When the war-ships of a navy lie cleared for action outside a harbor,
and the war-ships of the country with which they are at war lie cleared
for action inside the harbor, there is likely to be trouble. Trouble
between war-ships is news, and wherever there is news there is always a
representative of the Consolidated Press.
As long as Sampson blockaded Havana and the army beat time back of the
Tampa Bay Hotel, the central office for news was at Key West, but
when Cervera slipped into Santiago Harbor and Sampson stationed his
battle-ships at its mouth, Key West lost her only excuse for existence,
and the press-boats burled their bows in the waters of the Florida
Straits and raced for the cable-station at Port Antonio. It was then
that Keating, the “star” man of the Consolidated Press Syndicate, was
forced to abandon his young bride and the rooms he had engaged for her
at the Key West Hotel, and accompany his tug to the distant island of
Jamaica.
Keating was a good and faithful servant to the Consolidated Press. He
was a correspondent after its own making, an industrious collector of
facts. The Consolidated Press did not ask him to comment on what it
sent him to see; it did not require nor desire his editorial opinions or
impressions. It was no part of his work to go into the motives which led
to the event of news interest which he was sent to report, nor to point
out what there was of it which was dramatic, pathetic, or outrageous.
The Consolidated Press, being a mighty corporation, which daily fed
seven hundred different newspapers, could not hope to please the policy
of each, so it compromised by giving the facts of the day fairly set
down, without heat, prejudice, or enthusiasm. This was an excellent
arrangement for the papers that subscribed for the service of the
Consolidated Press, but it was death to the literary strivings of the
Consolidated Press correspondents.
“We do not want descriptive writing,” was the warning which the manager
of the great syndicate was always flashing to its correspondents. “We do
not pay you to send us pen-pictures or prose poems. We want the facts,
all the facts, and nothing but the facts.”
And so, when at a presidential convention a theatrical speaker sat down
after calling James G. Blaine “a plumed knight,” each of the “special”
correspondents present wrote two columns in an effort to describe
how the people who heard the speech behaved in consequence, but the
Consolidated Press man telegraphed, “At the conclusion of these remarks
the cheering lasted sixteen minutes.”
No event of news value was too insignificant to escape the watchfulness
of the Consolidated Press, none so great that it could not handle it
from its inception up to the moment when it ceased to be quoted in the
news-market of the world. Each night, from thousands of spots all over
the surface of the globe, it received thousands of facts, of cold,
accomplished facts. It knew that a tidal wave had swept through China, a
cabinet had changed in Chili, in Texas an express train had been held up
and robbed, “Spike” Kennedy had defeated the “Dutchman” in New Orleans,
the Oregon had coaled outside of Rio Janeiro Harbor, the Cape Verde
fleet had been seen at anchor off Cadiz; it had been located in the
harbor of San Juan, Porto Rico; it had been sighted steaming slowly past
Fortress Monroe; and the Navy Department reported that the St. Paul had
discovered the lost squadron of Spain in the harbor of Santiago. This
last fact was the one which sent Keating to Jamaica. Where he was sent
was a matter of indifference to Keating. He had worn the collar of
the Consolidated Press for so long a time that he was callous. A board
meeting--a mine disaster--an Indian uprising--it was all one to Keating.
He collected facts and his salary. He had no enthusiasms, he held no
illusions. The prestige of the mammoth syndicate he represented gained
him an audience where men who wrote for one paper only were repulsed on
the threshold. Senators, governors, the presidents of great trusts and
railroad systems, who fled from the reporter of a local paper as from
a leper, would send for Keating and dictate to him whatever it was they
wanted the people of the United States to believe, for when they talked
to Keating they talked to many millions of readers. Keating, in turn,
wrote out what they had said to him and transmitted it, without color or
bias, to the clearinghouse of the Consolidated Press. His “stories,”
as all newspaper writings are called by men who write them, were as
picturesque reading as the quotations of a stock-ticker. The personal
equation appeared no more offensively than it does in a page of
typewriting in his work.
Consequently, he was dear to the heart of the Consolidated Press, and,
as a “safe” man, was sent to the beautiful harbor of Santiago--to a spot
where there were war-ships cleared for action, Cubans in ambush,
naked marines fighting for a foothold at Guantanamo, palm-trees and
coral-reefs--in order that he might look for “facts.”
There was not a newspaper man left at Key West who did not writhe with
envy and anger when he heard of it. When the wire was closed for
the night, and they had gathered at Josh Kerry's, Keating was the
storm-centre of their indignation.
“What a chance!” they protested. “What a story! It's the chance of a
lifetime.” They shook their heads mournfully and lashed themselves with
pictures of its possibilities.
“And just fancy its being wasted on old Keating,” said the Journal man.
“Why, everything's likely to happen out there, and whatever does happen,
he'll make it read like a Congressional Record. Why, when I heard of it
I cabled the office that if the paper would send me I'd not ask for any
salary for six months.”
“And Keating's kicking because he has to go,” growled the Sun man. “Yes,
he is, I saw him last night, and he was sore because he'd just moved his
wife down here. He said if he'd known this was coming he'd have let her
stay in New York. He says he'll lose money on this assignment, having to
support himself and his wife in two different places.”
Norris, “the star man” of the World, howled with indignation.
“Good Lord!” he said, “is that all he sees in it? Why, there never was
such a chance. I tell you, some day soon all of those war-ships will let
loose at each other and there will be the best story that ever came over
the wire, and if there isn't, it's a regular loaf anyway. It's a picnic,
that's what it is, at the expense of the Consolidated Press. Why,
he ought to pay them to let him go. Can't you see him, confound him,
sitting under a palm-tree in white flannels, with a glass of Jamaica rum
in his fist, while we're dodging yellow fever on this coral-reef, and
losing our salaries on a crooked roulette-wheel.”
“I wonder what Jamaica rum is like as a steady drink,” mused the
ex-baseball reporter, who had been converted into a war-correspondent by
the purchase of a white yachting-cap.
“It won't be long before Keating finds out,” said the Journal man.
“Oh, I didn't know that,” ventured the new reporter, who had just come
South from Boston. “I thought he didn't drink. I never see Keating in
here with the rest of the boys.”
“You wouldn't,” said Norris. “He only comes in here by himself, and he
drinks by himself. He's one of those confidential drunkards, You give
some men whiskey, and it's like throwing kerosene on a fire, isn't it?
It makes them wave their arms about and talk loud and break things, but
you give it to another man and it's like throwing kerosene on a cork
mat. It just soaks in. That's what Keating is. He's a sort of a cork
mat.”
“I shouldn't think the C. P. would stand for that,” said the Boston man.
“It wouldn't, if it ever interfered with his work, but he's never fallen
down on a story yet. And the sort of stuff he writes is machine-made; a
man can write C. P. stuff in his sleep.”
One of the World men looked up and laughed.
“I wonder if he'll run across Channing out there,” he said. The men at
the table smiled, a kindly, indulgent smile. The name seemed to act
upon their indignation as a shower upon the close air of a summer-day.
