And a shell exploded at the little stable.
“One thousand six hundred and fifty metres”—he shot another order over the wire—and another—and another—and then:
“Battery, fire!” And with a cry, fell headlong from the treetop as the little home and its tragedy vanished in a whirl of smoke and wreckage.
THE KING OF THE PLEDGERS
By H. R. R. Hertzberg
The Editor of Life,
31 West 17th Street,
New York City.
I send this communication to you rather than to the editor of one of the country’s daily papers, because your publication is national and even international, instead of being a more or less local one, and also because the sketch of my life it contains, true though it is, has an appearance sufficiently fictional to fit one of your short-story numbers.
My special purpose in wishing to have this autobiographical sketch published is that it may warn and protect a worthy body of men, the Roman Catholic priesthood of the United States, against a class of grafters which preys upon them and of which I was the “King” for nearly ten years.