Page:The Country Boy.djvu/148

140 would leave Portland, Oregon, on Wednesday night of the following week—this was Friday—for New Orleans, with a select aggregation of sporting men from Portland to the Dempsey–Fitzsimmons championship fight. I read the statement many times, and felt more enthusiastic after each reading; so I went to the barn with the team, told father it was too dry to plow, and took the next train for Portland.

When I got to Portland, I went to the publisher of the Sunday Mercury, as it was the only sporting paper there; told him I was an artist and wanted to go to the big fight at New Orleans and do him a series of pictures. He asked me how much I would charge him, and I told him all I wanted was my transportation for the round trip. Ben Walton was an enterprising man, and strange as it may seem, agreed without ever asking to see any of my art work, and that fact alone made it possible for me to go. When I found I was really going, I wrote to my relatives and friends at Silverton of the great trip I was going to take, and in a couple of days my grandmother sent me by express a basket of roast chickens,