“That's so,” said Norris. “He wrote me last month from Port-au-Prince
that he was moving on to Jamaica. He wrote me from that club there at
the end of the wharf. He said he was at that moment introducing the
President to a new cocktail, and as he had no money to pay his passage
to Kingston he was trying to persuade him to send him on there as his
Haitian Consul. He said in case he couldn't get appointed Consul, he had
an offer to go as cook on a fruit-tramp.”
The men around the table laughed. It was the pleased, proud laugh that
flutters the family dinner-table when the infant son and heir says
something precocious and impudent.
“Who is Channing?” asked the Boston man.
There was a pause, and the correspondents looked at Norris.
“Channing is a sort of a derelict,” he said. “He drifted into New York
last Christmas from the Omaha Bee. He's been on pretty nearly every
paper in the country.”
“What's he doing in Haiti?”
“He went there on the Admiral Decatur to write a filibustering story
about carrying arms across to Cuba. Then the war broke out and he's
been trying to get back to Key West, and now, of course, he'll make for
Kingston. He cabled me yesterday, at my expense, to try and get him a
job on our paper. If the war hadn't come on he had a plan to beat his
way around the world. And he'd have done it, too. I never saw a man who
wouldn't help Charlie along, or lend him a dollar.” He glanced at the
faces about him and winked at the Boston man. “They all of them look
guilty, don't they?” he said.
“Charlie Channing,” murmured the baseball reporter, gently, as though
he were pronouncing the name of a girl. He raised his glass. “Here's
to Charlie Channing,” he repeated. Norris set down his empty glass and
showed it to the Boston man.
“That's his only enemy,” he said. “Write! Heavens, how that man can
write, and he'd almost rather do anything else. There isn't a paper in
New York that wasn't glad to get him, but they couldn't keep him a
week. It was no use talking to him. Talk! I've talked to him until three
o'clock in the morning. Why, it was I made him send his first Chinatown
story to the International Magazine, and they took it like a flash and
wrote him for more, but he blew in the check they sent him and didn't
even answer their letter. He said after he'd had the fun of writing a
story, he didn't care whether it was published in a Sunday paper or in
white vellum, or never published at all. And so long as he knew he wrote
it, he didn't care whether anyone else knew it or not. Why, when that
English reviewer--what's his name--that friend of Kipling's--passed
through New York, he said to a lot of us at the Press Club, 'You've got
a young man here on Park Row--an opium-eater, I should say, by the look
of him, who if he would work and leave whiskey alone, would make us all
sweat.' That's just what he said, and he's the best in England!”
“Charlie's a genius,” growled the baseball reporter, defiantly. “I say,
he's a genius.”
The Boston man shook his head. “My boy,” he began, sententiously,
“genius is nothing more than hard work, and a man--”
Norris slapped the table with his hand.
“Oh, no, it's not,” he jeered, fiercely, “and don't you go off believing
it is, neither. I've worked. I've worked twelve hours a day. Keating
even has worked eighteen hours a day--all his life--but we never wrote
'The Passing of the Highbinders,' nor the 'Ships that Never Came
Home,' nor 'Tales of the Tenderloin,' and we never will. I'm a better
news-gatherer than Charlie, I can collect facts and I can put them
together well enough, too, so that if a man starts to read my story
he'll probably follow it to the bottom of the column, and he may turn
over the page, too. But I can't say the things, because I can't see
the things that Charlie sees. Why, one night we sent him out on a big
railroad-story. It was a beat, we'd got it by accident, and we had it
all to ourselves, but Charlie came across a blind beggar on Broadway
with a dead dog. The dog had been run over, and the blind beggar
couldn't find his way home without him, and was sitting on the
curb-stone, weeping over the mongrel. Well, when Charlie came back to
the office he said he couldn't find out anything about that railroad
deal, but that he'd write them a dog-story. Of course, they were raging
crazy, but he sat down just as though it was no concern of his, and,
sure enough, he wrote the dog-story. And the next day over five hundred
people stopped in at the office on their way downtown and left dimes and
dollars to buy that man a new dog. Now, hard work won't do that.”
Keating had been taking breakfast in the ward-room of H. M. S.
Indefatigable. As an acquaintance the officers had not found him an
undoubted acquisition, but he was the representative of seven hundred
papers, and when the Indefatigable's ice-machine broke, he had loaned
the officers' mess a hundred pounds of it from his own boat.
The cruiser's gig carried Keating to the wharf, the crew tossed their
oars and the boatswain touched his cap and asked, mechanically, “Shall I
return to the ship, sir?”
Channing, stretched on the beach, with his back to a palm-tree, observed
the approach of Keating with cheerful approbation.
“It is gratifying to me,” he said, “to see the press treated with such
consideration. You came in just like Cleopatra in her barge. If the flag
had been flying, and you hadn't steered so badly, I should have thought
you were at least an admiral. How many guns does the British Navy give a
Consolidated Press reporter when he comes over the side?”
Keating dropped to the sand and, crossing his legs under him, began
tossing shells at the water.
“They gave this one a damned good breakfast,” he said, “and some very
excellent white wine. Of course, the ice-machine was broken, it always
is, but then Chablis never should be iced, if it's the real thing.”
“Chablis! Ice! Hah!” snorted Channing. “Listen to him! Do you know what
I had for breakfast?”
Keating turned away uncomfortably and looked toward the ships in the
harbor.
“Well, never mind,” said Channing, yawning luxuriously. “The sun is
bright, the sea is blue, and the confidences of this old palm are
soothing. He's a great old gossip, this palm.” He looked up into the
rustling fronds and smiled. “He whispers me to sleep,” he went on,
“or he talks me awake--talks about all sorts of things--things he has
seen--cyclones, wrecks, and strange ships and Cuban refugees and
Spanish spies and lovers that meet here on moonlight nights. It's always
moonlight in Port Antonio, isn't it?”
“You ought to know, you've been here longer than I,” said Keating.
“And how do you like it, now that you have got to know it better? Pretty
heavenly? eh?”
“Pretty heavenly!” snorted Keating. “Pretty much the other place! What
good am I doing? What's the sense of keeping me here? Cervera isn't
going to come out, and the people at Washington won't let Sampson go in.
Why, those ships have been there a month now, and they'll be there just
where they are now when you and I are bald. I'm no use here. All I do
is to thrash across there every day and eat up more coal than the whole
squadron burns in a month. Why, that tug of mine's costing the C. P. six
hundred dollars a day, and I'm not sending them news enough to pay for
setting it up. Have you seen 'em yet?”
“Seen what? Your stories?”
“No, the ships!”
“Yes, Scudder took me across once in the Iduna. I haven't got a paper
yet, so I couldn't write anything, but--”
“Well, you've seen all there is to it, then; you wouldn't see any more
if you went over every day. It's just the same old harbor-mouth, and
the same old Morro Castle, and same old ships, drifting up and down; the
Brooklyn, full of smoke-stacks, and the New York, with her two bridges,
and all the rest of them looking just as they've looked for the last
four weeks. There's nothing in that. Why don't they send me to Tampa
with the army and Shafter--that's where the story is.”
