distinctness, too, for I had the second place at the table that had been
assigned to the Evening Press crew. There were four of us in
all--Devore, who had elected to be in direct charge of the detail; Ike
Webb, our star man, who was to handle the main story; I who was to write
the running account--and, fourthly and lastly, Major Putnam Stone. The
major hadn't been included in the assignment originally, but little
Pinky Gilfoil had turned up sick that morning, and the chief decided the
major should come along with us in Gilfoil's place. The chief had a
deluded notion that the major could circulate on a roving commission and
pick up spicy scraps of gossip. But here, for this once anyway, was a
convention wherein there were no spicy bits of gossip to be picked
up--curse words, yes, and cold-chilled fighting words, but not
gossip--everything focused and was summed up in the one main point:
Should the majority rule the machine or should the machine rule the
majority? So the major sat there at the far inside corner of the table
doing nothing at all--Devore saw to that--and was rather in the way. For
the time I forgot all about him.
The clash wasn't long in coming. It came on the first roll call of the
counties. Later we found out that the Stickney forces had been
counting, all along, on throwing the convention into a disorder of such
proportions as to force an adjournment, trusting then to their
acknowledged superiority at organization to win some strong strategic
advantage in the intervening gap of time. Failing there they meant to
raise a cry of unfairness and walk out. That then was their
program--first the riot and then, as a last resort, the bolt. But they
had men in their ranks, high-tempered men who, like so many skittish
colts, wouldn't stand without hitching. The signals crossed and the
thunder cracked across that calm-before-the-storm situation before there
was proper color of excuse either for attack or for retreat.
It came with scarcely any warning at all. Old Judge Marcellus Barbee,
the state chairman, called the convention to order, he standing at a
little table in the center of the stage. Although counted as our man,
the judge was of such uncertain fiber as to render it doubtful whose man
he really was. He was a kindly, wind-blown old gentleman, who very much
against his will had been drawn unawares, as it were, into the middle of
this fight, and he was bewildered by it all--and not only bewildered but
unhappy and frightened. His gavel seemed to quaver its raps out
timorously.
A pastor of one of the churches, a reverend man with a bleak, worried
face, prayed the Good Lord that peace and good-will and wise counsel
might rule these deliberations, and then fled away as though fearing the
mocking echoes of his own Amen. Summoning his skulking voice out of his
lower throat, Judge Barbee bade the secretary of the state committee
call the counties. The secretary got as far as Blanton, the third county
alphabetically down the list. And Blanton was one of the contested
counties. So up rose two rival chairmen of delegations, each waving
aloft his credentials, each demanding the right to cast the vote of free
and sovereign Blanton, each shaking a clenched fist at the other. Up got
the rival delegations from Blanton. Up got everybody. Judge Barbee, with
a gesture, recognized the rights of the anti-Stickney delegation. Jeers
and yells broke out, spattering forth like a skirmish fire, then almost
instantly were merged into a vast, ominous roar. Chairs began to
overturn. Not twenty feet from me the clattering of the chairman's
gavel, as he vainly beat for order, sounded like the clicking of a
telegraph instrument in a cyclone.
I saw the sergeant-at-arms--who was our man too--start down the middle
aisle and saw him trip over a hostile leg and stumble and fall, and I
saw a big mountaineer drop right on top of him, pinning him flat to the
floor. I saw the musicians inside the orchestra rail, almost under my
feet, scuttling away in two directions like a divided covey of gorgeous
blue and red birds. I saw the snare drummer, a little round German, put
his foot through the skin roof of his own drum. I saw Judge Barbee
overturn the white china pitcher of ice water that sweated on the table
at his elbow, and as the cold stream of its contents spattered down the
legs of his trousers saw him staring downward, contemplating his
drenched limbs as though that mattered greatly.
All in a flash I saw these things, and in that same flash I saw, taking
shape and impulse, a groundswell of men, all wearing red buttons,
rolling toward the stage, with the picked bad men of the city wards for
its crest; and out of the tail of my eye I saw too, stealing out from
the rear of the stage, a small, compact wedge of men wearing those same
red buttons; and the prow of the wedge was Fighting Dave Dancy, the
official bad man of a bad county, a man who packed a gun on each hip and
carried a dirk knife down the back of his neck; a man who would shoot
you at the drop of a hat and provide the hat himself--or at least so it
was said of him.
