He poured his notes and his guts into the book, and finished it in a month. When he was done he borrowed some money from a friend in the Paramount office and got a Clipper seat to New York.
His publisher, Bird, liked the book and rushed it to press. He also gave Hall another five hundred and sent him to his own doctor to have his nose fixed up.
It was a good book, perhaps good enough to justify Bird's gamble, only it reached the critics three weeks after the Nazi panzer divisions were ravaging Poland and the smart boys in Paris were wearing smarter correspondents' uniforms and filing fulsome stories on the genius of Gamelin and Weygand. "We'll have to face it, Matt," Bird said, "no one but you and I give a damn about Spain right now. I'm taking back copies left and right from the booksellers. No, the hell with the advances. The war's far from over. You'll do another book for me, and we'll make it all up."
Through Bird, Hall got a job as a war correspondent for a Chicago paper. They shipped him to London, where he stewed in his own juices for months, and then to Cairo to join the fleet. Hall was assigned to the Revenger and, when the Nazis sank her, he spent some three days on a raft with a handful of survivors. One of them died of his wounds on the raft, and another went raving mad and slit his own throat with the top of a ration tin.
Hall filed a story on the experience when he was brought back to Cairo, and Bird cabled "That's your new book." It was an easy book to write. He took a room at Shepheard's and pounded it out in three weeks. The British censors liked it as "a tribute to British grit" and arranged for a captain attached to a military mission bound for Washington by plane to deliver the manuscript personally to Bird. The story was still hot when the script reached New York. Bird sold the serial rights to a big national weekly that same day for thirty thousand dollars. A lecture agency cabled offering a guarantee of a fantastic sum for a three-month lecture tour. A book club chose The Revenger, the critics sang its praises, and Bird bought himself a house in the country.
Hall quit his job and made the lecture tour and wound up with a fat bank account and a permanent appreciation of the value of a chance plop in the ocean. For the first time in his life, he found himself with enough money to do exactly what he wanted to do. The Army doctors had shown him to the nearest door, but he had offers from magazines and syndicates to return to the war zones, and the radio wanted him as a commentator.
It was Bird who first learned of Hall's new plans. And Bird understood. "The Spanish War was round one," Hall told him. "South America was one of the stakes. The Falange had an organization in the Latin countries. The Heinies used to brag about it to me in San Sebastian. I'm going to South America to see it for myself. Maybe there's a book in it, maybe there isn't. I can afford to find out."
Cuba had been the first stop on this odyssey. There Hall had had some tough sledding, met some Spanish Republicans who knew him from Madrid, won the aid of a group of young Cuban officials and written two angry and documented magazine pieces.
From Havana, Hall had flown to Puerto Rico.
Hall had stopped thinking. The reverie into which the lieutenant had plunged him passed into a rapt consideration of the imperfect smoke rings he was blowing toward the ceiling.