It was early the next morning when the two boys and Julius Caesar were
again on the point of hill overlooking Honolulu. It was so early that
the flags had not yet been hoisted over the public buildings. Each boy
carried a package, and these they unrolled and laid out together. The
display was something worth looking at. Any boy who could see that
layout of firecrackers and not feel a kind of a tingling run over him
resembling that which comes when he takes hold of the two handles of an
electrical machine wouldn't be a boy worth speaking of. He wouldn't be
the sort of a boy who had it in him to ever become President of the
United States, or captain of a baseball nine, or anything of that sort.
But these two boys quivered. Cocoanut quivered more than Billy did.
Silently the two boys and Julius Caesar awaited the raising of the flags
over Honolulu. Could they or could they not let off their firecrackers?
They might as well, said Cocoanut, be getting ready, anyhow, and so he
began tying strings of firecrackers together, adjusting cannon crackers
at intervals between the smaller ones, and adding Billy's string of
crackers to his own. When completed there were just thirty-seven and
one-half feet of firecrackers of variegated quality. Billy looked on
listlessly, and Cocoanut himself hardly knew why he was making this
arrangement. The sun bounced up out of the ocean, a great red ball
behind the thin fog, and bunting climbed the flagstaffs of Honolulu.
With eager eyes the boys gazed cityward until the moment when the breeze
had straightened out the flags and the device upon them could be seen.
Then they looked upon each other blankly. It was not the Stars and
Stripes, but the Hawaiian flag which floated there below them!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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