'Oh, Tommy!' she said. 'It was just what I wanted you to do. It's leaking a little, but that doesn't matter. Wasn't I telling you? It's the little things that count. And you remembered.'
Little things! She held the ensanguined head of Louis Devoe in her white apron. Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped upon the floor. Her face was bright and tender.
'Little things, indeed!' I thought again. 'The head-hunters are right. These are the things that women like you to do for them.'
Chloe came close to me. There was no one in sight. She looked tip at me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.
'You think of me,' she said. 'You are the man I was describing. You think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth living in. The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me happy in small ways. He must bring me little red peaches in December if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June. I will have no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons for me. You please me very well, Tommy.'
I stooped and kissed her. Then a moisture broke out on my forehead, and I began to feel weak. I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe's apron, and the head of Louis Devoe turn to a brown, dried cocoanut.
'There will be cocoanut-pudding for dinner, Tommy, boy,' said Chloe, gayly, 'and you must come. I must go in for a little while.'
She vanished in a delightful flutter.
Dr. Stamford tramped up hurriedly. He seized my pulse as though it were his own property that I had escaped with.
'You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum!' he said, angrily. 'Why did you leave your bed? And the idiotic things you've been doing!--and no wonder, with your pulse going like a sledge-hammer.'
'Name some of them,' said I.
'Devoe sent for me,' said Stamford. 'He saw you from his window go to old Campos' store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick, and then come back and make off with his biggest cocoanut.'
'It's the little things that count, after all,' said I.
'It's your little bed that counts with you just now,' said the doctor. 'You come with me at once, or I'll throw up the case. 'You're as loony as a loon.'
So I got no cocoanut-pudding that evening, but I conceived a distrust as to the value of the method of the head-hunters. Perhaps for many centuries the maidens of the villages may have been looking wistfully at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for other and lesser trophies.
To avoid having this book hurled into corner of the room by the suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a newspaper story. You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient city editor, no prodigy 'cub' reporter just off the farm, no scoop, no story--no anything.
But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the reporters' room of the Morning Beacon, I will repay the favor by keeping strictly my promises set forth above.
I was doing space-work on the Beacon, hoping to be put on a salary. Some one had cleared with a rake or a shovel a small space for me at the end of a long table piled high with exchanges, Congressional Records, and old files. There I did my work. I wrote whatever the city whispered or roared or chuckled to me on my diligent wanderings about its streets. My income was not regular.
One day Tripp came in and leaned on my table. Tripp was something in the mechanical department--I think he had something to do with the pictures, for he smelled of photographers' supplies, and his hands were always stained and cut up with acids. He was about twenty-five and looked forty. Half of his face was covered with short, curly red
whiskers that looked like a door-mat with the 'welcome' left off. He was pale and unhealthy and miserable and fawning, and an assiduous borrower of sums ranging from twenty-five cents to a dollar. One dollar was his limit. He knew the extent of his credit as well as the Chemical National Bank knows the amount of H20 that collateral will show on analysis. When he sat on my table he held one hand with the other to keep both from shaking. Whiskey. He had a spurious air of lightness and bravado about him that deceived no one, but was useful in his borrowing because it was so pitifully and perceptibly assumed.
This day I had coaxed from the cashier five shining silver dollars as a grumbling advance on a story that the Sunday editor had reluctantly accepted. So if I was not feeling at peace with the world, at least an armistice had been declared; and I was beginning with ardor to write a description of the Brooklyn Bridge by moonlight.
'Well, Tripp,' said I, looking up at him rather impatiently, 'how goes it?' He was looking to-day more miserable, more cringing and haggard and downtrodden than I had ever seen him. He was at that stage of misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to kick him.
'Have you got a dollar?' asked Tripp, with his most fawning look and his dog-like eyes that blinked in the narrow space between his high- growing matted beard and his low-growing matted hair.
'I have,' said I; and again I said, 'I have,' more loudly and inhospitably, 'and four besides. And I had hard work corkscrewing them out of old Atkinson, I can tell you. And I drew them,' I continued, 'to meet a want--a hiatus--a demand--a need--an exigency--a requirement of exactly five dollars.'
I was driven to emphasis by the premonition that I was to lose one of the dollars on the spot.
'I don't want to borrow any,' said Tripp, and I breathed again. 'I thought you'd like to get put onto a good story,' he went on. 'I've got a rattling fine one for you. You ought to make it run a column at least. It'll make a dandy if you work it up right. It'll probably cost you a dollar or two to get the stuff. I don't want anything out of it myself.'
I became placated. The proposition showed that Tripp appreciated past favors, although he did not return them. If he had been wise enough to strike me for a quarter then he would have got it.
'What is the story ?' I asked, poising my pencil with a finely calculated editorial air.
'I'll tell you,' said Tripp. 'It's a girl. A beauty. One of the howlingest Amsden's Junes you ever saw. Rosebuds covered with dew- violets in their mossy bed--and truck like that. She's lived on Long Island twenty years and never saw New York City before. I ran against her on Thirty-fourth Street. She'd just got in on the East