And I realized that the enemy, coming by concerted agreement from front
and rear at once, had nipped those of us who were upon the stage as
between two closing walls, and I was exceedingly unhappy to be there. I
ducked my head low, waiting for the shooting to begin. Afterward we
figured it out that nobody fired the first shot because everybody knew
the first shot would mean a massacre, where likely enough a man would
kill more friends than foes.
What happened now in the space of the next few seconds I saw with
particular clarity of vision, because it happened right alongside me and
in part right over me. I recall in especial Mink Satterlee. Mink
Satterlee was one of the worst men in town, and he ran the worst saloon
and prevailed mightily in ward politics. He had been sitting just below
our table in the front row of seats. He was a big-bodied man,
fat-necked, but this day he showed himself quick on his feet as any
toe-dancer. Leading his own forces by a length, he vaulted the orchestra
rail and lit lightly where a scared oboe player had been squatted a
moment before; Mink breasted the gutterlike edging of the footlights and
leaped upward, teetering a moment in space. One of his hands grabbed out
for a purchase and closed on the leg of our table and jerked it almost
from under us.
At that Devore either lost his head or else indignation made him
reckless. Still half sitting, he kicked out at the wriggling bulk at his
feet, and the toe of his shoe took Mink Satterlee in his chest. It was a
puny enough kick; it didn't even shake Mink Satterlee loose from where
he clung. He gave a bellow and heaved himself up on the stage and,
before any of us could move, grabbed Devore by the throat with his left
hand and jammed him back, face upward, on the table until I thought
Devore's spine would crack. His right hand shot into his coat pocket,
then, quick as a snake, came out again, showing the fat fist armed with
a set of murderously heavy brass knucks, and he bent his arm in a
crooked sickle-like stroke, aiming for Devore's left temple. I've always
been satisfied--and so has Devore--that if the blow had landed true his
skull would have caved in like a puff-ball. Only it never landed.
Above me a shadow of something hung for the hundredth part of a second,
something white flashed over me and by me, moving downward whizzingly;
something cracked on something; and Mink Satterlee breathed a gentle
little grunt right in Devore's face and then relaxed and slid down on
the floor, lying half under the table and half in the tin trough where
the stubby gas jets of the footlights stood up, with his legs protruding
stiffly out over its edge toward his friends. Subconsciously I noted
that his socks were not mates, one of them being blue and one black;
also that his scalp had a crescent-shaped split place in it just between
and above his half-closed eyes. All this, though, couldn't have taken
one-fifth of the time it has required for me to tell it. It couldn't
have taken more than a brace of seconds, but even so it was time enough
for other things to happen; and I looked back again toward the center of
the stage just as Fighting Dave Dancy seized startled old Judge Barbee
by the middle from behind and flung him aside so roughly that the old
man spun round twice, clutching at nothing, and then sat down very hard,
yards away from where he started spinning.
Dancy stooped for the gavel, which had fallen from the judge's hand,
being minded, I think, to run the convention awhile in the interest of
his own crowd. But his greedy fingers never closed over its black-walnut
handle, because, facing him, he saw just then what made him freeze solid
where he was.
Out from behind the Evening Press table and through a scattering huddle
of newspaper reporters, stepping on the balls of his feet as lightly as
a puss-cat, emerged Major Putnam Stone. His sleeves were turned back off
his wrists and his vest flared open. His head was thrust forward so that
the tuft of goatee on his chin stuck straight out ahead of him like a
little burgee in a fair breeze. His face was all a clear, bright,
glowing pink; and in his right hand he held one of the longest cavalry
revolvers that ever was made, I reckon. It had a square-butted ivory
handle, and as I saw that ivory handle I knew what the white thing was
that had flashed by me only a moment before to fell Mink Satterlee so
expeditiously.
