The Old Reporter
was doing perhaps the most brilliant work of his sort in the Western hemisphere. He kept a packed suit-case down there now, for he never knew when he took his bath in the morning where he would take off his clothes—if at all—the following night. He was the great Billy Woods.
III
Mr. Woods, the American reporter (or "correspondent" as that sounds more impressive), who had penetrated a part of India—from which all the English journalists, it is said, held back—in order to write those memorable letters to The Day about the Plague; who had discovered a new tribe—at least, as to local color—in Patagonia; who had described oil-well booms in Ohio, Indian-uprisings in the Bad Lands, mountain feuds in Kentucky, was back at general work again in New York. He couldn't keep away. He said he liked the smell of The Day office, and had to look at Madison Square at least once in every twenty-four
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