I hurried downstairs from my attic, to intercept some friend who would
confirm me in my interpretation of the signature.
It was Travers I ran into. I showed the letter to him.
"By Jove! It _is_ Baxter!" he cried.
He was as overwhelmed as I had been.
"Say, Johnnie, you must really amount to something, with all these
people back East paying such attention to you ... come on into Kuhlman's
and have a "coke" with me."
In Kuhlman's, the college foregathering place, the ice cream and
refreshment parlour of the town, we joined with Jimmy Thompson, our
famous football quarterback. The room was full of students eating ice
cream and drinking coco-cola and ice cream sodas.
"Say, let me print this."
"No, but you may put an item in the _Laurelian_, if you want to."
"I must write a story for the _Star_ about it."
It would have pleased my vanity to have had Jack put the story in the
papers, but I was afraid of offending Baxter ... afterward I learned
that it would not have offended him ... he had the vanity of a child, as
well as I.
I answered his letter promptly, in terms of what might have seemed, to
the outside eye, excessive adulation. But Penton Baxter was to me a
great genius ... and nothing I could have written in his praise would
have overweighed the debt I owed him for that fine letter of
encouragement.
* * * * *
So at last I was reaping the fruits of my years of struggle for the
poetic ideal--my years of poverty and suffering.
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