Writing this, I've been trying to think of the one word that would best
describe how Major Putnam Stone looked to me as he advanced on Dave
Dancy. I think now that the proper word is competent, for indeed the old
major did look most competent--the tremendous efficiency he radiated
filled him out and made him seem sundry sizes larger than he really was.
A great emergency acts upon different men as chemical processes act upon
different metals. Some it melts like lead, so that their resolution
softens and runs away from them; and some it hardens to tempered steel.
There was the old major now. Always before this he had seemed to me to
be but pot metal and putty, and here, poised, alert, ready--a
wire-drawn, hard-hammered Damascus blade of a man--all changed and
transformed and glorified, he was coming down on Dave Dancy, finger on
trigger, thumb on hammer, eye on target, dominating the whole scene.
Ten feet from him he halted and there was nobody between them. Somehow
everybody else halted too, some even giving back a little. Over the edge
of the stage a ring of staring faces, like a high-water mark, showed
where the onward rushing swell of the Stickney city delegates had
checked itself. Seemingly to all at once came the realization that the
destinies of the fight had by the chances of the fight been entrusted to
these two men--to Dancy and the major--and that between them the issue
would be settled one way or the other.
Still at a half crouch, Dancy's right hand began to steal back under the
skirt of his long black coat. At that the major flung up the muzzle of
his weapon so that it pointed skyward, and he braced his left arm at his
side in the attitude you have seen in the pictures of dueling scenes of
olden times.
"I am waiting, sir, for you to draw," said the major quite briskly. "I
will shoot it out with you to see whether right or might shall control
this convention." And his heels clicked together like castanets.
Dancy's right hand kept stealing farther and farther back. And then you
could mark by the change of his skin and by the look out of his eyes how
his courage was clabbering to whey inside him, making his face a milky,
curdled white, the color of a poorly stirred emulsion, and then he
quit--he quit cold--his hand came out again from under his coat tails
and it was an empty hand and wide open. It was from that moment on that
throughout our state Fighting Dave Dancy ceased to be Fighting Dave and
became instead Yaller Dave.
"Then, sir," said the major, "as you do not seem to care to shoot it out
with me, man to man, you and your friends will kindly withdraw from this
stage and allow the business of this convention to proceed in an orderly
manner."
And as Dave Dancy started to go somebody laughed. In another second we
were all laughing and the danger was over. When an American crowd
begins laughing the danger is always over.
* * * * *
Newspaper men down in that town still talk about the story that Ike Webb
wrote for the last edition of the Evening Press that afternoon. It was a
great story, as Ike Webb told it--how, still sitting on the floor, old
Judge Barbee got his wits back and by word of mouth commissioned the
major a special sergeant-at-arms; how the major privily sent men to
close and lock and hold the doors so that the Stickney people couldn't
get out to bolt, even if they had now been of a mind to do so; how the
convention, catching the spirit of the moment, elected the major its
temporary chairman, and how even after that, for quite a spell, until
some of his friends bethought to remove him, Mink Satterlee slept
peacefully under our press table with his mismated legs bridged across
the tin trough of the footlights.
* * * * *
In rapid succession a number of unusual events occurred in the Evening
Press shop the next morning. To begin with, the chief came down early.
He had a few words in private with Devore and went upstairs. When the
major came at eight as usual, Devore was waiting for him at the door of
the city room; and as they went upstairs together, side by side, I saw
Devore's arm steal timidly out and rest a moment on the major's
shoulder.
The major was the first to descend. Walking unusually erect, even for
him, he bustled into the telephone booth. Jessie, our operator, told us
afterward that he called up a haberdasher, and in a voice that boomed
like a bell ordered fourteen of those plaited-bosom shirts of his, the
same to be made up and delivered as soon as possible. Then he stalked
out. And in a minute or two more Devore came down looking happy and
unhappy and embarrassed and exalted, all of them at once. On his way to
his desk he halted midway of the floor.
