GALLEGHER
A NEWSPAPER STORY
BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
This is an illustration of a popular type of the short-story. The movement from beginning to end is swift and urgent; something important is happening all the time. Description is reduced to the minimum, and where it is used does not impede the action. The local color of a great newspaper office in a large city contributes to the impression of orderly activity and haste. Gallegher, moreover, is the kind of character that enlists sympathy by his youth, his daring, and his resourcefulness.
GALLEGHER
[Footnote: From "Gallegher and Other Stories," by Richard Harding
Davis. Copyright, 1891, by Charles Scribner's Sons.]
We had had so many office-boys before Gallegher came among us that they had begun to lose the characteristics of individuals, and became merged in a composite photograph of small boys, to whom we applied the generic title of "Here, you"; or "You, boy."
We had had sleepy boys, and lazy boys, and bright, "smart" boys, who became so familiar on so short an acquaintance that we were forced to part with them to save our own self-respect.
They generally graduated into district-messenger boys, and occasionally returned to us in blue coats with nickel-plated buttons, and patronized us.
But Gallegher was something different from anything we had experienced before. Gallegher was short and broad in build, with a solid, muscular broadness, and not a fat and dumpy shortness. He wore perpetually on his face a happy and knowing smile, as if you and the world in general were not impressing him as seriously as you thought you were, and his eyes, which were very black and very bright, snapped intelligently at you like those of a little black- and-tan terrier.