“Oh, I don't know,” said Channing, shaking his head. “I thought it was
bully!”
“Bully, what was bully?”
“Oh, the picture,” said Channing, doubtfully, “and--and what it meant.
What struck me about it was that it was so hot, and lazy, and peaceful,
that they seemed to be just drifting about, just what you complain of.
I don't know what I expected to see; I think I expected they'd be racing
around in circles, tearing up the water and throwing broadsides at Morro
Castle as fast as fire-crackers.
“But they lay broiling there in the heat just as though they were
becalmed. They seemed to be asleep on their anchor-chains. It reminded
me of a big bull-dog lying in the sun with his head on his paws and his
eyes shut. You think he's asleep, and you try to tiptoe past him, but
when you're in reach of his chain--he's at your throat, what? It seemed
so funny to think of our being really at war. I mean the United States,
and with such an old-established firm as Spain. It seems so presumptuous
in a young republic, as though we were strutting around, singing, 'I'm
getting a big boy now.' I felt like saying, 'Oh, come off, and stop
playing you're a world power, and get back into your red sash and
knickerbockers, or you'll get spanked!' It seems as though we must be
such a lot of amateurs. But when I went over the side of the New York I
felt like kneeling down on her deck and begging every jackey to kick me.
I felt about as useless as a fly on a locomotive-engine. Amateurs! Why,
they might have been in the business since the days of the ark; all of
them might have been descended from bloody pirates; they twisted those
eight-inch guns around for us just as though they were bicycles, and the
whole ship moved and breathed and thought, too, like a human being, and
all the captains of the other war-ships about her were watching for her
to give the word. All of them stripped and eager and ready--like a lot
of jockeys holding in the big race-horses, and each of them with his
eyes on the starter. And I liked the way they all talk about Sampson,
and the way the ships move over the stations like parts of one machine,
just as he had told them to do.
“Scudder introduced me to him, and he listened while we did the talking,
but it was easy to see who was the man in the Conning Tower. Keating--my
boy!” Channing cried, sitting upright in his enthusiasm, “he's put a
combination-lock on that harbor that can't be picked--and it'll work
whether Sampson's asleep in his berth, or fifteen miles away, or killed
on the bridge. He doesn't have to worry, he knows his trap will work--he
ought to, he set it.”
Keating shrugged his shoulders, tolerantly.
“Oh, I see that side of it,” he assented. “I see all there is in it for
YOU, the sort of stuff you write, Sunday-special stuff, but there's no
NEWS in it. I'm not paid to write mail-letters, and I'm not down here to
interview palm-trees either.”
“Why, you old fraud!” laughed Channing. “You know you're having the time
of your life here. You're the pet of Kingston society--you know you
are. I only wish I were half as popular. I don't seem to belong, do I? I
guess it's my clothes. That English Colonel at Kingston always scowls
at me as though he'd like to put me in irons, and whenever I meet our
Consul he sees something very peculiar on the horizon-line.”
Keating frowned for a moment in silence, and then coughed, consciously.
“Channing,” he began, uncomfortably, “you ought to brace up.”
“Brace up?” asked Channing.
“Well, it isn't fair to the rest of us,” protested Keating, launching
into his grievance. “There's only a few of us here, and we--we think
you ought to see that and not give the crowd a bad name. All the other
correspondents have some regard for--for their position and for the
paper, but you loaf around here looking like an old tramp--like any
old beach-comber, and it queers the rest of us. Why, those English
artillerymen at the Club asked me about you, and when I told them
you were a New York correspondent they made all sorts of jokes about
American newspapers, and what could I say?”
Channing eyed the other man with keen delight.
“I see, by Jove! I'm sorry,” he said. But the next moment he laughed,
and then apologized, remorsefully.
“Indeed, I beg your pardon,” he begged, “but it struck me as a sort
of--I had no idea you fellows were such swells--I knew I was a social
outcast, but I didn't know my being a social outcast was hurting anyone
else. Tell me some more.”
“Well, that's all,” said Keating, suspiciously. “The fellows asked me
to speak to you about it and to tell you to take a brace. Now, for
instance, we have a sort of mess-table at the hotels and we'd like to
ask you to belong, but--well--you see how it is--we have the officers
to lunch whenever they're on shore, and you're so disreputable”--Keating
scowled at Channing, and concluded, impotently, “Why don't you get
yourself some decent clothes and--and a new hat?”
Channing removed his hat to his knee and stroked it with affectionate
pity.
“It is a shocking bad hat,” he said. “Well, go on.”
“Oh, it's none of my business,” exclaimed Keating, impatiently. “I'm
just telling you what they're saying. Now, there's the Cuban refugees,
for instance. No one knows what they're doing here, or whether they're
real Cubans or Spaniards.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Why, the way you go round with them and visit them, it's no wonder they
say you're a spy.”
Channing stared incredulously, and then threw back his head and laughed
with a shout of delight.
“They don't, do they?” he asked.
“Yes, they do, since you think it's so funny. If it hadn't been for
us the day you went over to Guantanamo the marines would have had you
arrested and court-martialed.”
Channing's face clouded with a quick frown, “Oh,” he exclaimed, in a
hurt voice, “they couldn't have thought that.”
“Well, no,” Keating admitted grudgingly, “not after the fight, perhaps,
but before that, when you were snooping around the camp like a Cuban
after rations.” Channing recognized the picture with a laugh.
“I do,” he said, “I do. But you should have had me court-martialed and
shot; it would have made a good story. 'Our reporter shot as a spy, his
last words were--' what were my last words, Keating?”
Keating turned upon him with impatience, “But why do you do it?” he
demanded. “Why don't you act like the rest of us? Why do you hang out
with all those filibusters and runaway Cubans?”
“They have been very kind to me,” said Channing, soberly. “They are a
very courteous race, and they have ideas of hospitality which make the
average New Yorker look like a dog hiding a bone.”
“Oh, I suppose you mean that for us,” demanded Keating. “That's a slap
at me, eh?”
Channing gave a sigh and threw himself back against the trunk of the
palm, with his hands clasped behind his head.
“Oh, I wasn't thinking of you at all, Keating,” he said. “I don't
consider you in the least.” He stretched himself and yawned wearily.
“I've got troubles of my own.” He sat up suddenly and adjusted the
objectionable hat to his head.
“Why don't you wire the C. P.,” he asked, briskly, “and see if they
don't want an extra man? It won't cost you anything to wire, and I need
the job, and I haven't the money to cable.”
“The Consolidated Press,” began Keating, jealously. “Why--well, you know
what the Consolidated Press is? They don't want descriptive writers--and
I've got all the men I need.”
Keating rose and stood hesitating in some embarrassment. “I'll tell you
what I could do, Channing,” he said, “I could take you on as a stoker,
or steward, say. They're always deserting and mutinying; I have to carry
a gun on me to make them mind. How would you like that? Forty dollars a
month, and eat with the crew?”
