The Short Story of Harry Peyton Steger

- by Allen Rich

Introduction

When Harry Peyton Steger was selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he was studying Sanskrit at Johns Hopkins University.

But 116 years ago you would have found young Steger sitting at his desk in Duncan School on the west side of Bonham, a thriving rural northeast Texas community of 3,500 residents located 12 miles south of Red River and Indian Territory.

It seems fortuitous that, in 1897, school officials handed 15-year-old Steger his diploma and wished him well. As it turned out, Harry had much to accomplish and precious little time. He would be back, though.

In a life that lasted less than 31 years, Steger went from being a rapidly rising star at the University of Texas to become one of the brightest young editors on the East Coast. He edited O. Henry's final book, gave a young writer named Booth Tarkington his first big break, and married a beautiful actress, but Steger also came back to Bonham High School to teach Latin before launching his career.

The world was Harry Peyton's oyster and he had the movie star looks and charm combined with a brilliant intellect to throw it wide open.

Somehow it all seems so symbolic that Steger's last days as an editor at Doubleday Page & Company in New York City revolved around the art of creating short stories, a skill only a select group of authors possess because it requires capturing so much emotion in relatively little space. Harry Peyton Steger's life was a brilliantly crafted short story. Unfortunately it wasn't graced with an artful ending like the ones written by his friend, O. Henry.

So just who was this local boy turned literary figure? As is the case with so many North Texas residents, the Steger story begins in Tennessee.

Harry Peyton Steger was born in Moscow, Tennessee, not far from Memphis, on March 2, 1882. Harry’s father, Thomas Steger, moved the family to Bonham where young Harry began school as an inquisitive six-year-old. Actually, it seems five Steger brothers relocated to Bonham about the same time and quickly became an integral part of the local business scene.

There was the Steger Opera House, Steger Mill, Steger Lumber and Thomas Steger was a lawyer credited with managing Sam Rayburn’s congressional campaign in 1914. So, Harry Peyton Steger was hewn from solid timber and the family's intellectual attributes can be traced all the way back to Harry’s great-great grandfather, John Jefferson, brother of one of America’s truly great thinkers, Thomas Jefferson.

In the 1890s, Harry’s affluent world in Bonham was centered on education and culture. By special permission of the Regents, he was allowed admittance to the University of Texas in 1897 as a mere 15-year-old.

At UT, Steger blossomed. He became editor of the campus newspaper, The Daily Texan, as well as the campus yearbook. Steger’s roommate at UT was Roy Bedichek and another close friend was John A. Lomax. Bedichek became a noted naturalist and Lomax went on to be a celebrated folklorist.

Harry and “Bedi” shared a love for the classics as well as an interest in campus politics. According to the Texas Library Journal, it may have been Steger’s political activism and his role as newspaper editor that prevented the BHS graduate from being the first Rhodes Scholar from UT.

According to Steger, he was a “naughty boy” during his time as editor, but his friends evidently strongly opposed the punishment. Again, according to the Texas Library Journal, a protest over the scholarship debacle resulted in the first official “riff” between students and administrators at the University of Texas.

Steger returned to Bonham briefly where he taught Latin and Greek before enrolling at Johns Hopkins University to study Sanskrit. It was at Johns Hopkins, a year after the “naughty boy” incident, that Steger was selected to be a Rhodes Scholar, becoming the second UT grad to share that honor.

The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger 1899-1912, offer an enlightened glimpse of a Fannin County boy at home, abroad and finally rising through the ranks of the East Coast publishing world.

September 29, 1905
Mr. John A. Lomax, College Station, Texas

My dear Lomax:

I leave to-morrow for London, via Cologne, Vlissingen and Queensboro. The three months of Germany, spent in the midst of a German family, have been constantly delightful. Never was I more energetic, more cheerful, more ambitious; and, to fill my sweet cup, I can truthfully say that I can speak German. For two months now no word of English has passed the fence of my teeth. (Thanks, Homer, for that phrase!)

November 25, 1905
My dear Folks:

Last night I attended the annual Rhodes Dinner. Cecil Rhodes, as you may know, left a fund for this function and this year $1,500,000 were expended. There were nearly 200 present. The hall was a gorgeous sight. Nothing but evening clothes was to be seen. Rudyard Kipling was one of the guests. He wrote his name for me, as well as the other Rhodians; and I have preserved it in my toast-list. Lord Milne, Sir Lewis Mitchell and numerous other nabobs and potentates were also in evidence.

January 9, 1906
Dear Folks:

Lady Monkswell (one of the swellest of the English nobility) has invited all of the Rhodes Scholars to a reception at her town-house (in London) on the 18th inst. My curiosity bids me go, but my wardrobe, with more force, bids me stay. You see, to be observed, in London, on the streets, in the afternoon, or even in a home, without a frock coat and a high silk hat, or else a Prince Albert, would be as rude as appearing in pajamas. I tell you this because I think it will amuse you. There is never a place in the world where formality in dress counts for so much as it does in London. Of course, it is all silly rot.

Chapter 1

Harry Peyton Steger stepped out of his Uncle Verge's Steger Opera House, fumbled for a smoke and started a slow amble for home two blocks away. He needed time to think while he thought about time. Best Harry could tell, time had already run out for him in his hometown.

As a boy growing up in Bonham, a little North Texas town named after one of the heroes of the Alamo, Harry had kicked clods out of his way and wandered, lost in thought, along the dirt-road Main Street that passed just east of the towering Fannin County Courthouse. But this was a very different street now that he was a grown man kicking clods. And today was different from most days.
Today was Monday. Families in wagons, buggies and surries circled the Bonham Square, stocking up on groceries and picking up one or two items at the local hardware store they couldn’t make themselves in their blacksmith shop at home.

Not just any Monday, either. To make matters worse, it looked like horse traders were thicker ‘n fiddlers in hell in downtown Bonham.

The first Monday of each month was horse-trading day around the square and every horse in the county had his mane trimmed, his tail brushed and a price on his head. And not only horses, either. Milk cows. Mules. Hogs. Chickens. If you could eat it, ride it, milk it, skin it, shear it or plow with it, odds are someone would trade you fair and square for it.

Maybe nothing told more about the man than his set of mules.
Harry had learned to tell what section of the county a man called home just by looking at the pair of mules he owned. A small, lean pair of mules meant the man lived north of town and farmed the easy-breaking, sandy loam soil up along Red River. A big, heavily muscled pair of mules was a good indication this was a cotton farmer that worked the rich, thick, black gumbo prairies in northern Fannin County that had attracted so many frontiersmen to Texas in the first place.

Local cotton farmers had a favorite saying: "If you stick to this black land when it's dry, it'll stick to you when it's wet."

This was powerful soil where even stout mules struggled as they swelled in the harness and leaned forward to drag the moldboard bottom plow. From one end of the field to the other, from dawn ‘til dusk, these powerful mules labored. Many a cotton farmer prized a brutish set of mules, a dependable water well and a good woman, quite often, at least in Harry’s mind, in that particular order, too.

But more than anything, this one Saturday was about horses; horses broke to harness, gentle, old horses well past their buggy days that kids could still ride to school, young horses just now learning the feel of a saddle on their back and a steel bit between their teeth.

This was the one day each month a man with a good eye for horseflesh could come to town leading a broke-down nag and, four or five astute trades later, leave riding a Tennessee Walker without the sheriff’s boys on his trail.

Harry spun around to shield the south, summer wind with his back as he touched a match to a cigarette. He pulled the tobacco smoke deep into his lungs and let it out slowly while pulling his cap down low over his eyes. Turning back around to face the square, Harry couldn’t help but shake his head at the thought that this whole horse-trading business was his Uncle Ed’s idea, dang his hide. Every man, woman and child around the square knew Colonel Ed Steger. Today, they all seemed to know Col. Ed’s bookworm nephew, as well.

The questions showered down like a hard summer rain as Harry entered the town square.

"Harry, are you goin' to teach at Austin College?"

"Hey, does your papa know you smoke?"

"Are you studyin' law down there in Austin?"

"What happened down in Mineola, anyway, that you can't go back?"

The first two questions Harry answered with a silent, tight-lipped smile. The second two he simply let roll off his shrugging shoulders like water off a duck’s back.

“Geez…what got into his craw?” the fellow who asked about Austin murmured when he saw Harry wasn’t about to break stride.

"Aw, reckon his milk cow went dry and his chicken quit layin’," answered the man that asked about Mineola as he wiped a dribble of dark brown tobacco spittle off his chin with the back of his hand.

The thought of any one of the high-and-mighty Steger clan fretting over a chicken made both men laugh for a second as they scanned the crowd for an easy mark.

Harry had a plan, a rather ambitious one, actually, but as the pieces slowly fell into place, young Steger felt the sting of wagging tongues. The year was 1901 and only four years after Harry Peyton Steger had blasted out of Bonham like a homemade bottle rocket and took Austin by storm, he seemed to have briefly fallen back to earth in his old hometown with all the grace and force of an anvil.

Reaching the stairway to his temporary, second-story apartment for the summer, Harry bounded up the stairs, taking two steps at a time until he could close the door on the clamor below.

Slipping a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter, Steger slipped into his inner sanctum. In the world of the horse traders bartering on the street down below, Harry was a fish out of water, a minnow darting for cover. Up here, he was a shark. Now he was in his element, as practiced fingers danced on the keys to fire a missive to a close friend from his University of Texas days.

"Oh, ye gods and diminutive specimens of the piscatorial tribe, how I want to be back in Austin, where I can lapse into innocuous desuetude," Harry wrote to his old college roommate, Roy Bedichek. "The inhabitants of this burgh seem to have realized that I am marooned here for at least a month, for they have been persecuting me systematically."

Wrapping up his letter to Bedichek, Steger pulled some advertising shtick out of his bag of tricks he had picked up working at the UT campus newspaper and then Harry closed the letter with perception far beyond his tender years when he predicted his playful way with words would forever have a way of finding him out.

Are you impotent? Debilitated? Is your back weak? Have a dry hacking cough? Is your gait wavering and undecided? Do you feel occasional twinges of pain, with a noticeable irregularity in the heartbeats? A tightness about the chest? Pain and soreness over the kidneys? Oh, Beddy, if you have these symptoms you have been to a Bonham social function and nothing will do you any good...

With regards to the kittens, and the rest of the fellows, I am,

Yours very truly,

"Non Compos Mentis."

P.S. -- You see this is a pseudonym that nobody will ever guess is mine. I am fearful lest the letters I write will get into the hands of some unscrupulous publisher who will bring them out after my death. Therefore, this anonymous character. The inimitable style, will, I am apprehensive, reveal me as their author.

Chapter 2

News of Harry's accomplishments at the University of Texas had percolated through the local populace, passed on by the Steger family from the volume of missives mailed to Bonham from Austin.
"Did you hear Harry is president of the sophomore class at the University of Texas?"

"They say Harry is editor-in-chief of the university yearbook down there in Austin!"

In the town he always called his hometown, much was expected from young Steger and rightfully so. In due time, Harry would deliver.

But the same small town that had once offered a warm, cozy existence was now an ill fit for a 20-year-old returning in search of familiar stomping grounds for a season.

Former classmates were now consumed with the daunting task of starting careers and rearing families. Gone were all the dazzling and darling aristocratic daughters of Texas that seemed to find Harry quite the conversationalist down in Austin.

"None are intoxicating, fascinating, or calculating like the lotus to make a fellow forget his way home or anywhere else," Steger complained to Roy Bedichek about the slim prospects of the heart in Bonham. "No sylphs or nymphs among them, all mere ice cream and cold drink fiends."

Evidently, as this letter to Bedichek indicates, employment prospects for a fellow of Harry's ilk were even more dismal around the county seat.

Were you ever told to Back up and Fade Away and Do a Disappearing Specialty? I though that possibly I had better run a certain flourmill this summer, but the boss viewed me with no enthusiasm, and thought some very scathing thinks, and thunk some of them audibly. Said that Latin, and Greek, were not considered essential to the administration of such an institution. Repulsed again!!! But this rebuff is discounted by my success in the metropolis of Mineoleo-margerines. I sent them in a resignation, couched in the most flattering terms--both to them and myself--and explained what a loss they would incur by losing me, and how sorry I was, but that it was inevitable, and that their loss was someone else's gain. But horrible et mirabile dictu (ask Hargrove about this) there has ensued a most embarrassing silence -- the silence well nigh deafening in its intensity, a silence like that of the tomb. I am at a loss to tell accurately whether the dread tidings of my cruel intentions not to be with them has thrown the entire populace into a weeping and wailing and picking of teeth or whether I missed my graft, and there is to be heard the joyous tinkling of the gladsome cymbals, blending with the blithesome shouts of happiness, emanating from the Adam's-apple regions of the inhabitants of the Sandy dump of Wood county. (Don't spend too much time unraveling that sentence. Just take my word for it that it is classic.)

Actually Harry had done quite well in Mineola, where, as a mere 19-year-old, Steger was asked to teach Greek and Latin in addition to assuming the responsibilities of high school principal.
After this short and evidently very uncomfortable stay in Bonham, Steger returned to the University of Texas. However, one of Harry's mentors at UT, Dr. Battle, was suggesting that Harry teach another year to gain maturity and then Steger would most likely be appointed fellow in Greek. The following year, Dr. Battle explained, Harry would be ready for Harvard.

In Austin on April 15, 1902, Harry wrote Judge R.M. Lusk in Bonham to inquire about a vacancy for a Latin and Greek instructor in the Bonham High School faculty.

I shall appreciate very much any information or suggestions you may see fit to give me. I am anxious to remain next year at home. I shall await your reply, before I send any letters or "testimonials."

Trusting that you will pardon me, Judge Lusk, for coming to you in such fashion, I am

Yours sincerely,

Harry P. Steger

Meanwhile, Mineola broke the silence over in East Texas by offering Steger $65 per month if he would return, however Harry had his mind made up to spend 1902-03 teaching in Bonham and the letter from Mineola was forwarded to Mr. Duncan and the Bonham ISD School Board. It is most likely that a complimentary letter from Dr. Battle at UT to the local school board soon followed.
Undoubtedly, there were several other letters sent on behalf of Harry, but two recommendations of Steger, in retrospect, would most assuredly overshadow all others.

One was written to the school board by John A. Lomax, a close friend to Harry at the University of Texas and a man destined for his own place in history.

Lomax is probably best known for his work as a pioneering musicologist, but he also taught at Texas A&M and earned a Master of Arts at Harvard. To preserve the purest strain of work songs, spirituals and blues, Lomax often traveled from prison to prison. It was at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in 1933 that Lomax began recording the work of a 12-string guitar man by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly.
According to the Handbook of Texas, between 1906 and 1908 Lomax found cowhands in the back room of the White Elephant Saloon in Fort Worth that helped him write down several verses of "The Old Chisholm Trail." He found a Gypsy woman living in a truck near Fort Worth that taught him the words to "Git along Little Dogies." He found an old buffalo hunter in Abilene that gave him the lyrics to "Buffalo Skinners."

But just a few years before, Lomax also found time to sit down and write a letter to the school board in Bonham in reference to the gainful employment of one Harry Peyton Steger.

"Mr. Lomax has written me a letter to Mr. Duncan," Harry relays to his father, "but he refuses to let me see it, saying that he fears for the size of my head."

Another letter of historical note came to Bonham from a gentleman that seemed to be Steger's most trusted advisor at the University of Texas.

"Professor Houston has written me a fine letter," Harry writes home to his father, Thomas P. Steger. "Suppose you ask Mr. Duncan to let you see it. Professor Houston is a man that means every word he says, and recommends very few people."

Professor Houston was David Franklin Houston, dean of the faculty at the University of Texas, and so highly regarded an educator that Texas A&M hired him away to serve as president of their institution in 1902 until UT snatched him back in 1905 as president of the University of Texas.

Houston was the man President Woodrow Wilson chose to serve as Secretary of Agriculture from 1913 until 1920 when Houston was named Secretary of the Treasury, a capacity he held until 1921 when Wilson left office. Houston then resigned and entered private business where he became president of Bell Telephone and later Houston was a vice president at AT&T.

Two weighty recommendations, indeed, and the possibility exists that, long since filed away and forgotten, somewhere in Bonham today rests the brittle, yellowing letters John A. Lomax and David Franklin Houston penned to help Harry Peyton Steger find employment as a teacher in Bonham.

Chapter 3

Mention William Sidney Porter and Harry Peyton Steger and odds are no one will recognize either name. But Porter's pen name was O. Henry and he is still considered one of the brilliant short story authors in American literature. When it came time to tell Porter's own life story, he turned to his close friend, his literary executor and Fannin County's finest emissary in East Coast publishing circles, Harry Peyton Steger.

Tom Scott, Executive Director of the Fannin County Museum of History, was the first person I can recall mentioning the name of Harry Peyton Steger. Mr. Scott mentioned Steger was an East Coast editor (yawn) with an illustrious education (bigger yawn) and from a wealthy family (fall fast asleep).

For the most part, writers and editors occupy opposite ends of the universe, one dealing with matters of the heart and the other dealing with matters at hand. I pictured an entitled young Harry with his finely-oiled coiffure living the good life after a couple of well-placed telegraphs from daddy opened all the right doors.

I have never been more wrong.

In getting to know Harry through comments of his colleagues and the many letters he wrote, I'm finding a sincere and imaginative writer quite capable of bringing laughter, irony and longing to life with a pen and paper.

And Steger loved adventure. He takes obvious pleasure in recounting 16 days spent walking from Queensboro to London, finding food and a safe place to sleep as best he could.

One modern day example keeps coming to mind: Chris McCandless, subject of the book by Jon Krakauer and recent movie directed by Sean Penn, Into the Wild.

McCandless and Steger both admired Tolstoy.

Both gave up what could have been the sheltered life of relative aristocracy for the exhilaration of, hopefully, living off their wits.

McCandless traveled much of the South and West before plunging into the Alaskan wilderness, never to come out alive.

Steger roamed around Europe with his college roommate Roy Bedichek, but Steger was alone when he began the adventure of his life in the "wilderness" that New York City must have been to a young man arriving alone with no means of support.

Although he performed admirably, in the end Harry didn't made it out, either.

Steger came alive in my mind when the first line of a note addressed "Dear Bedi" caught my eye from its resting place on a wall at the Fannin County Museum of History.

"It's mean of me not to loosen up and send you a little Heine or at least my interpretation of Tolstoi," the note begins. "Every night finds me resolute to do one or the other; but the weary world is too heavy for me and I sleep."

Like a largemouth bass that had inhaled a top-water lure, I was being reeled in. I continued reading as I walked closer to the note. In the next paragraph, Steger was asking Bedichek if he would be interested in interviewing Geronimo.

"It's not often you get hold of a thing like Geronimo," Steger reminds Bedichek. "He's news."

By now my face is only an inch from the note. I was a fish in the net when I read the third paragraph.

"Do you remember at boy at Bonham -- Erwin Smith by name -- who played cowboy all the time?" Steger asked Bedichek. "He is making an artistic record with the camera of cowboy life that I believe will be of prime value. I go up to Boston -- where he is now an art student - this week to go over his material."

I stepped back to digest what was contained in the brief note. Here was an 1897 Bonham High School graduate asking Roy Bedichek, a man that went on to become the second director of the UIL in 1922 and who would later write Adventures With a Texas Naturalist, if he would be interested in trying to get a good interview out of Geronimo.

And it seems both men were aware of the enormous potential of Fannin County photographer Erwin E. Smith, another larger-than-life talent that went on to capture some of the best-known images of cowboys that worked the ranches out West in the early 1900s.

Easing up towards Tom Scott's desk at the museum entrance, in my most casual voice, I nonchalantly mentioned, "You know, maybe now I'd like to know a little more about that Steger fellow."

"Well, what do you want to know?" Tom obliged.

What I have come to know so far is that Steger graduated from Bonham High School in 1897, entered the University of Texas as a 15-year-old with special permission from the Regents, edited the campus newspaper, The Daily Texan, as well as the campus yearbook and later went on to became a Rhodes Scholar where he was elected president of the Arnold Literary Society, the largest debate club at Oxford.

The first sentence in the foreword to The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger 1889-1912 is simply remarkable, particularly knowing that John A. Lomax and Roy Bedichek were among the esteemed authors:

Many people who knew Harry Steger intimately while he was a student in the University of Texas regard him as our most gifted graduate.

And Steger, also in the foreword, summed up his richly rewarding life like this:

"Taught Greek and Latin in the Mineola (Tex.) High School one year; taught Latin in the Bonham school one year; went to Johns Hopkins University and studied Sanscrit. Went thence to Germany. Had previously passed the qualifying examination for the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, but was not given an appointment because I had been a naughty boy. Later received the appointment, went to Balliol College, Oxford, became president of the Arnold Literary Society there; contributed to the Oxford periodicals; traveled on the European continent; worked on a German newspaper in Cologne, Germany; went to Monte Carlo for the London Express; arrested by the Italian army (most of it) for constructing a wind-whistle on a rock in the Mediterranean; returned to London, free lanced, wrote series of stories on fat men, went to Carlsbad for my health and found it; walked from Queensboro to London, taking 16 days, begging my way and sleeping out of doors or in municipal lodging-houses; wrote series of articles describing this tramp; came to Glasgow (forgot how I managed it), sailed steerage for Quebec; scrambled on to New York. Shaved at once. Am now literary adviser to Doubleday, Page & Co.; edit Short Stories magazine and am generally active in the publishing business. Go back to Texas for a visit every chance I get. Literary executor for O. Henry."

Chapter 4

The year was 1902. Harry Peyton Steger had graduated from Bonham High School, completed his preliminary studies at the University of Texas and served as principal at Mineola High School where he also taught Latin and Greek. His advisors at UT felt there was one problem; Harry was still only 20 years old.
But all had arrived at the same conclusion. Steger could teach one year at Bonham High School and return to Austin to take a fellowship in Greek at UT for another year. By then, Harry would be 22 and primed for advanced studies at Harvard.

"I have plenty of time," Harry had written from Austin to his father, Thomas P. Steger in Bonham. "In fact, all the professors I have consulted tell me that a fellow makes a mistake in completing his education too soon; that the older he gets the more he gets out of his work; that twenty-seven is young for a man to leave college for good. Tell mama that she has not written me for an age. I suppose she knows it, but I want to put in formal complaint against such treatment."

Another letter Harry wrote to his father in the months before arriving in Bonham to teach Greek for the 1902-1903 school year is chock full of local history.

"Will you please look over Nunn & Jones' stock of Stein-Bloch clothing, and tell me what you think of it, and get the boys to quote me some prices? I will be willing to leave, to a great extent, the matter of selection to their taste. I intend to buy me a new suit soon, as my winter weights are becoming quite uncomfortable, besides not giving me that business-like appearance I studiously seek to put on in my present "situation," and I am of the opinion that I can select the same suit in Bonham for a few dollars less than it would cost me here, besides patronizing friends."

Apparently, like many parents of college-age youngsters, the Stegers felt their son's appearance had slipped a bit during his college years. Judging by Harry's reply, Bonham lawyer Thomas Steger had addressed the subject at great length in a previous letter sent to Austin.

"Your graphic description of your own personal appearance revived in me a desire to be dressed tastily," Harry responded in a letter to his father in Bonham, dated May 1902. "I have spells when I won't dress up, even when I have the clothes."

But even Harry's best clothing seemed no match for the company he was keeping in Austin, as this letter to close friend Roy Bedichek in August 1902 indicates.

"Miss Frances Waggener is about the most entertaining individual I have encountered in a tea-table fight. She's bright as she can be, and a most scientific punster. Going back, if I can borrow Edgar's cuffs, Davis' buttons, Lomax's collar and tie, Hatchitt's handkerchief, Sisk's shoestrings and stand my coat buttoned up tight over a dingy shirt once spotless."

Several of young Steger's receipts, dead soldiers as he liked to call them, are interesting glimpses into historic Bonham businesses, as well as Bonham today.

One receipt from Halsell & Caldwell noted this was the place to buy furniture, carpets and coffins. It makes one ponder if there were several merchants in town that specialized in that particular triad.

Another receipt was from Smith & Williams, a store that later became Smith, Moore & Williams and remained a local favorite until it closed October 16, 2010.

The clothes picked out for Harry by the boys at Nunn & Jones, which consisted of shirts, shoes and a hat, set young Steger back a whopping $10. It is also noteworthy that Mr. Nunn was none other than Henry Nunn, a man that would soon be on his way to fame and fortune as one of the founders of Nunn Bush Shoes, a company that has been creating shoes of distinction since 1912.
Harry's fortune was much more distant. Every letter during this period made mention of the dire finances Steger and Bedichek both were dealing with as they concluded their preliminary studies at UT. Steger's professors wanted him to teach another year to gain maturity before going off to pursue a master's degree on the East Coast, but Harry knew the job in Bonham was also important if he wanted to have the necessary funds to attend Harvard in two years.

Just before young Steger headed north to Fannin County and gainful employment as a teacher at Bonham High School, Harry and friends enjoyed one last weekend trip to the coast "at Harris Duncan's expense, praise the Lord!" Steger exclaimed. It was a memorable experience in South Texas, particularly for a boy reared along Red River.

"Every night dark clouds would come up," Steger wrote Bedichek later, "and we were so camped, with a trackless prairie between us and civilization, that it would have been well nigh impossible for us to escape a storm. The rain has been terrific. The trip has been the greatest of my life. And now the pleasure still is; for we are in the midst of old Southern plantations, whose owners have never "reconstructed" their attitude toward strangers and visitors. Dunk's two uncles have entertained us royally. Such cordiality and hospitality I have read of, but never before experienced. I caught more fish and larger fish than any member of the party. One cut my hand as I struggled to land him. We never failed to have more fish than we could make away with, and this diet was varied by crabs and oysters. Please don't forward any more mail to Coulterville. Let it go to Bonham hereafter. I shall be there by Wednesday of next week. We leave this A.M. for Egypt, which I understand has, besides its flesh pots, a tonsorial parlor."

Egypt, Texas, named back in 1827, was settled by families from the Deep South as part of Stephen F. Austin's first and second colony of Mexico. In 1902, this was a bustling place where the rail lines intersected with barge traffic on the Colorado River. The town's name came from Biblical overtones, because early colonists raised abundant crops. This was the land of plenty. Steger's mention of flesh pots is most likely a reference to Exodus 16:3 where the Israelites, hungry in the wilderness, fondly recalled the big metal caldrons used by the Egyptians to boil meat. A tonsorial parlor would be a barbershop.

After a week of camping on the coast, it was just Harry's way of saying he was hankering for a steak and a haircut.

Chapter 5

A century ago, When Harry Peyton Steger returned to Bonham to teach school for one year, many of the sights awaiting the 20-year-old UT grad would have are the same scenes still in place today. North Texas towns struggle to hold onto their legacy as familiar landscapes give way to urban sprawl, but it is interesting to note how much of Bonham has remained historically intact.

Steger most likely disembarked at the railroad depot, the center of travel in 1902 and perfectly preserved today as the Fannin County Museum of History. If Steger traveled up Center Street, the buildings on the east side of the Bonham Square looked very similar to the way they appear today.

According to research by the late Tom Scott, former Director of the Fannin County Museum of History, at least the center portion of the east side of the Bonham Square was constructed from materials purchased by the Ewing Brothers when the 1860 Fannin County Courthouse was torn down to make way for the larger 1888 version.

Dominating the Square in Steger's day was the majestic courthouse that many county residents are now working diligently to restore.

The town looks surprisingly similar to the way it appeared a century ago and the same could probably be said for the job Harry was in Bonham to tackle.

"To be a successful high school teacher," Steger writes to E.R.P. Duval, "a man should be the happy combination of billy goat and mule -- so that he can butt with one end and kick with the other."

Evidently, some parents had reservations concerning the brash, young teacher's tactics.

"I have just had a thrilling experience with an antiquated carbuncle, the bleak and barren exterior of whose head was equaled only by its bald and resounding interior," Steger wrote Bedichek. "He thought I had been cruel in my physical treatment of his offspring. He said -- with tears in his eyes, as he swallowed a large lump of imaginary something -- that he wanted to see me personally. I told him I was glad of it; that if he had asked to see me any other way, I would scarcely have known how to arrange it. He then said that he thought it rather contrary to good usage to write one's monogram on a victim's cuticle in characters that could not be erased. I replied, slapping him cordially on the back with a baseball bat which I chanced to have in my hand, that characters of this sort were the only ones which either he or his offshoot could ever expect to possess."

Another glaring difference between then and now, in addition to parent - teacher etiquette, was the Christmas break students and faculty received in 1902.

"It was decided to continue our educational plant in full blast until the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a thing was stirring, not even a mouse," Steger tells Bedichek. "To paraphrase, my holidays will not begin until the 25th."

The reason Harry was back in town had something to do with how he had left, originally. Steger had been allowed to enter the University of Texas as a 15-year-old. After completing his preliminary studies and teaching in Mineola for a year, his professors in Austin had plans for Harry to get his master's degree from Harvard. But first, they suggested, Harry should teach another year.

Steger's first letter from Bonham to Bedichek was dated November 23, 1902 and it seems the BHS Greek teacher was also on the editorial staff at the "great Daily Bazoo" where evidently material was scarce; Harry asks his friend to forward everything Steger had written that Bedichek could lay hands on.
Mayor Bradley, the county judge in 1902, had Harry taking care of his horse.

"I drive him every day or so," Steger notes, "feed him likewise; curry him, never."

Evidently, Harry's thoughts never stray far from a young lady named Eula, although it sounds as though she is far from Bonham.

"I have existed Eulaless for many a week now," Harry writes Bedichek, "and, as yet, have not contemplated self-destruction - i.e., not with that as a provocation."

Harry asks Bedichek to hurry down to Corner & Fontaine's in Austin to pick up a dozen or so little leather footballs, provided the items can be procured for 10-15 cents apiece.

"Sister is to fete the fete-ball team," Steger explains. "I suppose Fontaine will send then C.O.D., for of course you won't have $1.50. Cuss and fume, but nathless act. Why don't you write a letter couched in English which I can show somebody?"

Several of Steger's notes offer glimpses into early 20th century Bonham.

"One of Bonham's society women has recently met with a great loss," Steger writes Bedichek. "She was so injudicious as to put fifty dollars in greenbacks into her drop-stitch stocking for safe-keeping; and the entire amount worked out through the meshes."

"About a year ago Miss_____, a prominent belle of Bonham, was so unfortunate as to stick a needle into her side," Steger says in the next paragraph. "Physicians were unable to remove it. A few days since, a needle worked out into the arm of Mr. Charles Lansey. Mr. Lansey has been assiduous in his attention to Miss_______."

When the school year was over, Steger penned his apparent replacement, W.H. Thomas, a resident of Winchester, Texas.

"My dear Fritz, Superintendent Evans of Bonham has just written me that you had been elected at home with a salary of $75 per month. I am sincerely glad to hear of it, for many reasons; one of them being that I worked hard with my Latin classes there last year, and I would take it much to heart for an ignoramus to fall heir to them. Another is that I think you will have less work and more interesting work at home than you had at Cuero. Don't, O don't refuse to accept the place. I feel sure that you will have a pleasant year."

Chapter 6

Harry Peyton Steger, after receiving endorsements directed to the Bonham school board from David Franklin Houston and John Lomax on his behalf, had secured employment as a Latin and Greek teacher and was wrapping up the 1902-03 school year. As much as Steger missed the camaraderie of his close-knit circle of intellectually gifted friends at UT, the stay at Bonham had been fiscally rewarding. After all, he was hauling in almost $70 a month.
In a letter from Bonham in late April of 1903 and addressed to Harvard University students E.R.P. Duval and E.T. Miller, Steger announces a major accomplishment. Apparently Harry's success in literature and languages didn't translate to the realm of personal finances.

"Strange and impossible as it may seem to you -- who have had so much opportunity to know of my abnormal ability along this line -- I am at last the proud and prudent possessor of a bank account," Steger writes to his old friends he had first met at UT. "With this I hope to regain the original hue of my eyes, which have faded way to a bloated pink. Should I be successful in obtaining the Greek and Latin fellowship at the University of Texas for the ensuing year, I shall continue my work without hesitation. If this does not fall to my lot, I will be bound to drudgery and juvenile criminality for another session."

Even 105 years ago, football was an integral part of high school.

In a letter to Roy Bedichek, Steger notes, "Big McDaniel, erstwhile football hero, is now president of the Young Men's Commercial Club and Captain of the Fannin Guards, a military company organized for protection against the enemy. I understand from him that all their new guns have breeches which can be removed, and hastily put on when visitors appear. (A grim sort of humor pervades the above remarks.)"

Harry's tone changes dramatically the following fall semester when he returns to UT to try and fill Bedichek's role as editor of the college annual, Cactus. In late October, Harry finally gets a chance to converse with "Bedi," Steger's first roommate at the University of Texas. Maybe for the first time in his life, Harry was in over his head and his questions covered the gamut of content, cover to cover.

Would a leather back on the Cactus just be a rip-off of the annual Bedi turned out the year before?

How much leverage should the editorial board have in determining what went in and what was rejected?

And, maybe most importantly, would his dear friends bail him out of this predicament?

"Of course you know that I am to edit this year's Cactus, thanks to Joe B. (Hatchitt), Adrian (Pool), and their menial minions," Steger informs Bedi. "Of course you know too, that you are really going to do the work. I am determined to complete my faculty farce this year; and you must help me."

Later Steger adds, "I wish I didn't have to succeed you. It looks to me as if you did it all."

Every new editor has uttered that last sentence after replacing an industrious predecessor. Yet Steger knew his strengths would be a welcome compliment to the staff.

"I realize my inferiority in matters literary to Mr. Clyde Hill, Miss Bess Brown (the future Mrs. John A. Lomax), et al. -- this in all sincerity -- but I do think I can detect froth and bubble and foam sooner than they," Steger tells Bedi. "Do you see how that lagerish simile was fathered? Pardon me. It is a metaphor. When you say that a man is like a lion, that is a simile; but, when, on the other hand, you say that he is a lion in a fight, that is a metaphor."

But some of the students around the campus were teasing the anxious new editor.

"The boys have great fun with me," Steger writes Bedi. "When I run, they say 'Bedi.' When I go over to the University, they say 'Bedi.' When I go off by myself for a walk, they shout 'Bedi.' Imagine how my dander is kept erect by such a treatment. In reality, however, I have just about squelched it by a system of cold indifference."

Harry ends this letter in the typical, playful Steger style.

"This seems an excellent place to stop," Steger writes in closing. "The page is about filled up. There seems just enough room to put in an affectionate farewell. But, as usual, I am thoughtless in such matters. The end approaches and still I have not told you good-bye. Will I, I wonder, or will I procrastinate until space forbids? I hardly know. I hope not. Good-bye."

Thanksgiving of 1903 saw John Lomax and Curly Duncan visiting Harry in Austin and in early December, Steger wrote to ask Bedi to come to Bonham for Christmas.

"Are you coming home for Christmas," Harry inquires. "I mean to Bonham town. You can, if you will; and then we can discuss a thousand and one things that I want to talk to you about. Furthermore, we could go over to Whitewright, and, by calling on Miss Lillian Greer, have a meeting of the firm."

No other letter follows up on the holiday plans; however, Miss Lillian Greer would later become Mrs. Roy Bedichek.

In May of 1904, Harry returns to Bonham to find his father, Thomas, in bad health.

"Of course, under these circumstances, I could hardly gain my own consent to leave him," Harry writes to Edgar Witt. "As it is, we ride every evening. The Steger Horse and Mule Syndicate has given me for my own steed a fine four-year old, nine-hundred-dollar black stallion that paces like the wind. Dad has a somewhat more subdued plug of less pretentious gaits. We spend two or three hours a day in the saddle. The rest of my time is taken up with stenographic work of the several offices."

But something, or rather someone else was encroaching on Harry's time and thoughts as well: Miss Charlotte Lenora Thurmond, better known as Charlie Thurmond, the daughter of P.C. Thurmond, the law partner of Thomas Steger. In 1904, Miss Charlie would have been 19 and Harry was 24 years old.

