FullReads

The major hesitated, though. He readjusted his paper and fidgeted his pencil. He scratched his head and pulled at the little tuft of goatee under his lower lip. Like many a more experienced author, Major Stone was having trouble getting under way. He had his own ideas about a fitting introductory paragraph. Coming along, he had thought up a full sonorous one, with a biblical injunction touching on the wages of sin embodied in it; but, on the other hand, there was to be borne in mind the daily-dinned injunction of Devore that every important news item should begin with a sentence in which the whole story was summed up. Finally Major Stone made a beginning. He covered nearly a sheet of paper.

Then, becoming suddenly dissatisfied with it, he tore up what he had written and started all over again, only to repeat the same operation. Two salty drops rolled down his face and fell upon the paper, and instantly little twin blistered blobs like tearmarks appeared on its clear surface. They were not tears, though–they were drops of sweat wrung from the major’s brow by the pains of creation. Again he poised his pencil and again he halted it in the air–he needed inspiration. His gaze rested absently upon the pistol; absently he picked it up and began examining it.

It was a cheap, rusted, second-hand thing, poorly made, but no doubt deadly enough at close range. He unbreeched it and spun the cylinder with his thumb and spilled the contents into his palm–four loaded shells, suety and slick with grease, and one that had been recently fired; and it was discolored and flattened a trifle. Each of the four loaded shells had a small cap like a little round staring eye set in the exact center of its flanged butt-end, but the eye of the fifth shell was punched in. He turned the empty weapon in his hands, steadying its mechanism, and as he did so a scent of burnt powder, stale and dead, came to him out of the fouled muzzle. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed at it.

It had been many a long day since the major had had that smell in his nostrils–many a long, long day. But there had been a time when it was familiar enough to him. Even now it brought the clamoring memories of that far distant time back to him, fresh and vivid. It stimulated his imagination, quickening his mind with big thoughts. It recalled those four years when he had fought for a principle, and had kept on fighting even when the substance of the thing he fought for was gone and there remained but the empty husks. It recalled those last few hopeless months when the forlorn hope had become indeed a lost cause; when the forty cents he now carried in his pocket would have seemed a fortune; when the sorry house where he lodged now would have seemed a palace; when, without prospect or hope of reward or victory, he had piled risk upon risk, had piled sacrifice upon sacrifice, and through it all had borne it all without whimper or complaint–fighting the good fight like a soldier, keeping the faith like a gentleman. It was the Smoke of Battle!

The major had his inspiration now, right enough. He knew just what he would write; knew just how he would write it. He laid down the pistol and the shells and squared off and straightway began writing. For two hours nearly he wrote away steadily, rarely changing or erasing a word, stopping only to repoint the lead of his pencil. Methodically as a machine he covered sheet after sheet with his fine old-fashioned script. Never for one instant did he hesitate or falter.

Just before one o’clock he finished. The completed manuscript, each page of the twenty-odd pages properly numbered, lay in a neat pile before him. He scooped up the pistol shells and stored them in an inner breast pocket of his coat; then he opened a drawer, slipped the emptied revolver well back under a riffle of papers and clippings and closed the drawer and locked it. His notes he tore into squares, and those squares into smaller squares–and so on until the fragments would tear no finer, but fluttered out between his fingers in a small white shower like stage snow.

He shoved his completed narrative back under the roll-top of Devore’s desk, where the city editor would see it the very first thing when he came to work; and as he straightened up with a little grunt of satisfaction and stretched his arms out the last of his fine-linen shirts, with a rending sound, ripped down the plaited front, from collarband almost to waistline.

He eyed the ruined bosom with a regretful stare, plucking at the gaping tear with his graphite-dusted fingers and shaking his head mournfully. Yet as he stepped out into the street, bound for his lodgings, he jarred his heels down upon the sidewalk with the brisk, snapping gait of a man who has tackled a hard job and has done it well, and is satisfied with the way he has done it.

* * * * *

Under a large black head the major’s story was printed in the Fourth of July edition of the Evening Press. It ran full two columns and lapped over into a third column. It was an exhaustive–and exhausting–account of the Fall of Vicksburg.