For a moment Channing stood in silence, smoothing the sand with the sole
of his shoe. When he raised his head his face was flushing.
“Oh, thank you,” he said. “I think I'll keep on trying for a paper--I'll
try a little longer. I want to see something of this war, of course, and
if I'm not too lazy I'd like to write something about it, but--well--I'm
much obliged to you, anyway.”
“Of course, if it were my money, I'd take you on at once,” said Keating,
hurriedly.
Channing smiled and nodded. “You're very kind,” he answered. “Well,
good-by.”
A half-hour later, in the smoking-room of the hotel, Keating addressed
himself to a group of correspondents.
“There is no doing anything with that man Channing,” he said, in a tone
of offended pride. “I offered him a good job and he wouldn't take it.
Because he got a story in the International Magazine, he's stuck on
himself, and he won't hustle for news--he wants to write pipe-dreams.
What the public wants just now is news.”
“That's it,” said one of the group, “and we must give it to them--even
if we have to fake it.”
Great events followed each other with great rapidity. The army ceased
beating time, shook itself together, adjusted its armor and moved, and,
to the delight of the flotilla of press-boats at Port Antonio, moved,
not as it had at first intended, to the north coast of Cuba, but to
Santiago, where its transports were within reach of their megaphones.
“Why, everything's coming our way now!” exclaimed the World manager
in ecstasy. “We've got the transports to starboard at Siboney, and the
war-ships to port at Santiago, and all we'll need to do is to sit on the
deck with a field-glass, and take down the news with both hands.”
Channing followed these events with envy. Once or twice, as a special
favor, the press-boats carried him across to Siboney and Daiquiri, and
he was able to write stories of what he saw there; of the landing of the
army, of the wounded after the Guasimas fight, and of the fever-camp at
Siboney. His friends on the press-boats sent this work home by mail on
the chance that the Sunday editor might take it at space rates. But mail
matter moved slowly and the army moved quickly, and events crowded so
closely upon each other that Channing's stories, when they reached New
York, were ancient history and were unpublished, and, what was of more
importance to him, unpaid for. He had no money now, and he had become
a beach-comber in the real sense of the word. He slept the warm nights
away among the bananas and cocoanuts on the Fruit Company's wharf,
and by calling alternately on his Cuban exiles and the different
press-boats, he was able to obtain a meal a day without arousing any
suspicions in the minds of his hosts that it was his only one.
He was sitting on the stringer of the pier-head one morning, waiting for
a press-boat from the “front,” when the Three Friends ran in and lowered
her dingy, and the “World” manager came ashore, clasping a precious
bundle of closely written cable-forms. Channing scrambled to his feet
and hailed him.
“Have you heard from the chief about me yet?” he asked. The “World” man
frowned and stammered, and then, taking Channing by the arm, hurried
with him toward the cable-office.
“Charlie, I think they're crazy up there,” he began, “they think they
know it all. Here I am on the spot, but they think--”
“You mean they won't have me,” said Channing. “But why?” he asked,
patiently. “They used to give me all the space I wanted.”
“Yes, I know, confound them, and so they should now,” said the “World”
man, with sympathetic indignation. “But here's their cable; you can see
it's not my fault.” He read the message aloud. “Channing, no. Not safe,
take reliable man from Siboney.” He folded the cablegram around a dozen
others and stuck it back in his hip-pocket.
“What queered you, Charlie,” he explained, importantly, “was that last
break of yours, New Year's, when you didn't turn up for a week. It
was once too often, and the chief's had it in for you ever since. You
remember?”
Channing screwed up his lips in an effort of recollection.
“Yes, I remember,” he answered, slowly. “It began on New Year's eve in
Perry's drug-store, and I woke up a week later in a hack in Boston. So
I didn't have such a run for my money, did I? Not good enough to have to
pay for it like this. I tell you,” he burst out suddenly, “I feel like
hell being left out of this war, with all the rest of the boys working
so hard. If it weren't playing it low down on the fellows that have been
in it from the start, I'd like to enlist. But they enlisted for glory,
and I'd only do it because I can't see the war any other way, and it
doesn't seem fair to them. What do you think?”
“Oh, don't do that,” protested the World manager. “You stick to your own
trade. We'll get you something to do. Have you tried the Consolidated
Press yet?”
Channing smiled grimly at the recollection.
“Yes, I tried it first.”
“It would be throwing pearls to swine to have you write for them, I
know, but they're using so many men now. I should think you could get on
their boat.”
“No, I saw Keating,” Channing explained. “He said I could come along as
a stoker, and I guess I'll take him up, it seems--”
“Keating said--what?” exclaimed the “World” man. “Keating? Why, he
stands to lose his own job, if he isn't careful. If it wasn't that he's
just married, the C. P. boys would have reported him a dozen times.”
“Reported him, what for?”
“Why--you know. His old complaint.”
“Oh, that,” said Channing. “My old complaint?” he added.
“Well, yes, but Keating hasn't been sober for two weeks, and he'd
have fallen down on the Guasimas story if those men hadn't pulled him
through. They had to, because they're in the syndicate. He ought to go
shoot himself; he's only been married three months and he's handling the
biggest piece of news the country's had in thirty years, and he can't
talk straight. There's a time for everything, I say,” growled the
“World” man.
“It takes it out of a man, this boat-work,” Channing ventured, in
extenuation. “It's very hard on him.”
“You bet it is,” agreed the “World” manager, with enthusiasm. “Sloshing
about in those waves, sea-sick mostly, and wet all the time, and with a
mutinous crew, and so afraid you'll miss something that you can't
write what you have got.” Then he added, as an after-thought, “And our
cruisers thinking you're a Spanish torpedo-boat and chucking shells at
you.”
“No wonder Keating drinks,” Channing said, gravely. “You make it seem
almost necessary.”
Many thousand American soldiers had lost themselves in a jungle, and
had broken out of it at the foot of San Juan Hill. Not wishing to return
into the jungle, they took the hill. On the day they did this Channing
had the good fortune to be in Siboney. The “World” man had carried him
there and asked him to wait around the waterfront while he went up to
the real front, thirteen miles inland. Channing's duty was to signal
the press-boat when the first despatch-rider rode in with word that the
battle was on. The World man would have liked to ask Channing to act as
his despatch-rider, but he did not do so, because the despatch-riders
were either Jamaica negroes or newsboys from Park Row--and he remembered
that Keating had asked Channing to be his stoker.
Channing tramped through the damp, ill-smelling sand of the beach,
sick with self-pity. On the other side of those glaring, inscrutable
mountains, a battle, glorious, dramatic, and terrible, was going
forward, and he was thirteen miles away. He was at the base, with the
supplies, the sick, and the skulkers.