"I have found it impossible to talk to Charlie but once since I reached home, last Monday," Harry confided to a friend. "I have been racking my poor brain for excuses and pretexts and occasions whereby I might see her; but Fate is unkind. Tomorrow night, however, we two will go to see a cantankerous cantata presented by home talent. How thrilling and how romantic. I only wish that I had stayed in Austin. There, I knew it was impossible to see her, as long as she was in Bonham; but here I know that she is within eight blocks of me."

Chapter 7

The winter of 1904 would have found Harry Peyton Steger in Baltimore to continue his pursuit of "dead and dying languages" at John Hopkins. Harry is studying Greek, Latin and Sanskrit in a place that seems dark, cold and lonely, at least in comparison to Austin, Texas.

Surprisingly enough, Steger is also working as a night watchman at a laundry to make ends meet.

"For Heaven's sake, don't tell it!" Harry writes John Lomax of his employment. "It's not even an aristocratic laundry. Come to Baltimore to see me. I'll show you through the laundry. Hours from 2 to 7 a.m. Night before last I wrote a poem, Owed to the Laundryman -- A Shirt Tale."

Steger's confederate, Roy Bedichek, has evidently written to suggest the two close friends should take some time to explore the Bohemian scene in the Big Apple, but Harry is yearning for Europe.

"Your suggestion about New York is disgusting," Steger replies to Bedichek. "I want to get out of this country. Damn New York. I would say that the same amount of money necessary for our Bohemian peregrinations there would take us to Germany or to Italy, were I not ashamed to mention to you a thing that has always, consistently and constantly, enjoyed our righteous hatred. Money also be damned!"

It seems appropriate at this juncture to examine how much of Steger and his close circle of friends have been revealed through his letters so far. In 1904, much of Harry's world still revolves around the Office of the Registrar at the University of Texas and the fascinating participants, directly or indirectly, in Steger's life at this point seem to be John Avery Lomax, Roy Bedichek and Lillian Greer. All had a connection to the registrar's office.

Bonham native Charlie Thurmond deserves mention as well, although clues that divulge much about Miss Charlie are difficult to ascertain.

The primary triumvirate appears to be Lomax, Bedichek and Bedichek's future wife, Greer.

John Avery Lomax was the registrar at UT, where Lomax employed Roy Bedichek and Harry Peyton Steger. But Lomax may have met Miss Lillian Greer before he laid eyes on Roy and Harry.

Miss Lillian had stepped into the office around 1899 when the University of Texas hosted Baylor for an interschool debate, possibly a forerunner of today's UIL competitions. Lillian mentioned that an excited trainload of participants from Waco rode down to Austin for the competition and "the University" graciously entertained the Baylor students and faculty at the dam.

At some point during the day, Lillian and a friend visited the UT registrar's office and Lomax asked if he could serve as their host. The girls vividly remembered a riverboat ride. In 1902, Lillian was once again in the UT registrar's office, only this time to enroll for her senior year.

According to Baylor alumnus and Bonham historian Tom Scott, this was common practice during the early 20th century. Curriculum wasn't standardized to the degree it is today. In Lillian's day, many students would enter college and complete basic studies before transferring to a school that offered a degree in their chosen profession. UT, in particular, picked up many senior transfers.

On this particular day, Roy Bedichek was at the registrar's window to assist Lillian and when she departed, Bedichek turned and told Lomax, "That's the girl I'm going to marry."

"Well, I know her well," Lomax replied. "I spent an entire day with her once."

Lillian's letters offer a perspective into the life of Bedichek that would have been completely overlooked by this writer were it not for one short note Steger wrote from Bonham in December 1903 to Bedichek.

"Are you coming home for Christmas," Harry inquires. "I mean to Bonham town. You can, if you will; and then we can discuss a thousand and one things that I want to talk to you about. Furthermore, we could go over to Whitewright, and, by calling on Miss Lillian Greer, have a meeting of the firm."

The implication is that Lillian was in Whitewright during Christmas break 109 years ago. It is only fair to say Lillian knew how to pick 'em. She said there were only two beaus in her life; one was Bedichek, a man that spent 26 years shaping UIL and the other was John Lang Sinclair, the man who wrote "The Eyes of Texas."
Possibly the most enlightening detail about the men in this story is the spirit of adventure that seemed to fill the soul of many early 20th century Texans.

Lomax traveled to prisons throughout the South to document music that seemed closest to the original field shouts of America's first blues men.

Bedichek rolled out of his hometown of Eddy, Texas on a bicycle bound for El Paso, 800 miles to the southwest. Mud hampered travel at first and deep sand made bicycling difficult in far West Texas. In long stretches, Bedichek had no road at all, so he pushed the bicycle along train tracks. After reaching El Paso, Bedichek sold the bicycle and boarded the train for a ride to Deming in the New Mexico desert. It was a place that had its share of saloons and brothels because this was 1908 and it would be four more years until New Mexico became a state. But Bedichek loved the free spirits that roamed this last frontier and, in 1910, he sent for Lillian Greer to be his wife.

Harry Peyton Steger would eventually study at Oxford, which gave Harry an opportunity to travel through much of Europe. Steger spent time working at a German newspaper in Cologne, Germany and even went on assignment to Monte Carlo for the London Express. But he also spent 16 days walking from Queensboro to London, begging along the way and sleeping outdoors most nights.

The truest glimpse of this fearless adventurer may have been when Harry wrote to Bedichek in 1906 to see if his old college roommate would join him on a remote British island in the South Atlantic. Actually, Tristan da Cunha, the most remote archipelago in the world, consisted of three islands approximately 1500 miles west of the tip of South Africa.

"My first plan is to revolt from the Crown," Harry writes Bedichek. "The Crown wouldn't give a copper damn."

And what did the man that shaped UIL for 26 years think of this daring undertaking?

Lillian Greer Bedichek recalls a tent beside their home near Deming that contained, among other things, blue British Naval manuals that detailed the Tristan da Cunha archipelago.

"But what would you do there?" Lillian asked.

"I would write," Bedichek explained. "What else could you do?"

Chapter 8

People and places changed quickly in Harry Peyton Steger's life, as he raced the sand pouring out of his hourglass.

In 1902-03, he taught Greek and Latin at Bonham High School; in 1903-04, Steger was Fellow in Greek and Latin at the University of Texas. In the fall of 1904, Harry had moved on to do graduate work in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and February 1905 found Steger substitute teaching Greek and Latin at Baltimore City College. His passion for "dead and dying languages" was now putting five dollars per diem in his pocket.

Steger's professors at the University of Texas had been pointing their prodigy towards the hallowed halls of Harvard. The first mention of John's Hopkins came in a letter to Roy Bedichek dated October 1903. Bedichek, Steger's close friend and first roommate in Austin, had graduated from UT and was now teaching high school in Houston. In the letter, Harry was lamenting the fact even when he had good news, there was no longer anyone around he cared to share it with.

"If you were here," Steger notes, "I could say, 'Bedi, Dr, Fay told me yesterday that he wanted me to go to Johns Hopkins, so that I could remind his former associates of what he was capable'; or 'Bedi, Dr. Penick says that my translations of Aristophanes are as rich as old Dr. Gildersleeve's' -- You know what I mean."

Harry "stood the exams" to qualify for the Cecil Rhodes Scholarship in the spring of 1904.

"I probably busted," Steger tells Bedi. "I was too bull-headed and too harassed to study in preparation; and I'll probably remain indefinitely in this country, because I like to play the damn fool role in mine own land."

After the spring semester at UT in 1904, Harry came home to Bonham to find his father, attorney Thomas P. Steger in poor health. Then more bad news; Harry failed to secure the first Texas Rhodes Scholarship.

John Lomax had written from Cambridge, Massachusetts to see how Harry was taking the setback.

The reply to Lomax told of Steger's pragmatic approach to the development.

"The matter on which you write hit me pretty hard at first, but I got over it finally with little anguish and no damage to my morals. On Wednesday, Commencement Day, I was castigated sorely by the tongue of . . . I realized that something in the way of a miracle might keep my stock from suffering a slump, but that nothing short thereof could. My first move was to come home to Ma and Pa and attempt to study law. I didn't move very far this time.

I go to Hopkins next session, unless the Guatemalan ant is defeated in his encounter with the cotton-iverous weevil. Harvard is attractive, but the die is cast and I'm going to stick to its decision, even though ten thousand Solons tell me it is unwise. I had rather be my own wrong than somebody else's right! I said that, not because I felt it at all, but because it seemed so epigrammatic. Ain't it a daisy? I wish I believed it, so that I could use it again.

England appealed to me for the classics because somehow I felt that there a fellow could make his studies in Greek and Latin smell more of the violet, while over here it's the odor of the lamp that sticks to you. However, that's ancient history, and I don't give a rip.

So, in the summer of 1904, Steger played tennis in Bonham every day and imagined how he could spend evenings with Charlie Thurmond, the lovely, petite daughter of P.C. Thurmond, Thomas P. Steger's law partner. Miss Charlie started her higher education at UT and finished up at Vassar. Harry entered the University of Texas as a fresh-faced 15-year-old, "donning long trousers for the occasion," and went on to study at Johns Hopkins and Oxford.

They seemed destined to be together.

It is as easy to imagine the stimulating conversations these two budding intellectuals must have had on the front porch of the Thurmond home on West 5th Street in Bonham, as it is difficult to understand why a more permanent bond failed to develop.

Perhaps the answer would be revealed in Charlie's letters, if they only existed. Harry's letters during this time frame are something of a paradox.

"I only wish that I had stayed in Austin," Steger writes to Edgar Witt, a close confidante that would later become Lieutenant Governor of Texas. "There I knew it was impossible to see her, as long as she was in Bonham; but here I know that she is eight blocks from me."

A week later, on June 29, 1904, in another letter to Witt, Steger adds, "I have absolutely no troubles in the world, save my father's health and the natural embargo that the inquisitive population of a small but thoroughly alive and interested hamlet puts on my natural inclinations. To cease riddling, I mean that I find it difficult to see as much of Charlie as I would wish."

The next mention of Miss Charlie comes August 14, 1904 when Harry tells Witt that it will be easy to leave home now because "Charlie leaves for St. Louis the last of this week."

The late Tom Scott, a preeminent local historical and a valuable reference source throughout this project, vividly remembered Charlie Thurmond as a charming, well-read, elegant lady who enjoyed a leadership role in various ladies clubs in Bonham. Miss Charlie never married, a fairly common occurrence among highly educated, somewhat aristocratic late 19th century women, Mr. Scott adds. He even remembers a stately, black automobile that Charlie drove around town.

Thanks to librarian Barbara McCutcheon and the amazing staff at Bonham Public Library, a photo of Miss Charlie surfaced.

At age 35, Charlie was a beautiful lady, dark-haired with a serene smile. The photo was on a passport issued in May of 1920.

Charlie was sailing out of Montreal to spend the summer in Italy, France and Belgium.

Did she ever sail back into Harry's life?

It seems unlikely.

A gorgeous actress named Dolly McCormack eventually became Mrs. Harry Steger.

And when Charlie posed for the passport photo, Harry had already been dead seven years.

What we do know from looking at old Bonham Daily Favorite articles is that Miss Charlie was fatally injured December 28, 1955 when her car careened across Catron Park and slammed into the sidewalk.

Frank Doss was the first person to arrive at the scene of the accident and Mr. Doss assisted in placing Charlie in the Wise ambulance which transported her to M&S Hospital where she died the following day.

And we know that from Charlie's final resting place in the Thurmond family plot at Willow Wild Cemetery, a glance 50 yards to the south will reveal a headstone that reads Harry Peyton Steger.

The Thurmond family plot is next to another one-time law partner of P.C. Thurmond, Sam Rayburn.

Chapter 9

"Do you remember what it was that landed me in the penitentiary?" a rather unhappy Harry Peyton Steger wrote to Austin, Texas buddy Ed Miller. "Inter nos (or to prove bilingual ability) entre nous, never come to the Hopkins unless Huntsville is full."

The "penitentiary" Steger refers to is Johns Hopkins University, a prestigious graduate school no doubt, but a place, at least in our friend Harry's estimation, without the warmth of Austin.

The letter was written in January 1905 from The Hopkins Canning Factory, Tomato Ward, Vegetable No. 386.

"My impressions of Baltimore," Harry tells Roy Bedichek, "are confined to the facts that it stinks miserably and that there are three cops in town. I am not happy here. Of course, even if I had sufficient reason to be, I couldn't. I'm not built that way."

The last part of that paragraph probably tells much more about Harry, and writers in general, than the first part tells about Baltimore.

"There is a rarified atmosphere here," Steger writes to John Lomax. "There are magnificent libraries, able men, masterpieces of art, all that is quiet and elegant, but there is neither the bone-crackling hand-shake nor the cordial welcome to the stranger to which you and I in the South are trained. If somebody would just slap me on the back, I would not feel so blooming homesick."

Just financing the year at John's Hopkins caused great consternation, as Harry had noted in a previous letter to Lomax.

"Nothing remains save to beg from wealthy relatives, a course which would subject me to greatest humiliation and my family to a position of serfdom," Harry explained with his typical dramatic flair.

Evidently the family loan weighed heavy on Harry during the time he was in Baltimore.

"Recently, when I hied me away to these classic halls to mouse around in the linguistic herbarium, I brought me a regular prince of ghosts, who is now squatted grimly on my future," Harry explains to Edgar Witt. "He is a large mortgage, nice and comfortably housed. He stays with me, and does not allow me to forget he is here. I think he loves me. He is undoubtedly helping me toward my doctorate. He belongs to a usurer in dear old, nasty old Bonham."

Steger's writing is already rife with Latin and Greek influences, and would become even more so. But, even with a myriad of influences swimming in the young scholar's head, some of Harry's richest allegory sprang from his Fannin County roots. Baltimore was cold and lonely. Steger said he felt like a rooster that had wandered too far from his barnyard.

"If you want to do much in the crowing line," he advises Lomax, "stay at home. I wonder whether I couldn't get back in time now to make a crop!"

(The reference to "make a crop" is vivid, but strictly symbolic. After tossing out that same phrase in a letter to Bonham lawyer P.C. Thurmond, Steger admits he never spent a day of his life working in the field.)

Here is another colloquial gem that anyone from the Old South can appreciate, but one that would probably be lost in translation in the stuffy atmosphere that was suffocating Steger as he struggled for his Ph.D. at one of the finest graduate schools in the nation.

"All these graduate students here in the classics are soul-killing sticks, who know their Latin and Greek with a disgusting thoroughness when it comes to paradigms and irregular verbs," Steger tells Bedichek, "but, invariably, they have no more appreciation of the Greek or Roman heart than a tumble-bug has for pate de foie gras."

Bedichek would have loved that observation. Lomax would have laughed. But Bedi and John weren't there anymore. The joke would even have put a grin on O. Henry's reticent mug, but that friendship was still years away.

For now it was just the Hopkins and Harry.

But there was one saving grace. Professor Gildersleeve.

"Had it not been for him (Gildersleeve), Harvard would have undoubtedly been the theatre of my struggles," Steger remarked to Miller.

"Gildersleeve, in spite of his 74 years, is still ripe and not yet rotten," Harry tells Lomax. "He is, of course, the eminent Hellenist of America, possibly of the world; and his scholarship, besides having kidney and liver and all of the grosser anatomy, possesses heart and life."

"Gildersleeve is the sole case of bona fide genius I have met," Harry admits to Bedichek. "He is in the prime of mental acumen; and his repartee is epigrammatic and satisfyingly smutty. He is as much of a Greek as Aristophanes ever was and a damned sight more of one than Plato or Aristotle or the Hellenic dust-sifters."

And Dr. Bloomfield was "a Sanskrit shark," as Harry put it.

"Bloomfield," Steger continues to Lomax, "who, since the death of Whitney, has become recognized as the chief Indic and philological authority in America, and, with some pretzel-smacking savant of Tuebingen, of the educated world, is, strange to say, a man of delightful personality. His English is the purest and the most beautiful that I have ever heard or read."

Harry says that discussions with his Harvard connection, E.R.P. Duvall, points to the fact that Hopkins does require more work for its PhD than any other institution; perhaps no more on the cerebral level, but certainly more work.

However, Steger asks Ed Crane which fellows back in Austin "ought to be shot via the Cactus."

"I'll try to penetrate some of them," Steger comments to Crane, "just for the recreation when I grow tired of playing hide and seek with a Greek preposition or of trying to find out whether Caesar threw double six or crapped in that memorable crap game prior to his passage of the Rubicon."

At times, Steger almost hints at the future that waits beyond these trying times in a storied institution Harry calls "the greatest graduate school in the world."

For instance, Baltimore has a steady flow of German steamers.

"I have to keep away from the wharves," Steger says to Bedichek, "for it is all I can do to keep off them."

Europe is calling.

Steger even seems to anticipate The Short Story of Harry Peyton Steger when he asks Bedichek if biographers would prize his letters more if they were hand-written.

"Does my use of a typewriter militate against my chances for fame?" Steger wonders. "Would my letters to you be prized the same by biographers posthumous when transmitted via the crescendo keyboard as they would be when phrased in actual work of hand?"

And Harry finally manages to sell a piece of work to a publisher.

"I got two dollars and seventy-five cents for it," Steger tells Edgar Witt. "Ain't literature profitable?"

Chapter 10

Talk about a change of scenery.

The last time we heard from Harry Peyton Steger, he was bunkered down in burned out Baltimore.

On February 7, 1904, mere months before Steger arrived at Johns Hopkins University, a fire in Baltimore had destroyed 1,500 buildings in a 30-hour inferno.

But just listen to our friend from Fannin County now.

"The fine sea air has kept me ravenous," Steger writes his parents. "There have been beautiful sunsets. We have passed scores of ocean liners; we have been out of the sight of land twelve days; we have seen whales; we have seen enormous icebergs (two of them weighing over two million tons); porpoises; sailboats; lighthouses. The coast of France, the cliffs of Dover, the Isle of Wright, the English war fleet; we have had dances on board; we have seen the phosphorescent sea. It has been my most delightful week."

Harry is on his way to spend the summer in Germany and then it's on to Oxford.

Steger has finally been appointed a Rhodes Scholar.

And he had known all along this would happen.

Harry considered Germany "the land of scholars" and during his year at Johns Hopkins University, Steger was even hesitant to spend time at the wharfs for fear he might secure steerage on a German steamer. He had been chasing the Rhodes Scholarship for two years, ever since being passed over at the University of Texas due a "$4,500 joke" that Steger referred to later as his "naughty" incident. But all this was in the cards and, in every letter, it seemed Harry had been given a peek at the hand that would be dealt him. Soon Steger would be tramping about Europe.

Unfortunately, Steger wasn't able to share this experience with the person he had been talking about it for years - Roy Bedichek, Steger's first roommate at UT.

Or, would he?

"I'm a fortune teller," Harry Peyton Steger once joked to a friend.

Maybe he was.

After all, Harry complained that his health had been an issue since his late teens. The headaches and insomnia could largely be ignored, but when a 20-year-old writer's eyes suddenly began causing trouble, it was time to see a professional.

"My eyes gave out completely," tells Bedichek in 1903. "The oculist, or optician, or ophthalmologist, or eye-doctor, told me in accents humid with tears that I would have to quit my work. Of course that is all rot; but I will have to calm down a little bit."

Was Steger's health slipping away? His close friends certainly were.

"I have held for years that a friend's marriage takes him away from the haunts of his single friends and that they are gradually separated forever," Harry had once confided to Peewee Witt, yet no one could be more sincerely thrilled when a dear friend found a soul mate.

And as Steger set his sails for Europe, one by one friends were disappearing from the inner circle.

First it was John Lomax and Bess Brown. Then Peewee Witt, another impressive chum that turned out to be Texas Lieutenant Governor Edgar Witt, married Gwynne, or as Harry called her, Gwynnynynynyneeyenene.

Then Dexter Hamilton, Damnibidexterous Deck, of Corsicana, Texas recoiled from Steger after falling prey to the sting of Cupid's arrow.

"My dear old Deck, is it really so?" Steger inquires. "I am afraid it is not, so I won't allow myself too much latitude. However, if you have gone and inflicted yourself on another, for weal of woe, veal or ham, for batter or for wurst, let me be the first to bless you. Man is a useless animal by himself; and, if there was ever a mixture of heaven and hell, dark and bright, wit and pathos, buttermilk and champagne, I guess you are it. If you haven't married, be sure to do it by tomorrow night. It's all that will save you."

For Harry, however, the vivid love interests seemed to fade out of sight. Instead, he received an interesting letter from a cousin, Edith Lee Collier that Steger had played with 20 years before as a child in Moscow, Tennessee. Gifted intellects were obviously a family trait because Harry was officially a Rhodes Scholar and Edith was a Vassar girl.

"Your letter brought back to me many a memory of mud-pies, 'pokeberry ink' and 'playing house,'" Harry wrote back. "I am a dull old grind of a student in dead - and dying - languages. I leave here within a week now, for a summer's studies in Germany, in or around Bonn, Heidelberg and Zena -- with tramps through the country from time to time. What are you? In view of the old, old times, can't you tell me something of how the years have one for you since we were 'infants' together? Then, if you will listen, I will tell you the story of me sad little life."

Chapter 11

Harry Peyton Steger had arranged to spend the summer of 1905 with a family in Bonn, Germany. No one in the family spoke English and Steger expected to be fluent in German in a matter of weeks. His training actually began en route, because no one on the German vessel knew more than a few words of English.

"I have, consequently, been enabled, perforce, to learn more German than otherwise," Harry wrote to his parents in Bonham. "In fact, I can ask for anything I want now. By the end of summer I shall be able, beyond a doubt, to speak German with ease."

Bonn is an historic city, dating back to the first century, BC, with the remnants of a sprawling Roman fortress, the largest known Roman fort from ancient times, covering 250,000 square meters. The fort appears to have had military significance to the Western Roman Empire until the mid-5th century AD.

In 1794, Bonn was made part of the First French Empire when the city was seized by French troops, but, 20 years later, as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, Bonn became part of the Kingdom of Prussia. Then in 1871, less than 35 years before Harry Peyton Steger arrived, Bonn was made part of the German Empire during the unification of Germany.

Steger was instantly mesmerized.

"The beautiful and famous old city of Koln (Cologne) is only a few miles away," Harry writes back to his folks in Fannin County. "Bonn itself is a beautiful old town of, say, 70,000 people, delightfully situated on the River Rhein. Here is the swellest of the great German universities."

Steger was struck by the immense and dramatic architecture. Two things quickly caught his eye. First, Germans had an elevated appreciation of art and sculpture was everywhere. Beautiful sculpture becomes so common that you expect to see it on their fences, Harry tells his parents, and shrubbery adorns the landscape as well as almost every man's upper lip.

"We have, by actual count, seen only five men without mustaches," Steger writes. Some of them are poor little emaciated fuzzy affairs that seem reluctant and coy; but the shrubbery is on every lip."

And what they can't grow on their lip, they were growing in the countless manicured gardens that dotted the countryside.
Steger said you could put a German in outer space with a bathtub full of dirt and he would grow enough cabbage and grapes to satisfy the stomach, not to mention a section for geraniums to sooth the soul. Then he would antique the bathtub, adorn it with sculpture, put on a little classical music and celebrate the occasion with a beer.

Although slightly smaller than Texas, Germany had 15 times as many people. Harry found the landscape divided as precisely as a checkerboard and he found a thrifty people with their own advanced version of what we today like to call "Fannin County friendly."

"Polite!" Steger exclaimed. "The Germans are so polite that at times it wears on a nephew of Uncle Sam. If you ask a German anything on the street, he is sure to stop, bow, remove his hat, give you, in toto, if he can, all the information for which you have asked, to bid you good day and leave you, an astounded Yankee, with your mouth open. There is no rush, no hurry, no worry. An evening's stroll through any German town will show cozert garden after cozert garden crowded with men, women and children. What are they doing? They are drinking beer and enjoying classical music! There is less disturbance, less noise, however, than in an average hotel lobby in America. Many are the tales we all have heard about Germans and their beer. Their tales are not exaggerated. The beer, of course, is not the injurious stuff that has made Milwaukee famous; for German Lager contains but little alcohol."

Harry had always enjoyed a good smoke and a glass of wine, when his limited finances would allow. One of the many rewards of the elusive Rhodes Scholarship was that Steger was now earning a $1,500 stipend annually, enough to finance his European travels, particularly when you consider the price tags catching Steger's eye in 1905. Fine Rhein wine was sold on street corners for 12 cents a bottle, a good cigar would set you back 3 cents - the same amount as a pound of luscious grapes - and the finest tailor-made suits went for $10.

Suffice to say, Harry was happy.

"I was never more uniformly cheerful in my life," Steger wrote to his sister. "I am disgustingly, offensively, monotonously happy."

One sight proved to be rather curious to the Fannin County native; Germans utilized dogs as draft animals to pull peddler's wagons containing milk and fruit.

"Often the vehicles are large and cumbrous and heavy," Harry relays to the folks back home, "but the dogs all seem fine and strong and willing."

After initially immersing himself in the population, Steger turned his attention to some world famous attractions in the area, beginning with the visually stunning Cathedral of Cologne.

This colossal monument to Christianity and Gothic architecture was started in 1268 and only finished, after a variety of interruptions, in 1882. The Cathedral of Cologne was the tallest structure in the world until the completion of the Washington Monument in 1884. And, as if the 1268 starting date wasn't mind boggling enough, this site had previously been the location for a Roman temple built by Mercurius Augustus.

"Even its exterior stones all show careful and minute hand-carving," Harry writes to his parents. "When you enter the gigantic structure and walk through the long, broad corridors, a wave of cold, musty air strikes you. It strikes you as a draught from the grave. Here and there, every 50 feet or so, shining dimly in the ghostly dark, are candled shrines. The odds are that every shrine will show you several penitents seeking forgiveness at the feet of Mary's statue; and, if you watch these folks as they leave the Cathedral, you will see them all dip their fingers in one of the many bowls of holy water that deck the exit - water that may be full of germs, tadpoles and grosser impurities, but water that has been blessed by a priest and so is holy. Last week we climbed the Kreuzberg, a small mountain here, and wandered through a graveyard, where Schumman, the great composer is buried, where Beethoven, Schiller's wife and child all sleep."

Seventy percent of the population was Catholic and another fundamental difference between America and Germany was that the German government owned railroads, coalmines, the telegraph and many other industries. Steger questioned the populace and found that most felt the inherent problems associated with government ownership paled in comparison to the dangers of large greedy corporations and trusts.

Germans also exhibited a great deal of admiration for their government, although the governor didn't enjoy that level of praise. Many said the Kaiser talked too much.

"Is the Kaiser better than you?" Harry asked a policeman -- adding, in parenthesis -- (Oh, I've acquired brass!).

"Yes," came back my answer from out of the eaves of a ten-pound helmet, Steger recalled. "He is, as Kaiser, for God has willed to him the emperorship of Germany. Personally, he and I are both men."

But, along with the verdant beauty and soul-stirring architecture came ominous tones. Trouble was brewing.

Harry watches maneuvers featuring 4,000 German cavalrymen and armored horsemen.

The German Empire had only been unified for 35 years, but a wave of nationalism was sweeping over the countryside.

"America is the dump-pile for Germany," Harry was told flatly, "because no good German every leaves Germany."

"France is not going to pull England's chestnuts out of the fire," was another common declaration during the summer of 1905.

Another sentiment expressed on several occasions stuck with Steger: "If war with England should come,” the German men would remark, “I would be in soldier's uniform in 24 hours."

Chapter 12

Sometimes it only seems the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but Harry Peyton Steger is on the other side of the big pond now and tramping across Europe is everything the Fannin County native had dreamed of...and more.

"You should see me now," Steger writes from Bonn, Germany to his parents in Bonham. "I have a traveler's pack. It slings across my shoulders and is wonderfully easy to carry. It contains: a small German dictionary; a toothbrush, a tube of powder, a bottle of listerine, four collars, six handkerchiefs, two shirts, suits of underclothes, three pairs of socks, my overcoat, a pipe, some tobacco--and, really it is very easy to carry. In the morning--September 4, 1905--Herr Kube (the German with whom I live) and I start for a tramp along the Mosel. Get an atlas and see how the Mosel River winds about. Its water length is four times--almost--as great as the direct distance from mouth to source. We go from here [Bonn] to Coblenz by rail--fifty miles. My ticket there costs me 20 cents and brings me back, too, a round-trip!"

For the first time in years, Harry doesn't feel restricted by limited finances. Around Bonham, the Steger family owned and operated several prominent enterprises, with the Steger Mill as the family flagship. Harry's father, Thomas P. Steger, seemed to be a highly regarded lawyer. As a matter of fact, one of the junior partners at Thurman & Steger Law Firm was a young lawyer named Sam Rayburn. But Harry was far from an entitled, trust-fund child that background might conjure up.

In Austin, he worked at the UT registrar's office and tutored first-year students to get by while some of the wealthier students made fun of his clothes. In Baltimore, during his year at Johns Hopkins, Steger worked first as a laundry mat night watchman and later he filled in at Baltimore City College when their Latin and Greek instructor became ill.

Now Harry was hauling in $1,500 a year as a Rhodes Scholar and, in the German economy, Steger calculated that amount would equal $5,000 per year. It was a land of fine two-cent cigars and a bottle of pure Rhein wine was 12 cents, however Steger's frugal upbringing made him relinquish funds sparingly. For example, train fare was so inexpensive because Harry often traveled fourth class where he would "stand up in the car with the rest of the human drove."

"None save a noble-bleeded personage, or perhaps a vulgarly rich person intent on display, goes first class," Steger remarked. "All the better class of Germans, all tourists, travel 'second'; except, for short distances, when men are alone, they travel 'third'; workmen, laborers, nurses and hired women travel 'fourth.' Transportation, for persons, is very cheap; for baggage, very dear."

Only two months after first setting foot in Germany, Harry seems perfectly at ease on a foot-tour of the Mosel River with Herr Kube, his non-English speaking host. It has been weeks since Steger has spoken his mother tongue.

"Of course, my German has an accent," Harry admits, "but I'm always taken for a Dane, a Norwegian or a Hollander, as the accent seems to tend in that direction. I have not spoken a single, solitary word of English, I have read nothing but German literature, papers, novels, everything, and, to the best of my mind, it has been the greatest lark of my lifetime."

The sights along the Mosel River that Steger took in must have made fascinating reading to his family in Fannin County. There were remnants of a medieval dungeon, complete with the bones of prisoners tossed in by the cruel old lords.

Trier, Germany fascinated Harry.

"There are old Roman baths, the old palace where the Roman Emperor Constantino lived at different times, old Roman streets still in use," Steger wrote to his parents. "The Roman bridge across the Mosel, even 'till today the bridge most used in that vicinity; the Trier city library, where old books, richly illustrated by hand, years and years before printing was known, books whose marvelously colored pictures still retain their brilliance and clearness; manuscripts, with signatures of Martin Luther, of Goethe, of Schiller, of Calvin. I studied hard in Trier, for I had my first opportunity there of seeing a really considerable mass of Roman antiquities. Trier, by the way, is, according to indisputable evidence, some 1,300 years older than Rome. The Porta Nigra, an entrance the Romans built about 50 A.D., still stands, an enormous gateway."

To old pal Edward Crane in Dallas, Steger writes, "Come over here for a glimpse of the only people in the world who know how to live without working, to eat without digesting, to drink without getting drunk. Day before yesterday I came in from a 10-day's tramp along the Mosel River; and my sole comrade was Herr Kube, a totally Englishless German with whom I live here in Bonn. To be sure, little Harry would hesitate, ere he entered into a discussion on The Immortality of the Soul, where German was the medium. The beautiful country along the Rhein I know very well; and the magnificent old castles have seen me plump 20th century presence; but the windings of the Mosel have been the most beautiful to me.

"The course of the river is so crooked that I have, after climbing a little mountain, seen the stream in all four directions; and, too, Eddard, there were seven little German villages in sight, nestling snugly in the winding valley. Heidelberg, too, was interesting. The old university, with its student-prison, made great sport for me."
Heidleberg University was established in 1386, although some of the buildings date back to 1200 A.D. Since his father practiced law, Steger found it particularly interesting to learn that no municipal policeman could arrest a student of a German university.

"Here in Germany, each university has its own courts of criminal and civil procedure and a student is subject to no other authority," Harry had relayed to his father in Bonham. "This necessitates a complete court apparatus, and, in such a scheme, a dungeon is necessary. The prison at Heidelberg is the most picturesque. It is considered a lark to be imprisoned there, for they are given whatever they wish to eat and drink, whatever service they are willing to pay for, anything to read, or games to play, that they order; and chums are, at their request, put into the same room. The walls of these rooms are ludicrous sights. Not a half-inch of space is free from painting in crude and gorgeous colors. Here is a caricature of some august and reverend university official. The cause of their duress vile, and a comically composed verse serve as the text; there is a sonnet, perhaps in German, perhaps in Latin (and even occasional English verse), which the poor (?) prisoner has used to give vent to the pangs of his burdened, tortured soul."

Of all the memorable places he visited, Harry wrote that the colossal castle at Heidelberg was the most interesting ruin in Germany.

Even the size of the oven was staggering. It was larger than Harry's father's law office and Harry's uncle Ed Steger's offices combined. Heidelberg Castle was also home to the world's largest wine barrel. The local subjects paid their taxes in wine, so the "petty princes" built a 50-thousand gallon wine barrel to hold their reward. And they say everything's bigger in Texas!

Construction at Heidelberg began late in the 11th century and even though it shows the ravages of time, man and nature, the mammoth, vine-covered structure built on a hillside still towers over the city.

"Nature knows how to garnish a ruin to get the best effect," Mark Twain wrote of Heidelburg Castle in A Tramp Abroad a mere 25 years before Steger's visit. "Misfortune has done for this old tower what it has done for the human character sometimes − improved it."

To see the area at its best, Twain believed it necessary to see Heidelberg embellished by the soft glow of gas lamps as evening falls.

"One thinks Heidelberg by day--with surroundings--is the last possibility of the beautiful," Twain admitted, "but when he sees Heidelberg by night--he requires time to consider upon the verdict."

On the other hand, Berncastle, Germany left Steger with a very different impression.

"Berncastle has the narrowest, dirtiest streets it has been my misfortune to tread," Harry remarks. "And, probably from a sense of harmony, the people are supremely dirty, too. There are tottering, rambling old houses of the 13th century that still hold together and are inhabited by tottering, dirty old folks that still hold together. There is a recently erected monument and I wanted to take a picture of it. And old veteran of 1871, in a gaudy uniform that had at intervals proof of too close contact with its wearer's beer and cheese, caught me in the act and excitedly told me that to take a picture of that monument was most strictly forbidden. He identified himself as the sentry stationed there. I asked him the whyness of his whatness. He replied that a firm which gets out these View-Postal Cards had bought from the German Government all photographic rights!"

So, some nuances of German life perplexed the transplanted Texan. Tomato soup was very common, Harry observed, but order a raw tomato in a hotel and the staff will gaze at you as if they just found out you are contemplating devouring one of your own race.
And Steger continued to wrestle with his emotions as he observed the rituals of the region’s dominant religion.

"Here on the Rhein," Steger wrote to P.C. Thurman, "almost everything is Catholic. I wrote Charlie something of a lot of holy bones that cured everything from fits to sore eyes. To see, in Cologne, that grand mass, that magnificent cathedral, with its hundreds of years of history and accumulation of treasures of art and gold, does not tend to make me a Romanist. Poor old market women, bowed double with work, with hands all hard and gnarled, toothless, wavering in step, come in and pray to the blood spots on the stone feet of Jesus, and to the Holy Mary most of all, for forgiveness, pay their money that represents the sap of their life, cross themselves, "genuflect," dabble their priest-blessed hands in holy water and go away believing that the stone image of Christ on the cross has helped them. Often on the streets here I come across a crucifix which, for economy's sake, shows only the feet and the hands of Jesus nailed through--a ghastly sight, for no other part of the body is there."

