Chapter 9

“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.”