Читать книгу Exit Laughing - Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury - Страница 19

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My Uncle Jo had been dead for quite a spell before a disastrous shift in the already tottering and constantly scanty fortunes of the Joshua Cobbs and the necessities of earning a living for myself and helping to swell the household exchequer, booted me out of grade school and into the harsh world, alooking for a job. The stroke annulled a parental ambition for me to go to military college, at my grandfather’s expense, and thence to law school and, as it turned out, eventually quenched my own contingent dream of being a cartoonist.

At this optimistic age my calculated futurities forked this way and that. Taking into consideration the natural gifts I should have to bestow upon the world, my normal expectancies seemed moderate indeed. Having acquired success and an independent fortune practicing law and having followed that up with a fling at political eminence, in middle life I would retire to devote myself to big-game hunting, mainly in foreign parts, and to ornithology. In the last-named pursuit I was then and have always been an enthusiastic dilettante. My music deafness has handicapped me. Unless the note is very distinctive—the piped whistle of a meadow lark, the rattling laugh of the belted kingfisher—I cannot often recognize a bird’s call. But if I can get sight of the singer I probably know him. And the sight of him has for me an unfailing fascination—always has, always will. It likewise was on the schedule tentatively mapped for my maturity that when not scientifically engaged in nature study, or with matchless aim diminishing the fauna of this and other continents, I would give further proof of amazing versatility to an awed and appreciative planet by dashing off brilliant caricatures of fellow notables. On the whole I had rather a satisfactory program charted out. But now it was a condition which confronted me, not a theory.

I didn’t think that I’d care for the teeming marts of trade. I’d tried business; through two summers had driven an ice wagon to earn spending money and by hard experiences on my free Saturdays during the school year, I knew about delivering circulars and collecting bills and watering lawns and raking them. Also I was an adept at capturing flying squirrels and baby ’possums and fledgling redbirds and mockingbirds and selling them. Our stable loft was my menagerie. There wasn’t much market for snakes so I kept my snake collection for my own private purposes.^[1] Occasionally one of the more ambitious inmates would get loose and wriggle downstairs and start prospecting; and then Liza Rose Cherry, the cook, would go out in the alley, sometimes via the gate and sometimes over the back fence, and from there would threaten to quit. She stayed with us upwards of fifteen years and that was until she died.

So I turned down an opportunity to be callboy at the Illinois Central shops, figuring that Uncle Jo would have applauded my choice, and, as the prevalent phrase went, accepted a situation—at $1.75 a week—on the very paper with which for so long he was affiliated. I had a smattering of shorthand; had picked that up in between times. And when not writing “items,” which was the name for almost anything printable except a “personal” or a “death notice,” I did chalk-plate drawings. Pretty soon though I found out I’d rather write about things than try to illustrate them and through disuse gradually lost my dexterity at sketching, which for as far back as I remembered had been a part of me. My mother insisted that at eighteen months I was making recognizable pictures of bugs and spiders and chickens and she preserved a sheaf of crumbly scraps to prove it, along with my earliest extant photograph showing me lying on my tum-tum and scribbling away. It was recorded in family lore that fretfully I rebelled against watching for little feeble-minded birds to come out of black boxes; but paper and pencil had soothed my temperamental tantrums. We found these things amongst her private treasures after she died.

Anyhow, at sixteen, there I was, a cub reporter for the Evening News. At nineteen I was its managing editor. I was the youngest managing editor of a daily paper in the United States, so they said, and in the light of fuller knowledge I’m sure I must have been the worst managing editor of any age in the United States. I was reckless, smart-alecky, careless, gaudy in my enthusiasms, a dynamic builder of lurid headlines. I rarely let dull fact hamper my style. I think a count would have shown that my headlining brought down more libel suits on the sheet than my treatment of the news did and that, take it from this belated confession, was plenty of libel suits. After a few months the owners found out what was the matter with their paper and I lost my epaulettes. I had one high qualification though, when reduced to the ranks. I could work at high-pressure fifteen hours on a stretch, play dime-limit draw poker all night, drink my share of the drinks, and come to work next morning, blear-eyed perhaps and a trifle drowsy, but without a twitching nerve in my body. Until I was beyond voting age I didn’t know there was such a thing as a hangover. It was a profound shock to me when I began to lose my immunity. Until then headaches and queasy stomachs had merely been things other people had.

