When he had
embraced him the customary fifteen times on the right side and the
fifteen accustomed times on the left side, and had performed the
eighty-five gestures of greeting required by the social manual of
the bush, and asked the three hundred and sixty-five questions de
rigueur regarding the honorable health of his honorable horde of
offspring, and his eye had fallen again on the red cards in his
hand, the fact struck him that the relative was of precisely the
same shade of complexion as himself. Could he set him down as he
had many a mere red-blooded person and thereby perhaps establish a
precedent that might result in his own mortification? Yet could he
stretch a shade--or several shades--and set him down as "white"?
No, there was the oath of office, and the government that
administered it had been found long-armed and Argus-eyed. Long he
sat in deepest meditation. Being a Panamanian, he could not of
course know that Uncle Sam was in a hurry for his census. Till at
length, as the sun was firing the western jungle tree-tops, a
scintillating idea rewarded his unwonted cogitation. He caught up
the medium soft pencil and wrote in aristocratic hand down across
the sheet where other information is supposed to find place:
"Color;--A very light mixture," and taking his leave with the
requisite seventy-five gestures and genuflexions, he drifted
Empireward with the dozen cards the day had yielded.
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