“He died last spring,” said Green. “Guess he was the last leaf on the tree.”
“He came on five years ahead of me,” said Galbraithe. “He and I did the barrel murders together.”
“What was that story?” inquired Harding.
Galbraithe looked at Harding to make sure this was not some fool joke. At the time nothing else had been talked of in New York for a month, and he and Haydon had made something of a name for themselves for the work they did on it. Harding was both serious and interested—there could be no doubt about that. That was eight years ago, and it stuck out in Galbraithe’s mind as fresh as though it were yesterday. But what he was just beginning to perceive was that this was so because he had been away from New York. To those living on here and still fighting the old game it had become buried, even as tradition, in the multiplicity of subsequent stories. These younger men who had superseded him and his fellows already had their own big stories. They came every day between the dawn and the dark, and then again between the dark and the dawn. Day after day they came unceasingly, at the end of a week dozens of them, at the end of the month hundreds, at the end of a year thousands. It was fifteen hundred days ago that he had been observing the manifold complications of these million people, and since that time a thousand volumes had been written about as many tragedies enacted in the same old setting. Time here was measured in hours, not years. Only the stage remained unchanged.
Galbraithe stood up, so dazed that he faltered as though with the palsy. Harding took his arm.
“Steady, old man,” he cautioned. “You’d better come out and have a drink.”
Galbraithe shook his head. He felt sudden resentment at the part they were forcing upon him.
“I’m going back home,” he announced.
“Come on,” Harding encouraged him. “We’ll drink to the old days, eh?”
“Sure,” chimed in Green. The others, too, rose and sought their hats.