The price was not satisfactory. Edwards and his wife had counted upon receiving at least $300 for the story, and they needed that amount sorely. A respectful letter at once went forward to Harte & Perkins, appealing to their sense of justice and fairness, which Edwards had never yet known to fail him. On Nov. 3 came an additional check for $100, and these words:
"Replying to your favor of Nov. 1st, at hand today, we beg to state that we shall, agreeably with your request and especially as you put it in such strong terms, make the payment on 'A Girl from the Backwoods' $300. The story is much liked by our reader and we do think it is worth as much if not more than the Stella Edwards material which, however, in the writer's judgement was much overpaid. We shall take this into account when considering the acceptance of other stories from your pen, and while we do not say positively that we will not pay $300 for the next one, as we wrote you in our last letter this is a high price for this class of material and we will expect to pay you according to our views as to the value of the manuscript."
The year closed with an order from Harte & Perkins for another story of the Stella Edwards sort; a very dismal year indeed, and showing Factory returns as follows:
Two Five-Cent Libraries at $40 $ 80.00 Four magazine sketches at $10 40.00 One magazine sketch 6.16 "A Girl from the Backwoods," 300. --------- Total $426.16
Perhaps, after all, this was not doing so badly; for during this year, and the year immediately following, Edwards was to discover that he had had one foot in the grave. But his fortunes were at their lowest ebb. With 1898 they were to begin taking an upward turn.
Some one said that some one else, by using Ignatius Donnelly's cryptogram, proved that the late Bill Nye wrote the Shakespeare plays. This, of course, is merely a reflection on the cryptogram; BUT if Shakespeare's publishers had not been so slovenly with that folio edition of his plays, there would never have been any hunt for a cipher, nor any of this Bacon talk.
"In the early days, when I lived on the plains of Western Kansas on a homestead," says John H. Whitson, well and favorably known to dozens of editors, "I was nosed out by a correspondent for a Kansas City paper, who thought there was something bizarre in the fact that an author was living the simple life of a Western Settler. The purported interview he published was wonderful concoction! He gave a descriptive picture of the dug-out in which I lived, and filled in the gaps with other matter drawn from his imagination, making me out a sort of literary troglodyte; whereas, as a matter of fact, I had never lived in a dug-out. On top of it, one of my homesteading friends asked me in all seriousness how much I had paid to get that write-up and picture in the Kansas City paper, and seemed to think I was doing some tall lying when I said I had paid nothing."