Читать книгу A Book About Myself онлайн

91 страница из 148

During the second month of my work on the Globe there arrived on the scene a man who was destined to have a very marked effect on my career. He was a tall, dark, broad-shouldered, slender-legged individual of about forty-five or fifty, with a shock of curly black hair and a burst of smuggler-like whiskers. He was truly your Bret Harte gold-miner type, sloven, red-eyed at times, but amazingly intelligent and genial, reminding me not a little of my brother Rome in his best hours. He wore a long dusty, brownish-black frockcoat and a pair of black trousers specked, gummed, shined and worn by tobacco, food, liquor and rough usage. His feet were incased in wide-toed shoes of the old “boot-leather” variety, and the swirl of Jovian locks and beard was surmounted by a wide-brimmed black hat such as Kentucky colonels were wont to affect. His nose and cheeks were tinted a fiery red by much drinking, the nose having a veinous, bulbous, mottled and strawberry texture.

This man was John T. McEnnis, a well-known middle-West newspaper man of that day, a truly brilliant writer whose sole fault was that he drank too much. Originally from St. Louis, the son of a well-known politician there, he had taken up journalism as the most direct avenue to fame and fortune. At forty-five he found himself a mere hanger-on in this profession, tossed from job to job because of his weakness, his skill equaled if not outrivaled by that of younger men! It was commonly said that he could drink more and stand it better than any other man in Chicago.