“Great stuff!” he exclaimed. “Let me have that dispatch, will you, when you've finished. I've just discovered that this young Speranza's father was Speranza, the opera baritone. You remember him? And his mother was the daughter of a Cape Cod sea captain. How's that? Spain, Cape Cod, opera, poetry and the Croix de Guerre. And have you looked at the young fellow's photograph? Combination of Adonis and 'Romeo, where art thou.' I've had no less than twenty letters about him and his poetry already. Next Sunday we'll have a special 'as is.' Where can I get hold of a lot of his poems?”
The “special as was” occupied an entire page. A reporter had visited South Harniss and had taken photographs of the Snow place and some of its occupants. Captain Zelotes had refused to pose, but there was a view of the building and yards of “Z. Snow and Co.” with the picturesque figure of Mr. Issachar Price tastefully draped against a pile of boards in the right foreground. Issy had been a find for the reporter; he supplied the latter with every fact concerning Albert which he could remember and some that he invented on the spur of the moment. According to Issy, Albert was “a fine, fust-class young feller. Him and me was like brothers, as you might say. When he got into trouble, or was undecided or anything, he'd come to me for advice and I always gave it to him. Land, yes! I always give to Albert. No matter how busy I was I always stopped work to help HIM out.” The reporter added that Mr. Price stopped work even while speaking of it.
The special attracted the notice of other newspaper editors. This skirmish in which Albert had taken so gallant part was among the first in which our soldiers had participated. So the story was copied and recopied. The tale of the death of the young poet, the “happy warrior,” as some writer called him, was spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Gulf. And just at this psychological moment the New York publisher brought out the long deferred volume. The Lances of Dawn, Being the Collected Poems of Albert M. C. Speranza, such was its title.
Meanwhile, or, rather, within the week when the Lances of Dawn flashed upon the public, Captain Zelotes received a letter from the captain of Albert's regiment in France. It was not a long letter, for the captain was a busy man, but it was the kindly, sympathetic letter of one who was, literally, that well-advertised combination, an officer and a gentleman. It told of Albert's promotion to the rank of sergeant, “a promotion which, had the boy been spared, would, I am sure, have been the forerunner of others.” It told of that last fight, the struggle for the village, of Sergeant Speranza's coolness and daring and of his rush back into the throat of death to save a wounded comrade.