Books: Ranson\'s Folly
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Richard Harding Davis >> Ranson\'s Folly
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I gives a yell that throws them three dogs off their legs.
"Mother!" I cries. "I'm the Kid," I cries. "I'm coming to you,
mother, I'm coming."
And I shoots over her, at the throat of the big dog, and the other
two, they sinks their teeth into that stylish overcoat, and tears it
off me, and that sets me free, and I lets them have it. I never had
so fine a fight as that! What with mother being there to see, and not
having been let to mix up in no fights since I become a prize-winner,
it just naturally did me good, and it wasn't three shakes before I
had 'em yelping. Quick as a wink, mother, she jumps in to help me,
and I just laughed to see her. It was so like old times. And Nolan,
he made me laugh too. He was like a hen on a bank, shaking the butt
of his whip, but not daring to cut in for fear of hitting me.
"Stop it, Kid," he says, "stop it. Do you want to be all torn up?"
says he. "Think of the Boston show next week," says he, "Think of
Chicago. Think of Danbury. Don't you never want to be a champion?"
How was I to think of all them places when I had three dogs to cut up
at the same time. But in a minute two of 'em begs for mercy, and
mother and me lets 'em run away. The big one, he ain't able to run
away. Then mother and me, we dances and jumps, and barks and laughs,
and bites each other and rolls each other in the road. There never
was two dogs so happy as we, and Nolan, he whistles and calls and
begs me to come to him, but I just laugh and play larks with mother.
"Now, you come with me," says I, "to my new home, and never try to
run away again." And I shows her our house with the five red roofs,
set on the top of the hill. But mother trembles awful, and says:
"They'd never let the likes of me in such a place. Does the Viceroy
live there, Kid?" says she. And I laugh at her. "No, I do," I says;
"and if they won't let you live there, too, you and me will go back
to the streets together, for we must never be parted no more." So we
trots up the hill, side by side, with Nolan trying to catch me, and
Miss Dorothy laughing at him from the cart.
"The Kid's made friends with the poor old dog," says she. "Maybe he
knew her long ago when he ran the streets himself. Put her in here
beside me, and see if he doesn't follow."
So, when I hears that, I tells mother to go with Nolan and sit in the
cart, but she says no, that she'd soil the pretty lady's frock; but I
tells her to do as I say, and so Nolan lifts her, trembling still,
into the cart, and I runs alongside, barking joyful.
When we drives into the stables I takes mother to my kennel, and
tells her to go inside it and make herself at home. "Oh, but he won't
let me!" says she.
"Who won't let you?" says I, keeping my eye on Nolan, and growling a
bit nasty, just to show I was meaning to have my way. "Why, Wyndham
Kid," says she, looking up at the name on my kennel.
"But I'm Wyndham Kid!" says I.
"You!" cries mother. "You! Is my little Kid the great Wyndham Kid the
dogs all talk about?" And at that, she, being very old, and sick, and
hungry, and nervous, as mothers are, just drops down in the straw and
weeps bitter.
Well, there ain't much more than that to tell. Miss Dorothy, she
settled it.
"If the Kid wants the poor old thing in the stables," says she, "let
her stay."
"You see," says she, "she's a black-and-tan, and his mother was a
black-and-tan, and maybe that's what makes Kid feel so friendly
toward her," says she.
"Indeed, for me," says Nolan, "she can have the best there is. I'd
never drive out no dog that asks for a crust nor a shelter," he says.
"But what will Mr. Wyndham do?"
"He'll do what I say," says Miss Dorothy, "and if I say she's to
stay, she will stay, and I say--she's to stay!"
And so mother and Nolan, and me, found a home. Mother was scared at
first--not being used to kind people--but she was so gentle and
loving, that the grooms got fonder of her than of me, and tried to
make me jealous by patting of her, and giving her the pick of the
vittles. But that was the wrong way to hurt my feelings. That's all,
I think. Mother is so happy here that I tell her we ought to call it
the Happy Hunting Grounds, because no one hunts you, and there is
nothing to hunt; it just all comes to you. And so we live in peace,
mother sleeping all day in the sun, or behind the stove in the head-
groom's office, being fed twice a day regular by Nolan, and all the
day by the other grooms most irregular, And, as for me, I go hurrying
around the country to the bench-shows; winning money and cups for
Nolan, and taking the blue ribbons away from father.
A DERELICT
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."
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