Before the buoyant imaginations of moving-picture producers, as reflected on the silver screen, taught us that all great reporters were drunken geniuses, with a dashing way about them though, and that all women writers were beautiful abnormalities, and that a city room somewhat closely resembled feeding time at the zoo, a favorite fiction story was the one about the despised cub, whom even the copy boys snubbed and the Neroesque city editor sneered at and the rest of the staff ignored; but he went forth and all by himself, through a superhuman stroke of brilliancy, outslicked the supercilious star of the opposition sheet right down to his union suit. This was known as a “scoop.” Speaking personally, I never knew of but one such instance of success on the part of a comparative greenhorn when pitted against metropolitan talent. And success there was not to be attributed to the young hero’s intelligence. It was due to luck. I know whereof I speak because I was the young hero. In somewhat different words I’ve told the tale before in a book which, judged by royalty statements, could have sold only a few surreptitious copies, and anyhow the book has been out of print many a year and I figure no one, barring some ancient with an abhorrent good memory, will recall it, and here’s hoping he’ll be too poor to buy a copy of this work or, if he does buy it, be too feeble to protest that money was obtained from him under false pretenses.

At twenty I was drawing down twelve dollars a week, a top-notch salary for a reporter in a smallish interior city, and I fancied myself an exceedingly bright and capable young man. To strangers I always spoke of myself as a journalist; I always thought of myself as a journalist—never as a mere newspaperman. I rode free on the streetcars and had a season ticket for the theater and carried a pocketful of telegraph franks and annual passes on railways and steamboats. In those days a cub reporter on a country paper could get more free transportation over trunk lines than a railroad president can get now. Also, I was the resident correspondent for a list of city papers as long as my arm. I used to pick up a tidy bit of money out of this correspondence. Sometimes the weekly space bills equalled my salary.

This was the situation when in Chicago there was committed a murder that startled the whole country. A broken-nosed ruffian named Christopher Merry, who posed by day as a potato peddler and by night followed the vocation of burglary, put his faithful wife to death through slow degrees of almost incredible brutality. As I recall the gruesome circumstances, he sewed the body up in a roll of carpet and, with two lesser scoundrels to help him, carried it in a wagon to a secluded crossroads a few miles from Chicago, and buried it there late at night. Then they drove the team back and forth over the spot until the mound was flattened and all signs of digging had been wiped out. One of the three talked too much, was arrested and confessed. Appreciating the characters of the pair, the police threw double loops of men round the block and round the houses where they knew the murderer and his remaining accomplice had hidden. Cautiously they closed in and broke down the doors of Merry’s flat. The rooms were empty.

The crime itself, the grisly midnight burial of the victim and the manner of the escape—most of all the escape—made a whopping big story from the Chicago standpoint. A sizable reward was offered for Merry; a smaller, yet a good-sized one, for the other fugitive.

For a solid month they apprehended Chris Merry all over this continent. Every time a country constable saw a stranger with a broken nose he locked him up and wired to Chicago that he had the murderer. At first the Chicago police department and the Chicago newspapers sent men in response to these messages. Finally they got tired of answering false alarms and resolved to remain calm until the real Merry had been overtaken.

Meanwhile Merry and his partner, whose name was Smith, had been working their way south. They were aiming for New Orleans and then for Cuba, where they expected to join the insurrectos fighting against Spain and lose themselves somewhere in the interior of the island. It was a pretty good plan and it might have worked except that, as they were stealing a ride on a freight train in Indiana, a sudden cold snap descended upon them and Merry’s feet were so badly frostbitten that he became badly crippled. Every step he took must have been agony to him; but he kept going. At the beginning of Christmas week he and Smith crossed into Kentucky. At Louisville they climbed into a boxcar billed for Memphis. Toward dusk a brakeman discovered them and they were thrown off at a little station in the western part of Kentucky, called Fredonia.

That same night a tramp of the harmless variety known as a gay cat crawled into a toolshed back of an empty section house below Fredonia to stay until morning. There he found two more wayfarers. They permitted him to share the quarters with them. They had a bottle of whisky and they shared that with him, too. Pretty soon the evident leader of the pair—Merry, as it turned out—rolled over on his side and went to sleep. His companion and the tramp sat up to finish the bottle. Liquor loosened the clack of Smith’s tongue and he began to boast.

