me
of the ten he had just received.

"Just my luck, Fred," Field replied. "As I was leaving the office whom
should I meet but one of my old printer boys, dead broke. The X was all
I had, and he told me he had to have it, and he had to." It is needless
to say that Field got the second advance and succeeded in dodging all
impecunious "old boys" on the way home.

I have said that Denver at that time was the centre of all the railway
interests of Colorado and the far West. Being also the capital, it was
the place where legislators and railway agents wrestled with problems
of regulating tariffs and granting privileges to what may be called
their mutual benefit. It was from his experience in Denver that Field
learned that two-thirds of the business of a western legislature
consisted in causing legislative hold-ups, of which the transportation
companies were the victims, and the most vociferously impeccable
statesmen the chief beneficiaries. The secret service funds of the
railway companies doing business in Colorado paid out a hundred dollars
for protection from notorious sandbagging bills and resolutions to
every dollar they spent for special favors in grants and franchises.

This by way of preface to a story in which Eugene Field and a railway
official, who, as I write, holds a high position in the transportation
world, figure. This official was at that time the superintendent of the
Southwestern Division of the Pullman system, with head-quarters at St.
Louis. In those days every session of the Colorado legislature saw its
anti-Pullman rate reduction bill, which Wickersham, as I shall call
him, because that is not his name, was commissioned to checkmate,
strangle, or make away with in committee by the aid of annual passes,
champagne, and the mysterious potency of the national bank-note. As was
remarked by E.D. Cowen, to whose notes I am indebted for refreshing my
memory of Field's tales, Wickersham never failed in generalship,
principally because he was bold in his methods and picturesquely lavish
with his munitions of war. The Pullman Company did not then enjoy the
royalty and defensive alliance which now protects it against rate
legislation throughout the West, and so Wickersham was kept continually
on the go, making alliances and friendships among legislators and
journalists against the days of reckoning.

Field, as the managing editor of the Tribune, was a special favorite
with Wickersham, as he was of every profess