Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 123, No. 3 — page 149: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ie, % wondering what to do about it; who was subject to colds and toothache as we all are and dreaded dentists; who sometimes said angry things or foolish things, and wished next morning he hadn’t; who liked cream and a lump of sugar in his coffee and hated castor oil; who preferred a bad- smelling pipe to rich cigars and could curse a collar that bound his necktie as fluently as any longshoreman. They all forgot the real Walter Bowman at times—all save Bowman himself. ENTIRELY WITHOUT NOTES. II. WALTER_ BOWMAN had several secre- taries. There was the young man in his outer office who wore horn-rimmed spec- tacles, little more than a glorified office boy who took your card to Miss Smith, whose office was next to Bowman’s. Miss Smith was the human filter. She made it her business to interview seventy-five per cent. of Bowman’s callers. The remaining twenty-five per cent. talked with Filkins, Bowman’s confidential secretary, and seme of them with Bowman himself. There was @ personal stenographer in addition, who wrote all Bowman’s letters. And finally there was Eddy Denby. Denby was unknown in the Metropolitan offices. He never came there. On Broadway, half-way up Manhattan Island, in a building largely devoted to - Cloak and suit wholesalers, resident buyers and’ fashion magazines, Denby had a little Office behind a door which bore no name. There he kept a typewriter and a large filing case. He had another little room set aside for his personal use in Bowman's flat on Madison Avenue. Almost any time of day or night he might have been discovered in one or the other of these places when he was not at the research department of the public library— a tall, freckled young man, lean, red haired, stooping painfully over a small typewriter at which he poked with three fingers and a thumb, strewing half-burned cigarettes in a semicircle about his desk. _ Eddie Denby did not know ‘everything, but he knew where and how to find out about anything, which was why he earned e 431 a generous salary. Once he had a few facts on a subject he could write about it in one or the other styles which the reading public admired as the work of Walter Bow- man; or he could prompt Bowman to talk about it with satisfactory brilliance. In Bowman’s name he wrote letters to the papers advocating more playgrounds for children and free milk stations fer babies. He prepared Bowman’s little chat on “‘ The Municipal Ownership Bogey and Its Ef- fect on Modern Traction Financing,” de- livered before the Bankers’ Association convention and his illuminating discussion called, ‘“‘Some Significant Sidelights on Stress and Tensile Strength of Modern Steel and Concrete Construction as Dem- onstrated in Building the New North Hud- son Power Dam,” which Bowman delivered before an. international congress of engi- neers. Shortly after the close of the war he ar- ranged Bowman’s purchase of eight famous paintings by old masters from European owners and later engineered their private sale so.that Bowman made enough from six of them to afford to give one to the Metropolitan Museum and save another for his private enjoyment, to say nothing of the profits in publicity. He saw that Bow- man met the right people and said the right things to them, and if he said the wrong thing, as he occasionally did, Denby saw that the public didn’t hear about it. It speaks well for both men that they re- mained always close friends. Bowman had a fortunate sense of humor and was beauti- fully lacking in vanity. He never took the bit in his teeth and tried to outshine his anonymous mental guardian as other men of his kind have sometimes done, to their discomfiture. He regarded Denby’s constant presence and advice purely as a business proposition, a part of his duty to- ward the Metropolitan. ‘And on his part Denby was singularly free from petty envy. Denby never craved to play Bowman’s réle and take he credit for his own brilliance. They called each other Eddy and Wal- ter; went about together quite a lot; went fishing together in their old clothes when they could:steal a few days from business; ‘igina al i ron . Ql C oe 5) = SS CO be