“You’re just a plain bum,” he told the listening gay cat, “but we’re both bad guys.” He hauled out a revolver and flourished it. “The cops are lookin’ for us now for a big job we pulled off in Chi.” He produced a newspaper clipping from his pocket. The clipping bore reproductions of pen-and-ink pictures of two men. The names had been cut off, but the likenesses were fair and in them the startled tramp recognized his new acquaintances. He did not say much, but he did a lot of thinking. He craved to quit such dangerous company as soon as he could. Presently the frayed, greasy clipping dropped from Smith’s unsteady fingers and he slept too. The other waited until Smith began to snore. Then he rose softly and straightway departed from there—but he took that clipping with him.

The next night, which was the night before Christmas, an unfeeling flagman kicked him off a train into a roaring snowstorm and the town of Mayfield, Kentucky. Half-frozen, he hobbled to the nearest house and begged for something to eat. The head of the house gave him a hot supper and let him thaw out by the kitchen fire. The tramp sought to make his gratitude manifest. He hauled out his treasured clipping and showed it to his host and told how and when he got it.

“I’ll bet there’s a reward out for them two,” he said. “One of ’em’s feet is froze and he can’t travel far. You better see the sheriff or somebody, and then he kin ketch ’em and you’ll git part of the money.”

Behold how beautifully the thing worked out! The householder’s brother-in-law was Charley McNutt, the town marshal, a man with more than a local reputation as a detective. Straightway the tramp was taken to the town marshal’s house. There he repeated his story and surrendered the clipping, and then he disappeared without telling his name. Before daybreak McNutt was on his way up the line to Fredonia. He had compared the pen-and-ink drawings in the paper with two chalk-plate pictures upon a circular on file in his office, and he knew he was on the track of Merry and Smith and a big cash prize.

He took up the trail at Fredonia, tracing the two southward down the railroad to Kuttawa, a somewhat larger town. There Merry’s frost-cracked feet and his endurance had given out and the pair had secured lodgings—grim joke!—in the house of the Kuttawa town marshal, who took in boarders to help out his official income. Already he was on fairly friendly terms with his transient guests “from up north.” When the Mayfield marshal sought out his Kuttawa brother privately and told him whom he was harboring, the Kuttawa marshal almost had a fit. Upon hearing the size of the reward, he promptly revived.

These country policemen had better luck than the astute Chicago police department had had. They rounded up the dangerous boarders with ease. Afterward Merry, with a pleased grin, told me how he detected them watching the front and rear of the house in the dusk and how, stealing to a window with his revolver, he twice drew a bead upon the fair target of his host’s large white slouch hat. He did not in the least mind killing him, he explained, but in his crippled state he could not hope to get away; so what would be the use? He reasoned it all out, and then he surrendered.

The triumphant officers carried their prisoners a short distance to Princeton, which was a county seat, locked them up in the county jail, and then telegraphed Chicago headquarters that they had Merry and Smith in custody. But Chicago had heard that tale before—many times. It had got to be a joke. Chicago declined to become excited.

That afternoon, though, a special officer of the Illinois Central Railroad chanced to be in Princeton and he went to the jail to see the prisoners. As it happened, he knew Smith by sight, having met him professionally when he, the detective, was a plain-clothes man at Chicago headquarters. He hurried right out and wired to Chicago that this time it was Merry and Smith, sure enough; but, first, he warned the jailer of the dangerous characters of his charges and advised him against allowing strangers to see the trapped fugitives, knowing they had a wide acquaintance among traveling yeggmen.

It seemed that some of the Chicago papers had begun to suspect it might indeed be the far-hunted pair that had been nabbed down in a back county of Kentucky. Two of the papers—I forget which two now—had already started reporters south before the definite word came; but the Tribune, which had taken a leading hand in scoring the police for inefficiency and which, therefore, had a peculiar interest in the story, waited too long. The Tribune’s staffman failed to board the last train that would land him in Princeton in time to cover the story the following night.

So the Tribune’s acting telegraph editor, as I found out later, wired every one of the Tribune’s country correspondents within a radius of a hundred miles of Princeton to go there forthwith. He was hoping that out of the lot of them there might be one who would know enough to handle the story in some sort of fashion. One of these orders came to me and, as it turned out, I was the only country correspondent of the whole lot who obeyed. I went.

