Those clever and wideawake young men greeted him with enthusiasm and overwhelmed him with questions that ranged from the date of his birth to his opinion on the outcome of the World Series. They knew that their papers would give them a free hand in the matter of space, and they were in search not of paragraphs but of columns from the idol of the hour.
“You look limp and wilted, Joe,” laughed Jim, as they went back to their rooms.
“It’s no wonder,” growled Joe. “Those fellows got the whole sad story of my life. They hunted out every fact and shook it as a terrier shakes a rat. They turned me inside out. The only thing they forgot to ask was when I got my first tooth and whether I’d ever had the measles. And, oh, yes, they didn’t find out what was my favorite breakfast food. But now let’s get busy on these parcels and see what’s in them.”
“What’s in them is plenty,” prophesied Jim, “and these are only the few drops before the shower.”
It was a varied collection of objects that they took from the packages. There were boxes of cigars galore, enough to keep the chums in “smokes” for a year to come. There were canes and silk shirts and neckties accompanied by requests from dealers to be permitted to call their product the “Matson.” There were bottles of wine and whiskey, which met with short welcome from these clean young athletes, who took them over to the bathroom, cracked their necks and poured the contents down the drain of the washbasin, until, as Jim declared, the place smelled for all the world like a “booze parlor.”
“No merry mucilage for ours,” declared Joe, grimly. “We’ve seen what it did for Hartley, as clever a pitcher as ever twirled a ball.”
“Right you are,” affirmed Jim. “There’s none of us strong enough to down old John Barleycorn, and the only way to be safe is never to touch it.”
After they had gone through the lot and rung for a porter to carry away the litter of paper and boxes, they attacked the formidable pile of letters and telegrams.
Among the former were two offers from vaudeville managers, urging Joe to go on the stage the coming winter. They offered him a guarantee of five hundred dollars a week. They would prepare a monologue for him, or, if he preferred to pair up with a partner, they would have a sketch arranged for him.
“That sounds awfully tempting, Joe,” said Jim, as they looked up from the letters they had been reading together.