To be fair, Steger's reaction would probably have been no different than that of someone reared exclusively in Catholic services witnessing their first hellfire and brimstone brush arbor revival in Harry's hometown. The powerful emotions evoked in both scenarios would be difficult, if not impossible, for an outsider to comprehend.

And, as if penance for his doubt, Steger's fortune-telling skills seem to be fading.

He jokingly refers to his mom as "mither," probably an inside joke about the vernacular of the scholarly students Harry is now associating with, and Harry asks his mither to buy a post-card album for all the view-cards he is sending home.

"It has occurred to me that in later years it will interest me, too, to see the cards," Harry writes home.

Sadly, he is mistaken.

"The next letter you write me, after receiving this one, you had best address me at Balliol College, Oxford, England," Steger advises his parents. "That will be my permanent address for the next three years."

Wrong, again.

Chapter 13

The summer of 1905 found Harry Peyton Steger enjoying a summer in Germany and virtually swimming in academia. There were lectures in Bonn, given by world-famous professors, pilgrimages to feudal strongholds of the Middle Ages and an opportunity to feast hungry eyes upon impressive collections of Roman antiquities.

But soon he would grow weary of treading water in what he deemed to be the artificial world of the traditional academic process. Soon he would seem to drown.

For years, Steger had dreamed of studying in Germany, a place he often referred to as "the land of scholars." The Fannin County product had chased the elusive Rhodes Scholarship since his early days at the University of Texas. In Austin, Steger and his first college roommate at UT, Roy Bedichek, had dreamed of tramping across Europe. Now Harry's dreams are coming to life.

After being officially commissioned as a Rhodes Scholar, Steger spent a delightful summer in 1905 studying and backpacking along the verdant and meandering Mosel River in Germany before taking up residence at Balliol College in Oxford, England. And, just as the young roommates had planned years ago, Bedichek would join Steger for a trek around Europe. But, in 1907, Bedichek would find his close friend had resigned his coveted Rhodes Scholarship and was living a bohemian lifestyle while residing in a Whitechapel settlement in the London slums called Toynbee Hall.

And leave it to Steger to sum it up succinctly.

"I rotted before I ripened," Harry explained.

In the fall of 1905, however, Steger seemed well on his way to becoming a professor, perhaps at some ivy-covered East Coast institution or maybe at his beloved University of Texas. Harry's life was literally revolving around higher education.

Professor Bloomfield, head of the Department of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at Johns Hopkins, an esteemed educator Steger referred to as the "Sanskrit shark," had spent part of his summer in Heidelberg, Germany and Harry visited Bloomfield for a week. Steger seemed to enjoy seeing the sights and Bloomfield made use of the time to recruit his former student.

"Bloomfield was very encouraging to me," Harry wrote home. "He spoke more than once of the future that he thought I had and even suggested that I keep my eye on Johns Hopkins as a place to land."

At the same time, one of Steger's sponsors and former professors had just taken the job as president at UT. David Franklin Houston, a man that would eventually serve President Woodrow Wilson as Secretary of Agriculture and later Secretary of Treasury, had been lured back to the University of Texas from Texas A&M. In 1902, Houston had sent a letter of recommendation regarding Steger to the Bonham school board. Harry couldn't have been happier than to hear that a man he truly respected would be at the UT helm.

"With Houston as president and Mezes as dean, the University ought to make rapid strides," Steger wrote to his family in Bonham.

In a letter to John Lomax, a UT grad now employed by A&M, Harry recalled running into another old friend from Austin during his summer in Germany.

"Last week, as I got off one of those European toy trains in Cologne, I ran right into the arms of Professor Frederick Eby of Baylor University," Steger remarked. "We were one summer together in the Phi House at Austin. Surely the world is small. I like him; but his intellect is always indecently exposed. That's immodest. He ought to be more careful, especially when he 'goes out in company.' Where in the world is Bedichek? I have written and written cards asking for his address and all in vain. How has the change in administration at A&M and the University affected your personal comfort? Write me about it. You can't keep a good man down. Houston was shaped to be the president of the University of Texas. How is Miss Bess? Is Duvall back in Baltimore? Up to two weeks ago, I had the weest, daintiest, reddest, sickliest mustache that had ever turned the stomach of a respectable person. He resembled many things in my mind--a caterpillar, an emaciated toothbrush, what you will. He was plainly visible, vividly, a flaring, bedinky, red! He lived two months and seemed, in spite of his poverty, to get much out of life; probably because this is the native land of mustaches."

On September 29, Steger bid farewell to his German hosts, the Kube family. He gave his parents a detailed itinerary.

"I leave tomorrow for Oxford," Harry wrote home. "My itinerary is as follows: Leaving Bonn a.m., Rhein Saturday afternoon at 5:37, I go, by way of Koln, to Vlissingen, where (at 10:30 p.m.) I get on board a steamer, go to bed, sleep six hours and wake up Sunday morning in Queensboro England, where an express-train carries me to London. Breakfast in London; and up and away for Oxford, where I shall be, I hope, on hand for the midday meal. I leave Bonn and the Kubes very reluctantly. They have grown into me. This thing of being transplanted again makes me shiver a bit; but it gives me the opportunity to see other folks and lands."

On the same day, Steger got a note in the mail to Lomax.

"The three months in Germany, spent in the midst of a German family, have been constantly delightful," Harry relayed to his friend in College Station. Never was I more energetic, more cheerful, more ambitious; and, to fill my sweet cup, I can truthfully say that I can speak German. For two months now no word of English has passed the fence of my teeth. (Thanks, Homer, for that phrase!)"
In October 1905, Steger had settled into the routine at Balliol College, one of the 20 or so constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Harry's description of the life of a Rhodes Scholar must have fascinated his family in Fannin County.

"My day begins at 7:30," Harry begins, "when my servant--Brown is his name--raps at my bedroom door and exclaims, in an alarm clock tone of voice: '7:30, Sir!' I bustle out of bed, take a cold sponge bath in an English tub (which is an awkward hip-tub wherein one must sit), hastily don a few clothes, throw my academic gown about my shoulders (it reaches but to the bottom of the normal coat-tail), and go to roll call at 7:55. This is not really an ordeal, for it merely means that you show yourself to the head porter at the big college gate and go at once back to your room as soon as he has marked your 'present.' On reaching my room, I find breakfast spread on the table--fish, or eggs, or sausages, or ham and bacon,--with a big roll, butter and marmalade or jam of some sort. On my grate a kettle of hot water is humming away cheerfully and I make a cup of chocolate in a jiffy. After breakfast, I probably do nothing until 10 o'clock. This time I spend in reading letters and papers (which the college messenger delivers and puts on my table); and, at ten, to lectures (again my dinky little gown) or to my tutor. At one I am free again and I go to my room where I find lunch spread--cold meat (fine, too), bread and butter, dessert, marmalade. In the afternoon from two until four or 4:30, not a soul stays in college. Everybody is at some sort of exercise. I am rowing on the Thames or playing tennis. At 4:30 comes teatime! An Englishman will forego his soul before he will his afternoon tea. It is not as insipid as it sounds, for it means more than tea. It is a light meal, and, coming after considerable exercise, it is not altogether unwelcome. At seven in the evening every man in college takes dinner in the big, beautiful old Hall--tutors (corresponding in a large degree to our professors), students, professors (which is the climax of titles and an accordingly rare one)--all in academic costume."

Balliol College, Harry explains, is the crème de la crème of the 20 outstanding colleges at Oxford. In 1905, 20 Rhodes Scholars applied for entrance at Balliol; only Stevens of Connecticut and Steger of Texas were admitted. The campus is regal--"beautiful beyond the power of words to describe," Steger says. He finds the formal, conventional traditions to be irksome and daily amusement comes to the Fannin County native as he watches ancient routines carried out in what Harry feels is an overly dignified manner. For example, every Sunday evening chapel closes with a prayer for "John Balliol and his wife, Devoguilla, the founder of this college."

"The amusing mockery of it," Steger states,” is that John Balliol, brother to the king of Scotland, was a rowdy knight, who, in a spirit of adventure, sacked several churches in Oxfordshire and, in addition to being publicly scourged therefore, was compelled to found a college! Such was the beginning of Balliol in 1263; and this same prayer has been offered up for hundreds of years."

Harry's closest friends are a young Englishman named Wilkinson; a brilliant Persian nobleman named Ameer Ali; Matsudairi, a Japanese Marquis; Orr, a native of Tasmania; an Aussie named Leslie; Lewis, from South Africa; and an American named Hutchins. Steger points out that most Americans avoid being too clannish in order to absorb the influence of a myriad of cultures assimilating at Balliol.

A few Americans, adds Steger, have gone to the other extreme and ape the English to the point of disgust.

But, snobbery aside, life at Oxford allowed Steger to learn from historical figures. In November Lord Roberts stopped by to lecture on The Northern Frontier of India and the annual Rhodes Dinner featured Rudyard Kipling.

Over the Christmas break, Harry headed back to the land of the Teutons to participate in the pageantry of a German Christmas with the Kubes.

In January, Lady Monkswell ("one of the swellest of the English nobility") invited Harry to a reception at her townhouse in London.
"My curiosity bids me go," Harry writes to his parents, "but my wardrobe, with more force, bids me stay. You see, to be observed, in London, on the streets, in the afternoon, or even in a home, without a frock coat and a high silk hat, or else a Prince Albert, would be as rude as appearing in pajamas. I tell you this because I think it will amuse you. There is never a place in the world where formality in dress counts for as much as it does in London. Of course, it is all silly rot."

But there is much about Balliol to admire. The dean of the college, a man of independent means, accepts no salary and instead dedicates his pay to the upkeep of the historical buildings.
"Most American professors are complaining, and justly, of poor pay," Steger tells his parents. "But these chaps, though paid no more, seem to love their work so intensely that the money consideration assumes a more secondary place. Then, too, it is very seldom, with us in America, that a man of means goes into educational work."

Then, on January 13, 1906, there is a letter with that old familiar salutation. Evidently Steger had caught up with Bedichek.

Dear Bedi,

I have a message for you. In 1815 Great Britain annexed three little islands, called the Tristan d' Acunha group, situated in the South Atlantic Ocean, some 1,500 miles from Cape Colony. When annexed, the islands were uninhabited. In 1814, a small garrison was put on the largest of the three; in 1817, the garrison was withdrawn, but an English corporal remained behind with his wife and ten children. Eight years later, when the Colonial Office in London sent a boat thither, there were only 12 people on the island--the corporal had evidently not done so well as King David in "spreading his Maker's image through the land."

A few years later a party of Welsh sailors was shipwrecked there; and, today, the Colonial Office informs me there are a hundred people on this little island, which, by the way, is two and a half miles in diameter and boasts a bully climate. The temperature averages 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and 55 degrees in the winter. There is not a cent of coinage on the island.

There are two other islands; one is called The Inaccessible, and, the other, Nightingale Island. On the latter, two Germans lived for two years and then died. The islanders have a patriarchal government, raise a good crop of goats and sheep and speak a mixture of Welsh and English.

In spite of the fact that some of my utterances seem facetious, I would tell you seriously that none, absolutely none, of the data I have given is false, or stretched or tinted by fancy. It is, to me, nothing short of remarkable that, in this day of irrepressible civilization, a little cake of mud could have so long existed in its state of Nature, without any yeast of ferment thrown into it.

Does it not appeal to you as a delightful refuge from your future? To me, for whom the hopes and ambitions of others interested in me have for years been goads and pricks that foretold me of a future struggle to make good, the place seems an Elysium. There is no money there; therefore, we need no money. If I can get the British Government to give us transportation and a little authority, will you join me?

My first plan is to revolt from the Crown. The Crown wouldn't give a copper damn; the Tristanians would be glad to revolt, as a relief from the monotony of thinking themselves subjects of a power that never remembered them; it is not a disagreeable thought to me, to you, that the way to a gentle dictatorship among these exotic Arcadians will be easy. Not an inhabitant of this island has ever been off it.

I am afraid of a future that keeps me linked with people who expect achievements of me in realms of morbidity (all education is morbid). The Cecil Rhodes Scholarship heaps the mighty mountain over me. I speak German now with ease and rapidity. To satisfy my natural liking for linguistics, I shall graft Teutonic idioms onto the Anglo Saxon and Welsh potpourri that already passes muster in this Eden left virgin for you and me.

Of course I shall request the Colonial Office to give me an appropriation of money wherewith I may make it worth the while of two (at least two; better, three) buxom, hefty, husky maidens; for much I fear me that our loyal subjects have ere now lost all distinctions of family and that many a man has, in the maze, become his own uncle.

Remember that you, as well as I, have a future to evade.

Harry

Chapter 14

The winter and spring of 1906 found Fannin County native Harry Peyton Steger very much enjoying the accoutrements of an Oxford education. He even had a new friend that compared to the gifted comrades Harry had become so fond of in Austin.

Keimin Matsudaira had managed to attend Balliol several months before it was discovered that he "lived in the blight of a title," as Steger put it. But the Marquis of Matsudaira and knight of the Order of the East Wing of the Mikado's Palace had given up his Dukedom rather than follow through with an arranged marriage.
"The laws of his native peerage demanded of him his marriage to the daughter of a neighboring Nabob," Harry penned to John Lomax. "The fair one chanced to be but three years old."

"Oxford is not, in the smallest of detail, like any other place in the world," Steger tells Lomax. "Come and see. You and your woman and your girl-child would find it the garden spot of all, a cloister for seclusion, a music hall and a tavern for convivial symposia of the temporal and intellectual sort. Germany, too, is easily accessible; where living is so cheap that thieving doesn't pay. With these plain roads and village-inns at short intervals to rely upon, a man may see all the island and most the continent on a bike. Get Ed Miller to come. We'll make a colony."

To his cousin Edith, now a student at Vassar, Steger explains the unorthodox timetable for serious study at Oxford. During the semester, days are spent in discussion and debate. When college pauses for one of the many breaks, young scholars are expected to become immersed in their chosen field.

"We tire the sun with talking and send him down the sky, but we do very little work of an intense sort," Harry tells Edith. "The system of utilizing time is here the reverse of that in vogue at American colleges. It is taken as a matter of course that an Oxonian spends his term in the amenities and his vacation in the books. Contrary to custom, I am babbling away of myself. It seemed to me, however, that bits of Oxford would have more than trifling interest for a Vassar girl. In return, rehearse to me whatever is peculiarly Vassarian, for 'tis sure to interest me. The Miscellany you sent has been opening the eyes of an English girl who borrowed it. The English girl scarcely dares to read a magazine without a chaperone. Too much social coddling has made them 'scary.' The American girl is, to her, shockingly boisterous."

In mid-March of 1906, Steger was elected secretary of Arnold Literary and Debating Society, the largest debate club at Oxford. Easter vacation centered on a very enjoyable trip Harry and Matsudaira made to Germany and then Paris.

"It was as delightful a holiday as I ever had," Harry wrote to his folks in Fannin County. "After a week in Germany, we two went on to Brussels. To appreciate the little capitol of Belgium, one should see it before Paris; for it is nothing neither more nor less than a Paris in miniature. In its reckless gaiety, its little cafes jutting on the street, its fondness for staying up the whole night, its display of beautiful gowns and elegant dandies, its cosmopolitan street crowds, and its ability to use two or three languages, Brussels is a little Paris. There is in Brussels a quaint little fountain, now hundreds of years old but still running. It is so unique of its sort that I shall describe it to you. It is, first of all, the statue, about 2 1/2 feet high, of an absolutely naked baby boy. The figure is said, by all authorities, to be a wonderful work of art. The little chap 'pees' morning noon and night. It is a comical, a quaint, a grotesque sight; but vulgar it is not. It is called the Maennikin Fountain (Flemish for 'Little Man'). From Brussels we went to Paris and took up quarters in the Latin Quarter, the most interesting, the cheapest, the most notorious, the most comfortable, and the most famous, perhaps, of the French capitol. In a pension, or family hotel, our bed cost us a franc (about 22 cents) a night. Our dinner was a mighty meal of five courses, with a bottle of claret or of cider; and it, too, was a franc. The Louvre in Paris is a grand treasure-house of art and antiquity. I saw the old Greek statue of Samothrace, of Venus; and score after score of paintings by Michelangelo, Rubens, Raphael, Botticelli, etc., etc."

After several days in Paris, Matsudaira was called back to London on business; Harry accompanied his friend and spent the time at the British Museum, Hyde Park, Westminster Abbey, even taking in Old Curiosity Shop, supposedly the original of the Dickens' novel.

"I then came on back to Balliol," Steger continued, "the nicest, most homelike spot of them all, where, on my return from foreign lands and hotel life, with its thorns and its stones, you find a cheerful room and a singing kettle."

But the beauty of the English spring soon had Steger thinking about another tramp about the island.

John Orr, of Tasmania, James Macdonnell, of Canada, and Harry took off on bicycles for a five-day, 230-mile ride.

"The roads of England are, for the most part, smooth as billiard tables; the weather was ideal; the country inns are all clean and comfortable," Harry told his parents. "Their names smack of Dickens. One night we spent in the Blue Boar Inn; another, in the Green Man Inn; others we visited for rest or refreshments were the Dun Cow, the Four Alls, the Rainbowe (sic), the King's Arms, the Brown bear, the Plough and the Red Lion. We visited Rugby, where Tom Brown went to school; Coventry, Kenilworth--the scene of Scott's great novel and the site of Queen Elizabeth's favorite castle, the ruins which now stand, down in a green meadow, all covered with fresh ivy; Warwick, another grand castle, still inhabited. Here we were shown the helmet that belonged to Charles the First, the armor of Oliver Cromwell. Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakespeare's house and the church where he now lies buried, tho' very interesting, are, to my mind, thrown into the shadow by the beauty of the Avon River, the graceful curves it makes and the sloping meadows about it."

Harry had returned to Balliol and was resting from the journey when a playful letter to old friend Norman R. Crozier arrived April 23, 1906.

"This morning, as I was aroused from slumber by the siren notes of the early morning scout-call, your envelope was handed to me," Steger noted in his reply. "I read it in bed. Oxford, you see, is a luxurious place. I am glad that, in the brief scope of your note, you were so successful in abusing me. That short epistle is a masterpiece of subtle indignation and disgust. You have chastened my spirit; and, if I have done anything to be sorry for, I am glad of it."

Steger and Crozier had enjoyed these verbal jousts for years. In a letter from Bonham in 1899, Steger got Crozier's attention with the somewhat less than endearing introduction, "My dear Old Unprincipled Reprobate."

Now that Crozier was married, Steger addressed his letters to Madge and Mrs. Madge.

"In Oxford we have three vacations," Harry tells his old pal. "At Christmas, six weeks; at Easter five; in summer four months. Nobody studies this term. In the Oxford phrase, we all slack. Each afternoon, we play tennis on grass courts, or row indolently and dreamily about on the beautiful little rivers here--the Cher or the Isis."

In the part of the letter addressed to "Mrs. Madge," Steger touched on matters of the heart; in particular how a trip Harry was planning on making back to Texas might resuscitate the fading drumbeats of love. Alas, he seemed to already know the answer.

"I am getting old faster than the years come," Steger tells Mrs. Crozier. "My visit home this summer will be made, in large part, because I want to see how much I think of the girl, how much I think of myself, how much the girl thinks of me, how much she thinks of herself and whether a romance is a delusion. I fear it is."

But Harry doesn't say who she is and his friends who compiled The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger 1899-1912 don't volunteer that bit of information.

His father is familiar with young Steger's love interest; however, because in a previous letter to his dad, Harry admits she has not written in a month, so, for the most part, daydreams must fade to the harsh reality of life without her.

Meanwhile, his friends all seemed to be wrapped warm in the arms of the love of their life.

"I was always fond of Annie Jo Gardner," Harry tells Mrs. Madge. "It was impossible for me to refrain from grinning broadly when we met. She and Vance ought to make each other happy. Although my homeland has at times an attraction for me that draws me to it, I am by nature a tramp, and I shall never be able to stay long enough in one place to warm a home."

He closes the letter with a little advice to be passed along to "Mr. Madge."

"Norman is a man of education, of intellectual aspirations, of a home-loving heart. 'Money' will never mean to him 'life'--but it's a very fine fuel. Bless him, I wish I could get way off in some quiet place with him and talk," Steger relays through Mrs. Crozier. "I would give him the advice I wish I could myself take. When you have money--that delightful amount of it known in fiction as a 'competency'--you are in a way to be mildly happy; unless, of course, troubles come that money cannot solve."

And troubles were on their way. First, his eyesight seemed to weaken again.

"An oculist has put glasses on me for good," Steger writes to his folks in Bonham, "glasses for 'street-use' as well as for reading."
The next letter, written May 22, 1906 and conveying a more serious tone, comes from a hospital at Oxford.

Chapter 15

Harry Peyton Steger's scout, a term for the servants that looked after Oxford students, found him at four in the morning, delirious and writhing in agony. It was the middle of May 1906, and, perhaps, the beginning of the end.

The servant raced out of the room, only to franticly return, scarce minutes later, with a doctor he had awakened and told of the dire circumstance. The prescription, quite common 100 years ago, was for repeated doses of morphine. The delirium continued for a day or so, leaving Steger weak and trembling.

Over the course of the next week, Harry seemed to slowly recover from the mysterious malady. Then, eight days later, his scout was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of a thrashing, agonizing Steger.

And this time even morphine couldn't touch the pain.

Harry was admitted to the local hospital, but eventually released in eight days.

"Please don't be alarmed," Harry had written to his parents after first being hospitalized, "for the danger is past. Although the week has been a painful one, it has not been without good results; for my side seems, the doctor says, to have strengthen wonderfully. Perhaps, after all, I shall sail home later, in case I get rid of whatever it is that now offends my flesh."

A scant three days later, however, another onslaught left Steger weak and confused. The Oxford staff was bewildered.

"Tomorrow I am being sent to London for an expert to 'tap' and 'thump' me," Steger informed his distraught parents across the Atlantic. "Please do not think this is a blue letter. I have decided to tell you exactly the state of my health."

"The whole plaguly business was beginning to get on my nerves," Harry admitted later in a letter to his uncle, Ed Steger. "Friends of mine in college and some of the college authorities told the famous Olser of me. He came to see me; sent me to London under nurses' charge to be X-rayed. Nothing showed. On my return, he analyzed my urine, found uric acid in large quantities, hinted strongly at Bright's disease, gave me alarming advice about my future, sent me to Karlsbad."

The physician Steger refers to as the "famous Olser" was none other than Dr. William Olser or, later, Sir William Olser. Olser became the first chief of staff at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1889. Harry had met Olser in 1904 at Johns Hopkins University, over a decade after the legendary physician and scholar became one of the first professors of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1893. In 1905, Osler was appointed Regius Chair of Medicine at Oxford and, about one year later, he was passing along a rather gloomy prognosis to the Rhodes Scholar from Fannin County.

And one can only guess about the bedside conversations between Olser and Steger, because Olser was much more than an icon of modern medicine and a gifted author who also collected a staggering array of historical medical data. Olser was a magnificent joker who, in 1884, submitted what we would now call an urban legend in the form of a pseudoscientific submission called penis captivus that sailed straight over the heads of the knowledgeable editors of the Philadelphia Medical News.
It is humorous to note that a young Harry Peyton Steger once gleaned much satisfaction from sending false accounts of seemingly prestigious gatherings to the editors at Dallas News and then chuckled at their publication.

Sir William Olser is probably best known, however, for insisting that doctorial students would benefit immensely from visiting, studying and conversing with patients, a concept that developed into the medical residency program. Olser understood the accelerated learning that would take place once medical students were taken out of the lecture hall and, instead, allowed to perform lab tests and actually placed at bedsides.

Harry was in good hands.

Still, during this timeframe, Bright's disease--chronic inflammation of blood vessels in the kidney--was a rather general classification for several different forms of kidney disease.

Dr. Olser recommended Steger seek treatment in one of the therapeutic spas that dotted Karlsbad's famous hot springs and Alexander Cowie, an Englishman of independent means, arrived with Harry at the Angers Hotel in Karlsbad, Austria early in June of 1906.

"This is a beautiful little place, situated deep in a lovely valley," Harry relayed to his anxious parents in Bonham, "and, were it not for plutocrats (a class in Europe composed of Russian princes, English aldermen and American brewers), no more delightful spot could be imagined. Their presence, however, makes expenses soar aloft and gives more of the purse-proud air to the place. I am quite confident this system of waters will rejuvenate my kidneys..."
Harry had known something was "offending the flesh" in April of 1906 when, following an afternoon of vigorous exercise, he felt a stabbing pain in his right side. Three months later, after a rapid succession of excruciatingly painful attacks, Dr. Olser had hinted of a future clouded by diabetes and Bright's disease. But two weeks in Karlsbad under the care of a "dear old grandfatherly chap," Dr. London, worked wonders.

"I am happily rid of my stone!" Steger wrote to his parents on June 13, 1906. "Think of that! Of diabetes and Bright's disease, which Olser had intimated as being possible developments, Dr. London declares there is no trace. Regular hours, good diet and these cleansing waters will leave me in far better condition than I was. Dr. London says I came in the nick of time. Four more weeks will see the end of my Karlsbad treatment. I will gladly come home then, if you and mither say so."

Harry's English friend, Cowie, remained in Austria for a month with Steger before taking the long way home to London. It seems Cowie's inability to speak the language contributed mightily to the fact that he found himself on a train wandering through Holland before someone finally directed him to England.

Meanwhile, Steger had become fast friends with Richard Conried, son of an important New York City theatre director. Dr. Holland insisted on two weeks of a vigorous lifestyle following the treatment, so Steger and Conried set off on a motorized mountain tour of Western Central Europe.

"Conried is taking me for an eight-day's trip in Tyrol in his father's big motor car," Harry tells Ed Steger. “After that, I am visiting a Dutch friend of mine in Holland for a few days, then a short visit in Germany and then to Bremen for the boat to America. I wish my father and mother could realize how small the world is, after all. It is shrinking, too. The fast boats and cables are doing it. At present, cables and letters to consuls have rendered me an object of suspicion to the Austrian police. Please re-assure my people."

Chapter 16

The last installment of the Harry Peyton Steger saga found the Rhodes Scholar recuperating from a painful kidney malady. Under doctor's orders, Steger had been instructed to leave Oxford in June of 1906 for the healing waters of an Austrian spa.

Harry had tried to get his father to close up the house in Bonham and come join him for a summer in the Alps. Evidently, in 1906, travel and living abroad was quite reasonable.

"It has occurred to me that it would not be absolutely beyond the realms of possibility for you to come to Bremen on a North Loyd German Steamer from Galveston," Harry wrote to his father, Bonham attorney Thomas Peyton Steger. "Mither, I fear, would find the trip irksome."

Passage from Galveston to Bremen, which took about 20 days would cost $50; round trip fare was $90.

"Keep in mind that, for $16 a month, I can get you a nice room with a breakfast," Harry tells his dad, "and consider that it would make you ten years younger. Life is short."

One bit of comic relief here is that Harry tells Mr. Steger that Cowie would meet him in Bremen and act as his guide. This is the same Cowie that thought he was on a train bound for England and ended up in Holland instead.

Ever the pragmatic lawyer, Thomas Peyton Steger remained in Bonham and waited for Harry to come home for an extended visit once his kidney troubles improved. The last letter from Karlsbad was dated July 9, 1906 and the family must have inquired about Harry's lost love.

"Dad is mistaken," Steger says stoically. "I haven't heard from_____ in nearly two months."

The next letter was dated August 7, 1906.

"Your letter was waiting for me when I got home," Harry informs his closest friend, Roy Bedichek. "Oh yes, I had a pleasant trip. Slept in same cabin with Polish Jew that scratched himself when he talked."

No doubt that passage conjured up an image Bedicheck could have done without.

"Lomax's version of my illness is a true one," Steger continued. "I had, among other things, incipient Bright's disease and a stone in the kidney. I think they are all gone."

The homecoming must have done Harry much good, because this was the first feisty letter, full of what his friends referred to as Stegerisms, in quite some time.

"I'll not pretend that I have deciphered your itinerary," Steger says to Bedi. "After reading your time-table paragraph I get the impression you can come to Dallas or some other 'town on the Katy near Bonham.' I wish I knew exactly what you seemed to know when you made the plan. Here's my plan. Tell me 24 hours--better 48 hours--ahead (there is a system of telegraphic communication in action at most R.R. stations) where and when you want me to meet you. Bedi, I want to see that old dirty yellow mane of your worse than I do the historic (they are very old, I understand) pyramids of Egypt. Don't be indiscreet and expend too much money on the consummation of this reunion; but for God's sake give us the chance to dovetail again before we both get fat old and decent. I sent material re Tristan d' Acunha under separate cover. Read this matter leisurely and chronologically. Pay particular attention to the career of that grand old Tristandacunhanian patriarch, Peter Green. Preserve this material and return it to me flesh to flesh. You are a crank now. I sent you a newspaper clipping--a newspaper tearing--about this island. I had--as you would have done in the Barnhart Spindler days--tore this column out. You, you file, voul (did I touch a chord?), pink-haired, aesthete, trimmed it off daintily, cut it off symmetrically and sent it back."

H.P.S. Rex et Imperator Tristan d' Acunhaiae

There was no further mention of the reunion and the next letter was dated October 10, 1906. Harry was two thousand miles at sea on his return trip to Oxford. He had slipped the chief steward a couple of bucks in return for a private room near the bathroom. As it turned out, there were three other Rhodes Scholars on the ship and Steger took advantage of this captive audience to introduce the domino game "42" into the Oxford culture.

Harry wrote home to ask his father to check at the Fannin County Bank about a 10-dollar exchange and to tell the Bonham lawyer that he had decided to pursue courses in law at Oxford. Harry didn't seem to particularly care about the degree, but he sensed that this study would pay dividends in the days ahead. The tutors at Oxford even altered courses in order to give Steger the most practical study possible.

In December 1906, Harry was elected president of the Arnold Literary Society, the largest debate club at Oxford. About a week later, Harry wrote home that he was now living at Tybee Hall with a group of Oxford men that were investigating deplorable living conditions in the London slums. A harsh winter followed, with rising unemployment fueling the difficult experiences for many east Londoners that Steger was now chronicling in American, German and English magazines.

In order to accurately write about the frightening perspective of a homeless tramp, Harry set out penniless on a 250-mile walk from Queensboro to London, often surviving on backdoor handouts and sleeping in parks and sheds. His election to lead the most prominent debate club at Oxford and Harry's luxurious life at Balliol College must have seemed a lifetime removed from the tramp hoping to find a handout and a place to lay his head at night.
And don't forget that only eight months earlier Steger had been hospitalized and suffering from serious kidney disease. But Steger was finding a market for his writing now and he was convinced that there would be even greater profit in a news syndicate if Bedichek would join forces. Steger's unique humor surfaced when two of his close friends, Roy Sewell and Carrie Gardener, announced their nuptials. The occasion, as weddings often did, called for a roast and Steger wasted no time.

"Dear Idiot and the Other One," Harry addressed his congratulatory response. "I was digesting Old English Plum Pudding in a Dago restaurant when appeared the maid, with a bucket of slop in one hand, a smudge of dirt on her nose and your massive, engraved parchment in the other."

Evidently, either the "idiot" or the "other one" didn't understand the postage system, because Harry had to pay, apparently begrudgingly, 13 cents upon receipt of the wedding announcement.

"Do either one of you have any idea what 13 cents is worth down in the cellars?" Harry asked, teeming with mock indignation.
He then took the time to explain he could get a shave (3 cents), grab a breakfast consisting of bulbous kidneys and a cup of seaweed coffee (6 cents), follow that with five wild Woodbine cigarettes (2 cents) and still have enough left over (2 cents) for a ride on top of an omnibus.

"Seriously, I tried to cable you my congratulations," Harry finally admitted, "but the offices were closed in honor of the King's having shot ten tail feathers out of the royal pheasant."

Chapter 17

In the summer of 1906, Harry Peyton Steger had spent time in Karlsbad, Austria and Bonham, Texas as he recuperated from a series of bouts with Bright's disease. If his kidneys were indeed deteriorating, hints only seemed to surface occasionally as Steger resumed a vigorous lifestyle upon his return to England.
This might be a good time to catch up with some of the other people that played pivotal roles in Harry's life. Steger was still regularly exchanging correspondence with John Lomax and Roy Bedichek. Lomax was the University of Texas Registrar in 1900 where he employed Steger and Bedichek.

But the three men had something more in common than the long, tedious days they had spent checking grades at the registrar office. All three were on the brink of major success.

Fate came looking for Lomax first. To grasp just how much things changed for John Avery Lomax, consider two manuscripts. The first was a missive mailed by Lomax in 1902 to the Bonham school board in hopes they would find it in their hearts to hire homeboy Harry Steger as a Latin instructor. The second manuscript was actually a foreword or introduction for Lomax's anthology, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.

It was written by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910.
Roy Bedichek, often referred to as "Bedi" by his friends, would take over as the second director of the UIL in 1920 and spend the next 27 devising a competitive intellectual and athletic league that transformed a fledgling organization into the governing body for practically all public school interscholastic activities in Texas.

At the insistence of J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb, Bedichek took a sabbatical from his position as director of UIL in 1947 and spent a year in seclusion. The result was Adventures with a Texas Naturalist.

And Harry Peyton Steger would have his own rendezvous with destiny. Every day that passed brought Steger closer to his first encounter with a shadowy, elusive author that had gained national prominence via his spectacular short stories, yet no one even knew who the man actually was. His parents named him William Sidney Porter, but the world had come to know him as O. Henry, his pen name.

The circumstances of that first interview between Steger and O. Henry fell somewhere a meeting and a trap, depending on the perspective.

For the young Fannin County native, this was a chance to meet the writer everyone in New York seemed to be talking about, a chance that was made possible by publishers that didn't understand why one of their most successful writers avoided publicity at all costs.
For the reclusive author, however, this had the scent of a baited trap.

There were two very good reasons Steger would find Porter to be an extremely reluctant interview subject.

First of all, Porter was an enigmatic character that was at his best walking the New York City wharves late at night or studying the person at the opposite end of a park bench out of the corner of his eye.

And, second, he had a secret.

Chapter 18

One underlying theme, as the Steger saga plays out, is that this is in the truest sense, a Texas story. Act one was in Bonham and Austin, although act two took place in Europe and the curtain will close suddenly in New York City following act three. The inner circle of actors includes Harry Peyton Steger, Roy Bedichek, Lillian Greer, John Lomax and William Sydney Porter.

Before you start humming "The Eyes of Texas," which incidentally was written by a beau of Greer's, John Lang Sinclair, understand that this isn't about "ever thang's bigger in Texas" or false bravado, but a very real story of long ago when a frontier spirit once beat in the heart of Texas.

Steger, Bedichek, Greer, Lomax and Porter revered the Lone Star State, yet none of the five were born within the promised land south of Red River, east of the Rio Grande and west of the Sabine River. This is the story of what made Texas a shining star from the beginning of a dream by Stephen F. Austin's father.

This is a story of emigrants.

Steger was born in the state that gave Texas larger-than-life historical figures from Sam Houston and David Crockett to Sam Rayburn, the great state of Tennessee. (Although Houston was born in Virginia, he served as the governor of Tennessee and Texas.)

The Lomax family came from Mississippi. Bedicheck was a native of Illinois. Porter was born in North Carolina. And Greer was a Louisiana girl.

Lomax and Bedichek played prominent roles early in this story and Porter becomes the reluctant lead character that is written out of the plot much too soon in act three. Almost all we have of Steger are his letters; Lomax, Bedichek and Porter are mentioned countless times.

On the other hand, Greer is mentioned exactly once. But leave it to a lady to make the most of her entrance.

As the holidays were approaching in 1903, Steger tries to convince Bedichek to head north to Bonham where they could both take the train over to Whitewright to see Lillian Greer.

"The firm would be complete," Steger said.

Those five words were intriguing because they would seem to indicate Miss Lillian was regarded as an equal partner with Steger and Bedichek in this intellectual firm and partnerships weren't doled out with much frequency.

