Back-Trailers from the Middle Border | Page 8

when I readied the dub for luncheon, I often had Edward Wheeler or Irving Bacheller for a table companion. Sometimes, of a Saturday, I went out to Riverside with Irving, where I slept in a beautiful great room with a waterfall singing under my window.
Occasionally as I left the Club late at night, Lincoln Steffens, who had an apartment near my hotel, went with me, accommodating his step to my painful hobble. His kindness was like that of a son. I did not know till long afterward how desperately ill they all believed ink to be.
It was in this way, working at my hotel mornings an(L meeting my friends at noon, that the months of September and October were spent The city was absorbingly interesting and in my letters to Zulime and the children I made much of the slight gain in my health, and carefully concealed all my doubts.
One day as Irving Bacheller, Albert Bigelow Paine and I all gray-haired- were sitting together, one of the younger men passing by, smilingly alluded to us as "the hope of American Literature."
After a suitable answering quip, Albert turned to Irving and me and musingly said, "I wonder what the war is going to do to us old fellows. It will be a different world when this war ends I doubt if it will have any place for me."
In his remark was the expression of my own doubts. It stuck in my mind. My years, my disability, made the hazards of my removal to the East so great that I ceased to talk of it, although Bacheller was urging me to buy a little place near him in Riverside. Realizing that increasing rents, and higher cost of food and clothing would follow the war, I went about the streets pondering my problem "It will not be easy to break the bonds which time has created between Zulime and her Chicago friends, and is it right to take my daughters from the happy valleys of their childhood into a strange city, no matter how glorious?"
One evening as I sat at the long table in the Club Wilfrid North, one of my brother's friends, an actor whom I had not seen for some years, took a seat beside me. In answer to my question, "What are you doing?" he replied, "I am one of the producers in a moving picture company in Brooklyn." Later in the conversation he said, "Come over and see us I'd like to show you around. Perhaps we can arrange to put some of your stories on the screen--"
Although regarding his concluding remark as a polite phrase, I was sufficiently curious about the business in which he was engaged, to accept his invitation I knew nothing of film drama production, and this appeared an excellent opportunity to learn what a motion picture studio was like.
In spite of the colossal struggle in Europe (increasing every day in magnitude), the motion picture business was expanding with a magical celerity The demands which the belligerents were making upon us for food and munitions had raised wages, and the theaters, especially the moving picture theaters, were crowded with wage earners Fortunes were being made in the cinema world as if by the burnishing of a magic lamp Men who had been haberdashers a year or two before were now buying castles in England and every king and queen of Film-land dashed about in a gorgeous motor car.
It was inevitable that sooner or later I should share (to some degree) in this exciting game, and while I set forth on this afternoon for the office of the Vitagraph Company with no definite expectation of selling the rights to my stories I secretly nursed a timid hope that fortune might somehow, in some form, come my way.
Among the men whom I met that afternoon under the guidance of Wilfrid North, was Jasper E. Brady, head of the Scenario Department Colonel Brady had served on the plains as an army officer and had read some of my western stories and recognized in them a certain truth to the region. As I was about to leave he said, "Send me a copy of The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop. I know that book. There is a great picture in it. I'll have it read at once."
That night I mailed the novel to him and a few days later received from him a most cordial note. "My reader likes your work, as I do," he wrote in substance. "I'll take The Captain but I want a five-year contract covering the picture rights to all your books I'll have you riding about in your own limousine within a year."
Confidence in his judgment, joined with my own faith in one or two of my more romantic novels, led me (after