For weeks an average of at least one column of exciting Rawhide stampede news was published on the front pages of the big Coast dailies. The publicity campaign went merrily on. I kept close watch on the character of the news that was being sent out and was pleased in contemplating the fact that very little false coloring, if any, was resorted to. A boisterous mining-camp stampede, second only in intensity to the Klondike excitement of eleven years before, was in progress, and there was plenty of live news to chronicle almost every day.
After returning from one of my trips to Rawhide I became alarmed on reading on the front page of the leading San Francisco newspapers a harrowing two-column story about the manner in which Ed. Hoffman, mine superintendent of the Rawhide Coalition, had been waylaid the day before on a dark desert road and robbed of $10,000 in gold which he was carrying to the mines for the purpose of discharging the pay-roll.
I had just left Mr. Hoffman in Rawhide and he had not been waylaid.
I sent for the man who was responsible for the story.
"Say, Jim," I said, "you're crazy. There is a come-back to that yarn that will cost you your job as correspondent for your San Francisco paper. It is rough work. Cut it out!"
"Gee whillikins!" he replied. "How can I? Here's an order for a two-column follow-up and I have already filed it."
"What did you say in your second story?" I inquired.
"Well, I told how a posse, armed to the teeth, were chasing the robbers and explained that they're within three miles of Walker Lake in hot pursuit."
"You're a madman!" I protested. "Kill those robbers and be quick; do it to-night so that you choke off the demand for more copy, or you're a goner!"
Next day the correspondent wired to his string of newspapers that the posse had chased the robbers into Walker Lake, where they were drowned.