So, it should be easy to track down Greer, right? After all, in a town with a current population of less than 2,000 residents, surely someone would remember a remarkable scholar such as Lillian Greer.

Not exactly.

As it turns out, Greer was a teacher at Grayson College in Whitewright from 1903-1905 after receiving her B.A. from the University of Texas with a major in Greek and a minor in Latin. No wonder Steger considered Greer a member of the firm; just like Harry, Lillian displayed a proclivity for dabbling in dead and dying languages. And she was certainly hewn from good timber. The Greer family had moved from Keachie, Louisiana to Waco, Texas in 1893 where Lillian's father, James Francis Greer, became vice president of Baylor University.

It would seem Lillian saw the best days of Grayson College. The college had originally been located in a two-story wooden building in downtown Whitewright before an impressive three-story brick structure was built on the north side of town around the turn of the century. Grayson College enrollment peaked in 1904, but later that year a fire destroyed the main building and library. The school reopened in 1905, however it never seemed to recover and Grayson College closed in 1912. Lillian Greer left North Texas in 1905 to teach school in Waco.

Before this story leaves Whitewright, it might be worth noting that while these may very well have been lean years for Grayson College and Greer, one eighth grade dropout in Whitewright was on his way to amassing a fortune. According to the Handbook of Texas, Kay Kimbell attended public schools in Whitewright before dropping out in the eighth grade--again, around the turn of the century--to work as an office boy in a local grain-milling company. If the name Kay Kimbell doesn't ring a bell, well, maybe you've heard of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.

It was in Whitewright that Mr. Kimbell founded Beatrice Milling Company. At the time of his death about a half-century later, he was in charge of over 70 major corporations. Some folks in Whitewright still shake their heads and smile over the last pages in the Kay Kimbell story.

It seemed Mr. Kimbell's last wish was that he be laid to rest in Whitewright. Mrs. Velma Fuller Kimbell, who was a Whitewright native and the daughter of William David and Elsie Rebecca Fuller, preferred to think the couple would be interred side-by-side in Fort Worth, a city they had both grown so fond of since moving there in 1924.

Mr. Kimbell died in 1964 and was buried in Whitewright.
It was Mrs. Kimbell that had taught her husband to appreciate and collect fine art and, in the years following his death, she was responsible for turning the Kimbell Art Foundation into her husband's dream, the internationally renowned Kimbell Art Museum. When Mrs. Kimbell passed away in 1982 and was lowered into a grave in her beloved Fort Worth, Mr. Kimbell was waiting at her side where she had moved him.

Two very remarkable people and they both got their last wish.

Chapter 19

When we last left Lillian Greer, it was the spring of 1905 and she was on the train leaving a two-year teaching assignment at Grayson College in Whitewright to ride the rails back to her home in Waco where she would teach in the public school system.
We won't meet up with Miss Lillian for another five years when she climbs aboard another train, this time bound for New Mexico Territory to become Mrs. Roy Bedichek.

In 1910, Lillian would be leaving behind the family's new home and a comfortable life in Waco where her father, James Francis Greer, served as vice president at Baylor University to live in the untamed New Mexico Territory on a mesquite-covered desert homestead in a cabin Bedichek had warned her had "holes in the walls big enough to throw a cat through."

"Bedi and I came by our delusion honestly," Lillian Bedichek would write so stoically many years later in the first chapter of The Roy Bedichek Family Letters. "His forbears and mine had trekked across a continent a generation-jump at a time, from South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland to Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Illinois and finally Texas. The momentum of three generations shoved us on."

But three years before Lillian ever laid eyes on her husband-to-be, she had spent a wonderful afternoon with John Avery Lomax. Miss Greer was among many of the top students at Baylor who filled several train cars for a ride to Austin in 1899 to test their metal at an interschool debate, quite possibly a forerunner of today's UIL competitions. It was a grand occasion, by all accounts, with The University graciously entertaining their guests from Waco at the dam. And it was also a great recruiting tool, because Lillian and a friend from Baylor, Kate Carroll, made it a point to stop by the UT Registrar's office where a dashing young John Lomax asked if he might have the pleasure of escorting the young ladies for a day of sightseeing.

So, Kate, Lillian and John set off for a memorable day in Austin, highlighted by an afternoon ride on a riverboat.

Three years later, and still only a tender young thing of 17, Lillian Greer stepped into the UT Registrar's office again, this time to transfer from Baylor to The University. This time it was Roy Bedichek working the registrar's window. As Lillian turned and walked away, Roy had an epiphany.

"That's the girl I'm going to marry," Bedichek whispered to Lomax.
Lomax certainly hadn't forgotten the riverboat cruise with Lillian, but he was perceptive enough at this moment in the registrar's office to remain in the wings while the lead characters slowly circled each other onstage.

Now that Lillian was out of earshot, Lomax explained why he was qualified to recommend this young lady to his friend and employee.
"Well, I know her well," Lomax said quietly to Bedichek. "I spent an entire day with her once."

That fateful meeting occurred in 1902, the same year Harry Peyton Steger showed up in Bonham, much to the surprise of many residents who were waiting on great accomplishments from the gifted scholar, to teach Greek and Latin for a year at Bonham High School.

And it was in 1902 that William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, showed up in New York City. But, to understand one of the underlying forces that drove the prolific short story author in the Big Apple, it is necessary to understand what drove Porter out of Texas in the first place.

People often equate fame with success and happiness. Fame brings notoriety, which can often be translated into financial gain. Neither have much to do with happiness, with the possible exception of making happiness far more complicated.

Take the case of one William Sydney Porter. It would have been his gain, although our loss, if there had never been a need to invent O. Henry.

Porter would probably been much happier if he had just retired from his job at the General Land Office in Austin and spent every precious minute he could with his petite and lovely wife, Athol, and little Margaret, their daughter.

He left his native North Carolina for Texas back in 1882 in search of his health. He found it--and so much more. For a couple of years, Porter worked a number of odd jobs, from ranch hand to cook, as he worked his way towards Austin.

The outgoing and charismatic William Sydney Porter that took Austin by storm in 1884 was nothing like the reclusive and reluctant interview subject that Harry Peyton Steger would sit across the room from about 25 years later. The article ran in the New York Times, although Porter had skillfully left out the part about how he had to do a little running himself.

The Porter that the people in Austin knew in the mid-1880s was active in many social circles. William Sydney Porter and his future bride, Athol Estes enjoyed performing in local theatre groups and both loved music. William Sydney Porter had a smooth singing voice and had taught himself to play the guitar and mandolin.
At first, he even performed with the Hill City Quartet at civic functions. And he began to find his writer's voice, as well. Athol enjoyed her husband-to-be's initial efforts and urged him to pursue his passion for literature.

As an outgoing young man about town, William Sydney Porter had plenty of influential friends, including Texas Land Commissioner Richard Hall, who gave Porter a job at the General Land Office. Those may very well have been the happiest days of Porter's life.
But Athol was in poor health, weakened by tuberculosis. Her well-to-do family had even considered her too ill to marry, but the amorous couple eloped against their wishes. In 1887, a year after William Sydney secured steady employment at the GLO, Athol presented her loving husband with baby boy, but the infant only survived a few hours. About a year later, Margaret Porter was born.

The following year, 1890, Richard Hall ran for governor and lost. William Sydney Porter resigned his political post at the General Land Office and stepped out onto a slippery slope destiny had waiting.

Porter ventured into banking and then newspaper business, although maybe both would be better described as misadventures. Porter was a teller and bookkeeper at the First National Bank in Austin and he purchased The Iconoclast from William Cowper Brann and turned it into The Rolling Stone, a weekly paper that published the first short stories of the man that America would later know as O. Henry. (Porter would shortly thereafter sell The Iconoclast and its archives back to Brann, but that is a tumultuous story and one that really stands alone.)
Trouble was close behind.

In 1894, the bank's management felt they had sufficient reason to suspect Porter of suspicious bookkeeping entries and fired him. Money is the most addictive substance known to man because it fuels all other addictions. If the bank had anything less than a meticulous series of checks and balances to deter temptations and if Porter was keeping his paper alive with under-the-table personal loans, well, he certainly wouldn't have been the first or last to fall into that trap.

The Rolling Stone went under a year later.

As fate would have it, Porter had caught the eye of the editor at the Houston Post and the newspaper gave Porter a job.

However, while he was learning the ropes of being a big city columnist, the federal auditors were learning more about some questionable dealings at the First National Bank of Austin. A federal indictment for embezzlement was handed down with his name front and center, although Porter vehemently denied his guilt.
Porter's wealthy father-in-law posted bond.

Porter jumped bail.

Before jumping to the conclusion that Porter ran out on his family, there is obviously more to this story than meets the eye and more than Porter would even confide to the close friend he would name as his literary executor, Harry Peyton Steger.

In an important media release Steger had instigated on behalf of Doubleday Publishing Company, Porter told about some time spent in Honduras. Without beginning to understand the complexity of the situation, the interviewer asked point blank how Porter had financed the South American excursion.

"Well, y'see, I had a friend with money," Porter replied. "Wonderful thing, isn't that...a friend with money."

Maybe it was actually a friend with money; he had several that qualified.

Maybe his family helped him run. Maybe, by now, Porter had endeared himself to the wealthy family that had opposed this marriage in the first place. Whoever it was that came to Porter's aid in that dark hour, he never so much as whispered their name to anyone.

It just might be that, whether innocent or guilty, William Sydney Porter thought the one chance to spend the rest of his life with Athol was a clandestine relocation. He spent time New Orleans before it slowly sunk in that this would at best be a temporary respite from federal authorities and a mounting list of charges.
So, when the Deep South didn't offer enough cover, Porter set sail for South America.

The trade routes from New Orleans were busy with everything from ripe bananas to rowdy mercenaries, so someone dodging small-time embezzlement charges could have easily disappeared for good in a thatched-roof bungalow in any one of a half-dozen banana republics, which, by the way, is a term Porter first coined.
He was laying low in Honduras when the message came. Not only was Athol too weak to join him, but she was fading fast. Porter gave up his freedom for a chance to say goodbye to the love of his life. He sailed north and this time it wasn't the arts and music scene waiting for him in Austin. It was the law. Porter turned himself in to authorities in Austin in February of 1897.

Porter's father-in-law was there to bail him out so he could spend precious time with Athol. On July 25, 1897 Athol Estes Porter closed her eyes for the last time. On March 25, 1898, the cell door closed behind prisoner 30664 in the Ohio Penitentiary.

In 1899, the December issue of McClure's Magazine had an interesting short story called "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking" by a new writer on the national scene, O. Henry.

Porter was serving what turned out to be a three-year sentence and, at the same time, he was well on his way to becoming famous. Maybe it remains a matter of perspective which one did him the most harm in the long run.

Chapter 20

If I could beg your indulgence, our Steger saga must needs detour through Tom Bean. Not Tom Bean proper, but the town's namesake, the one and only Colonel Thomas C. Bean.

Bean first wandered into this story during a research phase to verify Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Booth Tarkington had actually written the epitaph on Harry Peyton Steger's gravesite in Willow Wild Cemetery in Bonham. Sure enough, Tarkington's words were there, etched in stone.

But another phrase on a nearby stone also caught my eye that day.

It said, "Born in Washington City, D.C., died in Bonham, Texas on July 24, 1887. Aged about 70 years."

Just so happened that I had my first clue at the riddle of the man we know as Tom Bean.

The story of the accomplishments of the Steger family in North Texas is remarkable in its own right--they owned a grain mill, a lumber yard, and an opera house in Bonham, among other business interests--but maybe the most amazing facet of this story is the outstanding cast of characters that shares the stage with the Stegers and their acquaintances. The Steger family shared history with everyone from Sam Rayburn to a savvy old politician that was an early influence on young Rayburn, Joe Bailey.

Although it has been a little hard to tell at times, this story revolves around the only son of Bonham attorney Thomas P. Steger, a gifted journalist and Rhodes Scholar named Harry Peyton Steger.
Roy Bedichek John Lomax, David Franklin Houston and Booth Tarkington all played prominent roles in Harry Peyton Steger's life. As remarkable as all those men were, Harry will always be best known as the editor who revitalized the career of William Sydney Porter, better known by his nom de plume, O. Henry.

But as fascinating a character as William Sydney Porter turned out to be, he didn't have anything on an enigmatic central figure in a lawsuit that the state turned over to Thomas P. Steger in 1887. Thomas P. Steger was the man appointed to settle the estate of Colonel Thomas C. Bean.

Tom Bean showed up in Bonham about 1842 and over the next four decades he held the record for accumulating the most land and cattle in Fannin County. When Bean died, he also set a record for most kinfolk. Although Tom Bean lived and died a confirmed bachelor, only the biblical Adam could claim more descendents.

You see, Bean's estate was estimated to be valued at $300,000 and everybody wanted a piece of the pie, with one claim even coming from as far away as China.

The case took a full decade of litigation and caused such a ruckus in Fannin County, it had to be moved over to Grayson County.

But, just who was Tom Bean?

Several authors offer some insight. Much of this information has been gleaned from the writings of a Bonham newspaper columnist, historian and jurist, Judge Will A. Evans.

A History of Fannin County Featuring Pioneer Families by Floy Crandall Hodge was another valuable source, as was A History of Texas and Texans by Frank W. Johnson.

Still, in the end, like any good story, you will have to make up your own mind.

Most accounts have Tom Bean leaving Palmyra, Missouri about 1839, spending time in Fayetteville, Arkansas and then showing up around 1842 in Fannin County with Colmore Bean, a man some say was his father while others will only say Colmore Bean claimed to be the father of Tom Bean.

Here is how Frank W. Johnson tells the story of a young surveyor named Tom Bean.

Where the young man was educated is a matter unknown, but he was acquainted with logarithms, latitude and departure, and such other features of higher mathematics as are required to do efficient work in his line. He was a man of mystery from the beginning, but as age crept upon him he grew more reticent about himself and finally reached a point where he resented mildly any attempt of his few friends to gain information about himself or his affairs.

Upon current subject, Col. Bean was sociable and companionable with those who chanced to attract him and seems to have offered no offensive speech except when privacy of his life was threatened with invasion. His services as a surveyor were in demand, and he took land at 25 cents an acre in settlement for his fees for his work. During his life he gathered together many thousands of acres which he refused to put to his own use, to lease or to sell.

When approached by those wishing to lease land from him, he generally used his famous expression, "Damn a rat! The poor folks need the pasture."

He wished to accumulate nothing but land and was frequently hard pressed for money to pay his taxes and to provide for the few wants of his body. He wore the same plug hat for 25 years, always carried an umbrella, and wore a long, black, sleek coat that served him from the vigor of manhood until his death.

Col. Bean made his home in a 14-square-foot cabin, in the back of which lived some of his old slaves, and they ministered to him during the lonely hours of his last existence. When Thomas C. Bean died in 1887 the book of his life was closed and sealed and the struggle for his estate began.

Floy Crandall Hodge paints a portrait of Tom Bean as a quiet, reserved gentleman with no close friends, yet he always treated everyone with dignity and respect.

Bean greeted every man he passed with, "How are you today, sir?"

People knew very little about old Tom. They knew him as a lodge master at Constantine Masonic Lodge and also as a potential suitor who never materialized for their spinster aunts.

He often visited their churches and although he gave generously, he never joined.

Legend has it that one night in a church service a buxom woman quivered by his side and said, "Oh, Colonel Bean, don't you want to go to heaven?"

The quiet gentleman bowed with his usual courtly grace.

"Well, not tonight, ma'am, not tonight," he said.

Hodge goes on to make a couple of interesting points. First, if people in small towns don't have the whole story, they are more than willing to fill in the blanks. Some local gossipers even claimed Tom Bean's last name was really Sanders, but he had been forced to take an alias after murdering a man. That would certainly fly in the face of all the other accounts of Tom Bean being a peaceful, dignified gentleman.

Hodge volunteered what seems to be the most plausible explanation for Bean's reclusive demeanor and secretive nature.

Hodge believes Tom Bean's mother was half-Indian.

That fact alone, given the laws at the time, could have kept the largest land baron in Fannin County from owning land.

Hodge also believed that Bean's real father was a Hessian soldier who fought against the colonies during the American Revolution.

The third author to give us insight into Tom Bean actually knew the man. Will A. Evans graduated from Cumberland Law School in 1859 and moved his wife and two sons to Bonham. Research by local historian Tom Scott tells us that Mr. Evans served several terms as a state representative for Fannin County and then became Fannin County Judge.

In 1883 the Evans family bought The Bonham News and for half a century a member of the Evans family was associated with the paper until it ceased publication in the early 1930s. In 1909, Judge Evans began writing a historical column about the Bonham he had found in 1859. One of Judge Evans' columns centered around an associate, Tom Bean.

Mr. Bean was a licensed lawyer, yet he did not go into courts to practice. He gave legal advice to many friends free of charge, and when suits were absolutely necessary, he most always turned the suits over to this writer, who for several years prior to Colonel Bean's death was his attorney in all business in Fannin County.

Bean did many deeds of charity and gave assistance to many that needed it, but he did not do it for show or ostentation. He did it because he felt like it and wished to do it, but he did not wish to make his deeds of charity public. I have been out with him and traveled some little with him and always found him to be liberal and looking more to the comfort of those with him than he was to his own comfort.

By all accounts, Tom Bean possessed a keen intellect, showed compassion for all of God's creatures and loved good literature, particularly Shakespeare and Dickens. Bean supposedly had an extensive library, which begs one question. Just how big a library can a man in a 14-square-foot cabin own?

According to records of the Constantine Lodge, Tom Bean was the Fannin County Clerk from about 1848 to 1850. Another record shows him as a District Clerk.

In 1861, Tom Bean built his cabin on the lot where 7th and Main Baptist Church is today. While he enjoyed attending balls and parties, most seemed to think Bean was happiest at home surrounded by the people that became his extended family, the African-Americans that worked for him. Sukey, his housekeeper and cook, had a cabin on the same property and was a longtime employee.

Could it have been that Tom Bean understood only too well how the stigma of racism could steal the American dream?

President Abraham Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, although it wasn't until June 19, 1865 that the announcement of the abolition of slavery was proclaimed in Texas.

Twenty-two years later when Tom Bean lay on his deathbed, the people that made his last days bearable were the African-Americans whose company he treasured. I never found where they were part of the deplorable circus of fake relatives that came forward to try and claim the estate.

But I did read that, on the day Tom Bean died, Sukey ran through the streets of Bonham crying.

Chapter 21

In the spring of 1907, a decade after delivering a speech on Character vs. Reputation to his 1897 Bonham High School graduating class, Harry Peyton Steger decided the time had come to depart the world of academia in search of his life's fortune in literature.

For 10 years, Steger had steadily and dutifully progressed toward a career as a professor, either at some revered, ivy-covered institution of higher learning on the East Coast, or at his beloved University of Texas.

His heart had been set, but matters of the heart are hard to predict.

Something, perhaps something Harry didn't fully comprehend, changed before the fruit of his labor was ready for picking.

"I rotted before I ripened," Harry shrugged.

Consider what all transpired in those 10 years.

He entered UT in 1897 ("donning long trousers especially for the event"), where Steger went on to be sophomore class president, editor-in-chief of The Cactus (UT annual), editor at the university newspaper, member Phi Betta Kappa; Phi Delta Theta Fraternity; Theta Nu Epsilon, Goo Roos (local, but interesting, he notes...who would have guessed otherwise!); fellow in Greek and Latin, took M.A. degree for metrical translation of Aristophanes' Greek comedy, The Wasp; went to Mineola where he was principal in addition to teaching Greek and Latin; taught Latin at BHS one year; thence studied Sanskrit at Johns Hopkins University where he was notified of his commission as a Rhodes Scholar (It seems Steger was the first UT grad to pass the standing Rhodes Scholarship test, although administrators passed over him initially because of what he alternatively referred to as the "naughty boy" incident or his "six thousand dollar joke."); spent the next summer immersed in the German culture while living with a family in Bonn; now fluent in German, Steger checked in to Baillol College, Oxford, where he became president of the largest debate club, the Arnold Literary Society; worked for a German newspaper in Cologne, Germany; was sent to cover an event in Monte Carlo by the London Daily Express; got arrested by the Italian army ("Most of it!") for building a wind-whistle on a rock in the Mediterranean; spent 16 days walking from Queensboro to London (penniless, living off hand-outs and sleeping in parks) in order to accurately document the travails of Englishmen in search of work during difficult times.

Now, after all that, consider that Harry was only 25.

Still, none of those events lessened the shock to the family back in Bonham when a letter came explaining Harry's decision to relinquish the Rhodes Scholarship, particularly after Steger had worked so diligently to secure the prestigious and coveted honor.

Esteemed local historian and distant Steger relative Tom Scott, who also happened to be a retired college professor, offered this explanation.

"There just has to be a jumping-off point," Mr. Scott says, reflecting on the educational process.

Correspondence between Harry and his mom hints to the fact she would have preferred her son to have picked a later time and place to jump.

In typical country-boy fashion, Harry had a running joke with the family about how his intellectual running buddies referred to their family matriarchs -- Harry had taken to calling his mom "Mither."
Mrs. Steger knew something was amiss after reading about two new Rhodes Scholars selected from Texas and she asked Harry to fill in the blanks.

"What Mither read in the newspapers concerning the Rhodes Scholarships does not in any way affect my tenure," Harry wrote back. "Under Rhodes' will, a vacancy remains vacant until the natural term expires. However, I have definitely decided to resign my scholarship; I have in fact done so; apart from my health, it is a waste of time."

What parent wouldn't cringe upon learning one of their progeny has come to the conclusion their Rhodes Scholarship is a waste of time?

In the short story of Harry Peyton Steger, turns out he was right.

Chapter 22

Much to the chagrin of his folks back in Fannin County, in the spring of 1907 Harry Peyton Steger decided maybe he had something more important to do than finish out the Rhodes Scholarship he had once cherished so dearly.

In Harry's case, though, he was right.

More specifically, in Harry's case, he was a writer. Steger had eight years of the finest education possible under his belt --University of Texas, Johns Hopkins University, Balliol College at Oxford -- but precious little time to leave his mark in literature, if he could even manage that feat.

"I hope it has not been very disappointing to you," Harry penned to his parents in Bonham. "I do not know exactly when I shall come back to America. It seems to me very inadvisable to leave Europe too hastily, for good. I may never get back. Furthermore, I can get some experience here. Of course, if I follow the dictates of sentiment and feelings, I would unhesitatingly return at once and fish for years in the lake at Wichita Falls; but there's no salary attached, is there? and no career. If I can get started over here, with a bit of prestige, why then I can continue on the other side. Bedichek is coming to England in June. We are going to give the news syndicate scheme, of which I gave details last summer, a modest trial."

Since all of those late-night brainstorming sessions with Roy Bedichek in Austin, maybe nothing ever intrigued either man more than making a living off their wits and the alphabet. Neither seemed driven by the desire for wealth as much as a need for adventure, intellectual stimulation, rousing conversations and late-night writing sessions.

"Don't you think you and I can make a living together?" Steger had written from Baltimore to Bedichek two years prior. "This matter of living has to be considered, you know. I'm inclined to think we can do it -- how remains to be seen; perhaps by writing? Tell me what you think. In plain clammy English--can we pay for grub with work?"

Seems like a reasonable question, perhaps even intuitive, in retrospect. In later years, Steger's flair with the pen would impress William Sydney Porter; Bedichek was eventually urged by J. Frank Dobie to capture his thoughts in a manuscript. But retrospect has 20/20 vision. Porter and Dobie possessed discerning eyes in the world of literature. What vision would the publishers that analyzed the collaborative effort of Steger and Bedichek possess?

Well, in 1907 Harry is selling enough of his work to magazines to believe his time has come. Bedichek would be sailing for England in June. Maybe their ship had come in.

"I hope you and I are going in for this thing for all it is worth and that we are not to drop it before it has been given an adequate trial," Steger writes to Bedichek regarding the proposed news syndicate. "I'll meet you in Liverpool; you'll come on to London where we can take a pause. I don't know yet whether it is best to do England first or the Continent."

This was the opportunity the two men had waited for -- tramping around the most interesting sights in Europe would give them ample material. The plan was to then document their adventures to launch the news syndicate.

Steger also had a novel started and four short stories well underway; plus, he was partnering with another Oxford student, Nixon, to complete a manuscript that Century Magazine Publishing Company in New York seemed anxious to publish.

And that was still only part of the writer's ambitious scheme.

"I want to start a first-class literary magazine to take over Holland's, to revive the old Southern Literary Messenger, or to start a new one, more or less typical of the South, but neither lurid nor cheap," Steger tells Bedichek. "Can't we do it? There's not only fun but money in it."

And, Harry reminded his old friend, if all else fails there was still Tristan D'Acunha, the most remote archipelago on the planet.

"There is no particular cause for alarm in my kidney," Steger adds. "Beyond the fact that Dr. Osler told me to carry a Bible and a flannel rag around with me, I know nothing of the damned thing. It doesn't interest me except when it hurts and that is seldom. What an idiot you are to give up smoking. You must take it on again. I am playing tennis again within a few days. This will put me in good shape. You needn't be squeamish about disreputable language, unless of course the guts of your bag are like to drop out from time to time. You might buy another suitcase; or, better still, a Gladstone-bag. Don't, however, land with the external accoutrement of a Methodist minister."

Bedichek wrote that the two of them should avoid all outsiders, but Steger made it very clear that his old friend Cowie was beyond reproach.

"You don't know Cowie and that you and I might plot the King's destruction in one corner of the room while Cowie sat and meditated in the other," Steger explained point blank.

That last exchange of missives between Bedichek and Steger was late April or early May 1907.

Some 50 years later, in a letter to Dudley Woodard dated August 8, 1957 that was published in The Letters of Roy Bedichek, Bedichek would reminisce about tramping across Europe with his friend from Fannin County.

Dear Dudley:

Yes, Harry Steger was one in a million. He had in just the right combination scholarship, companionability, wit, enthusiasm for things worthwhile, generous impulses, good looks -- but why try to enumerate. When I say he was the most lovable character, male or female, I have ever known that must cover it insofar as I am concerned.

I have a picture of him in his prime on my desk and I'm looking at it now. I have often told as illustrating the spontaneity of his with the crack he got off on me while we were returning from a walking tour of England and part of Germany in 1907. There was on our boat a bevy of sweet North Carolina lassies of an age to be interesting to young men. He rather cultivated them while I remained aloof, walking the decks alone.

One of the young ladies observed to Harry, "Your friend, Mr. Bedichek, seems to go around all the time with his head in the clouds."

"Oh no," said Harry, tapping his temple. "Clouds in his head."

The next letter in the Steger collection was written to his parents. It was dated August 26, 1907, Quebec, Canada. Steger and Bedichek had crossed over the pond.

So what became of the journal made by these two formidable writers as they detailed excursion after excursion across Europe? It is quite possible and plausible that thoughtlessly tossed in trash baskets in a dozen different publisher's offices was the best manuscript they never published.

You have to imagine that both writers poured their hearts into the journal in hopes of breathing life into the news syndicate. There seemed to be scarce time for anything else during the summer of '07. Whereas the long, lonely nights in Baltimore had produced voluminous letters, during what should have been the most remarkable summer of his life to date, Steger was simply too busy to write home.

It was 10 days on the Cassandra from Glasgow to Quebec.

"From here we go, up the St. Lawrence River, to Montreal," Harry wrote to his parents, "and thence by rail to New York City; Bedi to Texas."

The two men would never look on each other's face again.

Chapter 23

In the spring of 1907, a decade after delivering a speech on Character vs. Reputation to his 1897 Bonham High School graduating class, Harry Peyton Steger decided the time had come to depart the world of academia in search of his life's fortune in literature.

For 10 years, Steger had steadily and dutifully progressed toward a career as a professor, either at some revered, ivy-covered institution of higher learning on the East Coast, or at his beloved University of Texas.

His heart had been set, but matters of the heart are hard to predict.

Something, perhaps something Harry didn't fully comprehend, changed before the fruit of his labor was ready for picking.

"I rotted before I ripened," Harry shrugged.

Consider what all transpired in those 10 years.

He entered UT in 1897 ("donning long trousers especially for the event"), where Steger went on to be sophomore class president, editor-in-chief of The Cactus (UT annual), editor at the university newspaper, member Phi Betta Kappa; Phi Delta Theta Fraternity; Theta Nu Epsilon, Goo Roos (local, but interesting, he notes...who would have guessed otherwise!); fellow in Greek and Latin, took M.A. degree for metrical translation of Aristophanes' Greek comedy, The Wasp; went to Mineola where he was principal in addition to teaching Greek and Latin; taught Latin at BHS one year; thence studied Sanskrit at Johns Hopkins University where he was notified of his commission as a Rhodes Scholar (It seems Steger was the first UT grad to pass the standing Rhodes Scholarship test, although administrators passed over him initially because of what he alternatively referred to as the "naughty boy" incident or his "six thousand dollar joke."); spent the next summer immersed in the German culture while living with a family in Bonn; now fluent in German, Steger checked in to Baillol College, Oxford, where he became president of the largest debate club, the Arnold Literary Society; worked for a German newspaper in Cologne, Germany; was sent to cover an event in Monte Carlo by the London Daily Express; got arrested by the Italian army ("Most of it!") for building a wind-whistle on a rock in the Mediterranean; spent 16 days walking from Queensboro to London (penniless, living off hand-outs and sleeping in parks) in order to accurately document the travails of Englishmen in search of work during difficult times.

Now, after all that, consider that Harry was only 25.

Still, none of those events lessened the shock to the family back in Bonham when a letter came explaining Harry's decision to relinquish the Rhodes Scholarship, particularly after Steger had worked so diligently to secure the prestigious and coveted honor.
Esteemed local historian and distant Steger relative, the late Tom Scott, who also happened to be a retired college professor, offers this explanation.

"There just has to be a jumping-off point," Mr. Scott says, reflecting on the educational process.

Correspondence between Harry and his mom hints to the fact she would have preferred her son to have picked a later time and place to jump.

In typical country-boy fashion, Harry had a running joke with the family about how his intellectual running buddies referred to their family matriarchs--Harry had taken to calling his mom Mither.
Mrs. Steger knew something was amiss after reading about two new Rhodes Scholars selected from Texas and she asked Harry to fill in the blanks.

"What Mither read in the newspapers concerning the Rhodes Scholarships does not in any way affect my tenure," Harry wrote back. "Under Rhodes' will, a vacancy remains vacant until the natural term expires. However, I have definitely decided to resign my scholarship; I have in fact done so; apart from my health, it is a waste of time."

What parent wouldn't cringe upon learning one of their progeny has come to the conclusion their Rhodes Scholarship is a waste of time?

In the short story of Harry Peyton Steger, turns out he was right.

Chapter 24

It was the autumn of 1907 and Harry Peyton Steger was something of an arriviste in the New York literary circles, a wildflower seed that had slipped from the beak of a migrating bird that would now try to take root in the cultured rose gardens of New York City.

Young Steger would prove to be resolute and stalwart in the pursuit of his ambition to secure employment in his chosen field of literature, although the endeavor required precious time, a great deal of patience and a rather circuitous route. Friends were taking their place in the world, with the lone exception of his closest friend, Roy Bedichek. All the old cohorts from those glory days in Austin were matched up in blissful matrimony, again, save Bedi, who was back home in Eddy, Texas where he was exchanging occasional letters with Lillian Greer in nearby Waco and awaiting his own next big adventure.

Steger was alone and penniless in a cold city. Those warm and inviting streets of Austin were almost two thousand miles to the south. His family was fifteen hundred miles away in Fannin County. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Maybe the best chapter in the short story of Harry Peyton Steger was how he made it happen, anyway.

Evidently, the last time Steger and Bedichek would ever see each other was in Canada and it was under less than pleasant circumstances.

"My poor struggling, starving, hunted Bedi!" was how Steger began his first letter to Bedichek following what seemed to be an unnerving experience the two men shared shortly after arriving in Canada from Scotland. "I came nearer weeping tears of blood those last few hours of your incarceration than ever before in my life. Stranded in Montreal with another of God's creatures, I should never have found myself out there in those woods, nor have laughed as I did over our flight from the city and men. What a blessed spot that was! Your wire of Felix's (Felix E. Smith of San Angelo, Texas) response, the beautiful little picture-postcard of one of New York's most attractive sights and the scribbled note with enclosure of my check and key came to me here and, like the pistol and plank from a blood-stained floor, brought into court as evidence of murder, told me of the robbery, high treason and cruelty my own silence must have meant to you. As a matter of fact, I wired you at Montreal about eleven o'clock in the morning following my arrival here."

The first challenge for an unemployed and unknown writer in New York was to secure a place to reside while he shopped around his work in hopes of locating a publisher willing to subsidize a project.
As fate would have it, Hutchins, a former associate from Oxford who now lived close to New York needed company. And, boy, did Steger ever need a friend that needed company!

"Hutchings met me at the station the night of my arrival and brought me out to Englewood, New Jersey where he has a beautiful cottage," Steger wrote to Bedichek. "He is so lonely and he has given me such a welcome that I shall stay here at least a month before I shall begin to think that he is another victim. Hutchings has all of Ibsen, all of Shaw, most of Tolstoy; and it is the essence of bliss to sit reading at the window, occasionally reassuring myself by a glimpse at the resting scenery that I am no longer on boat, train, streetcar, ferry or whatnot in the way of a vehicle--that trees and grass and riverbanks are actually still. I am so tired of traveling. And yet--there is no evil that endureth. Hutchings understands thoroughly my material worthlessness and has, I say, been lonely in the big house--so there is actually no new victim under the wheels of my car. May you and I never attempt again to reach a whimsical destination on mystic resources."

Chapter 25

Harry Peyton Steger and Roy Bedichek returned to America at the end of August 1907 following their long-awaited tramp across Europe.

Low on funds, Harry was fortunate to take up temporary residence with Hutchings, an old friend from his days at Oxford that now lived in a large home in Englewood, New Jersey. Roy headed back to the farm in Texas. The two writers had started out with big dreams of jump-starting a news syndicate by documenting the "residence abroad" and they poured themselves into the project, visiting as many renowned landmarks in Europe as possible and writing late into the night while the visions of these places were still dancing in their heads.

After all, only 27 years earlier a version of this concept had worked for Mark Twain in A Tramp Abroad, his travelogue describing the experiences of a pair of Americans on a journey from Germany, through the Alps and into Italy. Steger and Bedichek were quick with the quill, but certainly no equal to Mark Twain, the man even William Faulkner called "the father of American literature."

However, even the immortal Twain was no stranger to failure; much of his work reflected on somewhat unsuccessful ventures as a printer, a soldier, a miner, and, of course, a steamboat pilot. You get the feeling Twain would have lowered his head and nodded knowingly had he seen Steger and Bedichek scrambling to board a tramp steamer bound for North America.

Later on, Steger would joke that after the steamer landed in Canada, he hurried down to New York and "shaved at once," but his letters reveal an idealist writer that had grown fond of a bohemian lifestyle. Harry went as far as to chide his former traveling companion for conforming far too quickly.

"You have never been seen in San Angelo with a beard; while I, staunch soul that I am, wore mine in New York City and Englewood until a combination of Sampson, Delilah and public opinion wrested it from me," Steger wrote to Bedichek in late December of 1907, almost four months after the two men made it back to America."

It was here that the old UT college roommates truly parted ways. While Bedichek still had several lean years ahead, Steger settled into a somewhat privileged existence in Englewood, where his Oxford friend that offered a place to stay also introduced Harry to the inner circle of top publishers.

"This town lies in the lap of gentle hills, far from the clatter of New York," Steger wrote Bedichek of his new abode in New Jersey. "I am at present Americanizing my manuscripts writ in the air of England and beginning my campaign against the prejudices and envy of American editors. I have an appointment soon with Phillips, head of the company that publishes The American Magazine."

