to the writing of short stories. In August
of that year my brother, accompanied by his wife, returned to Chicago
to report the Progressive convention. During the year 1913 he wrote
and produced the farce "Who's Who," of which William Collier was the
star, and in the fall of the same year spent a month in Cuba, with
Augustus Thomas, where they produced a film version of "Soldiers of
Fortune." In referring to this trip, Thomas wrote at the time of
Richard's death:

"In 1914 a motion-picture company arranged to make a feature film of
the play, and Dick and I went with their outfit to Santiago de Cuba,
where, twenty years earlier, he had found the inspiration for his story
and out of which city and its environs he had fashioned his
supposititious republic of Olancho. On that trip he was the idol of
the company. With the men in the smoking-room of the steamer there
were the numberless playful stories, in the rough, of the experiences
on all five continents and seven seas that were the backgrounds of his
published tales.

"At Santiago, if an official was to be persuaded to consent to some
unprecedented seizure of the streets, or a diplomat invoked for the
assistance of the Army or the Navy, it was the experience and good
judgment of Dick Davis that controlled the task. In the field there
were his helpful suggestions of work and make up to the actors, and on
the boat and train and in hotel and camp the lady members met in him an
easy courtesy and understanding at once fraternal and impersonal.

"The element that he could not put into the account and which is
particularly pertinent to this page, is the author of 'Soldiers of
Fortune' as he revealed himself to me both with intention and
unconsciously in the presence of the familiar scenes.

"For three weeks, with the exception of one or two occasions when some
local dignitary captured the revisiting lion, he and I spent our
evenings together at a cafe table overlooking 'The Great Square,' which
he sketches so deftly in its atmosphere when Clay and the Langhams and
Stuart dine there. At one end of the plaza the President's band was
playing native waltzes that came throbbing through the trees and
beating softly above the rustling skirts and clinking spurs of the
senoritas and officers sweeping by in two opposite circles around the
edges of the tessellated pavements. Above the palms around the square
arose the dim, white facade of the Cathedral, with the bronze statue of