Princeton was considerably less than a hundred miles from my town, and within an hour after the telegram reached me I was on my way. It was the first time an assignment of such size had been entrusted to me and I was swollen with a sense of my importance. At the same time I had only the vaguest idea of how to set about getting my story, or writing it after I got it. When I dropped off the train at Princeton the station platform was overflowing with townspeople, and at least half of them followed me up the street leading from the station. I felt flattered until one man asked who I was and I told him. Then my escort began to dwindle away. I was lean and tall and I wore a large ulster and a broad-brimmed hat; they had taken me for a Chicago detective who had been expected on that train.

Not knowing exactly what I was to do, except that I was to get an interview with the prisoners—my telegraphed instructions had been most explicit on that point—I marched into the local hotel and registered—the official loafers were pawing over the book to find out my name before I laid the pen down—and then I started for the jail. A volunteer committee went along to show me the way. The jail was a small mildewed-looking brick structure. Viewed from the exterior the most interesting object in connection with it was a gentleman of a stern aspect sitting on the front steps nursing a rifle upon his knees. Across the way two well-dressed young men were pacing to and fro, swearing in a feverish way. Passing them, I gathered from certain remarks that their preconceived notions of Southern hospitality had suffered a severe jolt.

I crossed over to the jail, showed my credentials to the person with a rifle, stated my business and said that I desired to be admitted to the presence of Merry and Smith. He was courteous enough—but he did not let me in. As I now recollect, he said the Twelve Apostles could not get into that jail except over his dead body. It seemed the jailer was a literal person. He had been warned against letting any strangers see his distinguished prisoners, and he was not letting any strangers see them. It made no difference who they were or where they came from; if they were strangers that amply was sufficient for him. I began to understand why the well-dressed pair across the street had shown so much heat. They were Chicago reporters—but also they were strangers.

I stood there a bit, wondering what I would do next. Then I remembered that I knew the mayor of the town. He was a friend of my father’s—they had been soldiers in the same regiment during the Civil War. I asked the way to his house. He was at home. He listened to me and then he locked his arm in mine and led me back to the jail—past those two fuming Chicago reporters, past the deputy on guard at the door and into the jailer’s office. The jailer was a grizzled old veteran with a gimpy leg. The mayor introduced me to him.

“Zach,” he said, “this boy is Josh Cobb’s son from Paducah and what’s more, he’s Bob Cobb’s nephew.”

If I had been his long-lost son that jailer could not have been any gladder to see me. He had been a gunner in my uncle’s battery all through the war. When the mayor explained that I represented a city paper and wanted to see his two charges, Zach reached for his keys.

“That there Chicago officer told me not to admit any strangers,” he said, “and I ain’t aimin’ to do so; but, son, you ain’t no stranger—you’re homefolks.”

He led the way into the body of the jail. It was a smelly unventilated cubbyhole of a place, with blank brick walls on two sides and rows of cells on the other two, and a red-hot stove in the middle. Half a dozen ragged negroes—the ordinary occupants of the establishment—were squatted round the stove. My men were in the largest of the cells. The jailer was not taking any chances with them. There was an extra heavy lock on the door of their cage, and for added precaution he had put leg irons on them and made their chains fast to the bars.

The jig was up and they knew it. Besides they had the pride of criminals who had outwitted their natural enemies, the police, and they were ready and willing to talk about their achievement. Somewhat haltingly, I told them I was serving the Chicago Tribune and wanted to get a statement from them; then I stopped, not knowing what to do or say next, and to cover the stage wait hauled out an impressively large notebook—sure sign of an apprentice hand. It should have been an inconspicuous wad of copypaper.

They did the rest themselves. They guyed my embarrassment and made fun of my broad-brimmed hat and my budding mustache, but they talked. There was no mention made of the murder—by unspoken consent all three of us avoided that painful subject—but they told me how they had watched the encircling loops of policemen closing in on them and how they had broken through those twin cordons. They gave me a circumstantial account of their subsequent wanderings, with the dates and names of the different towns they had visited; and I put it all down just as they told it to me. If I hesitated over the spelling of a proper name one or the other would help me out; and at the end Merry himself took my notebook through the bars and, holding it upon his knee, drew in it a rough diagram of the Chicago streets through which they had fled, indicating the situation of his flat and the blockading lines of the police. He made a couple of dots to show where two detectives had been standing when he and Smith slipped by, not six feet away, and he wrote down the names of those two detectives. He marked the place where they had scaled the structure of an elevated road and so had walked away to safety right above the heads of a dozen watchful officers. For Chicago purposes the stuff he was giving me was worth its weight in gold almost—only I did not know it.