Henry Watson, editor-in-chief of Dun's Review, happened to be an associate of Hutchings and lived nearby in Englewood. Almost immediately, the Watsons and Harry became close friends. Now that he was moving in the right circle, Steger had even met Page of Doubleday, Page & Co. Harry had lunch with the president of the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, another of the movers and shakers in the publishing world.

"I have the chance of my life right here, and I'm going to take it," Steger accurately predicted in a note to Bedichek.

At the same time, John W. Hopkins, Superintendent of Galveston City Schools was offering Harry $1,500 a year to come teach Latin and German in the Ball School, with the extra stipend that the same contract would be extended to Bedichek should Steger agree to the terms.

"What a cunning rascal Hopkins must be!" Harry exclaimed in the next letter to Bedichek. "I think Guy Witt must have put him in possession of our inordinate fondness for each other's company."

Keeping all options on the table, Steger told Hopkins that it would take time to correspond with Bedichek in regard to the teaching positions.

Poor finances continued to be the weak link in the chain Harry was assembling, but good friends held his plan together. Watson, Hutchings and Steger attended the New York Civic Federation annual dinner to listen to Andrew Carnegie speak. Steger was getting to know Arthur Page, an affable young man about the same age as Harry and the son of Walter H. Page, editor of World's Work and a partner of Doubleday, Page & Company.

Steger had a novel in the works, several short stories underway, plus a variety of tramp articles. Friends were starting to hint that Harry should lean on Walter Page.

"I had much rather have his company disinterestedly than resort to machinations whereby, through being his guest at his home here in Englewood, and having him dine with me, I could get him in such a tight place that he would have to squirm in rejecting a manuscript of mine," Harry explained to Bedichek. "Bedi, the truth of the matter is that I am lonely, lonely as hell. I had an impetus on reaching here, a superinduced fever of ambition, ordinary soul-killing ambition, a desire to get the better of the other fellow; but the fever has spent itself and I find myself in the midst of people who are steady and constant and purposeful and everything else that is inconvenient and disconcerting to a free man."

Evenings were spent dining with the Watsons or in a private box at the Metropolitan Opera where, as a guest of the New York Director of Grand Opera, Herr Heinrich Conreid, Steger was mesmerized by Boito's Mephistopheles.

On that particular occasion, Harry listened to the Russian bass Chaliapine sing the role of Mephistopheles and Geraldine Farrar sang the part of Margaret. During intermission he visited with the Duchess of Marlborough.

"No cash profits, however," Harry noted when he relayed the events to Bedichek.

Harry had become acquainted with the Conreid family while recuperating from kidney disease in Austria; Heinrich Conreid's son had invited Harry to join him for a two-week tour of Bohemia.
Other memorable nights found Hutchings and Steger taking in George Bernard Shaw's Candida at the little Berkeley Theatre or Ibsen's Masterbuilder.

He had made it from the world of horse traders circling the Fannin County Courthouse to rubbing shoulders with the world's elite. It was farther from the Steger Opera House and the dirt streets of Bonham to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City than mere miles on any map might indicate.

So it would seem Harry was doing quite well, wouldn't it?

"I am doing so well here that I only want you to send me ten dollars," Steger penned Bedichek.

Harry tried to leverage the loan by offering to send, upon receipt of the ten dollars, Fabian pamphlets describing the social democracy movement gaining a foothold among the early 20th century British intellectuals.

Evidently Bedichek was more interested in holding on to the $10 bill than in learning about principals the vanguards of this new movement held dear, because Steger had to ask again.

Although he didn't want to admit it, even to his closest friend, Harry had been forced to accept a job with Frederick Stokes Company that paid a scant $1.50 per day once the realization his manuscripts wouldn't sell finally sank in.

To make matters worse, the job necessitated Steger trade the spacious opulence of Hutching's home in Englewood for a lodging house in New York City where he could only afford a hall bedroom.

"Can you possibly send me a money order for ten dollars?" Steger asks Bedichek again. I can show you how much I need it, if you have forgotten my habitual state. Really, I have a most pleasant job, literary work and all that; but I am on $10 a week for two months. Stokes have my London record with the Express and expect me daily to flee. This job necessitates clean linen, etc. The cold weather has caught me drawers-less, two-pair-socked, two-shirted (over), one-suited, un-overcoated, three-shirted (under), one-pair-shod. I have held off you as long as I can. Particulars of work if you wish them. I still hold option on Galveston."

Harry had no one else to turn to; his father was also facing financial duress.

"My low state of pocket is due to the petitions of the man who sent me that soul-saving money order at Quebec," Steger explains to Bedichek. "He is now hard up and has asked me for $80. I have sent him thirty, which leaves me two in my possession."

But then, there is always the offer to teach school, Harry reminds Bedichek.

"And Galveston!" Steger writes Bedichek. "Ever before me as a soft spot on which a fallen angel may rearrange his halo. God is indeed good. I like God. I was speaking to Jesus about him just last night."

Chapter 26

Harry Peyton Steger had given up his Rhodes Scholarship and the $1,500 yearly stipend that went along with it. Now he found himself trying to get by in New York City making $1.50 a day working for Frederick Stokes Company and living in a cramped hall bedroom.

But Steger was becoming fast friends with Authur W. Page, son of one of the principals of Doubleday, Page & Company, and friends had a way of always coming to the Bonham High School graduate's rescue.

Steger's hall bedroom days were almost over.

Following his "residence abroad" with Steger in the summer of 1907, Roy Bedichek had made it back to Montreal on a tramp steamer with his close friend. Harry decided to make his stand in New York City while Roy worked his way back to Texas by taking odd jobs and then getting a railroad ticket as far south as funds would allow.

Evidently Bedichek made it back to his teaching job in San Angelo in time for fall classes and the next letter from Steger must have left his old friend shaking his head.

Bedi, why not drift to New York and save me the pulpy bulbousness of soul that a modicum of success threatens me with. I am getting this off to catch you in Fort Stockton, wherever in Gehenna that may be. Bet your horse's feet fall out, or that you stop en route to chase prairie dogs. New York is cankering me. My habits are exemplary and I like clean linen. The spark of genius flickers--while ever you get more and more applause.

Harry

PS: For professional reasons I am now calling myself "Peyton Steger."

Who could blame Bedichek if, from this point on, he began to wonder if his former college roommate was even the same old Harry anymore.

And Steger may have inflated the level of success he was enjoying. After all, as late as December 1907, a letter to his parents proves he was still living off pecans his family was sending from Fannin County.

The pecans are still holding out. They are fine. Don't, don't, don't think of sending me any Christmas presents, any of you. Make it a card. That is what I shall have to do. Seriously. The last of the pralines went last night as a finale to dinner.

Yours,

Harry

By February, management at Stokes had increased Harry's salary to $20 a week. He was still having lunch with Arthur Page two or three times a week. And he was still waiting for an editor to respond favorably to work Steger had submitted. Valuable lessons were being learned that would one day make Steger the rarest commodity -- an editor that writers saw as truly one of their own...because he was. Harry knew what it was like to go hungry while editorial staffs took their own sweet time to peruse manuscripts. Even then, they couldn't discern meaningful writing from fluff and froth.

"Holland's never reported on my tramp articles," Harry told his father. "You know, editors of all sorts are slow in such things. It makes something of a hardship on contributors."

Meanwhile, Harry was taking cold baths while old man winter slid his freezing fingers through New York City. His big break came when Arthur Page invited his father, Walter H. Page, to a luncheon with Harry. The elder Page saw the spark in Steger that lesser judges of talent had overlooked.

As a result of that conversation, Steger was hired at Doubleday, Page & Company and Harry devoted the rest of his life to the influential publishing firm.

Even in New York City, Steger continued to stumble into associates from his days in Austin. In the Breslin Hotel, Harry came face to face with Eleanor Brackenridge, a friend that he had also met in London where Eleanor was traveling with Paris, Texas native, Miss Emma Pryor.

Meanwhile, Bedichek continued to stumble in his quest for meaningful employment. Bedi wrote that his school teaching days were over, although he had no other solid prospects.

It was on October 21, 1908 that Steger penned a few words to Bedichek that eventually resulted in this manuscript, The Short Story of Harry Peyton Steger. In one of the middle rooms of the Fannin County Museum of History is a simple note stuck to the wall. The clues within that note turned out to be even better than I had hoped the day it froze me in my tracks. The letter reads....

Dear Bedi,

It's mean of me not to loosen up and send you a bit of Heine or at least my interpretation of Tolstoy. Every night finds me resolute to do one or the other; but the weary world is heavy for me and I sleep.

Geronimo has a story within his rotten hide. "The Chief" doesn't think it can be gotten out o' him. What would it cost you to go over there? I can sell the story for you twice, I am practically sure. (1) A Sunday story and (2) a magazine sketch. If you go, get some pictures of the old fellow and as much as you can in the way of a statement of fact. Find out, too, whether he has ever been written up before or not. It will probably vary. It's not often you get hold of a thing like Geronimo. He's news.

Do you remember a boy at Bonham -- Erwin Smith by name --who played cowboy all the time? He is making an artistic record with the camera of cowboy life that I believe will be of prime value. I go up to Boston -- where he is now an art student -- this week to go over material.

Yours,
Harry.

(After reading this note, my original intention was to write a 200-word tribute in memory of one of the most astute graduates in the history of Bonham High School, which is the primary reason for what turned out to be a most inappropriate title.)

Chapter 27

In our last installment, Harry Peyton Steger was on his way to Boston to visit an old friend from Fannin County, Erwin E. Smith, who happened to be studying sculpture in Boston during the fall of 1908.

In a letter to Roy Bedichek, Steger asks "Bedi" if he remembers a boy from Bonham who was always playing cowboy.

Of course, Steger and Bedichek had a long history dating back to their early years at The University of Texas, but it is remarkable that Erwin Smith and Bedichek evidently also knew each other as young men.

Bedichek, after an interesting sojourn to the territory of New Mexico, would go on to be the driving force behind UIL as we know it today. Steger would take his place as a rising star in East Coast literary circles. And Erwin E. Smith was on his way to becoming one of the preeminent photographers of the rapidly fading American West.

Even in 1908, Steger knew Smith would be remembered for documenting a dying way of life--the life of a cowboy. Between 1905 and 1912, Smith used photography to capture the daily life of cowboys working roundups and breaking horses on the big ranches in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

According to the Amon Carter Museum website, "Smith's photographs, showing both the romance and harshness of cowboy life, are some of the best-known images of the southwestern range early in the last century."

One hundred years ago, Steger already understood the value af Smith's artistry with the lens.

"He [Smith] is making an artistic record with the camera of cowboy life that I believe will be of prime value," Steger predicted in a note to Bedichek back in 1908. "I go up to Boston--where he is now an art student--this week to go over material."

What Steger failed to mention is that, long before he was attending New York Metropolitan Opera performances, he enjoy playing cowboy himself.

In Life on the Texas Range, J. Evetts Haley tells how deeply Western culture affected Smith and Steger as they grew up in turn-of-the-century Fannin County. Many of the facts and quotes Haley uses comes from a Holland's Magazine article written in 1909 by Steger, called "A Texas Boy in Boston and his Western Work."

Among Erwin's closest boyhood friends was Harry Peyton Steger. Steger, who gained youthful fame in the literary world, recalled that when the two met at Bonham, Erwin "wore the nine-year-old boy's terrific adaptation of what his vivid imagination tells him cowboys wear."

These two youngsters grew up in Bonham together, in a country that was, as Steger said, "well out of the geography of cowboys, but well within the circle of true Western atmosphere."

On Saturdays the Bonham square was crowded with covered wagons from the country. The heavy air buzzed with soft Texas voices, and tinkled as with tiny bells as many teams stood in their chain harness and persistently switched at flies. There were no cars, but boys then had horses.

Steger told of the times when he and Erwin, "constantly in a state of insulting challenge against those other presuming young gentlemen who owned steeds thought to be wind-speedy," rode through Bonham with abandon.

It was then a joyous thing for recklessly riding men of 12, imaginary six-shooters on their hips and the dangerous trail before them, to jog through the throng and then whip the air into a still breeze, full in their faces, as they raced for the open country, Harry Peyton on Lady Gray, pitted against Erwin proudly mounted on Sir Black.

Chapter 28

When we last checked in on Harry Peyton Steger, he was enduring the winter of 1907 in New York City, living off homemade pralines and figs sent from his family in Fannin County and bracing for a cold bath each morning in the cramped bathroom down the hall from the walk-up flat he now called home. There was rarely time or money for leisure. Harry was earning $1.50 a day to read and revise manuscripts for Frederick Stokes Company and his weary head hit the pillow by 9:00 p.m. every evening.

Career possibilities weren't exactly coming up roses for Steger's close friend Roy Bedichek, either. Steger and Bedichek had tramped across Europe in the summer of 1907 in hopes of establishing a news syndicate, and subsequently failed miserably.

Harry decided to make his stand in the East Coast publishing world, while Roy worked his way back to Texas.

Roy had tried his hand in real estate, farming and teaching; none had fulfilled the incessant yearning that, a decade earlier, had driven Bedichek to pen the following entry in his diary: "Today I was nineteen, I smoked my first cigar and I met a man who writes for a newspaper, and that's what I want to do."

As it turned out, the newspaper business was just a bicycle ride away for Bedichek. A very long bicycle ride.

One of the most fascinating features of Steger's story was how his job in the University of Texas registrar's office remained a central theme throughout his life.

The UT registrar, John Lomax, had hired two bright students, Steger and Bedichek, to assist in the office. The future Mrs. John Avery Lomax, Bess Brown, was one of the managing editors Steger answered to in his early days with the UT yearbook.

The future Mrs. Roy Bedichek, Lillian Greer, entered this story when she stepped into the registrar's office in 1899. The future Mrs. Harry Peyton Steger was still a decade away, however.

While this story primarily follows the short, but brilliant career of Steger, Lomax and Bedichek warrant their own story.

Bedichek would eventually become the driving force behind the University Interscholastic League as we know it now.

Lomax became a pioneering musicologist and folklorist, probably best known today for discovering a remarkable 12-string guitarist known as Lead Belly.

Steger would rejuvenate the career of O. Henry and earn a reputation as one of the brightest young publishers in the U.S.

For a time, Harry would fall, like everyone else it seems, into orbit around the magnetic personality of one of the most critically acclaimed writers in the country, Booth Tarkington.

"How I wish you knew this man Tarkington!" Steger wrote to Bedichek. "He is the most conspicuous literary figure in America--and a versatile, non-moral, friendly-age, lovable person. His bigness of body heart and mind makes those who get around him speedily take the position of a satellite, whether they will or not, whether they know it or no. Wilson [Harry Leon Wilson] and he are writing a play.

Wilson is a quiet, lonely, amiable fellow who gets Tarkington down here--away from the bottle--and patiently waits for the great man's mood to work. Then they 'collaborate.'

Tarkington has the fire, the spark and the conception of beautiful charm.

Wilson has the sane judgment of what will 'hit the audience' and so keeps the other man's art from being too perfect to pay."

And what did Pulitzer Prize-winning author Booth Tarkington think of Harry Peyton Steger, an 1897 graduate of Bonham High School?

"Harry Peyton Steger was the most splendid young man I have ever known," Tarkington wrote to Harry's father, Bonham attorney Thomas P. Steger. "If he had lived, he would have become the foremost publisher in America."

Chapter 29

In 1907, fortune was finally beginning to smile on one of the boys from the UT registrar's office.

John Lomax was the first to strike a vein.

From childhood, Lomax had collected the lyrics of old cowboy ballads. As a freshman at UT in 1895, Lomax showed this collection to his English professor and was promptly ridiculed for his efforts. With many educated Texans of the era focusing on academia at the expense of Lone Star State's rapidly disappearing heritage, call it a textbook case of being too close to the forest to see the trees.

Fate intervened in 1907 when Lomax attended Harvard University as a graduate student where renowned scholars Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge recognized the need to preserve the fading legacy of the American West.

So, while Steger was struggling through his first bitter New York winter, Lomax was about 190 miles to the northeast in Boston being encouraged to document his notes on the fading frontier.

The eventual book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, was published in 1910 and merited an introduction by none other than President Theodore Roosevelt.

While Lomax's first-year English professor at UT had rebuked this collection of lyrics so harshly that the humiliated freshman burned his collection, once the book was published Carl Sandburg observed that "The Buffalo Skinners" had a Homeric quality.

But, like Bedichek and Steger, Lomax would find it necessary to invent and reinvent himself time and time again.

Lomax took a job teaching English at Texas A&M in 1903 and then was hired to fill an administrative position at UT in 1910 where he continued his research and lectured. However, Lomax was fired in 1917 as the result of a dispute between Texas Governor James Ferguson and UT president Dr. R.E. Vinson.

In an interesting turn of events, Ferguson was impeached and Lomax was offered his job back. Instead, Lomax went into banking.

Along came the Depression.

Lomax found himself unemployed when the Dallas bank he worked for failed in 1931, but he suffered a much bigger loss that year when his wife Bess died. The couple had four children and now Lomax was raising the two that were still in school, including a 10-year-old daughter. He was 65, grieving over the death of his wife and out of a job.

But John Avery Lomax's finest work was still ahead of him.

In 1933, Macmillan Publishing decided to fund a project Lomax had invested most of his life researching, an anthology of American ballads and folk songs. His first stop was at the Library of Congress. But, instead of finding realms of written and recorded material, Lomax discovered that no one had the time or expertise to document the historic ballads, blues and folk songs being played by musicians from Appalachia to prisons throughout the South.

John Avery Lomax spent the next decade recording traditional music with the best equipment he could load into his car. His most famous session occurred inside the walls of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola where Lomax discovered a talented, although troubled, 12-string guitarist that answered to "Lead Belly."

That was the summer of 1933.

For the next 18 months, John Avery Lomax and his son, Alan Lomax, traveled the South recording musicians, but none were more intriguing than Huddy Ledbetter, better known then and now as Lead Belly.

When Lead Belly got out of prison in 1934, he accompanied Lomax as a driver and also performed at lectures, but by the end of March 1935 it was clear the two men would not be able to work together. Lomax was afraid that Lead Belly would just drink up all the money he had coming to him, so Lomax began giving the money to Lead Belly's wife in installments. A lawsuit ensued, Lomax was required to pay Lead Belly a lump sum and the two men never worked together again.

John Avery Lomax died in 1947 of a stroke, leaving behind a body of work and a legacy that only grows more valuable with each passing year.

Lead Belly was on his first European tour in 1949 when he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease.

And Lead Belly's last concert?

Well, he sang gospel songs with his wife, Martha. It was a tribute to John Avery Lomax at the University of Texas.

Chapter 30

The short story of Harry Peyton Steger finds the BHS graduate and Rhodes Scholar bracing for the winter of 1908 in New York City and finally beginning to climb the career ladder.

The life of a writer, it turns out, really wasn't that different 100 years ago.

"Barry Benefield is one of the best men on the New York Times," Steger tells John Lomax. "I can afford to eat one meal a day where he can afford to eat two."

Steger's latest project had involved visiting his childhood friend Erwin E. Smith in Boston where Smith was studying sculpture.

Popular films and authors were churning out romanticized versions of cowboy life, while Smith felt compelled to accurately depict the daily work of cowboys on the few remaining big ranches out west before the large cattle operations were carved up into small farms and homesteads. Steger could see the value of Smith's project.

"Do you remember a boy at Bonham--Erwin Smith by name--who played cowboy all the time?" Steger wrote and asked Bedichek. "He is making an artistic record with the camera of the cowboy life that I believe will be of prime value."

Today, the Amon Carter Museum maintains the Erwin E. Smith Collection. (http://www.cartermuseum.org/collections/smith/)

Steger had written articles about Smith's attempt to document an honest portrayal of a disappearing way of life, but evidently Lomax and Bedichek weren't impressed.

"You and Lomax jump on a fellow's article quite amusingly," Harry wrote to Bedichek. "The justice of your jump makes it no less amusing. You attack a serious effort and bring all your guns to bear; but the thing you shoot at is a flimsy, thin fabric put together overnight by an overworked man who has long since a subway complexion, a telephone voice, and a noisy, restaurant appetite.

"You know how adaptable I always was. You raise the quibble over my statement over the poems you and Lomax visited upon me in B Hall. It is immaterial whether they were yours or Browning's. You and he took yourselves more to heart than you ever did Browning; and he was least important to your souls when you declaimed and adored him.

"You, both of you, have a literary finish and a fertility of reference to which I shall never mount; so let it go at that. You have no call to pick flaws in my logic when I have never laid logic before you. Get out of the dust heap, thou picture of impotent rage, and cease to shake thy seditious fist in the face of the spent, unseeing Rockefeller.

"If I thought either of you, myself, or both of us, strong enough to fly away and be happy, last Friday would be my landlady's final day of reckoning; but we tried it, you and I, and failed miserably. We never approached the pinnacle where money is naught. You are not less compromising than me now.

"Are you not in Eddy, where your people are, and because your people are? Are you freer in mind, soul or body, than I? If you sadden at the thought of my joining a class of expedient-servers and time-servers, what bigness of soul is it that keeps you in Eddy and there fires you to anger at the Standard Oil Company and to aversion for Rockefeller's wealth?

"Come on, you dear, damned fool, and be half as strong as your utterances. Then I'll leave the pay-roll and the typesetters and go with you into a rarer air.

"You are the only chance I ever had; and you are not less a slave than I. Live three months jobless in New York and friendless; then live one month jobless. This obliterates the past, even Shaw.

"Do you remember how, when you roamed off into freedom, my soul cried out that Bedi had struck the gyves from him. And then you came back to Eddy because a house burned down or a sow littered. These are not reproaches nor counter-charges; but the lamentations of myself and yourself who thought ourselves free."

Harry

Chapter 31

The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger make note of several memorable Christmas holidays, as the young scholar made his way from Fannin County to Austin, Texas, then to Germany, then England and finally New York City.

Harry's first Christmas in the Big Apple was 1907. He had to write home and explain to his family that it wouldn't be right to accept any gifts because he couldn't afford to buy any.

"I shall not be able to make it home for Christmas," Harry wrote to his father, Bonham attorney Thomas P. Steger, on December 11, 1907. "Perhaps later in the year I shall drop south for a week or so; that is, if I get to where I can pay my own transportation charges back again. I assure you I do miss the possession of money. The pecans still hold out. They are fine. Don't, don't, don't think of sending me any Christmas presents, any of you. Make it a card. That is what I shall have to do. Seriously."

Things were about to change.

By the Christmas season of 1908, Harry was well on his way to earning a reputation as one of the brightest young publishers on the East Coast, thanks to his position as literary advisor for Doubleday, Page & Company.

Earlier in Steger's life, every thought seemed to work its way into his copious letters. Now every waking moment was filled with applying his understanding of people and literature to the vast resources available at Doubleday, Page & Company. The paradox with telling this story is that, just as we reach the most interesting phase of Steger's life, there isn't any mention in his collection of letters that tells when he was actually hired at Doubleday, Page & Company, when or how he met his wife, or when he first began piecing together the story behind his new firm's mysterious short-story writer, O. Henry.

Steger's letters indicate he was still employed by Frederick Stokes Company in May of 1908. Responsibilities were increasing dramatically, although the salary was still a touchy subject.

"I am now the chief executive in the office, having entire charge of the internal administration of affairs," Harry wrote to his family on May 3, 1908. "I have under me now three stenographers, several office boys and a varying number of girls who address our circulars and pamphlets. In addition to this executive work, I write our literary bulletins for the newspapers, interview authors who come into the office with manuscripts and draw up suggestions for advertising schemes of different sorts. My salary is, of course, much smaller than I might get in teaching; even smaller than I could command as a freelance journalist; but there is on the other side the great advantage of practical experience and intimate contact with the business of journalism. I am as much an idealist as I ever was, and work hard because I love my work. Last week Arthur Page invited me to luncheon at The Vagabonds' Club. This is an association of magazine editors and writers, artists, etc. The guest on the day I lunched there was Andrew Carnegie."

But there was more to this letter than describing the workday.

These were unsettled times in New York City, as a quarter of a million people in the city struggled to find work. A bomb exploded during a demonstration by socialists at Union Square on March 28, 1908 and the incident made headlines in newspapers across the country.

Back in Fannin County, Thomas Steger believes he spots Harry in a newspaper photograph from the disturbance that left a would-be bomber dead at Union Square.

"Although I am undoubtedly socialistic in my tendencies and would have been at Union Square if I had not been so busy in the office, I was as a matter of fact not present, and so the likeness of me that Dad has called to my attention is an accident and not a photograph," Harry wrote home. "That whole affair, by the way, was a sad fiasco on the part of the police. It was not intended in any way to be a violent demonstration. Real socialists are very mild people, full of dreams for the betterment of humanity and full of sympathy for the downtrodden members of a capitalistic society. The poor fanatic who wanted to kill the police only succeeded in killing himself. Evidence shows that he was absolutely without connections with any of the socialistic organizations and was only, in his poor, demented soul, trying privately to express his own disgust."

Harry Peyton Steger’s big break occurred some time during the summer of 1908 when his entry into an elite circle of East Coast publishers came as a result of Steger's enduring friendship with Arthur Page.

Harry’s literary skills intrigued Arthur’s father, Walter Page, enough that he hired the displaced Texan. For a young man of Steger's ilk, with dreams of making his mark in the publishing world, there could be no better mentor than Walter Page.

The senior Page was partner and vice president of Doubleday, Page & Co. Although The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger don’t give an exact date that Steger went to work for Doubleday, Page & Co. as a literary advisor, there was an interesting letter to Lomax on September 17, 1908. It seems Dr. S.E. Mezes was paying a visit to Walter Page when one of the men happened to mention Harry Peyton Steger.

“My name chanced to come up in their conversation, whereupon Page said: ‘He’s upstairs,’ and sent for me,” Steger relayed to Lomax. “We had a chat of some 30 minutes and Dr. Mezes sped onward to St. Louis where he was to meet Dr. Houston.”

Walter Page, in addition to being a noted journalist and publisher, would soon be President Woodrow Wilson’s choice as ambassador to the United Kingdom during World War I. Dr. Mezes was president of the University of Texas. Dr. Houston was the former president of Texas A&M and later the president of UT. Houston had written the Bonham school board in 1902 to implore them to hire Harry Steger to teach Latin.

Dr. Houston left the University of Texas in 1908 to serve as chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis. President Wilson tapped David F. Houston to be Secretary of Agriculture in 1913 and Houston later served as Secretary of Treasury in 1921.
Not bad company for Steger, a boy that grew up walking the dirt streets of Bonham.

Chapter 32

New York City was searching for its identity in 1908.

Unemployment was rampant, there was talk of anarchy and, worst of all, brazen women were daring to smoke in public.

The first two problems were bad enough; the third was unbearable. City government quickly sprang into action by passing the Sullivan Ordinance.

NO PUBLIC SMOKING BY WOMEN NOW proclaimed the New York Times headlines on January 21, 1908.

The subtitle questioned whether or not women would be reasonable enough to follow orders:

The Sullivan Ordinance, to be Passed by the Aldermen Today, Makes It Illegal. WILL THE LADIES REBEL As the Ladies of New Amsterdam Did When Peter Stuyvesant Ordered Them to Wear Broad Flounces?

Will the ladies rebel?

Gosh, if you let 'em smoke, the next thing you know they'll be trying to vote! Evidently this is a textbook example of a writer that didn't get out enough. Rebel, they did.

New York's finest hustled Katie Mulkahie off to the hoosegow for firing up a smoke January 22, 1908. New York Mayor Seth Low vetoed the discriminatory legislation two weeks later, although it would be 1920 before women could legally vote in the U.S. For those keeping score, when it came to women's suffrage we were several years behind Denmark, but well ahead of Djibouti, if that is of any consolation.

Meanwhile Harry Peyton Steger's standard of living was improving dramatically in 1908, thanks to his new position as literary advisor at Doubleday, Page & Company, but, just like New York City at the turn of the century, Harry was searching for his identity, too. Old friends were being usurped by a new breed.

"It is to my mind the most galling irony of life that associations cannot be kept up independent of time and space," Harry wrote to John Lomax. "I have now an entirely new set. They live, most of them, in New Jersey and write books and magazine stories. A half dozen of them sell pictures they paint of sway-backed, thin-hipped girls. A quaint crew and not the type with which we used to foregather. It was more the sort of exit that you or Bedichek should have had than I."

Just as Steger was beginning to gain a foothold in New York City, another Fannin County boy was drawing crowds in Boston. Erwin E. Smith moved to Massachusetts in 1906 to study under the direction of prominent sculptor Bella Lyon Pratt. While Smith is known today for producing a large volume of historic photography depicting cowboys hard at work in the early 20th century, the Honey Grove native was also a talented sculptor that earned a prize from the Boston Art Institute for his bust of a Sioux Indian.
But then, just as it remains today, it was Smith's photography that caught the public's eye.

In 1908, a Boston gallery displayed 40 of Erwin Smith's enlarged photographs of life out West and the exhibit was stopping crowds in downtown Boston. Two articles about Smith appeared in the Boston Herald.

Erwin Smith's childhood friend, Harry Peyton Steger, recognized the artistic and historic contribution Smith was making.

Speaking of Smith's photographs, according to the Handbook of Texas, Steger noted, "Whether the man who took them succeeds as a painter and sculptor, he has already done a work of great importance."

The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger only contains four entries for 1908; two missives were mailed to Harry's parents in Bonham, the aforementioned letter went to John Lomax and one was mailed to Roy Bedichek, although that note probably rubbed salt in his old friend's wounds; Harry was now enjoying the fruits of his labor, while Bedichek had several lean years yet to come.

For the remainder of his days, Steger would be consumed by his ambitious goal to make his mark in literature. Harry's every waking moment seemed to be divided between business luncheons, entertaining and recruiting writers at his bungalow in Freeport or traveling extensively on behalf of Doubleday, Page and Company.

"Some of his friends treated him as a sort of literary accoucheur, and depended on him to ease the births of their brain children, for they wrote and even wired him whenever they reached an awkward spot in the composition of a story," wrote playwright and humorist Montague Glass. "I remember once that in response to a telegram he journeyed as far south as Georgia to comfort a perplexed writer who was badly quagmired in the middle of a Saturday Evening Post serial. Another time he went to a western city and for several days sat outside the closed door of a writer's study to make sure that no intoxicants entered until the work in hand was finished."

"Lest anyone think these anecdotes trivial, let me say they are related to illustrate the simplicity and unaffected goodness of a man who in culture and real ability stood head and shoulders above the stilted, self-conscious little writing world of New York, where even professional humorists and illustrators for comic papers wear horn spectacles and the unbending expression of a hanging judge," Glass continued.

"I remember Harry at the public dinners and other revels of our efficiently organized New York Bohemia. There he sat while the craftsmen of the graphic and literary arts advertised themselves with speech, stunt and story--a twinkle in his boyish eye, his hair rumpled up, his shirt-front bulging, like an indulgent grandfather at a children's birthday party. He was, in fact, the foster-father of these spoiled literary children. I once accompanied Harry to the New York office of a London Publisher and witnessed negotiations with the publisher's representative, Mr. Smith, for the American rights to a popular English novel."

"Observe the behavior of Smith," Steger relayed in hushed tones to Glass before the two men entered the publisher's office. “In about 10 minutes he will touch the hand-bell on his desk after the fashion of the attaché in the third act of Sardou's Diplomacy and he will ask for the last London mail. The intention is to put the matter at once on such a high plane that I ought to be ashamed to dicker about the difference of a few dollars."

Glass and Steger were scarcely seated before Smith rang the bell and the stenographer brought in a handful of letters.

"Smith carefully selected one letter and, throughout the negotiations, he referred to it at intervals by way of refreshing his memory," Glass recalled. "Moreover, he quoted from it long sentences, tending to prove that both his principles and his principals forbade the acceptance of less than one and a half times the amount of Harry's offer. Even when he was not reading from it, he held it in his hand and it continued to be a splendid source of corroborative evidence until the stenographer entered and told him that a lady in the outer office wanted to speak to him. When he left the room, he omitted to take the letter with him and Harry pounced on it immediately."

It read:

We store your furs
Where moths can't reach them
For 2% of their value
Write us a postcard today
Our representative will call tomorrow

Chapter 33

Everything that had occurred in Harry Peyton Steger’s life up to this point, it would seem, was simply to prepare him for the year at hand.

1909 was probably the year Harry met his wife-to-be, it was most assuredly the year that Steger became inextricably involved in managing the career of William Sydney Porter, a reclusive and mysterious writer the world knew only as O. Henry, and it was also the year the responsibility of editor-in-charge of Short Stories magazine was turned over to the Bonham High School graduate.

Impressive, particularly considering Steger was only 25 or 26 at the time, and remarkable, perhaps even fated, when added to the fact he had arrived in New York City alone and practically penniless in the fall of 1907.

Playwright and friend Montague Glass asked Harry how, on top of reviving the career of O. Henry and republishing much of the well-known writer’s early work in collective form, he could possibly find time to devote to Short Stories and the numerous writers vying for a spot in that magazine.

“I can do it with my left hind foot,” Steger replied, showing his Fannin County roots, “before breakfast in the morning.”

Actually, Steger’s position guiding the content of Short Stories complimented his post as literary advisor at Double, Page and Company perfectly. As a writer badly bruised from rejection after rejection by editors and publishers he found none too impressive during his first few difficult months in New York, Harry now battled tooth and nail on behalf of dozens of aspiring authors, recruiting the cream of the crop for Doubleday, Page and Company and even going so far as to recommend the best of the remaining writers to other publishing houses.

When all else failed, there was always a place in Short Stories for a wordsmith.

“As little importance as he attached to this part of his work, he nonetheless made it inure to the benefit of his friends,” Montague Glass would explain later. “Short Stories was the ship’s graveyard of many a derelict manuscript—my own among others, nor do I with due modesty believe it was the worse on that account, for many of these stories had been rejected by editor after editor only upon the ground that they might offend advertisers. And at that time, Short Stories carried no advertising.”

According to Glass, Harry’s acceptance of stories ran something like this.

My dear Mont:

I have concluded to bury ‘Mr. Lomedico’ in the columns of Short Stories, and a check for it will be mailed to you just when your patience is about to become exhausted.

Yours Sincerely,
H.P.S.

At the same time, Doubleday, Page and Company asked Steger if he might be able to accomplish a task that seemed years overdue -- provide publicity for acclaimed short-story writer, O. Henry.

No one had managed to get a photograph of the shadowy author in a decade; he refused recognition of any sort, preferring to maintain a bohemian lifestyle that allowed him to weave unnoticed through the four million inhabitants of New York City, for they provided an endless source of plots and characterizations that were always at play in the mind of William Sydney Porter.

Steger was the ideal man to bring O. Henry out of hiding.

Harry came at this project with a writer's heart. On top of that, Harry understood the lifestyle. Half a century before the Beat generation and 60 or 70 years before the term hippies was coined, free-spirited souls that placed artistic expression far above status and wealth were known as bohemians. The description was first used in France in the late 19th century in reference to a large number of creative and artistic nonconformists arriving from Bohemia in the Czech Republic.

That same description had been applied to Steger in the first part of 1907 when he gave up his Rhodes Scholarship and decided to try and make a living as a writer in London.

Again, Montague Glass provides proper narrative for this period in Steger's life.

"It seems that after he left Oxford," Glass recalled, "he went up to London and sought a position with a publishing firm, and to eke out expenses, Harry rented two rooms in Bloomsbury, which he furnished with second-hand armchairs and a sofa or two. There Harry invited Oxford undergraduates to occupy for the night whenever they overstayed the last train and the tariff was six-pence for an armchair and a shilling for a sofa. A saucepan of porridge always simmered on the hob of the fireplace and a liberal helping was included in the charge for a night's lodging. The door was never locked and that the lodgers should come in and go out quietly and should leave the six-pence on the furniture occupied, were the only two rules, neither of which seems to have been strictly enforced; for, at the end of a month, when Harry was dispossessed because of the nightly riots on his premises, three shillings and sixpence had been collected as against ten shillings' worth of porridge consumed."

