I wondered how he could make anything out of this newspaper connection since, as Hartung and others told me, he could not write. It was necessary to rewrite his stuff almost entirely. But his great recommendation to Mitchell and others was that he could get news of things where other reporters could not, among the police, detectives and politicians, with whom he was evidently hand-in-hand. By reason of his underworld connections many amazing details as to one form and another of political and social jobbery came to light, which doubtless made him invaluable to a city editor. When some of his stories were given to me to rewrite we were thrown into immediate and clashing contact. Because of his leers and bravado, when he knew he could not write two good sentences in order, I frequently wanted to brain him but took it out in smiles and dry cynical comments. His favorite expressions were “See?” and “I sez tuh him” or “He sez tuh me,” always accompanied by a contemptuous wave of a hand or a pugnaciously protruded chin. One of the chief reasons why I hated him was that Dick Wood told me he had once remarked that newspaper work was a beggar’s game at best and that _writers grew on trees_, meaning that they were so numerous as to be negligible and not worth considering. I made the best of these trying situations when I had to do over a story of his, extracting all the information I could and then writing it out, which resulted in some of his stories receiving excellent space in the day’s news and made him all the more pugnacious and sure of himself. And at the same time these made him of more value to the paper. However, in due time I left the _Globe-Democrat_, and one day, greatly to my astonishment and irritation, he appeared at the North Seventh Street station as a full-fledged reporter, having been given a regular position by Mitchell and set to doing police work—out of which task at the Four Courts, if I remember rightly, he finally ousted Jock Bellairs, who was given to too much drinking.