Dr. Shumann had not seen him yet; he rose from the stove; it was the draught of course, from the opening and closing of the door, but it did seem as though it were the money itself passing in flame and fire up the pipe with a deep faint roar into nothing as Dr. Shumann stood again, looking down at her.
“It’s our boy,” he said; then he shouted: “It’s our boy, I tell you!” Then he collapsed; he seemed to let go all at once, though not hard because of his spareness, on to his knees beside the chair, his head in her lap, crying.
When the city room began to fill that evening a copy-boy noticed the overturned waste-basket beside the reporter’s desk and the astonishing amount of savagely defaced and torn copy which littered the adjacent floor. The copy-boy was a bright lad, about to graduate from high-school; he had not only ambitions but dreams too.
He gathered up from the floor all the sheets, whole and in fragments, emptied the waste-basket and, sitting at the reporter’s desk he began to sort them, discarding and fitting and resorting at the last to paste; then, his eyes big with excitement and exultation and then downright triumph, he regarded what he had salvaged and restored to order and coherence — the sentences and paragraphs which he believed to be not only news but the beginning of literature:
“On Thursday Roger Shumann flew a race against four competitors, and won.
On Saturday he flew against but one competitor. But that competitor was Death, and Roger Shumann lost. And so to-day a lone aeroplane flew out over the lake on the wings of dawn and circled the spot where Roger Shumann got the Last Checkered Flag, and vanished back into the dawn from whence it came.
“Thus two friends told him farewell. Two friends, yet two competitors too, whom he had met in fair contest and conquered in the lonely sky from which he fell, dropping a simple wreath to mark his Last Pylon.”
It stopped there, but the copy-boy did not. “O Jesus,” he whispered. “Maybe Hagood will let me finish it!” already moving towards the desk where Hagood now sat, though the copy-boy had not seen him enter.
Hagood had just sat down; the copy-boy, his mouth already open, paused behind Hagood. Then he became more complete vassal to surprise than ever, for lying on Hagood’s desk and and weighted down neatly by an empty whiskey bottle was another sheet of copy which Hagood and the copy-boy read together:
“At midnight last night the search for the body of Roger Shumann, racing pilot who plunged into the lake Saturday p m., was finally abandoned by a three-place biplane of about eighty horse-power which managed to fly out over the water and return without falling to pieces and dropping a wreath of flowers into the water approximately three-quarters of a mile away from where Shumann’s body is generally supposed to be since they were precision pilots and so did not miss the entire lake.
Mrs. Shumann departed with her husband and children for Ohio, where it is understood that their six-year-old son will spend an indefinite time with some of his grandparents and where any and all finders of Roger Shumann are kindly requested to forward any and all of same.”
And beneath this, savagely in pencil: I guess this is what you want, you bastard, and now I am going down to Amboise St and get drunk awhile and if you don’t know where Amboise St is ask your son to tell you and if you don’t know what drunk is come down there and look at me and when you come bring some jack because I am on a credit.
The End
