Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/285

 of the whole room, and would argue and hold forth on all sorts of topics of the town, as he loved to do, displaying an inner knowledge of men and things which, if it had been caught by a phonograph, could in some cases have been reeled off to stenographers and sold for enough to keep Billy Woods drunk for a week.

As it was, newspaper men of a certain sort used to get columns of Sunday space out of him, about all sorts of things, from Patagonian grasses to the social ambitions of the wife of the man who earned a living taking care of the bodies for the dissecting room of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Then when the papers came out—Billy always read all of them—he would scratch his head and say, "That's a good story. Say, do you know, I was going to do a special on that myself. Too late now."

If some one had taken him in hand, and assumed guardian- and manager-ship over him, on a per cent. basis—for Billy would have agreed—they might both have made a good thing of it. There was nobody to do this. Many of his old friends had quit the