The San Francisco earthquake—I believe they always allude to it out there as "the fire"—occurred—that next year; and Stanton, who had succeeded old Hanscher in Herald Square—the latter had died in harness at his desk—heard, in that mysterious way that newspaper men hear everything, that Shelby was in the ill-fated city when the earth rocked on that disastrous night. Immediately he telegraphed him, "Write two thousand words of your experiences, your sensations in calamity. Wire them immediately. Big check awaits you."
Silence followed. Stanton and I talked it over, and we concluded that Shelby must have been killed.
"If he isn't dead, here at last is the great adventure he has been longing for," I couldn't help saying.
No word ever came from him; but two weeks later he blew into town, and again Stanton found out that he had arrived.
"Why didn't you answer my wire?" he telephoned him.
"I couldn't," Shelby rather whimpered over the line. "You see, Stanton, old top, the thing got me too deeply. I just couldn't—I hope you'll understand—write one word of it."
But it was not the grief of the man who feels so deeply that he cannot shed a tear. It was the craven in Shelby that had shocked the meretricious Shelby into insensibility, into utter inarticulateness in one of the crowning disasters of the ages.
In the face of something so real, so terribly real, he was but a puny worm, with no vocabulary to express his emotions—for he had none, save the emotion of fear. That we knew from people who had been at the same hotel where he was stopping when the great shock came. He ran through the corridors like a frightened doe, in pajamas of silk, with wonderful tassels of green. He wrung his hands, and babbled like a lunatic. "Oh, my manuscripts! My manuscripts!" were the only intelligible words that came from his white lips.
Think of it! He thought of those piffling stories—those stories of unreality, when he was experiencing the biggest thing that ever came into his little life! Do you wonder that we cared even less for him after that? That I refused to see him at all, and that even wise, understanding Bill Stanton couldn't touch his syndicate stuff?