So, Harry had a thing or two in common with the elusive writer he now found himself pursuing, although Porter never deserted his bohemian lifestyle and by this point Steger would be best defined as a bourgeois bohemian -- someone who had now managed to parlay creativity into a lucrative trade.

What Steger didn't realize at the time was that one of the best known writers in the U.S. had a good reason for the low profile; it was to be a secret that Steger would only fully comprehend in 1912, two years after William Sydney Porter had died of tuberculosis. That was when Harry was in Austin, Texas going through documents tucked away in the attic of the house that had been the home of William Sydney Porter and his frail wife, Athol Porter, in the early 1890s. Harry was doing research for what was intended to be the official biography of Porter.

Surely, as Steger read and reread the words, the pieces came together; Harry finally understood his friend, Sydney Porter.

The personable and socially active Austinite of the late 19th century had disappeared under the crushing weight of a life that crumbled down around him.

Out of the debris walked O. Henry.

Chapter 34

In 1909, The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger contain correspondence between Steger and Harold Abrams in Dallas. Apparently Abrams was considering a "journalistic endeavor" and he wanted a little advice from Harry.

"You may look to me for whatever help I may be able to give you," Steger promised.

Evidently Jean Baptiste Adoue, a man that would later be elected mayor of Dallas, had spent several days with Harry the previous week and this project had been discussed at length.

"If you are going to do a book review," Steger instructed Abrams, "for the love of your fellow men veer as far away as you can from the perfunctory and stereotype. I estimate there are three or four different kinds of book reviews: 1. Everybody should read this book. 2. This is a book everybody should read. 3. Nobody should fail to read this book. Some reviewers think they are under an obligation to the publisher in return for an editorial copy of the book to perpetrate something of this sort. This is in great confidence, for the brood would turn and rend me."

Steger suggested substance over frills.

"Let it be as unadorned as a Quaker maiden," Harry advised with typical descriptive flair.

Steger also warned against the primary cause of demise from similar projects.

"They tell me," Harry relayed to Abrams, "that the greatest cause of the failure of the numerous magazines that do fail every year is a lack of a little more capitol."

Reoccurring shortages of capitol were also famously plaguing one of Doubleday, Page and Company's most lucrative accounts and one of the country's top short-story authors, William Sydney Porter. Writing under the pseudonym O. Henry, Porter was now raking in about $800 per story and he completed over 600 stories during the eight years he frequented Hell's Kitchen, riverfronts, the Bowery and market places of New York City--Baghdad on the Subway, as he called the burgeoning metropolis.

Yet, despite Porter's prodigious output, publishers were accustomed to a steady stream of complaints from the writer in regard to his ability to function with an empty purse.

Looking back, maybe the only time trickle-down economics ever truly functioned as promised was when Porter got paid. Every hard-luck story that crossed his path got a hand-out, and Porter's haunts were full of people struggling to survive. Every bartender that could turn out his favorite drink was rewarded for his effort.

A story was told that once Steger showed up at an appointed meeting place up with an advance payment after a plea from Porter. They passed a homeless man on the first corner and Porter tossed the fellow a $20 Double Eagle gold piece. The surprised panhandler even chased after his new benefactor to make sure this overly generous gift wasn't a mistake, but Porter waved him off.

When the tide came in for Porter, everyone's boat got a lift.

Put yourself in Harry's place. The phone had rang about 10:00 p.m., and that late hour almost made it a sure bet that either something was wrong back in Fannin County or Porter was in dire straits again.

"Say, uh, Colonel," the voice on the other end of the line began.

No doubt Steger would have breathed a sigh of relief that at least this call wouldn't bring bad news from home.

"I'm hard-pressed to come up with $86.14 by nine o'clock tomorrow morning," Porter confided, "and it occurred to me that perhaps you could meet me at 10:45 this evening for a financial infusion and literary counsel."

According to the one and only newspaper reporter ever invited to interview Porter, George MacAdam of the New York Times, this was standard modus operendi, with Porter asking for to-the-penny sums, often ending in 14, that were needed at an exact time. It seemed less like stepping out to help a friend than stepping into a plot. According to MacAdam, Steger had already become Porter's bookkeeper, banker and financial guardian.

On one hand, it is hard not to try and imagine Steger's face, after hurriedly dressing and racing to the aid of his friend and client, only to watch Porter toss a sizeable handout to the first hard luck case that crossed his path.

At the same time, Harry may not have even blinked. Not only was Steger an easy mark in his own right, but he was beginning to package and market the collective work of O. Henry in a way that would reap rewards for Doubleday, Page & Company for decades to come.

This was no time to quibble over $20.

Evidently, Doubleday, Page & Company turned the management of William Sydney Porter over to Steger when Harry was only 25. That would seem to be the case, because MacAdam's article appeared in the New York Times on April 4, 1909 and the article came after several weeks of trying to track down the elusive author. Steger had turned 26 on March 2.

The time that Steger and MacAdams spent attempting to corner their prey gave the reporter time to learn more about his subject. Steger told of how Porter had disappeared for a couple of weeks before calling one night for another advance.

"Hey, where in the world are you?" Steger blurted out.

Harry had stopped by Porter's place at the Caledonia several times to no avail. His secret knock had echoed in the silent, empty room.

"Come visit me at the Chelsea," Porter explained.

Hotel Chelsea, built in 1883, has been home to everyone from Mark Twain to Jimi Hendrix.

Steger arrived to find Porter occupying a six-room suite and wearing a blue dressing gown.

"Please excuse the negligee, but my clothes are all being cleaned," Porter offered as Harry plopped down in a chair across from the author's writing desk.

"Help me understand what we are doing here?" Steger asked.

"Well, I owe them so much at the Caledonia that it is weighing heavy on my pen," Porter said.

"So, you have given up your place at the Caledonia?" Steger said, mostly to himself, as he struggled to apply logic to this surprising development. He heard himself nervously tapping the desk with a finger and slid his hands into his trouser pockets.

"Oh no, I've got those too," Porter shrugged. "I just couldn't write there under the awkward burden of indebtedness. I'm certain this fresh perspective will result in a couple of quick stories, allowing me to square up and move back under more pleasant circumstances."

The irony of this situation is that a few short years before Steger had been on the verge of being named a Rhodes Scholar before he had learned the basics of balancing a checking account.

William Sydney Porter was the most unusual of literary figures. In an era when writers captured the public's fancy like no other -- this was still a couple of years before Mary Pickford elevated the role of actors in silent films with her first role in 1912 and the Golden Age of Radio wouldn’t begin until the 1920s -- no one could convince Porter to cash in on his growing reputation. He wanted no awards; allowed no photographs; granted no interviews.

All Porter seemed to really need was a chance to create the stories that kept him alive. The people in the street were oxygen to the breathless writer. New York City embraced its devoted scribe as a working-class hero.

Still, even Porter had to acknowledge glaring flaws in this strategy.
Newspapers had decided that Porter's notoriety could be used to help them sell a few extra editions, one way or another.

The worst example was when "that infernal paper in Pittsburgh" featured an article that said a delirious O. Henry burst into the office wearing filthy, tattered clothes, his stringy unwashed hair swirling as the disheveled author waved a handful of unsold manuscripts in the faces of employees at work in the room.

According to the Pittsburgh article, O. Henry had bummed a dollar from a stunned staff writer before storming out of the room.

It would seem that Porter had actually been in the Pittsburgh newspaper office because, during his official interview with Steger and MacAdams, Porter stated, "Why, I was the best-dressed man in the office, with the possible exception of the editor whose shoes were perhaps a bit more pointed than mine."

About a year passed before someone showed Porter the defamatory newspaper article and the incensed author made a special trip to Pittsburgh. Arriving at the office, Porter handed one of his cards to the secretary. After a minute or two of uncomfortable silence, Porter found himself standing face to face with the unscrupulous "libeler of his solvency."

Staring straight into the man's eyes, with measured breath, Porter exclaimed "Sir, I have come to whip you!"

"But wasn't it a bully good story?" asked the editor with shocked indignation.

The man had unknowingly hit the proverbial nail on the head.

In 1894-1895, Porter had published a humorous weekly in Austin, Texas called Rolling Stone that specialized in satirical articles and sketches, both done by Porter, that poked fun at well-known people.

What goes around comes around. Porter had just been poked.

But any reminder of those long lost days when his wife Athol would be waiting at home after a day’s work in the General Land Office and their daughter, Margaret, would fall asleep in his arms must have been a soothing respite for the lonely writer. To borrow a phrase from the old short-story master himself, Porter’s eyes must have, just for a breathless moment, gleamed the faint protest of cheated youth unconscious of its loss.

Athol, Margaret and William Sydney Porter in the early 1890s.
The Pittsburgh editor was caught off guard by the sudden change. With tilted head and furrowed brow, he watched Porter’s grimace fade to a peaceful smile.

Porter admitted that the article was, indeed, a very interesting read and he bought the editor lunch.

Editor's Note: This section of the Steger series depends heavily upon the one official interview William Sydney Porter allowed. However, the interview produced two separate articles, one by George MacAdam for the New York Times and the other by Harry Peyton Steger that ran later in the Dallas News.

Chapter 35

It would appear Harry Peyton Steger had two interesting assignments in his first months as literary advisor Doubleday, Page & Company; one was to prioritize and then funnel the work of dozens of aspiring young writers into Short Stories magazine, while the other was to schedule an interview for short-story author O. Henry.

If he had only known all the facts relating to these tasks, surely Harry would have chuckled at the irony of the situation.

On one hand, scores of young, unknown writers anxiously sending in submissions to Short Stories were enthusiastically waiting to be recognized. On the other hand, O. Henry, was just rolling his eyes at Harry's request and hoping he wouldn’t be recognized.

Editing Short Stories magazine came as easy as drawing the next breath to Steger. But it turned out that coaxing his enigmatic prey out of the shadows would be a bit of a challenge. Steger was already sensing the contradictions and chasms that lay between O. Henry the writer and his creator, William Sydney Porter.

"While he lets his light shine brightly before all men," Steger noted, "he has kept himself hid under a bushel."

Steger also relayed a story about how Who's Who in America got in touch with O. Henry in order to include only the barest necessities about the author in their publication.

He declined.

"We'll have to rely, then, on such information as we can gather from other sources," Who's Who threatened, according to Steger.

"You're welcome," O. Henry said quietly as he eased the telephone down in its cradle.

The way Harry went about his assignment to provide long-sought publicity for Doubleday, Page & Company's top short story writer is evidence of the level of competence Steger brought to the job. Chosen to write the newspaper article was George MacAdam, a veteran New York Times feature writer who had, only a year before in 1908, covered The Greatest Auto Race on Earth -- an amazing six-month race that logged 22,000 miles from New York to Paris. MacAdam was a real pro.

So was the photographer.

Fortunately, William M. van der Weyde was not only a skilled professional photographer, but a very competent journalist, as well. His writing gives another rare glimpse into O. Henry and the man who was rapidly becoming the author's confidante, financier and friend, Harry Peyton Steger.

"How Harry Steger, of the Publishing House of Doubleday, Page & Company, ever persuaded O. Henry to sit for his photograph, and how he ever persuaded O. Henry to walk around to my studio from his quarters in the Caledonia, only two blocks away is a matter that must have been as astounding to Steger as it has always been to me and all the members of O.H.'s circle of friends," Van der Weyde wrote. "I asked Harry one day how in the world he succeeded in getting him to my studio."

"He kicked like a mustang in harness in the first place," Steger confided with a groan. "I was nearly an hour getting him dressed and out on the street, and then an hour was consumed walking the two blocks to your studio. The last lap of the route, pulling and pushing him up your stairs was, of course, the worst. My arms ached from it."

"I was expecting Harry and O. Henry," the photographer explains, "because Steger had written me the day before apprising me of their coming. Steger's note is so characteristic of the big, whole-hearted Texan who wrote it, and who was later to become O. Henry's literary executor."

Van der Weyde even included Harry's letter.

I'm going to bring O. Henry up to your studio at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning to have you photograph him Van der Weyde style. He hates being pictured, but the only photograph there is of him--except a couple of miserable snapshots--is a fiercely bad thing made years ago, and we must have a new one--your sort. I'll bring O.H. myself. Go at him gently or he'll jump the traces.

Harry Peyton Steger

George MacAdam was having a much more difficult time. MacAdam found every trail cold, even though he came armed with an official letter from Doubleday, Page & Company, which logic would suggest should have the same effect as shaking salt on a magpie's tail -- the letter would compel O. Henry to grant his wish.
Instead, O.H. flew the coop.

At first MacAdam was turned away by a litany of excuses--too busy, trying to meet deadline, previous engagement. Even after enlisting Steger's assistance, it still took six weeks to finally corner O. Henry.

Suddenly, Harry couldn't get O. Henry to return a letter. The staff at the Caledonia didn't recall seeing their tenant, which didn't mean much because of the writer's unusual schedule, and even Harry's secret knock went unanswered.

Finally, the publisher's needs and the author's desires found a common denominator -- O.Henry needed money.

"Mornin' Colonel," O. Henry said when Steger answered the phone. "Say, word has reached me that it would be in my best interest if I can present one of my debtors with the $54.14 I owe him before six o'clock tomorrow evening."

O. Henry did his best to sound nonchalant, but Steger knew his friend had been dodging him and he also knew the request must have had some urgency to bring O. Henry out of hiding.

"Tell you what," Steger said after a second to remember the lines he had rehearsed. "How about we make it an even $60 and we'll deliver the funds tomorrow at noon."

It was the sort of compromise that allowed both men to function cordially in their primary capacities as writer and publisher.

The implication of the plural pronoun wasn't lost on O. Henry.

A moment of silence followed.

"That can be arranged," he said softly and the phone line went dead.

Chapter 36

New York Times feature writer George MacAdam and Harry Peyton Steger surely were more than a bit apprehensive as they walked into the Caledonia in late winter of 1909. After all, they had been hot on the trail of short-story writer O. Henry for almost two months before getting the green light to interview the reclusive author.

Harry stepped up to the door and delivered his secret knock -- one loud rap followed by a pair of quick taps -- a sure sign desirables lingered on the doorstep.

O. Henry opened the door.

"I've been trailing you for weeks!" the Times writer blurted out.

"I know you have," O. Henry sighed as he sank into an easy chair.

"And now you'll admit that you're cornered?" MacAdams joked.

"Afraid I'll have to," O. Henry said with a shrug. "Are you going to draw a pen-picture of me?"

MacAdams admitted that was his intention.

"Then let me ask you to say that I look like a healthy butcher," O. Henry requested. "Just that and no adornments."

Piece of cake, MacAdams thought as he looked over the broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced man, a man with none of the pale aesthetics of the literary lions that regularly disported themselves at local afternoon tea parties.

And so began the only interview O. Henry ever allowed.

"Did you go to college?" MacAdams began.

"No, that is one handicap I went into this work of writing without," O. Henry remarked. "As a youngster, I always had an intense desire to be an artist. It wasn't until I was 21 that I developed the idea that I'd like to write. After about a year writing a daily column for the Houston Post I got an opportunity to exercise both of these opportunistic yearnings. William Cowper Brann had been publishing his Iconoclast in Austin and failed. I bought the whole plant, name and all, for $250 and started a ten-page weekly paper. Being an editor, I resigned, of course, from the Post. Brann had gone to Waco. He wrote and asked for his title, the Iconoclast back. I didn't think much of it and let him have it. My paper was accordingly christened the Rolling Stone. But the Rolling Stone began to show unmistakable signs of getting mossy. Moss and I were never friends, so I said goodbye to the Rolling Stone."

"And after the Rolling Stone?" asked MacAdams.

"Then a friend of mine who had a little money --- wonderful thing, isn't it, a friend with a little money -- suggested that I join him on a trip to South America whither he was going into the fruit business," O. Henry recalled. "Well, turns out it takes a long time and costs a lot of money to understand how the little banana grows, and we didn't have quite enough of the latter."

"See any revolutions?" MacAdams asked.

"No, but I discovered plenty of the finest rum you ever saw," O. Henry said as the memory coaxed just the hint of a smile. "Most of the time I spent knocking around the consuls and refugees."

The banana plantation faded into oblivion and O. Henry said he drifted back to Texas where he was able to stand about two weeks working in a soda shop in Austin.

"They made me draw soda water and I gave up," the author recalled.

"After the soda fountain -- then what?" MacAdams questioned as he put together a timeline.

"Then came the high ball stage," O. Henry answered. "I went to New Orleans and took up literary work in earnest. I sent stories to newspapers, weeklies and magazines over the country.

Rejections? Lordy, I should say I did have rejections, but I never took them to heart. I just stuck new stamps on the stories and sent them out again. And in their journeying to and fro all the stories finally landed in offices where they found a welcome. As for rejections, take The Emancipation of Billy, as good a story as I ever wrote--it was rejected no less than 13 times. But, like all the rest, it finally landed."

The author told MacAdam and Steger that his now famous nom de plume, O. Henry, had been derived from an article in a newspaper in his days in New Orleans. After the high ball days along the Louisiana coast, O. Henry drifted north to Pittsburgh and then, after all his travels and travails, it seemed fate smiled for a moment on the struggling writer. Gilman Hall, the editor of Ainslee's Magazine, wrote and offered O. Henry $100 a story for up to 12 stories a year if he would relocate to New York City.

"That was a time when my name had no market value," O. Henry pointed out with obvious appreciation to Hall's discerning eye. "Since I've come to New York, my prices have gone up. Now I get $750 for a story that I would have been happy to sell for $75 during my days in Pittsburgh."

MacAdams and Steger wanted to know what advice the nation's top short-story author would give to young writers.

"I'll give you the whole secret of short-story writing," O. Henry replied. "Here it is. Rule #1 -- write stories that please you. There is no rule #2."

What about writers block?

"You've got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people and feel the rush and throb of real life," O. Henry explained. "You can't write a story that's got any life in it by sitting at a writer's table and thinking."

"But whatever you do, don't flash a pencil and notebook," the author added. "Either they will shut up or become a Hall Caine."

The real genius that lay beneath the veneer known as O. Henry came to the surface in another observation he gave freely. The heart of any story isn't the setting, but in capturing an honest glimpse into human nature -- the motivation that lies beneath all of our actions.

"Just change Twenty-Third Street in one of my New York Stories to Main Street, rub out the Flatiron Building and put in a town hall," O. Henry suggested, "and the story will fit just as truly in any town. At least, I hope this can be said of my stories. So long as the story is true to human nature, all you need do is change the local color to make it fit any town, north, south, east or west. If you have the right kind of eye -- the kind that can disregard high hats, cutaway coats and trolley cars -- you can see all the characters in the Arabian Nights parading up and down Broadway at midday."

MacAdam's article was published April 6, 1909 in the New York Times and Steger's version ran shortly thereafter in the Dallas News.

O. Henry, in retrospect, was rather economical with the truth, although he more than made up the difference with the wit and the road-weary wisdom of a seasoned traveler. Yes, whatever it lacked in facts was more than made up by O. Henry's entertaining delivery. It may have been the only interview he allowed, but O. Henry had a little practice telling this story.

It was the only one he dared tell his little girl.

Chapter 37

The year was 1909.

Geronimo would die February 17 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

O. Henry wasn't far behind, as the troubled writer continued to drink himself into an early grave.

John Lomax had completed his master's at Harvard and returned to College Station where he was teaching English at Texas A&M and putting together an anthology, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.

Evidently, Harry Peyton Steger's duties at Doubleday, Page & Company that year included playing tennis in the mornings with Booth Tarkington and then escorting Mrs. Tarkington for sunny afternoon drives.

Roy Bedichek was soaking up a little sunshine himself. Bedichek was on a bicycle, riding out of a small town near Waco and bound for El Paso, 800 miles away.

That distance, though considerable to say the least, doesn't reveal the challenges he faced. One hundred years ago, there wasn't even a road to follow much of the way. But there was a trail that ran along side the railroad tracks that Bedichek knew would eventually lead him into El Paso.

At first, torrential rains turned the primitive country roads into a muddy mess, forcing Bedichek to retreat to a hotel in Bartlett for almost a week. Then, after San Antonio, it was sand, not mud that slowed the bicycle trek.

Much of the time, Bedichek spent pushing his bike along the tracks. A chance meeting with a farmer might lead to a welcome trade for both participants -- a day or two of work for a few precious square meals. A deep hole in a creek might lead to a day or two of fishing.

Steger had waxed poetic in letters to his dear friend "Bedi" about daring to escape to a place where there was no money and no need for money. At times an intoxicating siren song from Tristan da Cunha, the most remote volcanic archipelago in the world, seemed to lure both men to the tiny, isolated South Atlantic islands midway between the tip of South Africa and South America.

All the while, there was a very sparsely populated territory just to the west of Texas, a mystical desert land of cactus and mountains that would become home to writer D.H. Lawrence and artist Georgia O'Keefe in the 1920s. Bedichek had set out for the New Mexico Territory over a decade before either Lawrence or O'Keefe set their sights on the Land of Enchantment and surely neither the writer or the artist had a journey that could compare.

Bedichek had to survive by his wits as he traversed the vast and barren West Texas landscape -- his bicycle odometer had registered 965 miles when the odyssey was over.

It was exhilarating to leave behind the constraints of civilization and, along with it, the dread of being caged for life.

And Bedichek's heart raced as he eased his bicycle out onto the framework of the highest railroad bridge in America and looked down at the Pecos River hundreds of feet below.

Built in 1892 by the Phoenix Bridge Company of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, the rails of the high bridge were 321 feet above the Pecos River, making it the third highest railroad bridge in the world at the time. The 401-foot Garabit Viaduct in France was built in 1884 and the 336-foot Loa Viaduct in Bolivia was constructed in 1889.

It was more than a third of a mile across the metal viaduct structure. Bedichek had heard that trains would slow as they approached the bridge and then ease across, giving passengers time to appreciate the spectacular vista of the gorge and river far below.

Starting across the expanse, step by measured step, Bedichek could see the terrain fall away with dizzying clarity through the gaps between the crossties until finally the Pecos River came into view over 320 feet below. He paused to take in the remarkable sight, steadying himself against his bicycle as a north wind whistled through the canyon and pushed at his back.

Bedichek glanced over his left shoulder; everything he knew -- his family, the woman he wanted to marry, every friend he'd ever known --everything and everyone was that direction. But he turned the other direction.

They were giving land away out west.

At long last, Bedichek pedaled into El Paso, sold his bicycle to the barber that was giving him a shave and grabbed a ride on a freight train bound for Deming, 100 miles to the west in the New Mexico Territory.

The best way to describe Deming in 1909 was that there were 3,000 residents and 16 saloons. Cowboys came riding up Main Street, leaving a trail of dust all the way to their favorite watering hole. And, of course, any territory filled with cowboys, lonesome homesteaders, land agents and well diggers will also have a contingency of ladies in pink tights that catered to the cowboys, lonesome homesteaders, land agents and well diggers. Supply and demand of the original sort.

But people in Deming, for the most part, minded their own business and displayed a level of civility and respect toward each other. To Bedichek, this was the last frontier and these were the last free people in North America.

He filed a homestead claim on 320 acres of desert land about nine miles south of town, nestled at the feet of the Florida Mountains. A few odd jobs as a stenographer allowed Bedichek to hire a fellow to help dig a well and build a 12x14-foot shack on the claim. Now he could be alone on his island, albeit one of the desert variety, to write to his heart's content.

Bedichek wrote and submitted newspaper articles, along with technical writing about irrigation and farming in the arid southwest. At night he lay in the tent he had stretched next to his shack and wrote poetry to Lillian Greer in Waco, where the Greer family had just built a fine new home, with indoor plumbing, no less.

In The Roy Bedichek Family Letters, it seems Bedichek was very honest about the harsh realities of life in the New Mexico Territory. The newspapers articles were, at best, a very limited success.

"I live on frijole beans and rabbits which I catch in traps," Roy wrote to Lillian. "I live like a lone wolf in a canyon. There are cracks in my shack you can throw a cat through and my tent is getting a little ragged."

While his stab at being a correspondent missed, the poetry found its mark. In 1910, Lillian kissed her mother goodbye and climbed on the train. Two days and 900 miles later, Lillian saw Roy waiting on the platform when the Golden State Limited rolled into Deming.

If up the sky in burning flight
Some mad star scorched its way
And if the mark, blood-red by night
Turned black as night by day
My love I'd liken to that star
Which did so wildly start
The mark I'd liken to a scar
Which burns across my heart.
-- Roy Bedichek

Chapter 38

There is only one thing that will make a young man's mind turn to chickens and lawnmowers.

"If you had not been so forbidding the other day, and hadn’t made my beautiful soul close up like the sensitive plant, I was going to tell you of my misfortune," Harry Peyton Steger wrote to Gertrude King on July 1, 1910. "I have been married for some two or three weeks. I am moving out to Garden City today and I suppose that is the end of me. I am beginning to see chickens in my dreams and I am actually going to invest in a lawnmower. Unless something happens soon, I am a goner."

Garden City was a relatively new village at the time, created in 1869 by Alexander Turney Stewart, an Irish immigrant and brilliant businessman that managed to turn a $10,000 inheritance into an estimated $40 million by the time of his death in 1876.

Even today, many families in Garden City can trace their heritage back to ancestors that came to America from Ireland in search of a better life. No doubt, Garden City suited the new Mrs. Harry Peyton Steger to a "T." She was an Irish lass herself, having immigrated to the U.S. with her family at the tender age of 12.

Harry's blushing bride in June 1910, one Dorothy McCormack, known to her family as Dolly, had an interesting story in her own right. Records show that Jane (Dolly, Dorothy) McCormack was born in North Dublin Ireland in 1884.

According to The New York Times archives, Dorothy had married one of New York's wealthiest young men, Wilson Royal Crosby, heir to United States Express Company, on March 1, 1903. Evidently, WIlliam's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Chauncey M. Crosby, didn't approve and therefore the union was kept secret. United States Express Company was a privately owned company specializing in handling parcels and freight throughout New England and even as far west as Colorado.

Dorothy's father was listed as a furniture salesman and her mother was a midwife, not exactly the same social circle as Chauncey and Mrs. Crosby. The headlines read, "Says Parents Bar Bride -- Young Mrs. Wilson Royal Crosby Is Kept From Her Husband."

The May 2, 1903 New York Times article said, "The marriage was in the nature of an elopement, although the couple did not leave the city."

Wilson was 23 at the time and Dorothy 19. The ceremony had been performed at Church of the Heavenly Rest, although the marriage only became public knowledge because the pretty blonde caused quite a commotion when she came to see Magistrate Deuel at the police station and then left in tears.

Upon questioning, the magistrate explained that the young lady had been secretly married to Wilson Royal Crosby, however the groom had fallen ill and was now being cared for at his parent's home; the parents refused to acknowledge the marriage or to even allow Dorothy to see the man she claimed was her rightful husband.

Furthermore, the magistrate explained, Dorothy refused to say that her husband had abandoned her or refused to support her.

"Had she made such a statement as that," Magistrate Deuell remarked in the newspaper article, "I would have at least given her a summons."

Dorothy was afraid her husband was dying and she only asked for advice about how she might see him, but she steadfastly refused to incriminate him in any way and left the police station weeping.

"I will not attempt to deny anything which you say the young lady said in court," stated a resolute Chauncey Cosby. "Nor will I make a statement."

Miss McCormack had listed her address as 163 West 47th Street when she was married and the landlady confirmed that Wilson Crosby had lived there with Dorothy. The landlady went on to say that she couldn't understand the reason Dorothy had made the complaint at the police station because the young bride had mentioned having tea with her in-laws.

"Of course, that was before they were married," the landlady added.

Chapter 39

To say the least, 1910 was a very interesting year for the old crew from the registrar's office at the University of Texas. The former UT registrar himself, John Lomax, would begin carving out his reputation as a folklorist and musicologist by publishing an anthology he had seemed born to write, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, with an introduction written by no less than President Theodore Roosevelt.

Noted literary figures such as Carl Sandburg remarked that some of these traditional cowboy songs from the rapidly fading American West had an undeniable Homeric quality. The foreword, interestingly enough, was written in Roy Bedichek's shack at the foot of the Florida Mountains in the New Mexico Territory--the shack Bedichek admitted had holes big enough to throw a cat through. So, it would seem Lomax and Bedichek had some time to commiserate and console each other for the difficult path they had chosen in life.

No doubt, Harry Peyton Steger's ears were burning.

When the conversation turned to Harry--actually he had dropped the Harry and was now calling himself Peyton Steger at the counsel of his new set of friends in the publishing world -- suffice to say Bedichek and Lomax were less impressed with their old friend than he seemed to be with himself these days.

Remember, it was Steger that wrote to Bedichek with nary a hint of modesty.

"Here I am," Steger said, "doing disgusting things: (1) enjoying the comforts and luxuries of and expensive hotel, all at the cost of a vested interest in the form of Doubleday, Page & Co.; (2) playing tennis every afternoon in the warm sunshine with Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson; (3) and driving in the morning with Mrs. Tarkington."

How do you think that played with Bedichek, a man that was Steger's intellectual equal, yet one who found himself scraping out a meager existence living off wild frijole beans he managed to gather and an occasional rabbit that would wander into one of the traps Bedichek had set out in the high desert country?

A quick glance in The Roy Bedichek Family Letters reveals just about what you might imagine.

"He is no good as game," Bedichek wrote to his fiancée Lillian Greer about the demise of his old friend, Harry. "Got to running with Booth Tarkington and cattle of that sort."

Now, to be fair, Tarkington was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Even the venerable Orson Welles thought enough of Tarkington's work that Welles' second feature film was a celluloid version of The Magnificant Ambersons, a novel by Tarkington that would garner a Pulitzer Prize in 1919. The Magnificant Ambersons was nominated for Best Picture in 1942 and starred memorable actors Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Ann Baxter and Agnes Moorehead. If you never saw Moorehead in this movie, maybe you'll remember her as the witch Eudora in the TV favorite, Bewitched. Even by today's standards, The Magnificent Ambersons is still regarded as one of the greatest American films ever produced, along with Welles’ first feature film, of course, Citizen Kane.

But none of the honors eventually bestowed on Tarkington would have filled the void Bedichek felt after losing his close friend to what he saw as the snobby, if not outright elitist, East Coast publishing establishment.

Yet, even though Steger and Bedichek would never be close friends again, their lives paralleled at times. Both were married in 1910. Harry Peyton Steger, now a highly respected literary advisor for Doubleday, Page & Company would take the hand of Dorothy McCormack, an Irish immigrant and the daughter of hard-working middle class parents. Harry and Dorothy's first home would be in Garden City, an upscale Long Island suburb just over 18 miles east of downtown Manhattan.

Conversely, Bedichek's blushing bride in 1910, Lillian Greer, was a UT grad and the daughter of a vice president at Baylor University. Lillian -- bless her heart, it must have been true love -- left the family's new home in Waco for Bedichek's shack eight miles southeast of the small city of Deming in what was then the New Mexico Territory.

"Bedi and I came by our delusion honestly," Lillian would write in The Roy Bedichek Family Letters. His forebears and mine had trekked across the continent a generation-jump at a time, from South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland to Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Illinois and finally Texas. The momentum of three generations shoved us on."

Lillian had taught Latin at Grayson College in Whitewright for two years until that impressive brick structure burned and then she returned home to teach in the Waco school system. When Bedichek convinced his bride-to-be to join him out west, Roy secured Lillian a teaching job and a place to live in Deming while they decided on the possibility of matrimony. They tied the knot on Christmas day, 1910.

Again, from The Roy Bedichek Family Letters...

"We were married on Christmas morning in 1910, by an elderly justice of the peace in failing health," Lillian wrote. "Although it was not quite seven o'clock, he was clean shaven and neat in his Sunday clothes; but, as the train left at 7:30 a.m., we could not wait for him to put on his shoes, so he married us in his sock feet. His wife called in two of the boarders to act as witnesses and herself wept as if Bedi had been an only son. She had never saw us before, never saw us again. Perhaps she was remembering her own wedding."

Or maybe the lady with tears rolling down her cheeks had heard about Bedichek's shack his glowing bride would soon call home.
Another memory from that day made Lillian smile for as long as she lived. After the rather unceremonious ceremony, the couple went to the train station for a newlywed trip up into the mountains to a resort at Faywood Springs. Bedi had gone to purchase tickets, leaving Lillian alone when the president of the Bank of Deming, John Corbett, chanced by.

Tipping his hat, Mr. Corbett asked, "My goodness, Miss Greer...what in the world would bring you down to the station at daybreak on Christmas morning?"

"Oh, uh...well, Bedi and I are going up for a week at Faywood," Lillian replied.

"Now, that's just fine," the bank president answered. "And I hope the both of you have a splendid time."

As Mr. Corbett tipped his hat again and walked off, suddenly Lillian's mouth fell open. It dawned on her that she had omitted to mention the most pertinent fact that she and Bedi had just been pronounced man and wife. Mr. Corbett hadn't so much as raised an eyebrow, she kept reassuring herself over and over. Still, all week long Lillian couldn't help but imagine that Corbett had gossiped about their meeting at the train station and townspeople were, on every corner, casting aspersions upon her character in absentia. After the honeymoon, Lillian returned to find the bank president hadn't breathed a word about their encounter.

Ever the romantic, Bedi brought his terrier-bulldog cross, Bo, on the honeymoon.

"Our room was on the first floor with windows opening on the long front veranda," Lillian wrote in the Bedichek Letters, "which was a great convenience for our dog. Although the mornings were nipping and the mercury near freezing, we spent our days in the open. To escape the full force of the wind, we sought shelter in Trujillo Canyon or camped in the lee of a massive boulder of the City of Rocks, a notable example of wind erosion. These huge stones, shaped like strange animals, aboriginal gods, giant chairs, some 40-feet high and big as a church, presented from a distance the illusion of a city. While Bedi drove, I got out and ran along the flinty ground behind the buggy until my hands and feet thawed out. Meanwhile Bo ranged far and wide routing out chilly rabbits, investigating tantalizing smells, then returning to see how we were faring. He was glad enough, though, to lie down with us by a fragrant cedar fire until the sun was high and the wind died down. In mid-afternoon, we returned to the empty old hotel. Not that we minded the lack of company."

Everyone in Deming knew Bo, or at least they did after the Albuquerque Boosters hit town with a half-grown brown bear. Every man that thought he had a bear dog came down to the railroad station where the bear was chained, glaring at any canine that dared so much as glance in its direction. About the time all the men realized there wasn't a real bear dog in Deming, the gnashing teeth of a rangy stray stung the bear. The bear twirled to retaliate, but the dog was one step ahead and already nipping flesh again on the beast's backside.

"Hey, fellers, looks like we got us an honest-to-goodness bear dog," someone in the crowd called out, but most realized this dog knew no master.

Legend had it Bo had been found in a hollow log down by the Mimbres River. Every man that had tried to chain him or lock the dog up soon found that the black-and-white mixed breed valued freedom more than any man in Deming. An alcoholic paper hanger had come the closest to capturing the heart of the terrier-bulldog cross because he never tried to chain up the dog and early risers noted the two often ended up sleeping on the porch together. But the drunk would spend his last dime on his next drink, leaving Bo to sneak around back doors for scraps, which in those days meant risking an occasional scalding. Until the day he died, Bo would jump in horror anytime he saw someone throw as much as a glass of water. Bo had been making the rounds and searching for scraps at eating establishments in Deming when the rangy dog spotted a sympathetic face.

Bedi had been eating supper at a Chinese restaurant -- Chinese workers had been employed in large numbers to build the railroads across the West -- when he looked up and locked eyes with a dog that had obviously missed many a meal. With every bite Bedi took, he could feel the desperate stare of the starving dog. Finally, it was too much. Bedi asked the waiter to wrap up a dime's worth of scraps and the dog caught the first bone in midair. Bedi smiled.

They would be friends for life.

As Bedi walked home that evening, the skinny stray walked 20 steps behind him, slowly gnawing a big bone and never taking his eyes off the man who had tossed it to him. Bo slept outside Bedi's door that night.

In addition to submitting articles to newspapers, Roy Bedicheck had been working as secretary for the Deming Chamber of Commerce and had even managed to borrow enough to buy a stake in The Deming Headlight.