It was cruelly hot. The heat-waves flashed over the sea until the
transports in the harbor quivered like pictures on a biograph. From the
refuse of company kitchens, from reeking huts, from thousands of empty
cans, rose foul, enervating odors, which deadened the senses like a
drug. The atmosphere steamed with a heavy, moist humidity. Channing
staggered and sank down suddenly on a pile of railroad-ties in front of
the commissary's depot. There were some Cubans seated near him, dividing
their Government rations, and the sight reminded him that he had had
nothing to eat. He walked over to the wide door of the freight-depot,
where a white-haired, kindly faced, and perspiring officer was, with his
own hands, serving out canned beef to a line of Cubans. The officer's
flannel shirt was open at the throat. The shoulder-straps of a colonel
were fastened to it by safety-pins. Channing smiled at him uneasily.
“Could I draw on you for some rations?” he asked. “I'm from the Three
Friends. I'm not one of their regular accredited correspondents,” he
added, conscientiously, “I'm just helping them for to-day.”
“Haven't you got a correspondent's pass?” asked the officer. He was
busily pouring square hardtack down the throat of a saddle-bag a Cuban
soldier held open before him.
“No,” said Channing, turning away, “I'm just helping.”
The officer looked after him, and what he saw caused him to reach under
the counter for a tin cup and a bottle of lime-juice.
“Here,” he said, “drink this. What's the matter with you--fever? Come in
here out of that sun. You can lie down on my cot, if you like.”
Channing took the tin cup and swallowed a warm mixture of boiled water
and acrid lime-juice.
“Thank you,” he said, “but I must keep watch for the first news from the
front.”
A man riding a Government mule appeared on the bridge of the lower
trail, and came toward them at a gallop. He was followed and surrounded
by a hurrying mob of volunteers, hospital stewards, and Cubans.
The Colonel vaulted the counter and ran to meet him.
“This looks like news from the front now,” he cried.
The man on the mule was from civil life. His eyes bulged from their
sockets and his face was purple. The sweat ran over it and glistened on
the cords of his thick neck.
“They're driving us back!” he shrieked.
“Chaffee's killed, an' Roosevelt's killed, an' the whole army's beaten!”
He waved his arms wildly toward the glaring, inscrutable mountains. The
volunteers and stevedores and Cubans heard him, open-mouthed and with
panic-stricken eyes. In the pitiless sunlight he was a hideous and awful
spectacle.
“They're driving us into the sea!” he foamed.
“We've got to get out of here, they're just behind me. The army's
running for its life. They're running away!”
Channing saw the man dimly, through a cloud that came between him and
the yellow sunlight. The man in the saddle swayed, the group about him
swayed, like persons on the floor of a vast ball-room. Inside he burned
with a mad, fierce hatred for this shrieking figure in the saddle. He
raised the tin cup and hurled it so that it hit the man's purple face.
“You lie!” Channing shouted, staggering. “You lie! You're a damned
coward. You lie!” He heard his voice repeating this in different places
at greater distances. Then the cloud closed about him, shutting out
the man in the saddle, and the glaring, inscrutable mountains, and the
ground at his feet rose and struck him in the face.
Channing knew he was on a boat because it lifted and sank with him, and
he could hear the rush of her engines. When he opened his eyes he was in
the wheel-house of the Three Friends, and her captain was at the wheel,
smiling down at him. Channing raised himself on his elbow.
“The despatch-rider?” he asked.
“That's all right,” said the captain, soothingly. “Don't you worry. He
come along same time you fell, and brought you out to us. What ailed
you--sunstroke?”
Channing sat up. “I guess so,” he said.
When the Three Friends reached Port Antonio, Channing sought out the
pile of coffee-bags on which he slept at night and dropped upon them.
Before this he had been careful to avoid the place in the daytime, so
that no one might guess that it was there that he slept at night, but
this day he felt that if he should drop in the gutter he would not care
whether anyone saw him there or not. His limbs were hot and heavy and
refused to support him, his bones burned like quicklime.
The next morning, with the fever still upon him, he hurried restlessly
between the wharves and the cable-office, seeking for news. There was
much of it; it was great and trying news, the situation outside of
Santiago was grim and critical. The men who had climbed San Juan Hill
were clinging to it like sailors shipwrecked on a reef unwilling to
remain, but unable to depart. If they attacked the city Cervera promised
to send it crashing about their ears. They would enter Santiago only to
find it in ruins. If they abandoned the hill, 2,000 killed and wounded
would have been sacrificed in vain.
The war-critics of the press-boats and of the Twitchell House saw but
two courses left open. Either Sampson must force the harbor and destroy
the squadron, and so make it possible for the army to enter the city,
or the army must be reinforced with artillery and troops in sufficient
numbers to make it independent of Sampson and indifferent to Cervera.
On the night of July 2d, a thousand lies, a thousand rumors, a thousand
prophecies rolled through the streets of Port Antonio, were filed at the
cable-office, and flashed to the bulletin-boards of New York City.
That morning, so they told, the batteries on Morro Castle had sunk three
of Sampson's ships; the batteries on Morro Castle had surrendered
to Sampson; General Miles with 8,000 reinforcements had sailed from
Charleston; eighty guns had started from Tampa Bay, they would occupy
the mountains opposite Santiago and shell the Spanish fleet; the
authorities at Washington had at last consented to allow Sampson to run
the forts and mines, and attack the Spanish fleet; the army had not been
fed for two days, the Spaniards had cut it off from its base at Siboney;
the army would eat its Fourth of July dinner in the Governor's Palace;
the army was in full retreat; the army was to attack at daybreak.
When Channing turned in under the fruit-shed on the night of July 2d,
there was but one press-boat remaining in the harbor. That was
the Consolidated Press boat, and Keating himself was on the wharf,
signalling for his dingy. Channing sprang to his feet and ran toward
him, calling him by name. The thought that he must for another day
remain so near the march of great events and yet not see and feel them
for himself, was intolerable. He felt if it would pay his passage to
the coast of Cuba, there was no sacrifice to which he would not stoop.
Keating watched him approach, but without sign of recognition. His eyes
were heavy and bloodshot.
“Keating,” Channing begged, as he halted, panting, “won't you take me
with you? I'll not be in the way, and I'll stoke or wait on table, or
anything you want, if you'll only take me.”
Keating's eyes opened and closed, sleepily. He removed an unlit cigar
from his mouth and shook the wet end of it at Channing, as though it
were an accusing finger.
“I know your game,” he murmured, thickly. “You haven't got a boat and
you want to steal a ride on mine--for your paper. You can't do it, you
see, you can't do it.”
One of the crew of the dingy climbed up the gangway of the wharf and
took Keating by the elbow. He looked at him and then at Channing and
winked. He was apparently accustomed to this complication. “I haven't
got a paper, Keating,” Channing argued, soothingly. “Who have you got to
help you?” he asked. It came to him that there might be on the boat some
Philip sober, to whom he could appeal from Philip drunk.
