom House and then look in at the Cable
office, where Michaelson lives sending telegrams about
anything or nothing and that brings me back to the hotel porch
again, where I have my boots shined once more and then go into
mid-day dinner. In the meanwhile Remington is looking for me
a hundred yards in the rear. He generally gets to "Josh's" as
I leave the Custom House — In the afternoon I study Spanish
out of a text book and at three take a bicycle ride, at five I
call at the garrison to take tea with the doctor and his wife,
who is sweeter than angel's ever get to be with a miniature
angel of a baby called Martha. I wait until retreat is
sounded and the gun is fired at sunset and having commented
unfavorably on the way the soldiers let the flag drop on the
grass instead of catching it on the arms as a bluejacket does,
I ride off to the bay for another bath — Then I take the
launch to the
Raleigh and dine with the officers and
rejoice
in the clean fresh paint and brass and decks and the lights
and black places of a great ship of war, than which nothing is
more splendid. We sit on the quarter-deck and smoke and play
the guitar and I go home again, in time for bed. I vary this
programme occasionally by spending the morning on the end of a
wharf watching another man fish and reading old novels and the
"Lives of Captain Walker" and "Captain Fry of the Virginius,"
two great books from each of which I am going to write a short
story like the one of the Alamo or of the Jameson Raid — The
life of Walker I found on the
Raleigh and the life of
Captain Fry with all the old wood cuts and the newspaper
comments of the time at a book store here. I don't know when
we shall get away but it is no use kicking
about it, Michaelson is doing all he can and the new tug will
be along in a week anyway. I shall be so glad to get to Cuba
that I will dance with glee.
DICK.
