The soldier is young, not much more than a boy. Fit-looking in his uniform shirt and trousers, leggings wound tight over the calves, square-chinned under a battered campaign hat, but no Adonis. The rifle slipping from his stiffened fingers was at parade rest, butt on the dusty ground, no bayonet fixed to its barrel. There is a look of confusion on the young American’s face, of innocence betrayed, his lips parted in surprise, his lower back arched in where the kris has been thrust from behind. The Cartoonist has actually seen a kris, hung behind glass on a wall in a Boston museum, but has added a few extra serpentine curves for effect.
The wily Filipino is a bit of a problem. The feet are bare, the clothes the same peon’s rags he has used for the Mexicans the Chief hates so much and more recently for the noble Cuban insurrectos. The straw hat is equally ragged but less round, coming to a point suggestive of a cutting edge at the peak. Even the shade of the skin he has left relatively unaltered, a delicate cross-hatching to give shape to the exposed areas and suggest something between white and negroid. He hopes that if it pleases the Chief enough to be reprinted on Sunday the color-ink boys will render it a yellowish-tan, like a bilious weak tea. He’s done the features over several times before hitting on something that looks right, the cheekbones high and sharp, the eyes narrow, up-slanting razor slits, the mouth twisted in a cruel, treacherous grin as he drives the crooked blade through his victim’s spine. Only a slight exaggeration from the one photo published of their jefe Aguinaldo, who—though reputed to be of a Chinese-Malay mix—bears the angular, cunning stamp of the Jap.
Beneath the assassin’s feet, trodden into blood-soaked foreign soil, lies Old Glory.
The Cartoonist roughs in the caption, noting below it that he wants the heavy Gothic font they use for In Memoriam buys on the obit page, sober and declamatory at once—
THE THANKS OF A GRATEFUL NATION