He began his quest with a capital of less than five dollars.  There were many disappointments, much weariness, and a long fast which came near to persuading him that his friends’ predictions were perhaps about to be fulfilled. But he got his opening.

Staggering with weakness, he had lived for two days in momentary dread of arrest for drunkenness.  Then just when it seemed that he could go no farther, a former acquaintance from the West, of whose presence in the city he was aware, met him.  Among the first questions was:  “Do you need money?” and forthwith a generous fifteen dollars was placed in his hand.  That day one of his special stories was accepted, and only a few days later he was taken on the staff of the Daily News, where soon the best assignments of the paper were given him.

Do you know why you are getting the best work to do here?” asked one of the new friends.

“Why?”

“It’s because you’re white.”

This position he retained until May of the following year, meantime contributing to the editorial page of The Saturday Evening Post.  Then an attack of typhoid lost him his position; but he had made loyal friends, who delighted to come to his aid.  Something of the quality of his own loyalty is expressed in an entry in his diary shortly after leaving the hospital.  “Many good lessons in human nature.  Learned much about who are the real friends, who may be trusted to a finish, who are not quitters, but it shall not be written.”  During the period of his convalescence which he spent among the Shawangunk Mountains of Sullivan County, New York, he decided that if it were possible he would not go back to newspaper work.  A friend had sent him a letter of introduction to the editor of Outing, which in August he presented, and was asked to bring in an article on the preservation of the Adirondack Park as a national playground.  The article proved acceptable, and thenceforth most of his work was done for that magazine.

In September he wrote his friend, Mr. James A. Leroy.

“My Dear Jim,—­I think that regardless of your frightful neglect I shall be obliged to write you another note expressing sense of under-obligationness to you for that letter.  It is the best thing I’ve run up against so to speak.  As a result of it I am to have the pleasure of hastening Detroitward.  There I shall register at the House.  I shall sit in the window with my feet higher than my head, and wear a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week air of nonchalance.  When the festive Detroit reporter shys past looking hungrily at the cafe, I’ll look at my watch with a wonder-if-it’s-time-to-dress-for-dinner air and fill his soul with envy.  This has been the dream that has haunted me ever since those childhood days when you and I ate at Spaghetti’s and then went to the House to talk it over.  I shall carry out the dire scheme and then—­well, then, if Fate says for me to hustle across the Great Divide, I’ll go with the feeling that life has not been in vain.”