"Gentlemen," he said huskily--"fellows, I mean--I've got an announcement
to make, or rather two announcements. One is this: Right here before you
fellows who heard most of them I want to take back all the mean things I
ever said about him--about Major Stone--and I want to say I'm sorry for
all the mean things I've done to him. I've tried to beg his pardon, but
he wouldn't listen--he wouldn't let me beg his pardon--he--he said
everything was all right. That's one announcement. Here's the other: The
major is going to have a new job with this paper. He's going to leave
the city staff. Hereafter he's going to be upstairs in the room next to
the chief. He's gone out now to pick out his own desk. He's going to
write specials for the Sunday--specials about the war. And he's going
to do it on a decent salary too."
I judge by my own feelings that we all wanted to cheer, but didn't
because we thought it might sound theatrical and foolish. Anyhow, I know
that was how I felt. So there was a little awkward pause.
"What's his new title going to be?" asked somebody then.
"The title is appropriate--I suggested it myself," said Devore. "Major
Stone is going to be war editor."
V
SMOKE OF BATTLE
This befell during the period that Major Putnam Stone, at the age of
sixty-two, held a job as cub reporter on the Evening Press and worked at
it until his supply of fine linen and the patience of City Editor
Wilbert Devore frazzled out practically together. The episode to which I
would here direct attention came to pass in the middle of a particularly
hot week in the middle of that particularly hot and grubby summer, at a
time when the major was still wearing the last limp survivor of his once
adequate stock of frill-bosomed, roll-collared shirts, and when Devore's
scanty stock of endurance had already worn perilously near the snapping
point.
As may be recalled, Major Stone lived a life of comparative leisure from
the day he came out of the Confederate army, a seasoned veteran, until
the day he joined the staff of the Evening Press, a rank beginner; and
of these two employments one lay a matter of four decades back in a
half-forgotten past, while the other was of pressing moment, having to
do with Major Stone's enjoyment of his daily bread and other elements of
nutrition regarded as essential to the sustenance of human life. In his
military career he might have been more or less of a success. Certainly
he must have acquitted himself with some measure of personal credit; the
rank he had attained in the service and the standing he had subsequently
enjoyed among his comrades abundantly testified to that.
As a reporter he was absolutely a total loss; for, as already set forth
in some detail, he was hopelessly old-fashioned in thought and
speech--hopelessly old-fashioned and pedantic in his style of writing;
and since his mind mainly concerned itself with retrospections upon the
things that happened between April, 1861, and May, 1865, he very
naturally--and very frequently--forgot that to a newspaper reporter
every day is a new day and a new beginning, and that yesterday always is
or always should be ancient history, let alone the time-tarnished
yesterdays of forty-odd years ago. Indeed I doubt whether the major ever
comprehended that first commandment of the prentice reporter's
catechism.
Devore, himself no grand and glittering success as a newspaper man,
nevertheless had mighty little use for the pottering, ponderous old
major. Devore did not believe that bricks could be made without straw.
He considered it a waste of time and raw material to try. Through that
summer he kept the major on the payroll solely because the chief so
willed it. But, though he might not discharge the major, at least he
could bait him--and bait him Devore did--not, mind you, with words, but
with a silent, sublimated contempt more bitter and more biting than any
words.
So there, on the occasion in question, the situation stood--the major
hanging on tooth and nail to his small job, because he needed most
desperately the twelve dollars a week it brought him; the city editor
regarding him and all his manifold reportorial sins of omission,
commission and remission with a corrosive, speechless venom; and the
rest of us in the city room divided in our sympathies as between those
two. We sympathized with Devore for having to carry so woful an
incompetent upon his small and overworked crew; we sympathized with the
kindly, gentle, tiresome old major for his bungling, vain attempts to
creditably cover the small and piddling assignments that came his way.
I remember the date mighty well--the third of July. For three days now
the Democratic party, in national convention assembled at Chicago, had
been in the throes of labor. It had been expected--in fact had been as
good as promised--that by ten o'clock that evening the deadlock would
melt before a sweetly gushing freshet of party harmony and the head of
the presidential ticket would be named, wherefore in the Evening Press
shop a late shift had stayed on duty to get out an extra. Back in the
press-room the press was dressed. A front page form was made up and
ready, all but the space where the name of the nominee would be inserted
when the flash came; and in the alley outside a picked squad of
newsboys, renowned for speed of the leg and carrying quality of the
voice, awaited their wares, meanwhile skylarking under the eye of a
circulation manager.
