He was still roaring, half an hour later, when McGibbon came anxiously in.
'Saw Humphrey Weaver down-town,' said the editor of the Gleaner, 'and he said I'd better look you up.'
An hour later McGibbon—red spots in his cheeks, a nervous glitter in his eyes—hurried down to the Gleaner office with the pencilled manuscripts of four of the 'Caliph' stories. He was hurrying because it seemed to him highly important to get them into type. For one thing, something might happen to them—fire, anything. For another, it might occur to Henry to sell them to an eastern magazine.
When Humphrey came in, just before six, Henry was already well into Scheherazade in a Livery Stable, and was chuckling out loud as he wrote.
Friday night was press night at the Gleaner office. Henry strolled in about ten o'clock and carelessly dropped a thick roll of script on McGibbon's desk.
That jaded editor leaned back, ran thin fingers through his tousled hair, and wearily looked over the dishevelled, yawning, exhausted, grinning youth before him. Never in his life had he seen an expression of such utter happiness on a human face.
'How many stories is this?' he asked.
'Ten.'
'Good Lord! That's a whole book!'
'No—hardly. I've thought of some more. There'll be fifteen or twenty altogether. I just thought of one, coming over here. Think I'll call it. The Story of the Man from Jerusalem. It's about the life of a little Jew storekeeper in a town like this. Struck me all of a sudden—you know, how he must feel. I don't think I'll write it to-night—just make a few notes so it won't get away from me.'