At the end of half an hour they sent me away with a farewell gibe or two. The old jailer wanted me to go home with him for supper; but I declined because in a dim sort of way I was beginning to realize I had the making of a pretty good yarn concealed about me, and I burned to get it unloaded. Going back to the hotel, I ran into the confederated town marshals who had made the arrests, and they supplied me with full details of their part in the drama. One of them, McNutt the Mayfield man, furnished a graphic enough word picture of the vanished tramp who had given the first clue.

The Western Union Company had its office in the lobby of the hotel, and when I got there the two Chicago men were sitting alongside the operator, who was a young nervous-looking fellow, hardly more than a boy in age. They were turning out copy, seemingly by the running furlong, while an admiring audience of citizens looked on over their shoulders. To this day I do not know whether they ever saw the two prisoners, but if they did I know they failed, by long odds, to get as much copy out of the pair as I did. I still believe that blood-dyed villain of a Merry actually took pity on my greenness and gave me a better story than perhaps he would have given to a skilled reporter. Probably I was the only person on earth who felt sorry when they hanged him a few months later in the Cook County jail.

Anyway, there sat the Chicago men writing away like mad, with the lone telegrapher looking decidedly uneasy and fidgety as he saw how fast the scribbled sheets accumulated. Abashed by the presence of these luminaries from the big city, I timidly introduced myself and announced that I was on hand to serve the Tribune. One of them, the younger of the two, merely looked at me with raised eyebrows and a grin on his face and went on writing. The other man was kinder. He was John Rafterey, a distinguished reporter, as I was to learn years afterward.^[2] He stopped long enough to tell me something of the records of Merry and Smith, and out of the clutter in his overcoat he dredged up for me a clipped-out Sunday special, which reviewed the killing of the woman and the police end of the escape. The clipping helped me mightily later on; but when I inquired regarding the chances of putting some copy on the wire they both agreed promptly that they expected to keep the operator busy until midnight or later. Neither one of them seemed to think it worth his while to ask whether I had seen Merry or Smith; if they had I should undoubtedly have turned over to them the whole of my story. But they did not ask, and I did not tell them.

I went in to supper, and over the fleet of white-china canary-bird bathtubs containing the meal, I digested the clipping that had been given me. After supper I headed for the station to make my arrangements for filing with the Postal. The Postal man, as I knew, acted as train dispatcher for the railroad, and because the Tribune’s instructions to me had come over the Western Union I should have preferred the Western Union; but I knew now it was the Postal or nothing. As I was starting I met a man I knew, a chap named Offutt, the circulation manager of a Louisville newspaper. He had been a reporter before he went into the business office. He had an evening off, and through sheer love of the game—and possibly also through pity for my evident inexperience—he offered to go along with me and help me put my material together.

At the station the night operator made us welcome in his little crowded office, but he said he was going to be so busy clearing trains that it would be nine o’clock for sure, and maybe ten, before he could touch anything else. However, he stole time to flash the Tribune a synopsis of my story—I did have sense enough to write that—and right away the answer came back. It ran something after this fashion:

SOUNDS LIKE A BIG STORY. WRITE IT FULLY. LEAD OFF WITH STORY OF THE FLIGHT AND THE ROUTE FOLLOWED BY FUGITIVES, SO WE CAN PREPARE MAPS AND DIAGRAMS FROM YOUR TELEGRAPHED DESCRIPTIONS. THEN SEND EVERYTHING IN DETAIL.

My enthusiasm grew; I realized now that I really did have a tale worth telling. I started off with a flamboyant and be-adjectived introduction of half a column or more, and then I settled down to spin out my yarn. Long before the operator was ready for me I was frightened at the mass of copy I had produced. Never before had I done a special of more than five or six hundred words, and here already were two or three thousand words at least—and I just getting started! Could any paper on earth print such a staggering big, long dispatch? Would any paper pay the tolls on it? Suppose the Tribune changed its mind and refused to take it? Inwardly I was a scared young person, but I kept right on writing; and all this time, at five or ten-minute intervals, the impatient telegraph editor in Chicago kept flashing inquiries, wanting to know why in Halifax and other localities that story did not come on.

