Outside that, his qualifications for writing fiction were superfluous, from an American audience’s point of view, for, to please that audience, he didn’t have to write good English, he didn’t have to be intellectual, cultured, witty, or a gentleman. But these unnecessary addenda did not positively count against him. * * * * * He talked over the situation with Coltfoot, who was loath to lose him and muttered of moneys. “No, Mike,” concluded Annan, “I’ve had my romp in your kindly columns. You let me train there. I feel fit for the fight, now. I’m on tip-toe, all pepped up.” “How much do you want then?” demanded Coltfoot, unconvinced. “Nothing. I’ve about a million things I want to try----” “Bosco,” nodded the other wearily;--“I know. But you’ll end in a Coney Island show, matched against all comers to eat twenty-five feet of sausages in twenty-five minutes.... Do a serial for us. We’ve never tried it but I believe the newspaper is destined to put the magazine out of business. I’ll take a chance, anyway. Will you?” “Maybe. I’m going to do a story--a kind of novel--a thing--something----” “I’ll take it without sample or further identification. It may cost me my job. Are we on?” “No, you crazy Irishman. Let me alone, I tell you. I may change my mind and try a play, or a continuity direct,--hang it all, I might even burst into verse. Do you want some poems?” he threatened. “No,” replied Coltfoot calmly, “but I’ll take them.” “I’ll do one farewell article for you. I’ll do it to-night. But that ends it.” “How about the poems?” “You’re very kind,” said Annan laughing. “It’s just the yoke, Mike. It hasn’t galled, but let me drop it for a while.... That stuff I did for you--well, it’s out of my system. I don’t care, now, whether it’s good or bad; I shan’t do any more anyway----” “Your public asks for it.” “I’m through----” “They want _that_!” “Well, I won’t do any more. I don’t want to. I can’t. I don’t think that way any longer. Damn it, I’ve gone on----” “They haven’t!” “Let ’em stay put, then,” growled Annan. “You mean you are going to abandon your public?” “I move. If they don’t want to follow----” “No writer can afford to abandon his public,” said Coltfoot, seriously. Annan, also serious, said slowly: “The Masters we scribblers try to follow went that way. They went _on_. Few followed them all the way.... Poe wrote only _one_ ‘Tales of the Grotesque’; Kipling wrote only one ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’; Scott one ‘Ivanhoe,’ Hawthorne one ‘Scarlet Letter’; Cooper, Dickens, Thackeray only _the_ one each.... And there was only one ‘Hamlet.’... And but one ‘Inferno.’... And one ‘Song of Songs.’... And one ‘Iliad.’” He shrugged: “So maybe, in my own cheap little job I have hit my high-spot with those stories of yours.... Maybe.... But I’m going on, I’m going to write what I please if it costs me my last reader.” Coltfoot made his last effort: “Dumas wrote ‘Twenty Years After’?”