ng Davis was
always going to some far-off land. He was just back from a trip
somewhere when I first saw him in his rooms in New York, rifle in hand,
in his sock feet and with his traps in confusion about him. He was
youth incarnate--ruddy, joyous, vigorous, adventurous, self-confident
youth--and, in all the years since, that first picture of him has
suffered no change with me. He was so intensely alive that I cannot
think of him as dead--and I do not. He is just away on another of
those trips and it really seems queer that I shall not hear him tell
about it.

We were together as correspondents in the Spanish War and in the
Russo-Japanese War we were together again; and so there is hardly any
angle from which I have not had the chance to know him. No man was
ever more misunderstood by those who did not know him or better
understood by those who knew him well, for he carried nothing in the
back of his head--no card that was not face up on the table. Every
thought, idea, purpose, principle within him was for the world to read
and to those who could not know how rigidly he matched his inner and
outer life he was almost unbelievable. He was exacting in friendship
because his standard was high and because he gave what he asked; and if
he told you of a fault he told you first of a virtue that made the
fault seem small indeed. But he told you and expected you to tell him.

Naturally, the indirection of the Japanese was incomprehensible to him.
He was not good at picking up strange tongues, and the Japanese
equivalent for the Saxon monosyllable for what the Japanese was to him
he never learned. For only one other word did he have more use and I
believe it was the only one he knew, "hyaku--hurry!" Over there I was
in constant fear for him because of his knight-errantry and his candor.
Once he came near being involved in a duel because of his quixotic
championship of a woman whom he barely knew, and disliked, and whose
absent husband he did not know at all. And more than once I looked for
a Japanese to draw his two-handed ancestral sword when Dick bluntly
demanded a reconciliation of his yea of yesterday with his nay of
today. Nine months passed and we never heard the whistle of bullet or
shell. Dick called himself a "cherry-blossom correspondent," and when
our ship left those shores each knew that the other went to his
state-room and in bitter chagrin and disappointment wept quite
childishly.

Of course, he was c