The Lost Road | Page 3

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This Etext prepared by Marleen Hugo [email protected]

THE LOST ROAD
THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

TO
MY WIFE

Contains:
THE LOST ROAD THE MIRACLE OF LAS PALMAS EVIL TO
HIM WHO EVIL THINKS THE MEN OF ZANZIBAR THE LONG
ARM THE GOD OF COINCIDENCE THE BURIED TREASURE OF
COBRE THE BOY SCOUT SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE THE
DESERTER

AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN T. McCUTCHEON

WITH DAVIS IN VERA CRUZ, BRUSSELS, AND SALONIKA
In common with many others who have been with Richard Harding
Davis as correspondents, I find it difficult to realize that he has covered
his last story and that he will not be seen again with the men who
follow the war game, rushing to distant places upon which the spotlight
of news interest suddenly centres.
It seems a sort of bitter irony that he who had covered so many big
events of world importance in the past twenty years should be abruptly
torn away in the midst of the greatest event of them all, while the story
is still unfinished and its outcome undetermined. If there is a
compensating thought, it lies in the reflection that he had a life of
almost unparalleled fulness, crowded to the brim, up to the last moment,
with those experiences and achievements which he particularly aspired
to have. He left while the tide was at its flood, and while he still held
supreme his place as the best reporter in his country. He escaped the
bitterness of seeing the ebb set in, when the youth to which he clung
had slipped away, and when he would have to sit impatient in the
audience, while younger men were in the thick of great, world-stirring
dramas on the stage.
This would have been a real tragedy in "Dick" Davis's case, for, while
his body would have aged, it is doubtful if his spirit ever would have
lost its youthful freshness or boyish enthusiasm.
It was my privilege to see a good deal of Davis in the last two years.
He arrived in Vera Cruz among the first of the sixty or seventy
correspondents who flocked to that news centre when the situation was
so full of sensational possibilities. It was a time when the American
newspaper-reading public was eager for thrills, and the ingenuity and
resourcefulness of the correspondents in Vera Cruz were tried to the
uttermost to supply the demand.
In the face of the fiercest competition it fell to Davis's lot to land the
biggest story of those days of marking time.

The story "broke" when it became known that Davis, Medill
McCormick,