“No doubt you are right. Thank you for taking the trouble to study my case and tell me so soon.”
“Don’t hesitate to stay on for the two weeks,” Mr. Bowring continued. “We can make you useful to us. And you can look about to much better advantage than if you were out of a place.”
“I’ll stay the two weeks,” Howard said, “unless I find something sooner.”
“Don’t be more discouraged than you can help,” said Mr. Bowring. “You may be very grateful before long for finding out so early what many of us—I myself, I fear—find out after years and—when it is too late.”
Always that note of despair; always that pointing to the motto over the door of the profession: “Abandon hope, ye who enter here.” What was the explanation? Were these men right? Was he wrong in thinking that journalism offered the most splendid of careers—the development of the mind and the character; the sharpening of all the faculties; the service of truth and right and human betterment, in daily combat with injustice and error and falsehood; the arousing and stimulating of the drowsy minds of the masses of mankind?
Howard looked about at the men who held on where he was slipping. “Can it be,” he thought, “that I cannot survive in a profession where the poorest are so poor in intellect and equipment? Why am I so dull that I cannot catch the trick?”
He set himself to study newspapers, reading them line by line, noting the modes of presenting facts, the arrangement of headlines, the order in which the editors put the several hundred items before the eyes of the reader—what they displayed on each page and why; how they apportioned the space. With the energy of unconquerable resolution he applied himself to solving for himself the puzzle of the press—the science and art of catching the eye and holding the attention of the hurrying, impatient public.
He learned much. He began to develop the news-instinct, that subtle instant realisation of what is interesting and what is not interesting to the public mind. But the time was short; a sense of impending calamity and the lack of self-confidence natural to inexperience made it impossible for him effectively to use his new knowledge in the few small opportunities which Mr. Bowring gave him. With only six days of his two weeks left, he had succeeded in getting into the paper not a single item of a length greater than two sticks. He slept little; he despaired not at all; but he was heart-sick and, as he lay in his bed in the little hall-room of the furnished-room house, he often envied women the relief of tears. What he endured will be appreciated only by those who have been bred in sheltered homes; who have abruptly and alone struck out for themselves in the ocean of a great city without a single lesson in swimming; who have felt themselves seized from below and dragged downward toward the deep-lying feeding-grounds of Poverty and Failure.
“Buck up, old man,” said Kittredge to whom he told his bad news after several days of hesitation and after Kittredge had shown him that he strongly suspected it. “Don’t mind old Bowring. You’re sure to get on, and, if you insist upon the folly, in this profession. I’ll give you a note to Montgomery—he’s City Editor over at the World-shop—and he’ll take you on. In some ways you will do better there. You’ll rise faster, get a wider experience, make more money. In fact, this shop has only one advantage. It does give a man peace of mind. It’s more like a club than an office. But in a sense that is a drawback. I’ll give you a note to-night. You will be at work over there to-morrow.”
“I think I’ll wait a few days,” said Howard, his tone corresponding to the look in his eyes and the compression of his resolute mouth.
The next day but one Mr. Bowring called him up to the City Desk and gave him a newspaper-clipping which read:
“Bald Peak, September 29—Willie Dent, the three-year-old baby
of John Dent, a farmer living two miles from here, strayed away
into the mountains yesterday and has not been seen since. His
dog, a cur, went with him. Several hundred men are out searching.
It has been storming, and the mountains are full of bears
and wild cats.”
“Yes, I saw this in the Herald,” said Howard.
“Will you take the train that leaves at eleven tonight and get us the story—if it is not a ‘fake,’ as I strongly suspect. Telegraph your story if there is not time for you to get back here by nine to-morrow night.”
“Of course it’s a fake, or at least a wild exaggeration,” thought Howard as he turned away. “If Bowring had not been all but sure there was nothing in it, he would never have given it to me.”
He was not well, his sleepless nights having begun to tell even upon his powerful constitution. The rest of that afternoon and all of a night without sleep in the Pullman he was in a depth of despond. He had been in the habit of getting much comfort out of an observation his father had made to him just before he died: “Remember that ninety per cent of these fourteen hundred million human beings are uncertain where to-morrow’s food is to come from. Be prudent but never be afraid.” But just then he could get no consolation out of this maxim of grim cheer. He seemed to himself incompetent and useless, a predestined failure. “What is to become of me?” he kept repeating, his heart like lead and his mind fumbling about in a confused darkness.
At Bald Peak he was somewhat revived by the cold mountain air of the early morning. As he alighted upon the station platform he spoke to the baggage-master standing in front of the steps.
“Was the little boy of a man named Dent lost in the mountains near here?”
“Yes—three days ago,” replied the baggage-man.
“Have they found him yet?”
“No—nor never will alive—that’s my opinion.”
Howard asked for the nearest livery-stable and within twenty minutes was on his way to Dent’s farm. His driver knew all about the lost child. Two hundred men were still searching. “And Mrs. Dent, she’s been sittin’ by the window, list’nin’ day and night. She won’t speak nor eat and she ain’t shed a tear. It was her only child. The men come in sayin’ it ain’t no use to hunt any more, an’ they look at her an’ out they goes ag’in.”
Soon the driver pointed to a cottage near the road. The gate was open; the grass and the flower-beds were trampled into a morass. The door was thrown wide and several women were standing about the threshold. At the window within view of the road and the mountains sat the mother—a young woman with large brown eyes, and clear-cut features, refined, beautified, exalted by suffering. Her look was that of one listening for a faint, far away sound upon which hangs the turn of the balances to joy or to despair.
That morning two of the searchers went to the northeast into the dense and tangled swamp woods between Bald Peak and Cloudy Peak—the wildest wilderness in the mountains. The light barely penetrates the foliage on the brightest days. The ground is rough, sometimes precipitous, closely covered with bushes and tangled creepers.
The two explorers, almost lost themselves, came at last to the edge of a swamp surrounded by cedars. They half-crawled, half-climbed through the low trees and festooning creepers to the edge of a clear bit of open, firm ground.
In the middle was a cedar tree. Under it, seated upon the ground, was the lost boy. His bare, brown legs, torn and bleeding, were stretched straight in front of him. His bare feet were bruised and cut. His gingham dress was torn and wet and stained. His small hands were smears of dirt and blood. He was playing with a tin can. He had put a stone into it and was making a great rattling. The dog was running to and fro, apparently enjoying the noise. The little boy’s face was tear-stained and his eyes were swollen. But he was not crying just then and laughter lurked in his thin, fever-flushed face.
As the men came into view, the dog began to bark angrily, but the boy looked a solemn