It was nearly midnight when Tommy and his friend Dobson returned to the hotel. “Your paper's been trying to get you for an hour, Mr. Hawkins,” said the night clerk when they came in. “Story right in the next room to yours. Old party in there hanged himself.” “So?” said Tommy. “Ungrateful old guy, he is! I put in the afternoon trying to cheer him up a little.” “Did you know him?” asked the clerk. “Nope,” said Tommy, moving toward the elevator. But a few moments later, confronted with the grotesque spectacle in the room upstairs, he said, “Yes--I--I know him. Jack! Jack! Get me out of here, Jack! It's Uncle Ezra, Jack! He's--he's come for me!” As has been remarked before, sometimes even a bubble may be a mordant weapon. VIII.--The Chances of the Street |Merriwether Buck had lost all his money. Also his sisters', and his cousins', and his aunts'. “At two o'clock sharp I will shoot myself,” said Merriwether Buck. He caressed a ten-shot automatic pistol in the right-hand pocket of his coat as he loitered up Broadway. He was light-headed. He had had nothing to eat for forty-eight hours. “How I hate you!” said Merriwether Buck, comprehensively to the city in general. “If nine pistol shots would blot you out, I'd do it!” Very melodramatic language, this, for a well-brought-up young man; and thus indicating that he was light-headed, indeed. And as for the city, it continued to roar and rattle and honk and rumble and squeak and bawl and shuffle and thunder and grate in the same old way--supreme in its confidence that nine pistol shots could not, by any possibility, blot it out. That is one of the most disconcerting things about a city; you become enraged at it, and the city doesn't even know it. Unless you happen to be Nero it is very difficult to blot them out satisfactorily. It was one o'clock. Merriwether Buck crossed the street at Herald Square and went over and stood in front of the big newspaper office. A portly young fellow with leaden eyes came out of the building and stood meditatively on the curb with his hands in the pockets of clothing that clamored shrilly of expense. “Excuse me,” said Merriwether Buck, approaching him, “but are you, by any chance, a reporter?” “Uh,” grunted the young man, frigidly affirmative. “I can put you in the way of a good story,” said Merriwether Buck, obeying an impulse: We may live anonymously but most of us like to feel that it will make a little stir when we die. “Huh,” remarked the reporter. “At two o'clock,” persisted Merriwether Buck, “I am going to shoot myself.” The reporter looked bored; his specialty was politics. “Are you anybody in particular?” he asked, discouragingly. “No,” confessed Merriwether Buck. It didn't seem to be worth while to mention that he was one of the Bucks of Bucktown, Merriwether County, Georgia. “I thought,” said the reporter, with an air of rebuke, “that you said it was a _good_ story.”