Besides, there was no telling when an arrest might be made in the
Bullard murder case--that just by itself would provide ample excuse for
an extra. Two days had passed and two nights since the killing of
Attorney-at-Law Rodney G. Bullard, and still the killing, to quote a
favorite line of the local descriptive writers, "remained shrouded in
impenetrable mystery." If the police force, now busily engaged in
running clues into theories and theories into the ground, should by any
blind chance of fortune be lucky enough to ascertain the identity and
lay hands upon the person of Bullard's assassin, the whole town,
regardless of the hour, would rise up out of bed to read the news of it.
It was the biggest crime story that town had known for ten years; one of
the biggest crime stories it had ever known.
In the end our waiting all went for nothing. There were no developments
at Central Station or elsewhere in the Bullard case, and at Chicago
there was no nomination. At nine-thirty a bulletin came over our leased
wire saying that Tammany, having been beaten before the Resolutions
Committee, was still battling on the floor for its candidate; so that
finally the convention had adjourned until morning, and now the
delegates were streaming out of the hall, too tired to cheer and almost
too tired to jeer--all of which was sad news to us, because it meant
that, instead of taking a holiday on the Fourth, we must work until noon
at least, and very likely until later. Down that way the Fourth was not
observed with quite the firecrackery and skyrockety enthusiasm that
marked its celebration in most of the states to the north of us;
nevertheless, a day off was a day off and we were deeply disgusted at
the turn affairs had taken. It was almost enough to make a fellow feel
friendly toward the Republicans.
Following the tension there was a snapback; a feeling of languor and
disappointment possessed us. Devore slammed down the lid of his desk and
departed, cursing the luck as he went. Harty, the telegraph editor, and
Wilbur, the telegraph operator, rolled down their shirtsleeves and,
taking their coats over their arms, departed in company for Tony's place
up at the corner, where cool beers were to be found and electric fans,
and a business men's lunch served at all hours.
That left in the city room four or five men. Sprawled upon battered
chairs and draped over battered desks, they inhaled the smells of rancid
greases that floated in to them from the back of the building; they
coddled their disappointment to keep it warm and they talked shop. When
it comes to talking shop in season and out of season, neither stock
actors nor hospital surgeons are worse offenders than newspaper
reporters--especially young newspaper reporters, as all these men were
except only Major Stone.
It was inevitable that the talk should turn upon the Bullard murder, and
that the failure of the police force to find the killer or even to find
a likely suspect should be the hinge for its turning. For the moment Ike
Webb had the floor, expounding his own pet theories. Ike was a good
talker--a mighty good reporter too, let me tell you. Across the room
from Ike, tilted back in a chair against the wall, sat the major,
looking shabby and a bit forlorn. For a month now shabbiness had been
seizing on the major, spreading over him like a mildew. It started first
with his shoes, which turned brown and then cracked across the toes, it
extended to his hat, which sagged in its brim and became a moldy green
in its crown, and now it had touched his coat lapels, his waistcoat
front, his collar--his rolling Lord Byron collar--and his sleeve ends.
The major's harmlessly pompous manner was all gone from him that night.
Of late his self-assurance had seemed to be fraying and frazzling away,
along with those old-timey, full-bosomed shirts of which he had in times
gone by been so tremendously proud. It was as though the passing of the
one marked the passing of the other--symbolic as you might say.
Formerly, too, the major had also excelled mightily in miscellaneous
conversation, dominating it by sheer weight of tediousness. Now he sat
silent while these youngsters with their unthatched lips--born, most of
them, after he reached middle age--babbled the jargon of their trade. He
considered a little ravelly strip along one of his cuffs solicitously.
Ike Webb was saying this--that the biggest thing in the whole created
world was a big scoop--an exclusive, world-beating, bottled-up scoop of
a scoop. Nothing that could possibly come into a reporter's life was
one-half so big and so glorious and satisfying. He warmed to his theme: