This went on for fifteen days, during which time I made Coffee John’s joint my headquarters. That was the only place where I could hope to keep sober, working at such high pressure, for I didn’t dare trust myself in a saloon, and I couldn’t afford to hire an office. The amount of black coffee I consumed made me yellow for a year. Whether Coffee John wondered what I was up to or not I never knew; at any rate he asked no questions and made no objections. The Great Bauer Syndicate went merrily, and the members, with the exception of the president, earned their salaries easily enough. If the job was especially difficult or delicate, I went out and got the story myself. At the end of the first week we drew our pay and divided it according to the agreement, but there were indications that my men thought they were getting clever enough to handle the work alone. If it hadn’t been that while I was waiting for them to come in I managed to write several columns of “space,” faked and otherwise, that they could turn in and get paid for without any work at all, I would have had trouble in holding them down to their contracts. Except for this, the prospects were bright for the prettiest little news syndicate that ever fooled a city editor. We made a record for two weeks, and then came the crash. I had been as sober as a parson for fifteen long, weary days, beating my record by twenty-four hours. I had drenched myself in black coffee, and turned out copy like a linotype machine, keyed up to a tension so tight that something had to give way. You can easily imagine what happened. One Monday night, after the last batch of copy had been delivered, and I had drawn down my second week’s pay, I relapsed into barbarism and cast care to the winds for the nonce. I started down the line, headed for Pete Dunn’s saloon at 1 A.M., with thirty dollars in my pocket, and I found myself on Wednesday morning at the Cliff House, with an unresponsive female, whom I was imploring to call me “Sollie.” What had happened to me in the interim I never cared to investigate. But the Great Bauer Syndicate was out of business. It seems that my three subordinates showed up as usual on Tuesday afternoon, and after waiting for me a while they attempted to cover their assignments without my help. The insurance solicitor got all twisted up, and never came back; the printer threw up his job when he failed to find me on his return. But the book-agent had grown a bit conceited by this time, and he thought he was as good as anybody in the business. So he sat down and wrote out his story, and by what they say about it, it must have been something rich enough to frame.