But Randall said this worried the night watchman too much, my appearing and disappearing, all hours of the night.  He didn’t relish coming every time to see if the store was being burglarised.

* * * * *

The outside world was beginning to notice me.  My poems, two of which I had sold to the Century, two to Everybody’s, and a score to the Independent, were, as soon as they appeared in those magazines, immediately copied by the Kansas newspapers.  And the Kansas City Star featured a story of me at Laurel, playing up my freaks and oddities ... but accompanied by a flattering picture that “Con” Cummins, our college photographer, had taken.

Also I was receiving occasional letters from strangers who had read my poems.  But they were mostly letters from cranks ... or from girls very, very young and sentimental, or on the verge of old-maidhood, who were casting about for some escape from the narrow daily life that environed them....

But one morning a letter came to me so scrawlingly addressed that I marvelled at the ability of the postal authorities in deciphering it.  The writer of it hailed me as a poet of great achievement already, but of much greater future promise....  Mr. Lephil, editor of the National Magazine, for whom he was writing a serial, had showed him some of my verse, and he must hasten to encourage me ...  I puzzled long over the writer’s signature....  It could not be possible! but it seemed to be inscribed with the name of a novelist famous for his investigations of capitalistic abuses of the people ... the author of the sensational novel, The Slaughter House, which was said to out-Zola Zola—­Penton Baxter.

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.