Finally, along toward half-past nine, the operator got his tracks and his wires cleared of railroad business and was ready to tackle my manuscript. He was a dandy operator, too; he fairly made that key of his beg for mercy. It was he who suggested that I break up my story into sections, with a separate dateline and a separate lead for each installment of it, which was a sound idea, because it gave my volunteer assistant, the circulation manager, a chance to write something. He proceeded to write in detail what I had already written in bulletin form—the narrative of the escape and the flight—while I, now altogether reckless of consequences and filled with the unapproachable joys of creation and authorship, turned myself loose on what I conceived to be a thrilling picture of that pair of shackled ruffians, sitting in that little box of a jail, bragging how they had outwitted the whole Chicago police department. I always liked to do descriptive stuff anyway, whereas a recital of plain facts slowed my pen and stifled my fancy. Pretty soon the operator had another notion.

“See here, kid,” he said; “I’m sending over a loop directly into the Tribune shop; but if I had another man here to help me out he could send into the city office of the Postal and they could hustle the stuff round by messenger and save a lot of time. My day relief lives up the street a piece, near the hotel. Why don’t you go up there and roust him out? He’ll be glad to come down here and help out with all this jag of stuff that you two are stacking up.”

I put on my hat and coat and went. It was nearly eleven o’clock then, and it was snowing a little and the road under my feet was as black as ink. I stumbled along, feeling my way until I came to the hotel, and I went in to ask the clerk the exact location of the house of the man I was looking for.

The clerk had just started to tell me when he broke off and pointed over my shoulder and said, “Why, there he comes now!”

The young Western Union operator had played out. Unused as he was to handling big budgets, his fingers had cramped. It was only a question of a little while until he would have to give up altogether. In this emergency he had suggested that maybe the Postal’s day man, as an act of neighborly accommodation, might be willing to help him; and so one of the harassed Chicago reporters had gone to the Postal operator’s house and waked him up and was now bringing him in. His face was puckered with sleepiness and he had an overcoat on over his nightshirt. Yawning and stretching himself, he was just sitting down at an instrument when I reached his side and told him I wanted his services too.

Still half asleep, he started to explain the situation while the two Chicago men glowered angrily at me and probably cursed me inwardly for a meddlesome young cub.

“I’ve promised to help these gentlemen out,” he said. “They’re in a fix, so they tell me.”

I had a flash of sagacity—the only real flash I begot unaided during the whole night.

“Yes,” I said, “but this is the Western Union you’re working for, isn’t it? You’re working for them for nothing, but I’ve got a slew of stuff to go over your own line—the Postal.”

“In that case,” he said, “it’s a different thing.”

The Chicago men, each with a great scad of copy yet to be sent, protested and begged and swore; but the Postal man went with me. He was no slouch of an operator either. In five minutes after we two reached the depot my story, or rather our story, for Offutt did his share, was feeding into the Tribune’s telegraph room over two wires at once. Pretty soon one of the telegraphers broke off long enough to take a line for me and toss it over:

LET IT ALL COME. SPREAD YOURSELF AND KEEP SENDING UNTIL WE SAY STOP.

I spread myself. I wrote and wrote and wrote! I elaborated my description of the jail scene. I piled the local color on by the hod-load. I described the principal local characters in the story—the jailer, his vigilant deputy, the two town marshals, the unnamed tramp who had sicked them onto their quarry. I humped my shoulders and curled my legs round the legs of my chair, and the sheets of copy slid out from under my fingers in a white stream.

At intervals one of the Chicago men would come in and want to know when a wire would be clear; and I, remembering that mossy and venerable yarn so dear to the heart of every green reporter—the one about the war correspondent who sent the Book of Genesis by cable in order to hold the wire against all opposition until his paper went to press carrying the exclusive account of a great battle—I, remembering that tale, would say to him that I could not tell him when I should be through or anyway near through, and then I would go on writing. He would curse and groan and go out and slam the door with unnecessary violence and I could hear him tramping up and down the platform. The operator of the Western Union had petered out altogether along about midnight.

I held my wires—both of them. I wrote everything I could think of and then wrote it over again. I wrote until my fingers were black from repeated sharpenings of my pencil—wrote until my right hand was numb up to the wrist. My head swam and my eyes blurred, but I kept on writing; and the wonder of it was the Tribune kept on taking what I wrote. I imagine one of my operators, appreciating the joke of it, must have quietly told the operator at the other end what the situation was; and possibly the Tribune people approved the notion of my holding the lines and shutting out my rivals. Anyhow they let me go ahead. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning—Sunday morning—before they finally cut off my torrent of literature. The message read:

THAT’S ENOUGH. GOOD STUFF! GOOD BOY! GOOD NIGHT!

