His letters were ignored.

To satisfy himself that they had been received, he registered several of them.

It was nothing less than robbery, he concluded--a cold-blooded steal; while he starved, he was pilfered of his merchandise, of his goods, the sale of which was the sole way of getting bread to eat.
Youth and Age was a weekly, and it had published two-thirds of his twenty- one-thousand-word serial when it went out of business.

With it went all hopes of getting his sixteen dollars.
To cap the situation, "The Pot," which he looked upon as one of the best things he had written, was lost to him.

In despair, casting about frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to The Billow, a society weekly in San Francisco.