“I shouldn’t think the C. P. would stand for that,” said the Boston man.

“It wouldn’t, if it ever interfered with his work, but he’s never fallen down on a story yet.  And the sort of stuff he writes is machine-made; a man can write C. P. stuff in his sleep.”

One of the World men looked up and laughed.

“I wonder if he’ll run across Channing out there,” he said.  The men at the table smiled, a kindly, indulgent smile.  The name seemed to act upon their indignation as a shower upon the close air of a summer-day.  “That’s so,” said Norris.  “He wrote me last month from Port-au-Prince that he was moving on to Jamaica.  He wrote me from that club there at the end of the wharf.  He said he was at that moment introducing the President to a new cocktail, and as he had no money to pay his passage to Kingston he was trying to persuade him to send him on there as his Haitian Consul.  He said in case he couldn’t get appointed Consul, he had an offer to go as cook on a fruit-tramp.”

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