“I haven't got anyone to help me,” Keating answered, with dignity. “I
don't need anyone to help me.” He placed his hand heavily and familiarly
on the shoulder of the deck-hand. “You see that man?” he asked. “You
see tha' man, do you? Well, tha' man he's too good for me an' you. Tha'
man--used to be the best reporter in New York City, an' he was too good
to hustle for news, an' now he's--now he can't get a job--see? Nobody'll
have him, see? He's got to come and be a stoker.”
He stamped his foot with indignation.
“You come an' be a stoker,” he commanded. “How long you think I'm going
to wait for a stoker? You stoker, come on board and be a stoker.”
Channing smiled, guiltily, at his good fortune, He jumped into the bow
of the dingy, and Keating fell heavily in the stern.
The captain of the press-boat helped Keating safely to a bunk in the
cabin and received his instructions to proceed to Santiago Harbor.
Then he joined Channing. “Mr. Keating is feeling bad to-night. That
bombardment off Morro,” he explained, tactfully, “was too exciting. We
always let him sleep going across, and when we get there he's fresh as a
daisy. What's this he tells me of your doing stoking?”
“I thought there might be another fight tomorrow, so I said I'd come as
a stoker.”
The captain grinned.
“Our Sam, that deck-hand, was telling me. He said Mr. Keating put it on
you, sort of to spite you--is that so?”
“Oh, I wanted to come,” said Channing.
The captain laughed, comprehendingly. “I guess we'll be in a bad way,”
he said, “when we need you in the engine-room.” He settled himself
for conversation, with his feet against the rail and his thumbs in his
suspenders. The lamps of Port Antonio were sinking into the water, the
moonlight was flooding the deck.
“That was quite something of a bombardment Sampson put up against Morro
Castle this morning,” he began, critically. He spoke of bombardments
from the full experience of a man who had seen shells strike off Coney
Island from the proving-grounds at Sandy Hook. But Channing heard him,
eagerly. He begged the tugboat-captain to tell him what it looked like,
and as the captain told him he filled it in and saw it as it really was.
“Perhaps they'll bombard again to-morrow,” he hazarded, hopefully.
“We can't tell till we see how they're placed on the station,” the
captain answered. “If there's any firing we ought to hear it about eight
o'clock to-morrow morning. We'll hear 'em before we see 'em.”
Channing's conscience began to tweak him. It was time, he thought, that
Keating should be aroused and brought up to the reviving air of the
sea, but when he reached the foot of the companion-ladder, he found
that Keating was already awake and in the act of drawing the cork from
a bottle. His irritation against Channing had evaporated and he greeted
him with sleepy good-humor.
“Why, it's ol' Charlie Channing,” he exclaimed, drowsily. Channing
advanced upon him swiftly.
“Here, you've had enough of that!” he commanded. “We'll be off Morro by
breakfast-time. You don't want that.”
Keating, giggling foolishly, pushed him from him and retreated with the
bottle toward his berth. He lurched into it, rolled over with his face
to the ship's side, and began breathing heavily.
“You leave me 'lone,” he murmured, from the darkness of the bunk. “You
mind your own business, you leave me 'lone.”
Channing returned to the bow and placed the situation before the
captain. That gentleman did not hesitate. He disappeared down the
companion-way, and, when an instant later he returned, hurled a bottle
over the ship's side.
The next morning when Channing came on deck the land was just in sight,
a rampart of dark green mountains rising in heavy masses against the
bright, glaring blue of the sky. He strained his eyes for the first
sight of the ships, and his ears for the faintest echoes of distant
firing, but there was no sound save the swift rush of the waters at the
bow. The sea lay smooth and flat before him, the sun flashed upon it;
the calm and hush of early morning hung over the whole coast of Cuba.
An hour later the captain came forward and stood at his elbow.
“How's Keating?” Channing asked. “I tried to wake him, but I couldn't.”
The captain kept his binoculars to his eyes, and shut his lips grimly.
“Mr. Keating's very bad,” he said. “He had another bottle hidden
somewhere, and all last night--” he broke off with a relieved sigh.
“It's lucky for him,” he added, lowering the glasses, “that there'll be
no fight to-day.”
Channing gave a gasp of disappointment. “What do you mean?” he
protested.
“You can look for yourself,” said the captain, handing him the glasses.
“They're at their same old stations. There'll be no bombardment to-day.
That's the Iowa, nearest us, the Oregon's to starboard of her, and the
next is the Indiana. That little fellow close under the land is the
Gloucester.”
He glanced up at the mast to see that the press-boat's signal was
conspicuous, they were drawing within range.
With the naked eye, Channing could see the monster, mouse-colored
war-ships, basking in the sun, solemn and motionless in a great
crescent, with its one horn resting off the harbor-mouth. They made
great blots on the sparkling, glancing surface of the water. Above
each superstructure, their fighting-tops, giant davits, funnels, and
gibbet-like yards twisted into the air, fantastic and incomprehensible,
but the bulk below seemed to rest solidly on the bottom of the ocean,
like an island of lead. The muzzles of their guns peered from the
turrets as from ramparts of rock.
Channing gave a sigh of admiration.
“Don't tell me they move,” he said. “They're not ships, they're
fortresses!”
On the shore there was no sign of human life nor of human habitation.
Except for the Spanish flag floating over the streaked walls of Morro,
and the tiny blockhouse on every mountain-top, the squadron might have
been anchored off a deserted coast. The hills rose from the water's edge
like a wall, their peaks green and glaring in the sun, their valleys
dark with shadows. Nothing moved upon the white beach at their feet, no
smoke rose from their ridges, not even a palm stirred. The great range
slept in a blue haze of heat. But only a few miles distant, masked by
its frowning front, lay a gayly colored, red-roofed city, besieged by
encircling regiments, a broad bay holding a squadron of great war-ships,
and gliding cat-like through its choked undergrowth and crouched among
the fronds of its motionless palms were the ragged patriots of the Cuban
army, silent, watchful, waiting. But the great range gave no sign. It
frowned in the sunlight, grim and impenetrable.
“It's Sunday,” exclaimed the captain. He pointed with his finger at the
decks of the battleships, where hundreds of snow-white figures had
gone to quarters. “It's church service,” he said, “or it's general
inspection.”
Channing looked at his watch. It was thirty minutes past nine. “It's
church service,” he said. “I can see them carrying out the chaplain's
reading-desk on the Indiana.” The press-boat pushed her way nearer into
the circle of battleships until their leaden-hued hulls towered high
above her. On the deck of each, the ship's company stood, ranged in
motionless ranks. The calm of a Sabbath morning hung about them, the sun
fell upon them like a benediction, and so still was the air that those
on the press-boat could hear, from the stripped and naked decks, the
voices of the men answering the roll-call in rising monotone, “one, two,
three, FOUR; one, two, three, FOUR.” The white-clad sailors might have
been a chorus of surpliced choir-boys.
But, up above them, the battle-flags, slumbering at the mast-heads,
stirred restlessly and whimpered in their sleep.