I got up on my feet, stiff and staggering and grimed to the eyebrows with graphite dust; and just then I heard the whistle of the train that would take me back home. I told my friend Offutt I would send him a fair share of what the Tribune sent me. Then I climbed wearily aboard the train and curled up in a seat in the day coach; and the next thing I knew the conductor was literally dumping me in a comatose heap off upon the platform at Paducah. I managed to get home and to bed, and there I stayed until dusk that evening. Then I got up and dressed, and went down to the book-store and waited until the Chicago Sunday papers came in. I bought a copy of the Tribune. I took one look and my eyes popped with amazement and pride—but mostly with pride.

The last column of the first page—under flaring headlines—was mine! Nearly five columns of the second page were mine! I had written the better part of a page for the Chicago Tribune. True, the copyreaders had pruned a lot of the fruits and flowers off my introductions, and they had chopped out a good many of my most cherished adjectives; but in all essentials it was my story and, what was more, a good share of it was exclusive, as I found by comparison of the Tribune with the other Chicago papers. To be sure, I was not responsible really for this exclusiveness. Most of it had been forced upon me, so to speak; and, anyway, I did not value that part of it as an older and wiser newspaperman would have valued it. What mainly concerned me was the length of the story, as measured in columns. I spent a happy evening picking out my literary flights that sailed through the yarn.

On Monday morning I got a letter postmarked Chicago, and opened the envelope to find inside a single sheet of notepaper bearing the heading: Editorial Rooms, the Tribune. The following lines were written on it in a somewhat crabbed hand:

Dear sir: You did excellent work in covering the Merry story for this paper, and I wish to thank you.

I have instructed the cashier to send you a check for fifty dollars as a bonus.

Yours truly,

Joseph Medill

I was tickled naturally to get such a letter; particularly tickled by the second paragraph. But in the abysmal depths of my ignorance I attached little importance to the fact that Joseph Medill himself had written, with his own hand, to express his appreciation of what a stranger had done for his paper. I knew that the editor or the publisher of the Tribune was a man named Medill, but by my estimates the only really great editors in America were Henri Watterson of Louisville, Henry W. Grady of Atlanta and Edward Carmack of Memphis, in the order named. A Medill more or less meant practically nothing to me. I carried that letter about in my pocket for a day or two, and then I tore it up or lost it or something. I wish I had it now.

Anyway, when my check came from the Tribune at the end of the month I forgot all about the letter. For the fifty dollars was what Mr. Medill had said it would be—a bonus—and in addition to the fifty they had allowed my expense account and given me full space rates for the story. In all it came to something like one hundred dollars. Here in one magnificent packet was as much as I made in salary in two months.^[3] It was the largest amount I had ever owned at one time in my life. It was hard to believe. If a man working one night could make that much off of a city paper how much could he make in a month or a year? The possibility staggered the imagination; anyhow it staggered my imagination. From that hour dated my desire to work on a big newspaper, by preference a Chicago or New York newspaper. I wanted to get there before mad extravagance plunged them into bankruptcy.

There is a hitherto unrelated sequel to the tag end of the yarn I have just told, a sort of moral to adorn the tale. It was early in 1904 when I took the plunge. Chicago was the first stop because it was nearer. “Harry” Beach, the A.P.’s top hand, whom I had met while covering the Goebel murder—of which there’ll be considerable to say farther along somewhere—took me in tow, vowing to get me a berth or know the reason why. Despite Beach’s fervent recommendations there didn’t seem to be any openings until we got to the Tribune building where “Eddie” Beck, still in active harness and still cutting wide swathes, presided as city editor. On the strength of Beach’s endorsement he decided he would take me on. But for complete confirmation he deemed it better to wait until James Keeley, the managing editor, and an Englishman, got back from dinner. While he waited, I was minded to tell them about the Chris Merry story and the complimentary letter I’d had from Mr. Medill, now deceased.

“Well, now, that makes it all the more binding on the plaintiff,” beamed Beck. “I guess you’re the same as one of the Tribune’s happy family already.”

Presently Keeley returned and Beck went into Keeley’s office, leaving us in the city room. Pretty soon he was out again, with a nervous fixed grin on his face and he beckoned Beach aside and talked with him a few minutes. I could see how Beach was frowning and how he gnawed his mustache. Abruptly he broke away and came to me, Beck following along, looking bothered.

