her eyelashes as she
choked a "good-by, Dave" to him, but he turned away without answering
her and went to find his next partner. It was growing late and the crowd
soon went down the long, dark stairway leading from Imperial Hall, into
the moonlight and down the street, singing and humming and whistling
"Love's Golden Dream," and the next day they and the town and the band
came down to the noon train to see the conquering hero go.

It was lonesome in the office after David went, and his music-box in the
corner was dumb, for we couldn't find the brass lever for it, though the
printers and the reporters hunted in his trunk and in every place they
could think of. But the lonesomest things in the world for him were the
machines. The big press grew sulky and kept breaking the web, and his
linotype took to absorbing castor-oil as if it were a kind of hasheesh.
The new operator could run the new machine, but David's seemed to resent
familiarity. It was six months before we got things going straight after
he left us.

He wrote us soldier letters from the Presidio, and from mid-ocean, and
from the picket-line in front of Manila. One afternoon the messenger-boy
came in snuffling with a sheet of the Press-report. David's name was
among the killed. Then we turned the column rules on the first page and
got out the paper early to give the town the news. Henry Larmy brought
in an obituary, the next day, which needed much editing, and we printed
it under the head "A Tribute from a Friend," and signed Larmy's name to
it.

The boy had no kith or kin--which is most unusual for a Welshman--and
so, except in our office, he seemed to be forgotten. A month went by,
the season changed, and changed again, and a year was gone, when the
Government sent word to Larmy--whom the boy seemed to have named for
his next friend--that David's body would be brought back for burial if
his friends desired it. So in the fall of 1900, when the Presidential
campaign was at its height, the conquering hero came home, and we gave
him a military funeral. The body came to us on Labor Day, and in our
office we consecrated the day to David. The band and the militia company
took him from the big stone church where sometimes he had gone to
Sunday-school as a child, and a long procession of townsfolk wound
around the hill to the cemetery, where David received a salute of guns,
and the bugler played taps, and our eyes grew wet and our hearts were
touched. Then we cover