Gallegher and Other Stories

and Other Stories, by Richard
Harding Davis

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Title: Gallegher and Other Stories
Author: Richard Harding Davis

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GALLEGHER AND OTHER STORIES
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
With Illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson
COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

TO MY MOTHER

CONTENTS
GALLEGHER: A NEWSPAPER STORY
A WALK UP THE AVENUE

MY DISREPUTABLE FRIEND, MR. RAEGEN
THE OTHER WOMAN
THE TRAILER FOR ROOM NO. 8
"THERE WERE NINETY AND NINE"
THE CYNICAL MISS CATHERWAIGHT
VAN BIBBER AND THE SWAN-BOATS
VAN BIBBER'S BURGLAR
VAN BIBBER AS BEST MAN

GALLEGHER A Newspaper Story
[Illustration: "Why, it's Gallegher!" said the night editor.]
We had had so many office-boys before Gallegher came among us that
they had begun to lose the characteristics of individuals, and became
merged in a composite photograph of small boys, to whom we applied
the generic title of "Here, you"; or "You, boy."
We had had sleepy boys, and lazy boys, and bright, "smart" boys, who
became so familiar on so short an acquaintance that we were forced to
part with them to save our own self-respect.
They generally graduated into district-messenger boys, and
occasionally returned to us in blue coats with nickel-plated buttons, and
patronized us.
But Gallegher was something different from anything we had
experienced before. Gallegher was short and broad in build, with a
solid, muscular broadness, and not a fat and dumpy shortness. He wore
perpetually on his face a happy and knowing smile, as if you and the

world in general were not impressing him as seriously as you thought
you were, and his eyes, which were very black and very bright, snapped
intelligently at you like those of a little black-and-tan terrier.
All Gallegher knew had been learnt on the streets; not a very good
school in itself, but one that turns out very knowing scholars. And
Gallegher had attended both morning and evening sessions. He could
not tell you who the Pilgrim Fathers were, nor could he name the
thirteen original States, but he knew all the officers of the
twenty-second police district by name, and he could distinguish the
clang of a fire- engine's gong from that of a patrol-wagon or an
ambulance fully two blocks distant. It was Gallegher who rang the
alarm when the Woolwich Mills caught fire, while the officer on the
beat was asleep, and it was Gallegher who led the "Black Diamonds"
against the "Wharf Rats," when they used to stone each other to their
hearts' content on the coal-wharves of Richmond.
I am afraid, now that I see these facts written down, that Gallegher was
not a reputable character; but he was so very young and so very old for
his years that we all liked him very much nevertheless. He lived in the
extreme northern part of Philadelphia, where the cotton- and
woollen-mills run down to the river, and how he ever got home after
leaving the Press building at two in the morning, was one of the
mysteries of the office. Sometimes he caught a night car, and
sometimes he walked all the way, arriving at the little house, where his
mother and himself lived alone, at four in the morning. Occasionally he
was given a ride on an early milk-cart, or on one of the newspaper
delivery wagons, with its high piles of papers still damp and sticky
from the press. He knew several drivers of "night hawks"--those cabs
that prowl the streets at night looking for belated passengers--and when
it was a very