Here a $50,000 robbery had been committed and the thieves were calmly discussing getting their boots blacked and replenishing their wardrobe (one suit of clothes between them seems to have been enough) before taking to flight. Shades of Sherlock, how easily a boy of 12 makes business for the police department!
Or consider this gem from Act II. The aforesaid "J. B." and "B. J." have evidently been "pinched" while getting their boots blacked or while buying their suit of clothes:
J. B.—We're in the jug at last, Jim, and I'm afraid we'll be sentenced to be shot.
B. J.—Don't be discouraged, Bill.
Enter Sleek, the detective.
Sleek.—We've got you at last, eh?
J. B.—You'll never get the money, just the same.
Sleek.—We'll shoot you if you don't tell where it is like a dog.
Then here's something else which seems to prove that young Edwards occasionally fell into rhyme:
Oh, why cut down those forests,
Our forests old and grand?
And oh, why cheat the Indians
Out of all their land?
Enclosed by civilization,
Surrounded they by towns,
Calmly when this life is done
They seek their hunting-grounds!
John Milton Edwards has always had a place in his heart for the red man, and another for his country's vanishing timber. He is to be congratulated on his youthful sentiments if not on the way they were expressed.
In 1882 the Edwards family removed to Chicago. There were but three in the family—the father, the mother, and John Milton. The boy was taken from the Ottawa high school and, as soon as they were all comfortably settled in the "Windy City," John Milton made what he has since believed to be the mistake of his career. His father offered him his choice of either a university or a business education. He chose to spend two years in Bryant & Stratton's Business College. His literary career would have been vastly helped had he taken the other road and matriculated at either Harvard or Yale. He had the opportunity and turned his back on it.
He was writing, more or less, all the time he was a student at Bryant & Stratton's. The school grounded him in double-entry bookkeeping, in commercial law, and in shorthand and typewriting.
When he left the business college he found employment with a firm of subscription book publishers, as stenographer. There came a disagreement between the two partners of the firm, and the young stenographer was offered for $1,500 the retiring partner's interest. The elder Edwards, who would have had to furnish the $1,500, could not see anything alluring in the sale of books through agents, and the deal fell through. Two years later, while John Milton was working for a railroad company as ticket agent at $60 a month, his old friend of the subscription book business dropped in on him and showed him a sworn statement prepared for Dun and Bradstreet. He had cleared $60,000 in two years! Had John Milton bought the retiring partner's interest he would have been worth half a million before he had turned thirty.
The fiction bee, however, was continually buzzing in John Milton's brain. He had no desire to succeed at anything except authorship.