Back-Trailers from the Middle Border | Page 8

the first person till Edward Wheeler suggested
that some readers might think it too egotistic."
"Put it back. I don't agree with Wheeler. No one wfll criticize it on the
score of egotism. My readers will want to know that Hanalin Garland is
telling the story of his pioneer relations and friends."
This judgment by one of the keenest minds of my acquaintance,
encouraged me to work, every morning, upon the revision, with all the
power I still retained, but 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