At age 31, Roy was now running his own newspaper -- the dream he had written about a decade earlier in his diary had come to life. And, of course, just as soon as school let out and her teaching responsibilities allowed, Lillian raced down to the newspaper office to help out.

Braced by the addition of two very bright and dedicated UT graduates, the Headlight prospered. On nights they could make it out to their homestead, since there really wasn't room to sleep inside the shack, so they made a pallet in the sand. On a tarp, Roy and Lillian would spread blankets and pillows.

Lillian was learning to cook by reading Marian Harland's White House Cook Book, although Lillian would grin to herself at the obvious fact that any stove in the White House would sit firmly on four legs, while the stove in her shack had three legs and dared to, on occasion, tilt over and dump its load of hot coals onto the floor.
Then one glorious day Lillian looked out to see Roy pulling up in the yard with a big kitchen range practically filling his buckboard. Yes, it was definitely used, although still a vast improvement over the older, smaller stove. But it turned out that this stove wouldn't quite connect to the flue that carried the smoke outside. Roy solved that dilemma by finding a sturdy wooden box just the right height and then, with leverage and an improvised ramp, working the box underneath the big kitchen range so that now the flue fit perfectly.

This arrangement came with certain inherent advantages and disadvantages. Lillian found herself climbing up on the edge of the box and then precariously balancing while she stirred her skillets. On the other hand, it was pleasant to just walk up and look straight into the oven without even bending over.

Chapter 40

From the very beginning when Harry Peyton Steger and Roy Bedichek became close friends at the University of Texas in the fall of 1898, Steger, the son of a lawyer in Bonham, Texas, and Bedichek, the son of an educator in Eddy, Texas, seemed cut from the same bolt of cloth.

Bedichek and then Steger would take turns as editors at The Cactus, the University of Texas yearbook.

Both were uncommonly bright idealists that easily stood out among their peers, even in an era when UT was seen as a premier finishing school that offered degrees unavailable at many smaller institutes of higher learning, a powerful attraction for third- and fourth-year students from across the South and West. The brightest and the best made their way to Austin.

After all, that was how Bedichek met his wife-to-be. Lillian Greer spent two years at Baylor University and then transfered to the University of Texas in 1901, where she majored in Greek and minored in Latin before starting her teaching career in 1903 at Grayson College in Whitewright, Texas.

Steger and Bedichek immersed themselves in the classics during late-night debates at B Hall in sessions that sometimes included their esteemed boss, UT registrar John Lomax. Even sparring missives between Steger and Bedichek reveal the indelible influence of their favorite writing, from Byron to the Bible.

A decade later, the two men still had everything in common except the circumstances under which they labored. Both were newlyweds in 1910 and both spent long hours pouring their heart into a blossoming career in publishing. The similarities ended there.

Steger was now a fast-rising star in the East Coast publishing scene, employed as a literary advisor by Doubleday, Page & Company and he and Dorothy were moving into their new home in Garden City, a suburb of New York City.

Meanwhile, Bedichek was far from the bright lights, or even running water, for that matter. Roy and Lillian were drawing water out of a well at their shack in the New Mexico Territory and trying to carve out a living on their homestead near the foot of the Florida Mountains. Roy had borrowed enough to become part-owner of a newspaper in a dusty town with dirt streets and about 3,000 residents, counting the dancing girls in the saloons. Before you consider Bedichek's enterprise too lightly, however, take note that the Deming Headlight, as Lillian would write later, was "the official organ of Democrats in Lincoln County."

To fully appreciate life in the territory west of Texas during this timeframe, is also important to understand that it would be another five years before 500 faithful followers of Pancho Villa spurred their ponies into a slumbering Columbus, New Mexico to steal horses, mules and weapons and then torch the town.

Some say Villa came to pull the U.S. into the Mexican Revolution. Others say the raid was to retaliate against an arms dealer, Columbus hotelier Sam Ravel, who pocketed Villa's money in a money-for-guns deal that went south. Whatever the motivation had been, by daybreak Pancho Villa's men were on the run and Ravel's Commercial Hotel was in ashes.

As the crow flies, that historic attack would have happened less than 20 miles from the shack where Roy and Lillian often slept outside under a tarp while Bo, their bulldog-terrier cross, stood guard.

But in 1916, Roy, Lillian and even Bo were long gone.

Bedichek could easily have become a prominent publisher in the New Mexico Territory if not for the Prohibition movement. The controlling interest in Deming Headlight was owned by Methodists favoring The Noble Experiment. As a minority owner, Roy found himself in the rather uncomfortable predicament of being forced to write rhetorical editorials in support of the upcoming Prohibition election in 1911. But when Bedichek questioned if a town with 3,000 people really needed 16 saloons, the letters to the editor section heated up with residents explaining that evidently the town did require at least that many saloons since they all stayed full.

Resentment boiled over at the fact anyone would try to control what most Deming residents considered a personal choice and at the Methodists, in particular, who had pushed for the election in the first place. Roy, neither a prohibitionist nor a Methodist, suddenly found himself in the awkward position as the primary voice in Deming speaking out in favor of the movement.

The election would have dire consequences. Advertisers threatened to stop supporting the newspaper. Even the close friends Roy counted on no longer wanted to visit or be seen with him.

When Navajo Bill turned a cold shoulder, Bedichek knew he had worn his welcome out.

Lillian tells this part so eloquently in The Roy Bedichek Family Letters.

Navajo Bill, porter at the Palace Saloon and once Bedi's unconditional admirer, now looked the other way. Navajo had been one of General Crook's scouts during the last Apache campaign. Bedi used to visit the old man in his tent in the Chinese graveyard, burial place of the coolies who died while working on the railroad. Navajo lived there all alone except for his pet bull snake. He enjoyed talking about his fights with the Apaches. He had once received one of their arrows in his backside while escaping on horseback and still had the arrow to prove his story. He would show you the scar, too, if you encouraged him.

When hungry or in trouble, the old scout could always count on Lola Denison for help. An old-timer herself, Lola was still in the business, the oldest in the world. Occasionally, on a bright Sunday afternoon, one might see Lola taking an airing in a handsome carriage driven by a woman of about her own age, a pink-tights associate of other years, now grown wealthy and respectable. But so deep was the love of the older and more influential members of the community for the auld lang syne, and so profound the reverence for the friendship that endured through fair weather and foul, that there was never a slurring whisper, nor an eyebrow lifted as the carriage passed along the main residential streets of the town.

It should come as no surprise that residents of Deming breathed a collective sigh of relief when Prohibition was voted down in the 1911 election, but the die was cast when it came to Bedichek's future as editor at the newspaper.

The bank called in its note.

Roy had known more than his share of failure before this kick in the ribs. He had tried his hand in the real estate business, taught school in Houston, tried to start a newspaper syndicate with Harry Peyton Steger, gave teaching another shot, this time in San Angelo, and then tried to start a small ranch. When none of those attempts panned out, Roy came home to help out on his father's farm in Eddy. It was there the notion struck him that they were giving away land out west. Roy had spent weeks riding a bicycle from Eddy to El Paso, often with no roads, in order to homestead land in the New Mexico Territory. He had known trials and tribulations, but this was too much.

"Bedi hated to give up his paper," Lillian wrote in The Roy Bedichek Family Letters. "When he talked to me about it, he even cried."

And so it was that Roy, Lillian and their children, Mary and Sarah, stood on the Deming railroad platform in 1913, with their suitcases beside them. People that saw them waiting for the train noticed Bo was nowhere to be seen. When packing started in earnest, Bo took off.

In the days ahead, no one seemed to miss the man that poured his heart and soul into their newspaper, or notice how quickly the Deming Headlight faded, for that matter. But for weeks people kept an eye out for the town's only bear dog, particularly after a pair of silver prospectors told about seeing a big black and white dog lying solemnly beside a hollow log along the Mimbres River.

Timing is everything, however, and just as the train pulled into the station, Bo came running up. All five members of the Bedichek family climbed onboard. The Land of Enchantment hadn't been all that enchanting after all.

It was time to go home to Texas.

Roy Bedichek would become secretary of the Young Men's Business League in Austin that same year. By 1916, Bedichek was city editor for the San Antonio Express. Roy became the second director of University Interscholastic League in 1920, a post he would hold for 30 years, with one notable exception.

In 1946, at the urging of J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb, Bedichek took a year sabbatical from UIL to write Adventures With a Texas Naturalist. In 1948, Bedichek retired from UIL and began writing Karankaway Country.

Following an early morning stroll to study birds in 1960, Roy Bedichek died.

If you are wondering about what happened to the blue-bound Reports of the British Navy on the Island of Tristan Da Acunha, books that Roy kept in his tent in the New Mexico Territory that described the planet's most remote volcanic archipelago, rocky islands halfway between Africa and South America that captivated both Steger and Bedichek, they can be found in the Roy Bedichek Collection at the Center for American History in Austin, Texas.

Chapter 41

Harry Peyton Steger, now officially listed as Peyton Steger in the magazine he edited, Short Stories, was being given more responsibility as a literary advisor at Doubleday, Page & Company and rewarded with less oversight of daily details at the publishing plant.

Steger found it amusing that the conversation among New York publishers at their luncheons in early 1910 often turned to John Lomax, Steger's former boss at the University of Texas, and Lomax's unusual book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.

After a brief intermission, Steger and Lomax were once again communicating regularly. But a chasm had formed between Steger and Roy Bedichek, the person Steger had once thought of as his twin spirit.

Maybe the final letter from Bedichek to Steger arrived in February 1909.

"I am trying to read your letter now," Steger had written back in their typical jousting fashion. "It is somewhat difficult because in a fit of rage at your delay I tore it into several sections. It is foolish of you to talk of a gulf that is widening."

It seems doubtful that Bedichek even bothered to reply.

However, Bedichek was still sending articles and ideas to Lomax, who would, in turn, advise Steger.

"By all means send me the stories you have that Bedichek has written," Steger told Lomax. "It is unlikely that he will send any direct. He outlined to me last October, in a letter, a series of articles on the West that I am sure I could easily place for him if he would deliver the manuscript in a form at least near completeness. His address at Deming, New Mexico comes as a surprise to me; for he has not deigned to write since he left Eddy. I shall send him at once an insulting missive to arouse him. He ought to turn out some good stuff for our publishers who, I understand, are not creative nor artistic, but only mere worms."

Hoping to branch out his literary base, Lomax submitted several poems to Short Stories magazine. Lomax and Bedichek had often made a point of chiding Steger for not fully grasping the significance of some of this same poetry during sessions in B Hall at UT. The poetry was rejected by Steger, although with a great deal of respect for his old friend.

"I am afraid my own magazine does not use poetry," Steger explained. "Much as I would like, for the sake of our old friendship, and for the delectation of my readers to run it, I am under the accumulative pressure of 18 years, during which Short Stories has never published a single verse. You may rest easy in the assurance, however, that I shall see a fair chance given it elsewhere."

Lomax also stayed in touch with Steger's parents in Bonham, occasionally to the consternation of our boy, Harry. For, evidently, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas P. Steger and John Lomax were all concerned about Harry Peyton Steger's health. An elevated concern in Bonham resulted in an admonition from young Steger to his friend.

Dear Lomax:

Seriously, you made a great mistake in judgment when you wrote my people that I was suffering with a bad throat, and that I was jaded and other hopeless things, which I imagine you never really said, but which their own fancies have evolved. As a matter of fact my health and general physical condition have been getting better and better for the past two years---principally because I do not think anything about them.

I have, this morning, a characteristic letter from my father, whose hectic temperament has led him to picture me on the very verge of disintegration and nothing short of a physician's certificate, and a detailed photograph, will give him back his buoyant spirits. Of course, I look tired; when a man's throat has been hurting him for three or four days and he has been trying to talk through it, it is sure to take some of the bloom off the pansy.

Do not take this too much to heart; but I really think you ought to follow up your first communication with another certificate that you actually saw me walk, unaided, across streets and up steps. On second thought, do not write them at all as they would at once know that it was my doing and attribute to me all sorts of heroic motives. I suppose the physician's certificate is the only way out of it for me; I shall send you the bill.

Yours sincerely,
H.P. Steger

Lomax's wife, Bess Brown Lomax, had, of late, begun referring the Steger as simply "Stege," and the close association the nickname intimated warmed Harry's heart. In his early days at UT, Bess Brown had been one of the primary editors at the Cactus that Harry initially reported to.

"When I was in Johns Hopkins folks wore narrow black ties and called each other 'Mister,' " Harry wrote to Bess, "and I've never had a soft spot for the Hopkins'. This is to assure you how comforting to me your friendly greeting is. "Stege" is the greatest intimacy I have achieved here. Again, thanks."

The note also included a statement of gratitude to John Lomax. It would seem Lomax had explained to his old friend, in rather plain English, just what he thought of Harry going by his middle name, Peyton, at the urging of his new set of friends on the East Coast.

"Tell Lomax," Steger relayed though Lomax's wife, "that his treatment has restored 'Harry' and cold type proclaims as much in the March issue of Short Stories."

Steger had a new wife and home, his position at Doubleday, Page & Company required a great deal of travel and 1910 was something of an Indian summer in the life of O. Henry. A collection called Whirligigs was published that year and included "The Ransom of Red Chief," a timeless story about two bumbling kidnappers who became victims of their own plot when the kid they took turned out to be so obnoxious that not only does the ransom not get paid, but the two kidnappers actually have to end up paying the father before he will let them bring the brat back home.

"I tried to be faithful to our articles of depredation," one kidnapper finally admitted to the other, "but there came a limit."

O. Henry's genius was well known in his beloved New York City and Steger's strategy of combining larger collections of the short-story author's work was paying off, but Steger's travels taught him that marketing had to improve if the writer and publisher were to reap anything close to maximum profit levels. For example, while visiting Nashville on business, Steger found O.Henry's work to be scarce throughout the city's bookstores. It was particularly demoralizing for someone that understood how badly the writer needed more income, just how good some of these short stories were, and yet there were the bare shelves looking back at him when Steger went looking for O. Henry's work in Nashville.

Steger suffered a bout of pneumonia, but as soon as his energy returned, books were on their way to fill those empty shelves.

"The young gentleman with the glasses at the Presbyterian Book Store will shortly learn that I am not the liar that you have so ruthlessly allowed him to think me," Steger joked with Nashville native Verner Jones. "I shall send him soon so much O. Henry material that he won't be able to find window space for it. When I do, you and those others whom I reproached for the scarcity of O. Henry book readers in Nashville must in some way start a boom. So far as general publicity for Doubleday, Page & Company is concerned, I have practically let up on my efforts since you took things into your own hands. My reception at the hands of the Nashville Press, under your potent auspices, has completely turned my head. Seriously, I am determined to get back to Nashville. Use your own invention and help me find provocation. I am glad you told me some things about John Trotwood Moore, thus drawing me into correspondence with him. His latest communication is going to be a gallon of old corn whiskey. I am going to write him that it would be less courteous, but wiser, if he let it accompany a manuscript."

A native of Alabama, John Trotwood Moore moved to Tennessee where he went on to eventually become became state librarian, historian, and archivist, leaving behind a legacy of preserving Tennessee history. He was also a bit of a naturalist, as evidenced by insightful advice he left behind in "A Summer Hymnal."

"A little kindness and patience," Moore offered, "is the greatest thing in the world for making friends of birds....as well as of people."

Chapter 42

In The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger 1899-1912, there was only one brief mention of the passing of William Sydney Porter and that was to professor D.F. Eagleton at Austin College in Sherman.

Professor Eagleton was considering submitting a manuscript that used two O. Henry short stories to define the writer.

Porter died June 6, 1910.

I think your selection of "The Passing of Black Eagle" and "The Ransom of Red Chief" are very discerning. And what you tell me of your own changing attitude to O. Henry's work is very interesting, for I have a theory that he nearly always responds to "advances."

The difficulty you outline is entirely real. With his many-facetted, elusive, lovable, deep personality back of his work, it is impossible in two short stories to give an adequate impression of the man himself. I find this whenever I try---in my fanaticism---to secure converts.

By all means let Doubleday, Page & Company have a chance at the manuscript, if you are so good. Send it to me here when it is completed and I promise you a quick and friendly consideration.

Very sincerely yours,
Harry Peyton Steger

Fate kindly punched the ticket on O. Henry's final trip out of his beloved Baghdad-on-the-Subway on June 5, 1910. The last two panic-stricken years of frantic races to meet deadlines were over. A short-lived second marriage, coupled with too much drinking, too much smoking and too little sleep finally drained what little remained of one of the most accomplished short-story writers that particular medium ever knew.

Art imitates life and that was never truer than the way William Sydney Porter's bittersweet stories, written under the pen name O. Henry, reflected his tumultuous life. On one hand, it is hard not to smile at the dozens of humorous stories about Porter; at the same time, the letter he wrote telling his daughter not to think he had forgotten her birthday gift---Porter told little Margaret he had the perfect gift in mind but he couldn't find the exact one he wanted yet---was haunting. Little Margaret Porter would have been about 10 years old and she had already known the horror of watching her mother slowly wither and die of tuberculosis two years earlier. She didn't know her dad was writing from prison.

Neither did the publishers that helped launch Porter's writing career. All the unsuspecting publishers actually knew was that these stories were signed by a man named O. Henry and postmarked from New Orleans. Porter was sending short stories from Ohio Penitentiary to an old pal in New Orleans who would then forward them to publishers.

Where exactly the name O. Henry originated is still the subject of conjecture. If you remember, O. Henry claimed he picked up a newspaper, combined a couple of names and came up with O. Henry. But, then again, the man tended to be rather economical with the facts at times. A remarkable intellectual named Guy Davenport suspects the name was a derivative of Ohio Penitentiary. Davenport has credentials that are difficult to contradict; he was a Rhodes Scholar where he studied under J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford before earning his PhD at Harvard.

Still, another theory makes you wonder. According to writers Bennett Serf and Van Cartmell, there was a guard at Ohio Penitentiary named Orrin Henry. Somewhere, either on a uniform or a duty roster, William Sydney Porter spotted the guard's name with the first name abbreviated---O. Henry. It had a nice ring to it.
Porter's struggle with deadlines was legendary. One tale seems to indicate that after Porter missed deadline after deadline while writing "Gift of the Magi," the frustrated editor came and sat on the writer's sofa to make sure the promising start actually reached an appropriate conclusion.

Another time, Porter had sent in a very interesting beginning to a short story and an excited editor happily issued an advance to the writer. However, a lengthy period passed and no ending was in sight. Not wanting to waste the captivating beginning to the story, the resourceful editor printed what little of the story he had and offered a $100 prize to whoever could devise with the best conclusion. That was a lot of money. Entries poured in, ranging from mundane to magnificent finales. The eventual winner, it just so happened, turned out to be a fellow named O. Henry.

But place yourself in Porter's shoes and suddenly his stark, forbidding perspective comes into focus. Failure to meet any of a number of contractual obligations could easily mean another trip to prison and the end of a second chance at life the writer had created in the place had grown to love, New York City.

Harry Peyton Steger had become Porter's bookkeeper, personal banker, publisher and confidante. Steger championed the writer's cause, although Porter's fear of publicity made large-scale promotion difficult.

Steger finally managed to get a professional photograph made of Porter, but his initial attempt was two-fold failure. After a difficult debate, Porter agreed a promotional photograph was necessary and Steger scheduled a talented photographer to capture the historic image on celluloid.

At the appointed time, neither the photographer nor O. Henry showed up.

It took some time, but Steger finally tracked down the photographer only to find the fellow had pawned his camera. Steger helped the man get his camera back.

It was easier to find O. Henry---he was in bed and complained bitterly to Steger when roused about being unable to keep the commitment because he had no suit of clothes to wear. It seemed O. Henry was in arrears to his tailor for $7.50 and the clothier refused to release the author's only suit until he was paid in full.

Steger reached into his pocket for the $7.50.

Part of Porter's problem may be attributed to his favorite drink. In his one official interview, Porter referred to his time in New Orleans as "the highball stage." New York Times feature writer George MacAdam noted that Porter was fond of Sazerac cocktails, a powerful pre-Civil War concoction made with Rye whiskey, Peychaud's Bitters and absinthe. Two other fans of absinthe were Vincent van Gogh and Ernest Hemmingway. The green fairy, as absinthe was often called, didn't make a habit of leaving happy endings under your pillow.

And so it was that in the early summer of 1910, three months and one day short of his 48th birthday, William Sydney Porter succumbed to complications arising from a lethal combination of cirrhosis of the liver, diabetes and an enlarged heart.

The memorial service in New York City would have made a great short story because in error the chapel had scheduled a wedding and a funeral for the same time. It was as though O.Henry saved one last bittersweet twist for his own ending. Happy wedding guests and grieving friends of Porter began taking their seats when the mistake became obvious.

In deference, the wedding party bid their condolences and retreated to rooms at the back of the chapel until the funeral service was over. A heartbreaking ending followed by joyous beginning; Porter would have smiled and jotted down some notes.

William Sydney Porter was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina, the same cemetery where Thomas Wolfe would be interred 28 years later. North Carolina was always close to Porter's heart, as was Austin, Texas and New Orleans, Louisiana.

But one city he loved most of all.

"Open the curtains so I can see New York," were his last words. "I don't want to go home in the dark."

Note: Every year, the O. Henry Award is bestowed upon exceptional short stories. Winners include Stephen King (1996), John Updike (1991), Woody Allen (1978), Eudora Welty (1968), John Cheever (1956), William Faulkner (1949), Truman Capote (1948), Stephen Vincent Benét (1940) and Irvin S. Cobb (1922).

Chapter 43

The death of William Sydney Porter certainly would have come as no surprise to those aware of the health issues that eventually claimed the short-story writer on June 6, 1910. Porter was right about three important points; he knew the drinking, smoking and late nights would catch up with him.

But Porter also knew if the characters in his work could accurately portray and act out moments of human nature, then his stories would appeal to readers everywhere. Unfortunately he didn't live to see his wit and captivating endings catch on in South America, across Europe and even Russia. Porter's phrase "Bolivar cannot carry double" from The Roads We Take eventually became a Russian proverb.

As Porter's literary executor, Harry Peyton Steger was actually busier than ever. Sixes and Sevens, a collection of 25 short stories was published in 1911 and it contained what J. Frank Dobie, a true fan of the Wild West, would later call the finest short story in American literature, "The Last of the Troubadours."

Steger had once been frustrated because Porter's shadowy lifestyle meant very few people outside of the author's regular haunts even knew he existed. The other side of that coin was that now almost no one seemed to know the writer known as O. Henry was gone.

Steger had to advise a college professor in 1912 that Porter had been dead almost two years.

The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger 1899-1912 portray a man of literature that was completely at ease among the East Coast publishing elite and one that obviously cherished his days at Oxford. Yet this was a man who never forgot there were still a few folks quick with the quill south of the Mason-Dixon Line and to his last breath Harry championed his professors at the University of Texas and the education that experience afforded him.

For years, for whatever reason, something had been missing from Steger's letters. First he lost his health in 1906 and spent months Carlsbad, Austria recuperating from a mysterious kidney ailment. Then he gave up his Rhodes Scholarship launched into a period of social consciousness, living in the Whitechapel Settlement of the London slums where he served as a parochial visitor for the London Relief Committee and chronicled the despair of the impoverished and unemployed that were all around him.

There was one brief, precious respite when his old UT buddy Roy Bedichek came over for their long-awaited tramp around Europe. Both barely had money for steerage on a tramp steamer bound for North America.

That was followed by an extremely bleak and mostly unemployed year in New York City. Then his predicament forced him into a job editing manuscripts for a scant $1.50 per day. But after hiring on at Doubleday, Page & Company and spending a year working up to the position of literary advisor, Stegerisms started showing up in his letters again.

Don't forget this man has already been a high school principal at Mineola after graduating from UT, taught Greek and Latin at Bonham High School, accepted a fellowship at UT for a year, did post-graduate work at Johns Hopkins University for a long, cold year, and spent a summer living in Germany to learn the language before moving to England to study at Oxford.

And at this point, Harry is still in his late 20s.

A lot can happen in a young man's life when he graduates from high school at the tender age of 15.

Now, as a wise old man of 29, Steger was, as playwright Montague Glass noted, the foster-father of the spoiled literary children of New York Bohemia.

And that uniquely colorful personality begins showing up in letters that were part business and part entertainment. Glass once said that he was certain many details had to have been negotiated, but with Harry taking care of the contracts, all he seemed to remember was the laughter.

Here is a sampling of Steger's letters from 1912.

Mr. G.C. Field,
Dear Field:

I am afraid I don't know myself what I'm doing but it will stand a subscription to keep the Bodleian from becoming a Music Hall. I enclose a check for one guinea. If that is too small, send it back and I'll buy rum with it. If it's acceptable, I shall try to do likewise each year for a term of ninety-nine years -- but this is no legal document and binds neither myself nor maidservant nor my manservant nor the ass within my gates. But may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth if I let the Bodleian pass.

Yours sincerely,
H.P. Steger

Mrs. Corra Harris,
Pine Log, Georgia

Dear Mrs. Harris:

That fellow you quoted as saying that "The Recording Angel" had sold forty thousand copies was not a liar, let us hope, but a prophet. We are making a special campaign in Georgia just now, and I hope there will be returns. You know, of course, that the whole South is a mighty bad book market. "The Recording Angel" is doing very well indeed here in New York City.

Dorothy has upset things for herself, and incidentally for me, by suddenly being called upon to undergo an operation, by escaping Lethe through ether with a horrible narrow margin, and by now getting well rapidly. Margaret Porter (Miss O. Henry) is living with us and if Dorothy continues to mend I shall jump on a train at the Pennsylvania Station and crawl off somewhere in Georgia by slow car or mule and find my way to Pine Log.

Yours sincerely,
H.P. Steger

Mr. Wainwright Evans,
Dear Evans:

It was good to hear from you after so long a silence. I myself have one foot on the train step on my way South for a week's business, so I shan't be able to make the English language do many ticks. However, I have this day written Dr. Galloway. I don't think the old gentleman has much faith in anything about me except my violation of college rules. He used to meet me occasionally in my capacity as a violator.

Yours sincerely,
Steger

Miss Roberta Lavender,
University of Texas

Dear Miss Lavendar:

Thrice I roamed about the corridors of your office and thrice I was doomed to disappointment. I forget how many times Hector dragged Cleopatra around the walls of Corinth, but I do know how hard I tried to find you. I wanted to see you surely. Don't forget my whereabouts if you come East.

Yours sincerely,
Harry Peyton Steger

Mr. Irvin S. Cobb,
Yonkers, New York.
Dear Cobb:

There ought not be anything the matter with the choice little volume of short stories -- by Irvin S. Cobb. Publishers and booksellers and all that class of highwaymen say that there is nothing to a book of short stories. I think this is correct ninety-nine and forty-four hundredths cases. O. Henry's short stories sell better today than they did two or three years ago. Kipling's keep up their sale, too. Won't you send me a choice selection of your own wares, made by your own fair hand, and let me take a look at them? Make 'em as funny as you can without getting the reader pinched for disturbing the peace.

Yours sincerely,
Harry Peyton Steger

Mr. Montague Glass,
Villa Aristide,
St. Malo, France,
Dear Mont:

Will it have to be a book of stories this spring from you or is there a chance for something more close to the ancient novel for so popular among the Greeks?

It was careless of me to omit in my letter yesterday the news that the black cat presented us with six kittens during my absence in Canada. Five of them are a composite gray and are precisely alike. The sixth is black with a white collar button. They are all doing well, except that the mother spends a large part of her day carrying members of her family from one room to another. When I left home this morning, she was running three different establishments -- the cellar where she had put three of her offspring, the closet in my room where one lay on my best trousers, and the closet in Dorothy's room where the other two flourished and made a great noise. We have to keep all the doors open so that she can circulate. Perhaps the kindly verdict of this month's Current Literature will interest you. They have reprinted your story, Mr. Lo Pinto.

Yours sincerely,
Harry Peyton Steger

PS: Does Mary Caroline know that Dorothy won a 3/4 mile swimming race several weeks ago, and a near-gold bracelet thereby?

Mr. H.B. Huebsch
225 Fifth Ave.,
New York City.
Dear Benny:

This confirms my oral opinion to you of "The Mission of Victoria Wilhelmina." This is the real article and make no mistake. Every line in it is true, and it will shock only the inexperienced and smug. I do think that the harshness of the first two or three pages is gratuitously great, and ought to be lightened. I am firmly convinced this change is necessary.

Yours sincerely,
Harry Peyton Steger

Mr. Irvin S. Cobb,
Yonkers, New York.
Dear Cobb:

L.W. Payne, Jr., of the University of Texas, is getting together for Rand, McNally & Company a Southern Reader. He seemed pleased and delighted when I told him there were people actually writing today who were Southerners. On my personal assurance that you, Harris Dickens, and Mrs. Cora Harris would die in time and leave something behind you, he wants to include you in his selection.

Yours sincerely,
Steger

Mr. Thomas Metcalf,
175 Fifth Ave.,
New York City.
Dear Tommie:

I have always suspected that beneath your gentlemanly and cultured veneer you were really a pretty decent sort...

Yours sincerely,
Harry

Mr. Montague Glass,
504 W. 143rd Street,
New York City.
Dear Mont:

Sign this contract and return one copy at once without a quibble, scribble or cavil and no questions will be answered. Initial the inked out paragraph on the third page. The exemption on the first thousand copies won't amount to anything. I'll agree right here to pay you the royalty on these first copies if you are not satisfied a year from now. You may reserve dramatic, fishing and Halley's Comet rights.

Yours sincerely,
Harry Peyton Steger

Chapter 44

In the fall of 1907, Harry Peyton Steger had arrived in New York City as an unknown 24-year-old with little more than a dream to become a successful writer. As the months passed he awoke to the reality that no one had more than a passing fancy in any of his projects. Steger had hired on at Frederick Stokes Company and put his nose to the grindstone.

He may have been on the bottom rung of the publishing ladder, but at least he was on the ladder. At times he seemed to be getting by living off the figs and pecans his parents were sending from Fannin County, however he sensed he had his hands on his future and Harry never loosened his grip.

But a letter to his parents dated May 3, 1908 depicts a young man grown weary beyond his mere 25 years. The dream of making a living off his creative writing ability had faded along with his energy.
"Recently I have had so little leisure that I have not been up to attempting any independent writing," Harry told his parents. "I am in something of a rush all the time. The day goes by with a whiz and it's time to go to bed. I think I was asleep every night by nine o'clock."

Now compare that with how life had changed by 1912.

"It nearly breaks my heart to get out of bed before 10 o'clock and I can't get to bed until two in the morning," Steger told his close friend Booth Tarkington. "All the which is apparently pitched in the key of complaint. I have never had so bully a rest!"

Harry had hit his stride.

Steger's address had changed of late, as well. His first months after arriving in New York had been spent at a spacious Englewood, New Jersey home, courtesy of an old friend from Oxford.

He then briefly occupied a sparse hall bedroom, which was all his $1.50 a day salary would permit.

Next, it would seem, Steger had a room at the Caledonia, the same hotel that O. Henry called home. In 1910, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Peyton Steger had moved into their new home in Garden City, New York. Since Doubleday, Page & Company had a publishing plant in Garden City, this arrangement would have been ideal. But in 1912, the Stegers relocated to a bungalow by the bay in Freeport, Long Island.

As playwright Montague Glass recalled, 20 or more writers would often converge for weekends that consisted of conversation, dinners, fishing parties and a little business worked in on the side.

"I suppose that, as a representative of my publisher, he must have had business dealings with me," Glass would write later, "but I do not recall them; for contracts were signed as mere incidents of jolly luncheons and dinners, all the details having been arranged at fishing parties and weekend visits to Harry's bungalow in Freeport. His wide acquaintance with American writers grew of course out of his occupation as representative of a large publishing firm, but there was nothing of the publisher's tout about Harry. It is even conceived that he made unprofitable contracts for his principals, since his sympathies were always with the author."

Quite often, the Harry and Dorothy would lend out their bungalow during extended periods of travel, as this letter to Freeman Tilden indicates. Harry was chiding Freeman for not being able to figure out how to operate the furnace, although Steger admitted to mechanical shortcomings of his own.

"Indeed, the difficulties that you people encountered in Freeport make us insufferably proud," Steger wrote, "for we have succeeded in heating the house. The furnace eats right out of Dorothy's hand and my pocket. The other night I had to go down and let the steam out of the chimney. When I put coal in it, it either explodes or goes out. The real object of this letter is to tell you all we love you all just as much as ever and unless you think it will be too chilly for you, you can have the house during the months of July and August."

To Montague Glass, Harry wrote, "I am about to invest in an ancient motorboat and shall want you to be at our launching. Unless your recent social distinctions have made you put up the age limit of your associates. However, you can bring the Howells if you want to."

A letter from England found its way to Harry in Austin, Texas where he was accumulating material for a project.

"Your letter to me was forwarded on to me in Texas where I was following the trails of O. Henry and collecting biographical material in the pursuance of my hobby," Harry wrote back to F.J. Foley, Esquire in Oxford, England. "I decided not long ago to keep my name on the Balliol books (not as a debtor, but as a member of the college!) and so your thoughtful gossip of the college was very welcome. Jimmy Palmer Bishop in India! I wonder if the English bishop in India has anything to do with the Hesitant Hindoo? Over my fireplace is a modern engraving, in the old style, of Balliol College. Far be it from me to take issue between a man and wife, but if Mrs. Wiley can negotiate an American trip with four children, it is not for you to claim the feat is either ridiculous or impossible. Why don't you come over here determined to take up your residence for a month or two at some pleasant place whither we Rhodes Scholars may proceed as pilgrims?"

Steger seemed bent on the acquisition of an impressive stable of writers of merit and, while it cost a pretty penny to entertain lavishly, a letter to James Francis Dwyer shows the literary agents priorities.

Dear Dwyer:

I've handled the serial publication of several friends of mine and of many Doubleday authors. The sales have gone into thousands of dollars and I've never taken a penny of commission; except once. This was a failure and I've given up (before I formed it) the habit. You are strengthening my job when you give me your eminently marketable stuff to handle. This is your really material return for services. As to the other thing, forget it. If I really need the account (my need, I admit, was at least in part a ruse, for you seemed so determined to have me take that commission) I'll do as you suggest; but let's proceed on the basis that we stick. I don't think we need to discuss the other thing any more, for we understand each other. Can you, Mrs. Dwyer and Glory come out next Sunday for the day? Fishing perhaps, food surely.

Yours sincerely,
Harry P. Steger

Chapter 45

In 1912, Dorothy Steger was slow to recover from two operations and Harry Peyton Steger thought a season in Paris might be just the thing to put the bloom back on the pansy.

Still, parting was difficult.

The last time Harry ever laid eyes on Dorothy, she was standing along the ship's railing with tears streaming down her face.

A letter from Steger to Montague Glass defined the fall of 1912.

Mr. Montague Glass,
Care of Thomas Cook & Sons,
Nice, France.

Dear Mont:

Two hundred Greek soldiers calling themselves The Detroit Reserves sailed for Havre in the steerage of the French liner Chicago on Saturday, October 19th. Among the cabin passengers were two beautiful ladies whose faces were wreathed in tears, also en route for Harve. Their addresses for the next six weeks will be Mrs. H.P. Steger, care of American Express Company, 11 Rue Scribe, Paris, and Miss Margaret Porter, likewise in this gentle corporation's charge.

The boat is a 10-day boat, so they will probably not be in Paris until the 30th of October. They intend to live there six or eight weeks at a Pension. If you and your Mary Caroline or ward Isabel go to Paris, I hope you will find them merry and happy. I want Dorothy to stay over there until she is entirely recovered from her illness and operations, so don't do anything to make them homesick.

I give you fair warning that if you are the least bit encouraging you may have for a few days four "traveling" ladies on your hands, instead of two.

Your bully letters were forwarded to me down in Indianapolis where I was sitting up with Tarkington and incidentally doing my O. Henry book. I finished my book and a rotten job of it, too. I also brought back a mighty good novel by Tarkington that Lorimer is going to run in the Post.

