Damon Runyon

El Paso Herald/March 12, 1912

When that fresh, young traveling man, in the sassy brown velour lid and the tight pants, breezed into Marlin last winter and stuck his head into the weather-beaten house of J. Hickby, dealer in cigars, tobacco, farm produce and school supplies, established 1861, he was astonished to find an order awaiting him.

“Boy,” said the proprietor, genially, “send me a carload of them seegareets with the bad smell in ’em—the kind that burn like an old livery stable.”

“Egyptian?” queried the commercial man.

“Don’t care if I do,” replied Mr.Hickby, “I have a little rye and syrup. Be sure and put a loud smell in them see-gareets, and outside of that you kin make ’em out of anything you want to. Them Jints are coming from New York, and “Ed” Ames and Chief Meyers and all the boys are my customers for seegareets.”

Shelves Are Piled High

Sad to relate, Mr. Hickby now mournfully contemplates an array of shelves piled high with vari-colored boxes containing “coffin tacks,” while his erstwhile patrons, Ames and Meyers and Josh Devore, and a horde of other young Giants pass his place without as much as looking in, leaving long spirals of pipe smoke in their wake.

The cigarette has been banished from the training camp of the Gotham club, and the famous old war cry of the Giants, “gimmen me the makins,” is no longer heard in the land.

Calabash club and the Briar Root circle meet every evening in the lobby of the hotel, and you can now produce a cigarette case loaded to the guards in the presence of the assembled ball players with complete safety. It has been decreed that an athlete cannot train on cigarettes, and none of them is trying, so Mr. Hickby is stuck with his new stock.