I, "that's different. Arizona is a long way from New
York. I could have a man stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair
of chaparreras if I wanted to, and it wouldn't be noticed until the
usual error-sharp from around McAdams Junction isolates the erratum
and writes in to the papers about it. But you are up against another
proposition. This thing they call love is as common around New York
as it is in Sheboygan during the young onion season. It may be mixed
here with a little commercialism--they read Byron, but they look
up Bradstreet's, too, while they're among the B's, and Brigham
also if they have time--but it's pretty much the same old internal
disturbance everywhere. You can fool an editor with a fake picture of
a cowboy mounting a pony with his left hand on the saddle horn, but
you can't put him up a tree with a love story. So, you've got to fall
in love and then write the real thing."

Pettit did. I never knew whether he was taking my advice or whether
he fell an accidental victim.

There was a girl he had met at one of these studio contrivances--a
glorious, impudent, lucid, open-minded girl with hair the color of
Culmbacher, and a good-natured way of despising you. She was a New
York girl.

Well (as the narrative style permits us to say infrequently),
Pettit went to pieces. All those pains, those lover's doubts, those
heart-burnings and tremors of which he had written so unconvincingly
were his. Talk about Shylock's pound of flesh! Twenty-five pounds
Cupid got from Pettit. Which is the usurer?

One night Pettit came to my room exalted. Pale and haggard but
exalted. She had given him a jonquil.

"Old Hoss," said he, with a new smile flickering around his mouth, "I
believe I could write that story to-night--the one, you know, that is
to win out. I can feel it. I don't know whether it will come out or
not, but I can feel it."

I pushed him out of my door. "Go to your room and write it," I
ordered. "Else I can see your finish. I told you this must come
first. Write it to-night and put it under my door when it is done.
Put it under my door to-night when it is finished--don't keep it
until to-morrow."

I was reading my bully old pal Montaigne at two o'clock when I heard
the sheets rustle under my door. I gathered them up and read the
story.

The hissing of geese, the languishing cooing of doves, the braying
of donkeys, the chatter of irresponsible sparrows--these were in my
mind's ear as I read. "Sufferin