The Stolen Story and Other Newspaper Stories/The Cub Reporter and the King of Spain

The Cub Reporter and the King of Spain
A MR. KNOX sat swinging a pair of good legs over the end of the dock at the foot of East Twenty-sixth Street, smoking vile cigarettes and wishing something would happen. Small monotonous waves slapped the green-coated piles below, which smelled oozy. Out in the channel ferry-boats and tugs tooted in a self-important manner, but Mr. Knox yawned and would not look up at them; and that is the way he spent most of his time.
He had learned that when it was flood-tide the incoming Thirty-fourth Street ferry boats headed away down the river as if for his dock, just as the patient Twenty-third Streeters pretended to want to land above him when the tide was pulling out. He knew who were the owners of the steam-yachts ​anchoring there in Kip's Bay; and he could tell many of the harbor tugs and all the Sound steamers by their whistles. That was why he would not look up unless he heard a new voice come across the water. All this bored him exceedingly.
Hamilton J. Knox had been one of the great men of his day, which was a year or two ago, when in college. He was in the World now. Therefore he was not even a man, it seemed, but a boy learning things about

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