Curiously, this story captured the fancy of Mr. Binns as it did that of his city editor later, completely. It was such a thing as he could do, and do well. With almost deft literary art he turned it into a rather striking black tragedy. Into it, after convincing his rather fussy city editor that it was worth the telling, he had crowded a bit of the flavor of the hot waterfronts of Cairo, Memphis, Natchez, and New Orleans, the sing-song sleepiness of the stevedores at their lazy labors, the idle, dreamy character of the slow-moving boats, this rickety alley, with its semi-barbaric curtain-hung shacks and its swarming, idle, crooning, shuffling negro life. Even an old negro refrain appropriate to a trinket peddler, and the low, bold negro life two such truants might enjoy, were pictured. An old negro mammy with a yellow-dotted kerchief over her head who kept talking of “disha Gawge” and “disha Sam” and “disha Marquatta” (the girl), had moved him to a poetic frenzy. Naturally it made a colorful tale, and his city editor felt called upon to compliment him on it. But in the _News_, owing possibly to Collins’s inability to grasp the full significance, the romance, of such a story as this, it received but a scant stick--a low dive cutting affray. His was not the type of mind that could see the color here, but once seen he could realize wherein he had been beaten, and it infuriated him. “You think you’re a helluva feller, dontcha?” he snarled the next day on sight, his lip a-curl with scorn and rage. “You think you’ve pulled off sompin swell. Say, I’ve been up against you wordy boys before, and I can work all around you. All you guys can do is get a few facts and then pad ’em up. You never get the real stuff, never,” and he even snapped his fingers under the nose of the surprised Mr. Binns. “Wait’ll we get a real case some time, you and me, and then I’ll show you sompin. Wait and see.” “My good fellow,” Mr. Binns was about to begin, but the cold, hard, revengeful glare in the eyes of Mr. Collins quite took his breath away. Then and there Mr. Collins put a strange haunting fear of himself into Mr. Binns’s mind. There was something so savage about him, so like that of an angry hornet or snake that it left him all but speechless. “Is that so?” he managed to say after a time. “You think you will, do you? That’s easy enough to say, now that you’re beaten, but I guess I’ll be right there when the time comes.” “Aw, go to hell!” growled Collins savagely, and he walked off, leaving Mr. Binns smiling pleasantly, albeit vacantly, and at the same time wondering just what it was Mr. Collins was going to do to him, and when. The sequel to this was somewhat more interesting.