Murderer's Row, who could not talk anything else, but who had shown some
international skill in the use of a jimmy. And at eight, he covered a
flower-show in Madison Square Garden; and at eleven was sent over the
Brooklyn Bridge in a cab to watch a fire and make guesses at the losses
to the insurance companies.

He went to bed at one, and dreamed of shattered locomotives, human
beings lying still with blankets over them, rows of cells, and banks of
beautiful flowers nodding their heads to the tunes of the brass band in
the gallery. He decided when he awoke the next morning that he had
entered upon a picturesque and exciting career, and as one day followed
another, he became more and more convinced of it, and more and more
devoted to it. He was twenty then, and he was now twenty-three, and in
that time had become a great reporter, and had been to Presidential
conventions in Chicago, revolutions in Hayti, Indian outbreaks on the
Plains, and midnight meetings of moonlighters in Tennessee, and had seen
what work earthquakes, floods, fire, and fever could do in great cities,
and had contradicted the President, and borrowed matches from burglars.
And now he thought he would like to rest and breathe a bit, and not to
work again unless as a war correspondent. The only obstacle to his
becoming a great war correspondent lay in the fact that there was no
war, and a war correspondent without a war is about as absurd an
individual as a general without an army. He read the papers every
morning on the elevated trains for war clouds; but though there were
many war clouds, they always drifted apart, and peace smiled again. This
was very disappointing to young Gordon, and he became more and more
keenly discouraged.

And then as war work was out of the question, he decided to write his
novel. It was to be a novel of New York life, and he wanted a quiet