o weeks....

That was the only way to collect the evidence.

I drank but sparingly, as I loafed about the joints and "houses."

Jerome Miller did not drink at all ... and was the spirit and soul of
our activities.

* * * * *

"Senator" Blair came out with a humorous editorial the night before we
were to take the day's charge of his paper.

He headed his editorial "A Youthful Interim ... Youth Must Be Served!"

He was laying down his pen, he wrote, for a week-end holiday ... he had
dug a can of bait and would go fishing, turning all the care and trouble
of a newspaper over to youth and eagerness ... would forgot all his
troubles for a few days....

The editorial made us roar with laughter ... Blair didn't know the
trouble that was preparing for him.

* * * * *

I wrote a poem for the Scoop Club Edition of the Laurel _Globe_ ...

"The Bottoms now I sing, where whiskey flows
And two-cent makes life coleur de rose,
Where negro shanties line the sordid way
And rounders wake by night who sleep by day--"

* * * * *

By noon of the day, hints of what was coming were riding the winds of
general report....

Carefully we read the proofs.

At last there it was--all the data, statistics, and details of the
town's debauchery and corruption ... damning, in cold type, the
administration, and the aquiescent powers in the university.

We ourselves had not as yet begun to perceive what it would lead to--a
state-wide scandal that would echo in the Chicago, San Francisco and New
York newspapers, and result in severe criticism of the university
faculty for remaining blind to such a condition of affairs ... and how
there would be interrogations in the Kansas Legislature and a complete
shake-up of the political power in Laurel.

* * * * *

News of the forthcoming expose spread mysteriously in "The Bottoms"
before the paper was off the press. To avoid the coming storm, already
negro malefactors and white, were "streaming" as Travers phrased it, "in
dark clouds" out of town, for brief sojourns, beyond reach of the
compelling subpoena, in Kansas City, Missouri.

By five o'clock the edition, an extra large one, had been almost
exhausted, and people were lining up at the newspaper office, paying
five cents a copy....

"Senator" Blair rushed back, having heard of what he called our
"treachery"