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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.”