Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/293

 up his mind. Even when she died he could have held off—but everybody said they did not blame him, and he did not blame himself, and there was so much satisfaction in letting go once more and getting recklessly, gloriously drunk.

Before he left the Sanitarium something else happened for the first time in years. His father came to see him; came all the way from Virginia to pray with him, as he told Billy, who almost blushed, and after the old gentleman had left, promising to return the next day, the reporter laughed, kindly. He laughed again the second day, and the third. The fourth time he cried. They weren't fake tears this time. They lasted so long. … But Billy declined with very sincere thanks to go home and do the prodigal-son act. Once a newspaper man, always a newspaper man. But he was going to get some quiet indoor work, writing para graphs on some mild afternoon paper, or something of that sort.

Woods came out, pronounced cured, and he hurried back to Park Row and showed