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.
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