Out through the crack in the wall of mountains, where the sea runs in to
meet the waters of Santiago Harbor, and from behind the shield of Morro
Castle, a great, gray ship, like a great, gray rat, stuck out her nose
and peered about her, and then struck boldly for the open sea. High
before her she bore the gold and blood-red flag of Spain, and, like a
fugitive leaping from behind his prison-walls, she raced forward for her
freedom, to give battle, to meet her death.
A shell from the Iowa shrieked its warning in a shrill crescendo, a
flutter of flags painted their message against the sky. “The enemy's
ships are coming out,” they signalled, and the ranks of white-clad
figures which the moment before stood motionless on the decks, broke
into thousands of separate beings who flung themselves, panting, down
the hatchways, or sprang, cheering, to the fighting-tops.
Heavily, but swiftly, as islands slip into the water when a volcano
shakes the ocean-bed, the great battle-ships buried their bows in the
sea, their sides ripped apart with flame and smoke, the thunder of their
guns roared and beat against the mountains, and, from the shore, the
Spanish forts roared back at them, until the air between was split and
riven. The Spanish war-ships were already scudding clouds of smoke,
pierced with flashes of red flame, and as they fled, fighting, their
batteries rattled with unceasing, feverish fury. But the guns of the
American ships, straining in pursuit, answered steadily, carefully, with
relentless accuracy, with cruel persistence. At regular intervals they
boomed above the hurricane of sound, like great bells tolling for the
dead.
It seemed to Channing that he had lived through many years; that the
strain of the spectacle would leave its mark upon his nerves forever. He
had been buffeted and beaten by a storm of all the great emotions; pride
of race and country, pity for the dead, agony for the dying, who clung
to blistering armor-plates, or sank to suffocation in the sea; the lust
of the hunter, when the hunted thing is a fellow-man; the joys of danger
and of excitement, when the shells lashed the waves about him, and the
triumph of victory, final, overwhelming and complete.
Four of the enemy's squadron had struck their colors, two were on the
beach, broken and burning, two had sunk to the bottom of the sea, two
were in abject flight. Three battle-ships were hammering them with
thirteen-inch guns. The battle was won.
“It's all over,” Channing said. His tone questioned his own words.
The captain of the tugboat was staring at the face of his silver watch,
as though it were a thing bewitched. He was pale and panting. He looked
at Channing, piteously, as though he doubted his own senses, and turned
the face of the watch toward him.
“Twenty minutes!” Channing said. “Good God! Twenty minutes!”
He had been to hell and back again in twenty minutes. He had seen an
empire, which had begun with Christopher Columbus and which had spread
over two continents, wiped off the map in twenty minutes. The captain
gave a sudden cry of concern. “Mr. Keating,” he gasped. “Oh, Lord, but I
forgot Mr. Keating. Where is Mr. Keating?”
“I went below twice,” Channing answered. “He's insensible. See what you
can do with him, but first--take me to the Iowa. The Consolidated Press
will want the 'facts.'”
In the dark cabin the captain found Keating on the floor, where Channing
had dragged him, and dripping with the water which Channing had thrown
in his face. He was breathing heavily, comfortably. He was not concerned
with battles.
With a megaphone, Channing gathered his facts from an officer of the
Iowa, who looked like a chimney-sweep, and who was surrounded by a crew
of half-naked pirates, with bodies streaked with sweat and powder.
Then he ordered all steam for Port Antonio, and, going forward to the
chart-room, seated himself at the captain's desk, and, pushing the
captain's charts to the floor, spread out his elbows, and began to write
the story of his life.
In the joy of creating it, he was lost to all about him. He did not know
that the engines, driven to the breaking-point, were filling the ship
with their groans and protests, that the deck beneath his feet was
quivering like the floor of a planing-mill, nor that his fever was
rising again, and feeding on his veins. The turmoil of leaping engines
and of throbbing pulses was confused with the story he was writing, and
while his mind was inflamed with pictures of warring battle-ships, his
body was swept by the fever, which overran him like an army of tiny
mice, touching his hot skin with cold, tingling taps of their scampering
feet.
From time to time the captain stopped at the door of the chart-room
and observed him in silent admiration. To the man who with difficulty
composed a letter to his family, the fact that Channing was writing
something to be read by millions of people, and more rapidly than he
could have spoken the same words, seemed a superhuman effort. He even
hesitated to interrupt it by an offer of food.
But the fever would not let Channing taste of the food when they placed
it at his elbow, and even as he pushed it away, his mind was still fixed
upon the paragraph before him. He wrote, sprawling across the desk,
covering page upon page with giant hieroglyphics, lighting cigarette
after cigarette at the end of the last one, but with his thoughts far
away, and, as he performed the act, staring uncomprehendingly at the
captain's colored calendar pinned on the wall before him. For many
months later the Battle of Santiago was associated in his mind with a
calendar for the month of July, illuminated by a colored picture of six
white kittens in a basket.
At three o'clock Channing ceased writing and stood up, shivering and
shaking with a violent chill. He cursed himself for this weakness, and
called aloud for the captain.
“I can't stop now,” he cried. He seized the rough fist of the captain as
a child clings to the hand of his nurse.
“Give me something,” he begged. “Medicine, quinine, give me something to
keep my head straight until it's finished. Go, quick,” he commanded. His
teeth were chattering, and his body jerked with sharp, uncontrollable
shudders. The captain ran, muttering, to his medicine-chest.
“We've got one drunken man on board,” he said to the mate, “and now
we've got a crazy one. You mark my words, he'll go off his head at
sunset.”
But at sunset Channing called to him and addressed him sanely. He held
in his hand a mass of papers carefully numbered and arranged, and he
gave them up to the captain as though it hurt him to part with them.
“There's the story,” he said. “You've got to do the rest. I
can't--I--I'm going to be very ill.” He was swaying as he spoke. His
eyes burned with the fever, and his eyelids closed of themselves. He
looked as though he had been heavily drugged.
“You put that on the wire at Port Antonio,” he commanded, faintly; “pay
the tolls to Kingston. From there they are to send it by way of Panama,
you understand, by the Panama wire.”
“Panama!” gasped the captain. “Good Lord, that's two dollars a word.”
He shook out the pages in his hand until he found the last one. “And
there's sixty-eight pages here,” he expostulated. “Why the tolls will
be five thousand dollars!” Channing dropped feebly to the bench of the
chart-room and fell in a heap, shivering and trembling.
“I guess it's worth it,” he murmured, drowsily.
The captain was still staring at the last page.
“But--but, look here,” he cried, “you've--you've signed Mr. Keating's
name to it! 'James R. Keating.' You've signed his name to it!”
Channing raised his head from his folded arms and stared at him dully.
“You don't want to get Keating in trouble, do you?” he asked with
patience. “You don't want the C. P. to know why he couldn't write the
best story of the war? Do you want him to lose his job? Of course you
don't. Well, then, let it go as his story. I won't tell, and see you
don't tell, and Keating won't remember.”
His head sank back again upon his crossed arms. “It's not a bad story,”
he murmured.
