IN spite of this little mishap, which did me no great harm, there was a marked improvement in my affairs in every way. I had a better room, various friends—Wood, McCord, Rodenberger, Hazard, Bellairs, a new reporter by the name of Johnson, another by the name of Walden Root, a nephew of the senator—and the growing consideration if not admiration of many of the newspaper men of the city. Among them I was beginning to be looked upon as a man of some importance, and the proof of it was that from time to time I found myself being discussed in no mild way. From now on I noticed that my noble Wood, whom I had so much looked up to at first, began to take me about with him to one or more Chinese restaurants of the most beggarly description in the environs of the downtown section, which same he had discovered and with the proprietors of which he was on the best of terms. They were really hang-outs for crooks and thieves and disreputable tenderloin characters generally (such was the beginning of the Chinese restaurant in America), but not so to Wood. He had the happy faculty of persuading himself that there was something vastly mysterious and superior about the entire Chinese race, and after introducing me to many of his new laundry friends he proceeded to assure me of the existence of some huge Chinese organization known as the Six Companies which, so far as I could make out from hearing him talk, was slowly but surely (and secretly, of course) getting control of the entire habitable globe. It had complete control of great financial and constructive ventures here, there and everywhere, and supplied on order thousands of Chinese laborers to any one who desired them, anywhere. And this organization ruled them with a rod of iron, cutting their throats and burying them head down in a bucket of rice when they failed to perform their bounden duties and transferring their remains quietly to China, in coffins made in China and brought here for that purpose. The Chinese who had worked for the builders of the Union Pacific had been supplied by this company, so he said.