Earl Derr Biggers

“ Billy sighed.
“Poor Percy,” he muttered. “Poor Percy. He's nothing more than a tidy on one of the chairs of her flat.”
Two weeks later the great water-front fire burst into the headlines. It was featured in all the papers as a “two-million dollar blaze.” Several lives were lost, and a number of men showed of what they were made—but in this generation everything—success or failure, achievement or calamity—is measured by money. So, if you are to be properly impressed, you must remember that this was a two-million-dollar-blaze. ”

“ At the office, where Percy would appear in the morning, red-eyed and weary, anywhere from an hour to four hours late, he was regarded as a harmless idiot who might do something unexpectedly good if nothing good was expected of him. Sent out to get facts, Percy often got them. Not always, but often. However, the management in those days was genial and bibulous, itself, and Percy stayed on in a glow of good fellowship. Nobody trusted him—his chin was warning enough—and when the big stories broke he was pushed into a corner ”

“ Percy was sitting thoughtfully at his typewriter, hammering out a story.
“Say, Billy,” he inquired suddenly, “how is it you spell 'equilibrium?'”
“Well,” began Ranson, “my own private way of—”
He was interrupted by the city editor, a brisk, sprightly gentleman who had an abrupt manner and a biting tongue.
“See here, Myers,” said that dignitary, coming up suddenly, “you needn't finish that story.”
“But why not?” Percy protested. “It's a good—”
“Because,” said the city editor, “there is no longer any Star to write for. The paper suspended an hour ago.” ”

“ Moored to a blazing pier there was a fisherman's lonely little dory, and as we slipped past it something that had been huddled up in the stern stood up and screamed. We heard its scream above the crackle of the flames and the chug-chug of our engine, and as it stood silhouetted against that awful wall of fire, we saw that it was a small and terrified boy. ”

“ Then we sort of “took stock”—stock of all our opinions and beliefs and judgments. Percy looked scared and limp and dripping and, altogether, very funny. We might have laughed, but we didn't—for we remembered that the impulse to do what Percy had done had come to neither of us until he was very nearly back to the launch—with the boy in tow.
We delivered the kid, singed, soaked, terrified still, to a waiting ambulance further down the shore, and Billy continued solemnly his collecting of data on the blaze. As we chugged swiftly about the harbor Percy sat in the stern-sheets and shivered. ”

“ The rest of the office was on its hilarious way out to drown its sorrows at a nearby fount, and Ransom and I were going over to The Press—which had magnanimously agreed to take us back that noon. As we were passing out, Percy ran over and borrowed a dollar from us.
“What's to become of him?” I asked thoughtfully, as we went down the stairs.
“Oh, he'll be taken care of, all right,” said Billy, smiling. “A dollar is the price of a marriage license in this state.” ”

“ Billy was right. That dark morning Minnavieve actually took the bewildered Percy by the hand and led him over to the City Hall, where he spent his borrowed dollar to be united to her in the holy bonds of matrimony. The next evening Percy came drifting into the Press office and told us about it. Minnavieve was sitting not far away, and she glanced at him occasionally with an air of proud proprietorship.
“She's a good little woman,” he told us over and over. “She'll make me a good wife.” ”

“ Imagine, if you can, a worse hell for a man than his—surrounded by primroses and poppies, reading the book of his wife's sticky soul-sobs, as she had penned them for the great public to gloat over.
We looked at Percy; in wonder that he did not scream out in rebellion—but he gazed back at us with the placid expression of a calf. Actually, he seemed 1appy. Minnavieve ranted on about Nietzsche—neither of us had ever heard of the gentleman before—and read us passages from his work. ”

“ We thought it more likely she would make him a good husband—but kept it to ourselves. Billy congratulated him warmly.
“But for a newly married man,” he said, “that two days' beard is unbecoming. For Heaven's sake, get a shave.”
Percy blushed.
“I'm—I'm growing a beard,” he said. It was Minnavieve's scheme for hiding that terribly unsatisfactory chin.
Immediately after her arrival on The Press Minnavieve began bombarding Hayes, the city editor, for a place for Percy. Hayes was big, red-faced, profane, and he said he had no place on his sheet for spineless infants. ”