"Wild? You do not know the half!" said the excitable little editor, who, despite the frequency of his gestures and the volubility of his explanations was busily working with diagrams the while. "You know there was a census in Porto Rico in 1899?"
"I didn't until this morning," the boy answered "but as I see that most of these tables are compared with that year it is evident that there must have been."
"There was a census," the editor went on, after a pause during which he had been working over a column of figures, "and my uncle was a supervisor. Mr. Gatten--you know him?"
"He was in the Porto Rico census, too. Then in 1903 he went to assist in the census of the Philippines. It was done by the War Department, because the fighting was hardly over. You think the census difficult? You should hear my uncle! The Dattos were not all stopped fighting, because just as soon as the Philippine Commission thought it safe, the census began."
"Did any one get killed by hostile natives?" asked Hamilton, scenting a story.
"Several wounded, one badly, but no one killed. But"--and he waggled a finger warningly--"there were plenty of places where the census was only estimated! The blowpipe and the poison arrow are most dangerous. Even with the soldiers taking the census and going with other census men, it was very risky among the uncivilized tribes."
"I think the wildest people in the world, the most savage, are in those jungles. My uncle had to go to the haunts of the Pygmies."
"Pygmies!" exclaimed Hamilton in surprise. "I didn't know that the Stars and Stripes floated over Pygmy tribes! I thought they were only in Africa!"
"The Negritos are pygmies," answered the editor, "seldom over four feet ten inches for the man and the woman two or three inches shorter; they use their toes like fingers, they wear only a loin-cloth, their hair is fuzzy like a black bush, and they seldom use fire, even for cooking."
"How do they live?" asked Hamilton. "We have got used to thinking of the Red Indians as a part of the United States races, but the Pygmies seem outlandish. Have they huts or do they live in caves, or how?"
"Nothing!" was the answer. "A few have rough huts, but most of them wander in the forests."