“Oh, don’t do that,” protested the World manager.  “You stick to your own trade.  We’ll get you something to do.  Have you tried the Consolidated Press yet?”

Channing smiled grimly at the recollection.

“Yes, I tried it first.”

“It would be throwing pearls to swine to have you write for them, I know, but they’re using so many men now.  I should think you could get on their boat.”

“No, I saw Keating,” Channing explained.  “He said I could come along as a stoker, and I guess I’ll take him up, it seems—­”

“Keating said—­what?” exclaimed the “World” man.  “Keating?  Why, he stands to lose his own job, if he isn’t careful.  If it wasn’t that he’s just married, the C. P. boys would have reported him a dozen times.”

“Reported him, what for?”

“Why—­you know.  His old complaint.”

“Oh, that,” said Channing.  “My old complaint?” he added.

“Well, yes, but Keating hasn’t been sober for two weeks, and he’d have fallen down on the Guasimas story if those men hadn’t pulled him through.  They had to, because they’re in the syndicate.  He ought to go shoot himself; he’s only been married three months and he’s handling the biggest piece of news the country’s had in thirty years, and he can’t talk straight.  There’s a time for everything, I say,” growled the “World” man.

“It takes it out of a man, this boat-work,” Channing ventured, in extenuation.  “It’s very hard on him.”

“You bet it is,” agreed the “World” manager, with enthusiasm.  “Sloshing about in those waves, sea-sick mostly, and wet all the time, and with a mutinous crew, and so afraid you’ll miss something that you can’t write what you have got.”  Then he added, as an after-thought, “And our cruisers thinking you’re a Spanish torpedo-boat and chucking shells at you.”

“No wonder Keating drinks,” Channing said, gravely.  “You make it seem almost necessary.”

Many thousand American soldiers had lost themselves in a jungle, and had broken out of it at the foot of San Juan Hill.  Not wishing to return into the jungle, they took the hill.  On the day they did this Channing had the good fortune to be in Siboney.  The “World” man had carried him there and asked him to wait around the waterfront while he went up to the real front, thirteen miles inland.  Channing’s duty was to signal the press-boat when the first despatch-rider rode in with word that the battle was on.  The World man would have liked to ask Channing to act as his despatch-rider, but he did not do so, because the despatch-riders were either Jamaica negroes or newsboys from Park Row—­and he remembered that Keating had asked Channing to be his stoker.

Channing tramped through the damp, ill-smelling sand of the beach, sick with self-pity.  On the other side of those glaring, inscrutable mountains, a battle, glorious, dramatic, and terrible, was going forward, and he was thirteen miles away.  He was at the base, with the supplies, the sick, and the skulkers.