“Let’s get moving,” snapped Beach. “We’re through here.”

“Now wait,” said Beck. “The offer of the job is still open, Cobb.”

“Like hell it is!” barked Beach. “You know Cobb’s told you the truth and I know dam’ well he’s telling the truth, but that would only make it all the worse for him. He might make good in your sight and in the sight of man and God and everybody else around here but that wouldn’t save him from being gutted the first chance that Cockney scared-cat got.”

In the hallway outside he faced me, simmering with vexation. “You know what?” he growled. “It seems that when Beck told Keeley how you mopped up for the Tribune that time, Keeley suddenly remembered that he was acting telegraph editor then and for him to admit, even after eight or nine years, that just once he’d slipped up by failing to get a staffman down there promptly, would be a reflection on his infallibility. It’s plain as the nose on your face that that’s what he’s afraid of. So he tells Beck you’re faking the whole thing; that he distinctly recalls sending a man who hit the town as soon as any other Chicago reporter did, and while you or some other local hand might have covered odds and ends that you never touched a finger to the story proper. Well, that would be that cagey Englishman’s way. But the tough part is you can’t take a place here. Beck couldn’t save you long.”

So Chicago’s loss was New York’s gain, not that Chicago didn’t somehow contrive to continue getting out daily newspapers. Five months later I’d shipped my wife and baby daughter south to live off my father-in-law and from him I borrowed two hundred dollars—I got down to the last seventeen of those dollars when the break in my favor came—and was off for New York.

[1]

I scarcely can remember when I wasn’t collecting something—birds’ eggs, pressed wild flowers, autumn leaves, cigarette pictures, geological specimens, mound builders’ artifacts—mounds of those earliest people dotted the county—postage stamps, tamed pets and, for the past fifteen years or so, examples of the ancient relics and the more modern handicrafts of the original Americans, plains tribes, woods tribes and desert dwellers alike. My hobbies may change, but I have at least one to go along on and running concurrently with it, my abiding interest in bird life. As a boy I was a deft merchandiser in specimens. Classifying, labeling, identifying, swapping off duplicate items and dickering for new ones—these have been joys to me all my life and still are. The man or woman without a healthy fad has surely missed something. What a pleasure Peggy Hopkins Joyce’s helpmate collection must have been to her! And one of the happiest men I ever knew was DeWolf Hopper, the Husband of His Country.

[2]

When newspapermen met they used to tell this story on Rafterey: One May night his city editor—it may have been “Mr. Dooley” Dunne—said, “John, you’re covering the Decoration Day parade tomorrow. And for heaven’s sake cut out the line about ‘the thin ranks grow thinner’ and the one about ‘the boys in blue are getting gray’ and the one about ‘Hail, heroic saviors of the Union’ and all the rest of that time-worn tripe. There must be some new way to start off a G.A.R. story—some angle or slant that hasn’t been worked to death. You find it.” This made a hard assignment instead of an easy one. Fortifying himself for it, John rather overestimated his cubic capacity. As he sat dazedly in the press stand what impressed him more than any one thing else was the astonishingly large number of veterans who came gimpily along Michigan Avenue in brand-new, creaking shoes. So John went back to the office, sat down, wrote one introductory sentence and fell asleep across his typewriter. When they pried him off, this, they saw, was what he had written: “God, how their feet hurt them!”

[3]

Part of this important money went to buy the handsomest box of superior mixed bonbon chocolates to be had at Gilbert Brothers’ drugstore—large bow of lilac ribbon on the cover and pair of stylish embossed tin tongs inside—for a young resident of south Georgia who had come up from Belmont College in Nashville to spend the holidays with two home-town girls, she bringing with her, in addition to various other attractions, the slurred intonations of the lower coast country, which had a fascinating, slightly foreign sound to those who spoke with the twangier, more nasal inflections of the inland river bottoms. (Yankees don’t know it but there are fully a dozen distinctive shadings of pronunciation in various main divisions of the South and dozens of lesser subshadings peculiar to this locality or that.) Within four years I had worn the resistance of the fascinating Georgia visitor down to the point of surrender. When the officiating minister bade me repeat after him the words, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” I said to myself, “Umph uh, there goes my Ridpath’s History of the World and the plush postage stamp album.” True, I had ninety dollars saved up, but that was to be spent in riotous living on the wedding trip, and was. We breakfasted mighty sketchily aboard the diner on the morning we got back.