Charlie Falls is full of mournful prophesies that all three of you will be hiking back long before your allotted time. He and Alberta are getting ready to break ground at the Sage Patch and accordingly making a pretense of economy. I had dinner with them night before last at Mouquin's, and then following strict discipline, administered by my own hand, took a night train for Freeport.

Dorothy's sister and her husband are taking care of the house and Teddy. Teddy appears to be most cheerful and intent on making all he can of his liberty.

Yours sincerely,
Harry

So, Harry had completed Rolling Stone, a compilation of several unpublished short stories O. Henry had written, plus examples of the newspaper column William Sydney Porter had written in Houston, years before the invention of O. Henry. Of course, the title of the book came from the satirical newspaper Porter had published during 1894-95 in Austin, The Rolling Stone, and a variety of excerpts from the newspaper were included.

Here is an example of the "news" Porter included in The Rolling Stone.

Our worthy mayor, Colonel Henry Stutty, died this morning after an illness of about five minutes, brought on by carrying a bouquet to Mrs. Eli Watts just as Eli got in from a fishing trip.

Here's another newsworthy item.

Longtime advertisers, Adams & Co, grocers, have cancelled their ad. Coincidentally, no less than three children have recently been poisoned by eating their canned vegetables and J. O. Adams, the senior member of the firm, was run out of Kansas City for adulterating codfish balls. It pays to advertise.

Rolling Stone also had examples of Porter's artwork and letters Steger had found when he retraced the author's footsteps, first in North Carolina and then Texas. While all the letters offer insight into Porter's personality, one was a jewel.

The letter was written in 1902 to a prominent Oklahoma City attorney, Al Jennings. Before Porter became an author and prior to Jennings practicing law, the two men had served time together --- Jennings had been convicted of robbing trains and Porter was imprisoned for embezzlement.

In the letter, Porter wants to collaborate with Jennings and it eventually became "Holding up Trains" in Sixes and Sevens.

"Here is a rough draft of my idea," Porter told Jennings. "Begin abruptly, without any philosophizing, with your idea of the best times, places and conditions for the hold-up. Get as much meat in it as you can and, by the way, stuff it full of genuine western slang--(not the eastern story paper kind.) The main idea is to be natural, direct and concise. I hope you understand what I say. I don't."

Porter adds that to improve their odds of eventually seeing the story in print, he would forward Jennings' original manuscript as well as a manuscript Porter had doctored up.

"If he uses mine," Porter explains, "we'll whack up the shares of the proceeds. If he uses yours, you get the check direct. If he uses neither, we are only out a few stamps."

Al Jennings went on to make a career in Hollywood, but Porter was the better writer and some editor chose Porter's version, written under the pen name O. Henry.

"When you see your baby in print," Porter warned Jennings, "don't blame me if you find strange ear marks and brands on it. I slashed it and cut it and added lots of stuff that never happened, but I followed your facts and ideas, and that is what made it valuable. I'll think up some other idea for an article and we'll collaborate again sometime---eh? As soon as the check comes in, I'll send your 'sheer' of the boodle. By the way, please keep my nom de plume strictly to yourself. I don't want anyone to know just yet."

Chapter 46

As winter of 1912 set in, Harry Peyton Steger scurried about the country in an effort to advance the work of a stable of writers under contract to Doubleday, Page & Company. He was also having a difficult time convincing his step-son, Teddy, that the post cards arriving regularly actually were from the young boy's mother in France. Teddy insisted that Harry was sending them.

Meanwhile, in Paris, Dorothy was homesick and still complaining of a reoccurring pain in her side.

"Here I am growing icicles at Freeport and not knowing just exactly whether Dorothy is stepping aboard a homecoming ship or is dancing with glee along the banks of the Seine," Harry wrote to Montague Glass.

The Executive Council of the Alumni Association of the University of Texas sent Harry, he suspected because of his capacity as vice-president, a leather-bound alumni catalogue with his name stamped aureately.

"Last night I read page after page of it," Harry penned John Lomax, "and my reading filled me with a sadness that lasted well in to the wakeful night. I hadn't been closer to the University of Texas since, as a long-haired freshman, I first heard Alex Camp and George Robertson talking in their Titans' vocabulary in the big endless corridors outside your window."

Lomax mentioned he was considering publishing a magazine and Steger offered to submit sketches for a cover design, with the winning submission to collect $50.

"If your expense will allow you, you ought to have some color on the magazine," Harry advised his longtime friend. "And make it look as little like a cross between a Congressional Record and Burpee's seed catalogue as you possibly can."

And, as O. Henry's literary executor, Steger continued to diligently promote projects of the late author. Harry altered his schedule so he could remain in New York City to watch the Lamb's Club perform an O. Henry sketch. And then there was a hastily arranged trip to Grand Rapids to see the first performance of O. Henry's play.

In a letter to Will Hogg, Steger mentions that he has finally managed to bring the play to a stage.

Steger and Lomax had been discussing ways to bring more positive media to UT (it had just passed 2,000 in enrollment) and to aid Will Hogg's altruistic endeavors.

Will was a philanthropist and the oldest son of Texas' first native governor, James Stephen Hogg, a man of national renown.

James Hogg ran the Longview News and founded the Quitman News. As governor from 1891-1895, Hogg was a determined supporter of the Panama Canal and he prodded the state legislature to propose a constitutional amendment in order to create a Railroad Commission of Texas to protect landowners from powerful railroad entities and protect stockholders from deceptive practices by railroads that manipulated stock prices.

The populist governor went after large corporations for price fixing and he even filed a lawsuit against Standard Oil Company and asked that its chief executive, John D. Rockefeller, be extradited back to Texas.

In Governor Hogg's most unforgettable speech, he stated famously: "Let us have Texas, the Empire State, (be) governed by the people, not Texas, the truckpatch, ruled by corporate lobbyists."

For standing up to powerful corporations on behalf of the common taxpayer, Jim Hogg County was named in his honor. Yet, despite all those remarkable achievements, Governor Hogg is probably best remembered today for naming his lovely daughter Ima Hogg.

It is commonly believed that Gov. Hogg named another daughter Ura Hogg, but that appears to be a forerunner of today's urban legends.

Will Hogg and his sister, Ima, were great supporters of the arts, civic groups, non-profits and the University of Texas. Miss Hogg was also a noted historian. According to The Handbook of Texas, in 1962 when Jacqueline Kennedy decided to furnish the White House with the finest historic furniture, she asked for Ima Hogg's assistance.

In his heyday, Governor Hogg was even popular and well known as far away as New York. The New York Times featured the then former governor in a hilarious "Man in the Street" column in their September 6, 1903 edition.

Ex-Gov. Hogg of Texas, who has a reputation for liking to play a practical joke every time he gets a chance, says he has been cured of the habit. The last time he was in New York the joke he tried to perpetrate was turned back at him in great style. It happened that he wanted a shoe shine.

The bootblack, a small-sized Italian, began to chatter at him after he had taken his seat in the high chair. Not being in a conversational frame of mind, the portly Governor thought it would be a good plan to feign that he was deaf and dumb. So he responded by signs to everything the bootblack said.

This proceeding naturally caused the desired silence on the part of the Italian, and the Governor was wrapped in his own thoughts, when suddenly a little newsboy ran up and asked him if he wanted a paper. Before he could reply the bootblack turned to the boy and said: "You notta talka to him. He deaf."

The newsboy looked him over, says the Governor, and then remarked in a loud voice:

"Well, say, he's a fat old hog, ain't he?"

The Governor, who weighs 300 pounds or more, relishes telling the story, but he adds feelingly that he kept up his bluff after hearing the brutal comment of the newsboy.

Chapter 47

Never had Harry been busier. With his wife, Dorothy recuperating in France, Steger criss-crossed the country tackling projects.

"Dear Tark," Steger writes to Booth Tarkington in late October on 1912, "here is our check for $5,000. You can have the balance in the course of a week. I'm going down to Atlanta at the end of this week or the first of next, and I will drop off for an hour or two on my way back. Dorothy and Margaret Porter are on their way back to Paris for two or three months, and I am taking advantage of their absence to do a lot of running at nobody's inconvenience but my own. I want to stay over here until Sunday to see a performance of an O. Henry sketch at the Lamb's Club, so it may be well toward the end of next week before I drop in to say hello. If I miss you, I shall be sorry; but I shan't mind breaking the trip for four or five hours anyhow."

A letter written about the same time to Corra Harris explained why Harry wanted to make a trip to Atlanta.

"I despair of making you understand why I waited nearly ten days before having the five thousand dollars sent to you," Steger had hurriedly forwarded to Mrs. Harris in Pine Log, Georgia, "but you are so wrong in your explanation to yourself that I should like, out of justice to our friendship, to come and talk it over with you, and I want to bring the check with me. I think a more definite understanding and meeting of our minds than at present exists is pretty essential to our relations in the future, and I don't believe I shall soon forget this terrible letter of yours until I have talked it out with you 'face to face.' I can come to Atlanta or anywhere else on receipt of this letter, if you will wire me, and bring the check with me."

An old friend helped alleviate some of the tension, however. Joe B. Hatchitt wrote from Lockhart, Texas to remind Harry, now that Steger has ascended up the East Coast publishing ladder, not to forget who had nudged him into this line of work in the first place back when Harry was a young pup working on the University of Texas yearbook staff.

"So you are to blame for all the trouble I have been in these many years," Steger replied, tongue-in-cheek. "I had forgotten until your letter came that you and your henchmen were responsible for my editorial job. From the tone of your letter I gather you expect gratitude."

Meanwhile, Steger and John Lomax are still deciding which one of them should write a lengthy article detailing the civic work and philanthropy of Will Hogg.

"If you decide to write it yourself, don't expurgate Will," Steger warns. "Put him all in ---profanity, tobacco juice and all. I can do the editing at this end."

Another letter to Grace McGowan Cooke shows the compromising skills of a literary agent deftly dancing between the demands of a superior and the creative input of a valued writer.

Dear Mrs. Cooke:

Lately Wilson gave me, or rather all publishers through me, an epistolary drubbing for questioning the wisdom of titles. Personally "The Joy Bringer" suits me all right, but it is rather remarkable how nearly everyone else objects to it. I put the decision up to you for your decision.

Very sincerely yours,
Harry Peyton Steger

Mrs. Cooke must have sent a missive that left no doubt other publishing entities were beating a path to her door.

"Of course it interests us very much to know that you have been approached by Small, Maynard & Co., and by other publishers as well," Harry replied. "It only confirms our judgment that you are all right, and I hope the flirtatious creatures will be kept off for a time through my early receipt of the contract I sent you the other day. You must surely have it in your hands by now."

Harry was also negotiating on behalf of Mrs. Harris.

"If Reynolds makes any fruitful suggestions to me, I shall be glad to act in cooperation with him," Harry tells Mrs. Harris. "I am hoping, however, that Cosmopolitan will see the folly of letting such a good thing go by, and will come across celestially."

On December 23, 1912, Harry sent his father, Thomas P. Steger, the 12th volume of O. Henry and wrote on the flyleaf, "Here it is at last, Dad. See what you think of it."

Thomas Steger received this telegram from Harry on December 24.

Thos. P. Steger,
Bonham, Texas

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to home folks; am sending sets of O. Henry in leather and things all delayed. Dorothy not well in Paris but better now. Long letter soon; summer visit assured. Love from Uncle Harry to Su, Alice, Elizabeth Roberts.

The Steger family found this letter in the mail December 30, 1912.

Dear Dad,

I've ordered some mighty good cigars sent to you. They should have reached you before you get this letter, but, of course, things move very slowly this time of year.

Your letter about the gigantic box electrifies me. I shall be very popular for a period. Dorothy will insist that a part of it be saved against her return when she hears of it...poor girl! She hasn't been very cheerful because her side won't let up....bless your hearts, all of you, for keeping up the good old box habit. It began way back in freshman days, didn't it? You can't stop now!

Now here is my real Christmas present. When I get through with Austin in June, you and Mither are to come back with me and we're to have a visit. The railroad tickets both ways will be in my inside coat pocket and you must begin now to arrange court dockets, etc., to get away around June 15 or July 1 at the latest. This is definite. Dorothy will be home and strong again, I shall not be as busy as I was and the Glasses will be here. I'm planning this seriously, so don't disappoint me.

Affectionately yours,
Harry Peyton Steger

It would be the last letter the Steger family ever got from Harry.

Chapter 48

Things happened fast in the life of Harry Peyton Steger.

As a 15-year-old graduating from Bonham High School in 1897, Steger had delivered a high school address on the topic of "Character vs. Reputation."

Eight years later, in the fall of 1904, Harry was studying at Balliol College in Oxford, England as a Rhodes Scholar. He had completed basic studies at the University of Texas and spent a long, cold year in Baltimore doing graduate work at Johns Hopkins.

In September 1907, a little over 10 years after graduating from high school, Steger landed in New York City with no means of income and with his sights set on making a living off creative writing. Harry had to find another target for his literary skills, but the success he seemed to sense was only months away. By September 1908, Harry was an indispensable member of Doubleday, Page & Company.

"It was more the sort of exit you or Bedichek should have had than I," Harry wrote to Lomax.

Less than a dozen years after graduating from Bonham High School, Steger was now a literary advisor at one of the most prominent publishing firms in the county, revitalizing the career of O. Henry and still finding time to edit Short Stories magazine ("before breakfast, with my left hind leg").

Harry married an actress named Dorothy McCormack, bought a new home in Garden City, a suburb 20 miles from New York City, and then the couple decided to buy a bungalow in Freeport, Long Island where weekends meant fishing excursions with friends and long dinners with many of the writers Harry was either befriending or recruiting for Doubleday, Page & Company. Dorothy said she never knew how many guests were on the train bound for the bungalow until the caretaker began setting out chairs.

Dorothy seemed to care deeply for Montague Glass and the rest of Harry's inner circle. Harry doted over Teddy, the young son Dorothy brought into the marriage.

But then, in the first bitter-cold days of January 1913, with Dorothy in Paris, Montague still secluded and writing in a French villa and all of Harry's family far away in Fannin County, it happened.

Harry's kidneys began shutting down.

Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say it happened again.

An incident in May 1906 would surely have been a precursor.

Back in his days at Oxford, Harry had noticed a "penetrating pain" coming from his right kidney after exercising one day. The following morning at 4:00 a.m., Steger woke up screaming and a doctor that was hurriedly summoned gave repeated doses of morphine. Harry seemed to be on the road to recovery when, eight days later, his attendant at Oxford heard Steger thrashing and moaning. Again the doctor arrived to find Harry screaming and delirious. This time even morphine couldn't touch the pain. He spent eight days in the hospital, only to have a reoccurrence three days after being released. One of the world's leading physicians at the time, Dr. William Olser, examined Harry.

"He came to see me," Harry had explained to his Uncle, Ed Steger, "and sent me to London under nurses' charge to be x-rayed. Nothing showed. On my return, he analyzed my urine, found uric acid in large quantities, hinted strongly at Bright's disease, gave me alarming advice about my future and sent me to Karlsbad [Austria]."

Dr. Olser's warning had merit.

It is quite possible Harry had already been troubled to a certain extent by juvenile diabetes for years. He had been plagued by vision problems, periods of relative lethargy and headaches. The diagnosis administered by Dr. Olser seems to have been an indication of type 2 diabetes, right down to the uric acid stone Harry passed once treatment began in Karlsbad.

Proper exercise and a strict diet are necessary to limit the effects of type 2 diabetes and Harry wasn't doing a very good job of managing either one. John Lomax had been worried enough about his old friend's appearance to tell Harry's parents about his concern and had been verbally thrashed by Harry for his effort.

Lomax, like Olser, had reason to worry about Harry's future.

Bellevue Hospital, located on First Avenue near the East River where Dorothy and the McCormack family learned to be strong swimmers, was established in 1736 when George Washington was only a four-year-old toddler. This historic medical facility was America's first public hospital. Just after the first of the year in 1913, Harry was admitted to Bellevue Hospital.

Harry Peyton Steger had ridden his unique gift of logic and reason to prominence in the publishing world, but with his kidneys failing and toxins backing up in his body, Harry became belligerent and delusional. On January 3, 1913, against the advice of his attending physicians at Bellevue and without stopping to sign the customary release form, Harry checked himself out of the hospital.

Now he was alone in New York City.

Steger knew hundreds of people in the city through his profession and social life, but there wasn't a close friend there to make responsible choices now that Harry's thoughts were clouded with poison.

Harry went from Bellevue to the Hotel Caledonia.

Was he turning to a trusted friend in his hour of desperation?

As reality slipped away, could he have been looking for his old room at the Caledonia? Maybe he was even looking for O. Henry. Steger ended up in the apartment of an acquaintance at the Caledonia, where he collapsed. Harry was rushed to Polyclinic Hospital, but it was too late.

Harry Peyton Steger lapsed into a diabetic coma and died January 5, 1913. The standard Certificate of Death issued by the Department of Health of the City of New York listed diabetic mellitus and chronic interstitial nephritis as contributory causes of death.

It would have been a day before the stunned Steger family in Bonham read and reread the telegraph. In Paris, Dorothy Steger and Margaret Porter packed in a state of shock and boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm in hopes they could make it back in time for the funeral in Bonham.

Word of Harry's passing quickly spread among publishing associates, the writers who depended on him and, of course, his close friends from those days Steger always cherished at the University of Texas.

Thanks to a passage written by J. Frank Dobie, we even know how the news struck Roy Bedichek, the one person on earth that Harry considered his twin.

Roy cried all day long.

Chapter 49

In the late summer of 1906, Harry Peyton Steger had boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm in Bremen, Germany bound for the states. That was after a series of kidney ailments had interrupted his studies at Oxford and eventually led to a summer of medical care in Carlsbad, Austria.

As Harry liked to say, he "lost his health and went to Carlsbad to find it."

Now it was the first week of January 1913 and Mrs. Harry Peyton Steger was on the Kaiser Wilhelm bound for her young husband's funeral.

Steger had slipped into a diabetic coma and died January 5, 1913 at Polyclinic Hospital in New York City. Harry's wife, at his suggestion, had been in Paris, France at the time of his death in hopes some time abroad might speed her recovery from a series of surgeries.

Dorothy Steger would arrive in New York City a little over a week later and then accompany the body to Bonham by train.

Management at Doubleday, Page & Company where Steger worked as a literary advisor issued a statement: "To us who were Harry Steger's work-fellows, it is not yet possible to realize that he is not at work in his corner, energetic, kindly, sympathetic and effective. He was the friend of everyone in the shop and his eager and comprehensive mind was always ready to help with any problem, business or personal. At thirty, Steger was an able and brilliant businessman, editor, friend, a loyal and dependable teammate, a man ready to lend a hand to any worthy service; a splendid judge of good material, one sure in the long run to have been a foremost figure in the publishing work he liked to do. He will always remain a vital influence in the lives of us who knew him well."

Irvin S. Cobb, a prolific author, the nation's highest-paid staff writer for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and a close friend of Steger, needed time to let the reality of the passing of Harry sink in.

"I want someday soon to see you," Cobb wired Steger's employers, "and hear from you the details of the death of one of the most loveable men I ever knew."

Down in Pine Log, Georgia, the news hit Corra Harris even harder. She had lost two children in infancy. Her husband, a circuit-riding Methodist minister 10 years her elder, had struggled with depression and alcoholism until his suicide in 1910.
Living an isolated existence in the Georgia mountains during this bleak period in her life when she turned to writing to support her family, Corra depended on Harry's expertise as she formulated complex novels such as The Recording Angel and sold serials to Saturday Evening Post.

"He was the best friend I ever had," Corra wrote. "I always fell back on him in any kind of trouble or discouragement about my work. And he always responded like the whimsical, good spirit he was. He was one of the few men I have known who escaped partisanship in the exercise of his office. His integrity was a kind of gentleness which was no respecter of persons. He had a wit so keen that he could laugh at his own or any other man's little eccentricities, but I believe he had the tenderest, kindest heart to the unhappy and the unfortunate I ever knew."

Pulitzer Prize winner Booth Tarkington mailed this letter to Harry's parents in Bonham.

"Harry Peyton Steger was the most splendid young man I have even known, Tarkington wrote. "If he had lived, he would have become the foremost publisher in America. He had a great heart---a good, great heart. There was no limit to his kindness, to his generosity, to his charity. An experienced man of the world, he had preserved his gentleness unimpaired. Brilliant, charming, learned, brave, gay and gentle, he brought sunshine with him. High and lowly welcomed him. He was what used to be called 'a fine gentleman' in the best meaning of that phrase."

A train carrying the body of Harry Steger, accompanied by his wife, Dorothy, and business associates from New York finally pulled into Bonham about 8:00 p.m. on Monday, January 20.

Bonham High School closed its doors at 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 21, 1913 to allow students and faculty to attend the funeral of the BHS honor graduate and former teacher en masse.

According to the Bonham News, services were originally planned to be held in the home of Harry's parents, Judge and Mrs. Thomas P. Steger, but, to accommodate the number of people that wished to pay their last respects, funeral services were moved to Union Presbyterian Church in Bonham.

Pallbearers were Jack Russell, Dr. E.H. Foster and McKee Black, all of Bonham, along with Edwin Witt of Waco, plus Drummond Hunt and Ed Crane of Dallas.

His travels over and his words already beginning to fade on the yellowing pages of letters sent to friends, those six men carried the body of Harry Peyton Steger to its final resting place in Willow Wild Cemetery.

Chapter 50: epilogue

This project is dedicated to my friend and mentor, Tom Scott. Harry Peyton Steger is another example of local history, much like legendary jazz guitarist Charlie Christian that would have slipped away forever if not for the keen perspective of Mr. Scott. Thank you, Tom, for this story only happened because of you.

I can still see Tom leaning back in his swivel chair at the Fannin County Museum of History desk and thumbing over his shoulder in an attempt to direct my attention to a photograph of Steger on the wall behind him.

"You need to do something about this guy," Tom would say about Steger.

He was right, too.

Even when I realized Tom was handing me one of the best unwritten chapters in Fannin County history, I was still only looking at the tip of the iceberg.

The Bonham Public Library allowed me to study a collection of Harry Peyton Steger's letters that the Ex-Students Association of the University of Texas had compiled and my intention was to churn out a brief 300-word article about a Bonham boy that had been a Rhodes Scholar and, eventually, the editor and friend of acclaimed short-story writer O. Henry.

At that time, The short story of Harry Peyton Steger seemed like an appropriate title. Forty-nine chapters later...maybe not so much.

I started writing that first night and I vaguely remember glancing up at the clock. It was 3:00 a.m., I had about 800 words typed up and hadn't even gotten through the foreword of The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger 1899-1912. Although I wasn't to the book's introduction yet, I knew our boy Harry had entered UT as a 15-year-old (having donned long trousers especially for the event, he noted), won the Cecil Rhodes Scholarship in competitive examination, been elected president of Oxford's largest debating club, tramped across Europe, was sent to Monte Carlo for the London Express and had been arrested by the Italian Army (most of it, he added tongue-in-cheek) for building a wind-whistle on a rock in the Mediterranean Sea.

I should have changed the title right then, because Harry hadn't yet thrown away his Rhodes Scholarship, spent 16 days begging his way from Queensboro to London penniless in order to write a series of articles about the plight of the unemployed, not to mention hiking and biking across Europe with old college pal Roy Bedichek before they both scraped together just enough money to scramble aboard a tramp steamer bound for Quebec. Steger would arrive in New York City (and shave at once, he recalled) with little money and no promise of employment.

In two years Steger would be working his way into the position of literary advisor with Doubleday, Page & Co. and naively coaxing a reluctant O. Henry into doing a little publicity work.

What could it hurt?

A lot, actually.

It troubled me that Harry had relinquished his Cecil Rhodes Scholarship, enough so that I went to talk to Tom Scott.

"There comes a jumping off place, Allen," Mr. Scott told me. "Harry was only 25, but you have to understand he had been in college, what, about 10 years, maybe? There comes a point where you realize you may have taken enough from the educational process to actually begin applying what you've learned."

Tom had also told me that Harry's tombstone in Willow Wild Cemetery had an epitaph written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Booth Tarkington. I found the tombstone, but no inscription and I came back to the Fannin County Museum of History to tell Mr. Scott that perhaps he was mistaken.

"Oh, hell!" he said. "Go home and mix up one part bleach to four parts water and come back and get me."

In 30 minutes, Tom and I were looking at a concrete slab over the gravesite and the slab was covered by an inch-thick layer of lichen and grass clippings. The bleach helped dissolve the moss. A hoe scraped off the resulting sludge to reveal the epitaph Tarkington had written to Harry's dad, Thomas Peyton Steger.

With an unhappy look on his face, Tom was shaking his head.

"But there it is," I said.

"It's not the phrase I thought it was," Mr. Scott replied.

"But it matches what I've read in Harry's letters, so we're on track," I offered.

We both shrugged as if to say, "Hey, it is what it is."

In addition to Tom, this project could never have happened without the ladies at Bonham Public Library. Whatever information I truly needed, they came up with it.

Barbara McCutcheon had The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger patiently waiting for the chance to come to life. She compiled the chapters as this story unfolded and also found a haunting photo of Charlie Thurmond. Charlie was a friend of Harry's and a Vasser girl reared on West Fifth Street. Their fathers operated Thurmond and Steger Law Firm, which was where Sam Rayburn worked to meet the requirements needed in those days to become a lawyer.

The Thurmond family plot is next to another one-time law partner of P.C. Thurmond, Sam Rayburn.

Charlie's photo came from a passport signed in Grayson County by Winnie Jones, Deputy Clerk of the U.S. District Court in Sherman, Texas. It was 1920 and Charlie was on her way to spend the summer in Italy, France and Belgium. Those were the days, my friend.

Debbie Green found several historical facts, including transcripts from when Harry's uncles in Bonham had been subpoenaed to testify before congress after a contract to supply mules to the U.S. Army came up lame. Best I can tell, the Steger Mule Syndicate got caught between a rock and a hard place. The boys had to decide between contributing to the politician that had originally greased the government wheels to enable the contract or pay off their business partner. Evidently it didn't take long to come to the conclusion it would be better to face all of congress than face the wrath of Congressman Joe Bailey.

For 18 months, whenever I was stumped, I took a stool at Bonham Public Library and I usually had the answer before I got up.

Arlene Moore provided the most likely scenario behind Harry Peyton Steger's irrational behavior in his final hours and the story would have been vastly inferior without her many contributions.

I want to also thank former Fannin County Clerk Tammy Skidmore Rich for being the first person to recognize this was more of a book than a column and for helping me locate the final will of Harry's father. I saw a lot of my own father in the pragmatic behavior of Bonham lawyer Thomas P. Steger as he tried to explain the ways of the world to an idealistic son busy "chasing butterflies."

Tom Scott and I discussed this passage at length without coming to agreement.

Tom said Harry was referring to literary adventures.

"Oh, I don't know, Tom," I wondered aloud. "Seems to me he may mean two-legged butterflies."

Losing his only son had taken the wind out of Thomas P. Steger's sails, but he stoically went on. Then, in the spring of 1931, his wife died.

When Thomas made out his will, he left his money pistol to a grandson. Thomas asked that as little notice of his death as possible be given and he didn't even want a headstone. I guess his last request was to simply be laid to rest beside his son. Then he went home and put a bullet through his heart.

Another person that encouraged me more than he knows is Dr. Pat Taylor, who, like Harry Peyton Steger, is an accomplished graduate of Bonham High School.

"This should be a screenplay," Dr. Taylor wrote me early on.

He's right, of course. I just don't know how to get Larry McMurtry to polish up the script and Johnny Depp to take the lead role.

At one point I wondered about attempting to secure a J. Frank Dobie Fellowship and spend a year on Dobie's ranch putting this project together correctly. But The short story of Harry Peyton Steger was all made possible because the businesses in Bonham have allowed North Texas e-News to be a part of this community for the past decade. I would never let them down and let go of something so many people have worked so hard to build, story by story, concept by concept.

Just like Harry Peyton Steger, Bonham is the place I have always been proud to call my hometown. And I'm proud that small towns in Texas still turn out humble, respectful, intelligent young men that can compete anywhere. At every BHS graduation, I catch myself thinking that any one of a number of our young men and women may very well be our next Harry Peyton Steger.

And I would be remiss if I didn't express sincere appreciation to my brother, Mark, for adding a little Rich family perspective to the Steger family saga.

Early in this project, I admitted to being more than a little intimidated at the fact that one of the poorest students in Bonham High School history was undertaking the life story of perhaps the most accomplished scholar BHS ever produced.

"Now, now, you're being way too hard on yourself," Mark consoled me. "You have to admit it is a bit of ever-so-subtle symbolism that depicts the way things have gone in Bonham to let a D- student tell the story of our only Rhodes Scholar."

That wouldn't be so funny if he wasn't so right.

Don't forget this all started with a 3x5 card on the wall of Fannin County Museum of History. It may have been the first 3x5 card I ever studied. My guess is the card is still on the museum wall and all 49 chapters are right there on it if you squint your eyes and look hard enough.

If there was one particular moment of enlightenment during the past 18 months, it was that some of the men I hold in great esteem---in particular John Lomax and Roy Bedichek---remembered a guy from my hometown as the very best of their generation of UT graduates...our boy, Harry.

If I was driven by one underlying cause over the course of this project, it was that maybe Harry's hometown should remember him, too.

I have saved a few of my favorite stories for the faithful followers of The short story of Harry Peyton Steger. The first ones come from playwright Montague Glass.

Harry had told Montague that he was fond of the young of all species, but "particularly cats and authors." The bills that came from feeding both were staggering.

It seems that one night after enjoying an evening of theatre in New York City, Harry and Montague were walking past the Verdi monument at Broadway and 71st Street when the mournful mewing of a discarded kitten froze Harry in his tracks. Montague watched as Harry scrambled around the monument until the kitten was located.

Cuddling his new friend, Harry exclaimed, "Now...we're off to find a dairy!"

At midnight, none of the posh establishments nearby remained open, so the two men ambled 10 blocks with the hungry kitten twisting and turning in Harry's pocket before, at last, strolling into an open diner.

"Say, what would you have that would be good for a starving kitten we just found?" Harry asked the owner.

"Smoked sturgeon," the man replied, not missing a beat.

"Hey, then I'll take ten cents worth," Harry replied.

The proprietor fixed his gaze on Harry for a moment and said sternly, "C'mon, who's gonna sell ten cents worth of sturgeon? Best I can do is twenty-five cents for a quarter of a pound."

"Fire away!" Harry exclaimed as he set the squirming kitten down on the floor of the diner.

The hungry little feline devoured the fish and frantically searched for more, so Harry coughed up another two bits for a second helping.
Just as that delicacie, too, disappeared, a fellow that appeared to be a regular customer walked in and casually ordered a bottle of milk. The proprietor promptly obliged and Harry had a puzzled look on his face as he watched the customer disappear out the front door.

"OK, wait a minute," Harry said as he turned around to the man running the diner. "Are you telling me you think smoked sturgeon is better for a little kitten than milk?"

"What do I look like...a cat doctor?" the proprietor sneered.

Harry picked up the kitten and started for the door.

"Look, mister," the man said, softening his tone a bit as he savored his last minor victory of the day, "just be glad that wasn't a puppy you picked up. I'd a' stuck a sucker like you with a $5 chunk of Westphalia ham."

Harry would have shrugged off the exchange as an unpleasant business deal with an unfortunate fellow of inferior breeding. If you know better, you do better and gentlemen knew better than to take advantage of any one of God's creatures, two-legged or four-legged.

Besides, fifty cents of smoked sturgeon was nothing to a man who often had almost that many people out to the bungalow in Freeport for dinner and conversation. His wife, Dorothy, remarked to her family that she had no idea how many people to expect until the caretaker began setting out chairs.

Here is how Montague Glass described an evening with Harry and Dorothy:

"There I have met every condition of author,---authors for whom the American publishers were fighting like terriers over a choice bone, authors whose youth and inexperience never found their way past the outer office-boy of a magazine or publisher's office,---fiction writers, poets, historians and scientists and all of them unaffectedly enjoying themselves. There was something about Harry's mere presence that banished affection and made even the writers of best sellers unbend and become as human beings. Nor did anyone talk shop at these gatherings."

"The danger of sitting down 13 to a table," Harry said one Sunday, "is that somebody's bound to break a glass over just how much a word Robert W. Chambers gets for his stuff."

There was, however, little chance of 13 at Harry's table. The number was more often twenty and over, with Harry at the head seated in an armchair---a black cat and a white cat cradled in either arm.

Corra Harris summed up Harry's character in one phrase.

"He had a sweet soul," she wrote me.

And I can say no more than that.

-- Montague Glass

In "Out of the Old Rock," J. Frank Dobie had a humorous recollection of a conversation between a young Harry Peyton Steger and Roy Bedichek.

In the vigor of early manhood Bedi drank some whiskey---maybe not too much---although after he married, any drinking was bad economically. I don't think he ever loved any man quite so much as he loved his college friend Harry Steger, with whom he bicycled through Europe and who died young. He cried all day long, so Mrs. Bedichek has told me, after receiving word of Steger's death. One of his favorite anecdotes was of meeting Steger on Congress Avenue in Austin one day. They both wanted a drink but before entering a saloon swore to each other that they would take only one and then get out. They took the drink, and it was good.

"Well, let's go," said Bedi.

"That drink makes me feel like a new man," Steger said, "and now the new man has to have a drink."

I never did ask Bedi if he joined the new man.

-- J. Frank Dobie

Maybe the most beautiful surprise as I put the previous 49 chapters together was an email that made its way to my farm in rural Texas from New York City.

I came across your article today online and was very interested.... you see my great-aunt "Dolly" McCormack was Mr. Steger's wife at the time of his death. Is there anything in his letters about a wife & son? My grandfather talked about her often to me as a child, but I have not been able to find any information on her. He claimed that she was an actress in silent films, that her first marriage to a wealthy NYC heir was annulled by his parents...I am the one who found evidence of this marriage in the New York Times archives. I cannot tell you how excited I was to have at least one of the stories of his beloved sister confirmed. I Google Mr. Steger every few months just to see if there is anything new listed for him and that is how I found your article. I have two pictures, prints actually, hanging in my dining room that, according to my grandfather, hung in Dolly and Harry's home!

That email came rather early in this project from Dorothy (Dolly as her family called her) Steger’s great-niece, Jan Massey. I raced to tell Tom Scott.

“Harry had a son?” we both wondered aloud.

Well, not quite.

The best Jan and I can determine, Teddy Steger was about two years old when Harry and Dorothy married, although the McCormack family always just assumed it was Harry’s child.

After Harry died, Dorothy temporarily left Teddy with her family in New York and moved to California where she married a Hawaiian man named Jack Ena. Thanks to the research of Jan Massey, we know what happened to all but one of the central characters in this story.

“My Aunt Irene, along with her mom and sister, put young Ted on the train to California in late 1913 or early 1914,” Jan recalls. “They looked for him for years… writing letters into the 1960's looking for him. I think that image of putting a 5- or 6-year-old on a train alone must have haunted her all of her life. We always looked for Ted Steger but I have a feeling that we should have looked for him under the name of the woman who took him in when his mom died in 1918.”

So, Dorothy Steger died during the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918. For an unknown reason, Ted never seemed to be a part of Dorothy’s family after she remarried in California. He wandered, pretty much on his own, for four or five years. Another lady’s son befriended Ted and the McCormack family now believes they were looking all those years for the wrong name.

“That woman's name was Mona Chapman,” Jan said, “and he could have changed his last name to Chapman after her. Ted would have been only 10 when she took him in.”

The last word in this should come from Carl Sandburg, a man that won two Pulitzer prizes and, according to the fall 1985 issue of Texas Library Journal, a professor that read The Letters of Harry Peyton Steger and recommended them to his college students because of Steger's unique gift with descriptive phrases.

Sandburg told an audience there would be no need to introduce him to Harry Peyton Steger once he got to heaven.