We located all the places where booze was sold, and ascertained exactly how much whiskey was disposed of in the town's drug stores for "snake bite" and "stomach trouble." We discovered many interesting things--that, for instance, "Old Aunt Jennie," who would allow her patrons any vice, but demurred when they took the name of "De Lawd" in vain--"Old Aunt Jennie" ran a "house" where the wilder and more debauched among the students came (in justice to Laurel University, let me add, very few) girls and boys together,--and stayed for the night--when they were supposed to be on trips to Kansas City.... Travers and "The Colonel" and I were half-lit for two weeks.... That was the only way to collect the evidence. I drank but sparingly, as I loafed about the joints and "houses." Jerome Miller did not drink at all ... and was the spirit and soul of our activities. * * * * * "Senator" Blair came out with a humorous editorial the night before we were to take the day's charge of his paper. He headed his editorial "A Youthful Interim ... Youth Must Be Served!" He was laying down his pen, he wrote, for a week-end holiday ... he had dug a can of bait and would go fishing, turning all the care and trouble of a newspaper over to youth and eagerness ... would forgot all his troubles for a few days.... The editorial made us roar with laughter ... Blair didn't know the trouble that was preparing for him. * * * * * I wrote a poem for the Scoop Club Edition of the Laurel _Globe_ ... "The Bottoms now I sing, where whiskey flows And two-cent makes life coleur de rose, Where negro shanties line the sordid way And rounders wake by night who sleep by day--" * * * * * By noon of the day, hints of what was coming were riding the winds of general report.... Carefully we read the proofs. At last there it was--all the data, statistics, and details of the town's debauchery and corruption ... damning, in cold type, the administration, and the aquiescent powers in the university. We ourselves had not as yet begun to perceive what it would lead to--a state-wide scandal that would echo in the Chicago, San Francisco and New York newspapers, and result in severe criticism of the university faculty for remaining blind to such a condition of affairs ... and how there would be interrogations in the Kansas Legislature and a complete shake-up of the political power in Laurel. * * * * * News of the forthcoming expose spread mysteriously in "The Bottoms" before the paper was off the press. To avoid the coming storm, already negro malefactors and white, were "streaming" as Travers phrased it, "in dark clouds" out of town, for brief sojourns, beyond reach of the compelling subpoena, in Kansas City, Missouri.