On reaching 20th Street, the cordon of police, with pistols ready, keeping the crowd in order, showed plainly where the stable was. Gradually I bored a way through. The stable stood back from the road, a courtyard in front of it. A ladder, crowded already with reporters climbing up, led to a hayloft just above. I met the _Evening Telegram_ man, whom I knew, half-way up this ladder. “Got a messenger boy? No! Then you can share mine,” he offered good-naturedly. The only occupants of the yard were a dozen of these messenger boys, waiting to take the “copy” to the various newspaper offices. It was 8.30 A.M. I noticed to my surprise that the _Evening Telegram_ man was a star reporter; three rungs above him, to my still greater surprise, climbed Richard Harding Davis. My vanity was stirred. This was a big story, yet Cooper had chosen me! As I squeezed up the ladder, my hands stuffed with paper, the lion below gave forth an awe-inspiring roar; it was a dreadful sound. The great doors of wood seemed matchwood easily burst through. The crowd swayed back a moment, then, with a cheer, swayed forward again. In the loft I found some twenty reporters; each time the brute gave its terrible roar they scuttled into corners, behind the hay, even up into the rafters of the darkened loft. Pistol shots accompanied every roar, and the added terror lest a bullet from below might pierce the boards on which we stood, made us all jump about like dervishes. One man wrote his story, perched in the dark on the highest rafter, from which he never once moved. I scribbled away, and threw down my “stuff” to the boy below. Meanwhile the circus officials were doing their best to force the great beast into a cage. This cage stood ready against the outside doors in the yard, and at the right moment these doors would be swiftly opened. On being driven into the stable, the animal had found, and quickly killed, a trotting horse, valued at $2,000, standing in its stall. This detail I at first disbelieved, but when my turn came to kneel and peer through the trap-door for feeding the hay down into the dark stable below, I found it was all true. In the centre of the floor the great lion was plainly visible, not six feet below my own face, lying with two paws stretched upon the carcass of a torn, dead horse. The smell of flesh and blood rose to my nostrils. In a dim corner perched on a refrigerator, sat one of the trainers, a pistol in his hand. In another corner, but invisible from my peephole, crouched another circus man, also with his pistol, and each time the lion made an ugly move, both men fired off their weapons.... I wrote more “bulletins,” and dropped them down to a messenger boy in the yard. He hurried off, then returned to fetch more “copy”; I sent at least a column for the first edition. I felt a very proud reporter.