But the captain shook his head; his loyalty to his employer was still
uppermost. “It doesn't seem right!” he protested. “It's a sort of a
liberty, isn't it, signing another man's name to it, it's a sort of
forgery.”
Channing made no answer. His eyes were shut and he was shivering
violently, hugging himself in his arms.
A quarter of an hour later, when the captain returned with fresh
quinine, Channing sat upright and saluted him.
“Your information, sir,” he said, addressing the open door politely, “is
of the greatest value. Tell the executive officer to proceed under full
steam to Panama. He will first fire a shot across her bows, and then
sink her!” He sprang upright and stood for a moment, sustained by the
false strength of the fever. “To Panama, you hear me!” he shouted. He
beat the floor with his foot. “Faster, faster, faster,” he cried. “We've
got a great story! We want a clear wire, we want the wire clear from
Panama to City Hall. It's the greatest story ever written--full of
facts, facts, facts, facts for the Consolidated Press--and Keating wrote
it. I tell you, Keating wrote it. I saw him write it. I was a stoker on
the same ship.”
The mate and crew came running forward and stood gaping stupidly
through the doors and windows of the chart-room. Channing welcomed them
joyously, and then crumpled up in a heap and pitched forward into the
arms of the captain. His head swung weakly from shoulder to shoulder.
“I beg your pardon,” he muttered, “I beg your pardon, captain, but your
engine-room is too hot. I'm only a stoker and I know my place, sir, but
I tell you, your engine-room is too hot. It's a burning hell, sir, it's
a hell!”
The captain nodded to the crew and they closed in on him, and bore him,
struggling feebly, to a bunk in the cabin below. In the berth opposite,
Keating was snoring peacefully.
After the six weeks' siege the Fruit Company's doctor told Channing he
was cured, and that he might walk abroad. In this first walk he found
that, during his illness, Port Antonio had reverted to her original
condition of complete isolation from the world, the press-boats had left
her wharves, the correspondents had departed from the veranda of her
only hotel, the war was over, and the Peace Commissioners had sailed for
Paris. Channing expressed his great gratitude to the people of the hotel
and to the Fruit Company's doctor. He made it clear to them that if they
ever hoped to be paid those lesser debts than that of gratitude which he
still owed them, they must return him to New York and Newspaper Row.
It was either that, he said, or, if they preferred, he would remain and
work out his indebtedness, checking bunches of bananas at twenty dollars
a month. The Fruit Company decided it would be paid more quickly if
Channing worked at his own trade, and accordingly sent him North in one
of its steamers. She landed him in Boston, and he borrowed five dollars
from the chief engineer to pay his way to New York.
It was late in the evening of the same day when he stepped out of the
smoking-car into the roar and riot of the Grand Central Station. He had
no baggage to detain him, and, as he had no money either, he made his
way to an Italian restaurant where he knew they would trust him to
pay later for what he ate. It was a place where the newspaper men were
accustomed to meet, men who knew him, and who, until he found work,
would lend him money to buy a bath, clean clothes, and a hall bedroom.
Norris, the World man, greeted him as he entered the door of the
restaurant, and hailed him with a cry of mingled fright and pleasure.
“Why, we didn't know but you were dead,” he exclaimed. “The boys said
when they left Kingston you weren't expected to live. Did you ever get
the money and things we sent you by the Red Cross boat?”
Channing glanced at himself and laughed.
“Do I look it?” he asked. He was wearing the same clothes in which he
had slept under the fruit-sheds at Port Antonio. They had been soaked
and stained by the night-dews and by the sweat of the fever.
“Well, it's great luck, your turning up here just now,” Norris assured
him, heartily. “That is, if you're as hungry as the rest of the boys
are who have had the fever. You struck it just right; we're giving a big
dinner here to-night,” he explained, “one of Maria's best. You come in
with me. It's a celebration for old Keating, a farewell blow-out.”
Channing started and laughed.
“Keating?” he asked. “That's funny,” he said. “I haven't seen him
since--since before I was ill.”
“Yes, old Jimmie Keating. You've got nothing against him, have you?”
Channing shook his head vehemently, and Norris glanced back complacently
toward the door of the dining-room, from whence came the sound of
intimate revelry.
“You might have had, once,” Norris said, laughing; “we were all
up against him once. But since he's turned out such a wonder and
a war-hero, we're going to recognize it. They're always saying we
newspaper men have it in for each other, and so we're just giving him
this subscription-dinner to show it's not so. He's going abroad, you
know. He sails to-morrow morning.”
“No, I didn't know,” said Channing.
“Of course not, how could you? Well, the Consolidated Press's sending
him and his wife to Paris. He's to cover the Peace negotiations there.
It's really a honeymoon-trip at the expense of the C. P. It's their
reward for his work, for his Santiago story, and the beat and all
that--”
Channing's face expressed his bewilderment.
Norris drew back dramatically.
“Don't tell me,” he exclaimed, “that you haven't heard about that!”
Channing laughed a short, frightened laugh, and moved nearer to the
street.
“No,” he said. “No, I hadn't.”
“Yes, but, good Lord! it was the story of the war. You never read such
a story! And he got it through by Panama a day ahead of all the other
stories! And nobody read them, anyway. Why, Captain Mahan said it was
'naval history,' and the Evening Post had an editorial on it, and said
it was 'the only piece of literature the war has produced.' We never
thought Keating had it in him, did you? The Consolidated Press people
felt so good over it that they've promised, when he comes back from
Paris, they'll make him their Washington correspondent. He's their
'star' reporter now. It just shows you that the occasion produces the
man. Come on in, and have a drink with him.”
Channing pulled his arm away, and threw a frightened look toward the
open door of the dining-room. Through the layers of tobacco-smoke he
saw Keating seated at the head of a long, crowded table, smiling,
clear-eyed, and alert.
“Oh, no, I couldn't,” he said, with sudden panic. “I can't drink; doctor
won't let me. I wasn't coming in, I was just passing when I saw you.
Good-night, I'm much obliged. Good-night.”
But the hospitable Norris would not be denied.
“Oh, come in and say 'good-by' to him, anyhow,” he insisted. “You
needn't stay.”
“No, I can't,” Channing protested. “I--they'd make me drink or eat and
the doctor says I can't. You mustn't tempt me. You say 'good-by' to him
for me,” he urged. “And Norris--tell him--tell him--that I asked you to
say to him, 'It's all right,' that's all, just that, 'It's all right.'
He'll understand.”
There was the sound of men's feet scraping on the floor, and of chairs
being moved from their places.
Norris started away eagerly. “I guess they're drinking his health,” he
said. “I must go. I'll tell him what you said, 'It's all right.' That's
enough, is it? There's nothing more?”
Channing shook his head, and moved away from the only place where he was
sure to find food and a welcome that night.
“There's nothing more,” he said.
As he stepped from the door and stood irresolutely in the twilight of
the street, he heard the voices of the men who had gathered in Keating's
honor upraised in a joyous chorus.
“For he's a jolly good fellow,” they sang, “for he's a jolly good
fellow, which nobody can deny!”