The attempt to obtain authority to organize a machine gun battery met
with many discouragements and repeated failures. No one seemed to have
thought anything about the subject, and Tampa was not a good place nor
climate in which to indulge in that form of exercise, apparently.
Perhaps the climate was one reason why so little thinking was done,
and everything went "at sixes and sevens."

[Illustration: Skirmish Drill at Tampa.]

The officer who had conceived the scheme was a young man, too. He was
only a second lieutenant ("Second lieutenants are fit for nothing
except to take reveille"), and had never, so far as his military
superiors knew, heard the whistle of a hostile bullet. He had made no
brilliant record at the Academy, had never distinguished himself in
the service, and was not anybody's "pet." He was, apparently, a safe
man to ignore or snub if occasion or bad temper made it desirable to
ignore or snub somebody, and, above all, had no political friends who
would be offended thereby.

"Politics" cut quite a figure in Tampa in some respects. An officer
who was known to be a personal friend of Senator Somebody, or protege
of this or that great man, was regarded with considerable awe and
reverence by the common herd. It was ludicrous to see the weight
attached to the crumbs of wisdom that fell from the friends of the
friends of somebody. They shone only by a reflected light, it is true;
but nobody there at Tampa had a lamp of his own, except the few who
had won renown in the Civil War, and reflected light was better than
none at all. A very young and green second lieutenant who was able to
boast that he had declined to be a major in a certain State was at