"What's up?"

I had made my way to the desk of the sporting editor, who writes poetry and pretends he's so aerial that he never knows what day of the week it is, but when you pin him down he can tell you exactly what you want to know--from the color of the bride's going-away gown to the amount the bridegroom borrowed on his life insurance policy.

"Search me!" he answered--as usual.

"But there's something going on in this office!" I insisted.

"Everybody looks as exercised as if the baby'd just swallowed a moth-ball."

"Huh?"

He looked around--then opened his eyes wider. "Oh, I believe I did hear 'em say--"

"What?"

"That they can't get hold of that story about the Consolidated Traction Company."

"--And d.a.m.n those foreigners who come over here with their fool notions of dignity!" broke in the voice of the city editor--then stopped and blushed when he saw me within ear-shot, for it's a rule of the office that no one shall say "d.a.m.n" without blushing, except the society editor and her a.s.sistants.

"Who's the foreigner?" I asked, for the sake of warding off apologies.

That's why men object so strongly to women mixing up with them in business life. It keeps them eternally apologizing.

"Maitland Tait," he replied.

"Maitland Tait? But that's not foreign. That's perfectly good English."

"So's he!" the city editor snapped. "It's his confounded John Bullishness that's causing all the trouble."

"But the traction company's no kin to us, is it?" the poet inquired crossly, for he was reporting a double-header in verse, and our chatter annoyed him.

"Trouble will be kin to us--if somebody doesn't break in on Great Britain and make him cough up the story," the city editor warned over his shoulder. "I've already sent Clemons and Bolton and Reade."

"--And it would mean a raise," the poet said, with a tender little smile. "A raise!"

"Are you sure?" I asked, after the superior officer had disappeared.

"I'd like--a raise."

He looked at me contemptuously.

"You don't know what the Consolidated Traction Company is, I suppose?"

he asked.

My business on the paper was reporting art meetings at the Carnegie Library and donation affairs at settlement homes because the owner and publisher drank out of the same canteen with my grandfather--and my fellows on the staff called me behind my back their ornamental member.

"I do!" I bristled. "It's located at a greasy place, called Loomis--and it's something that makes the wheels go round."

He smiled.

"It certainly does in Oldburgh," he said. "It's the biggest thing we have, next to our own cotton mills and to think that they're threatening to take their doll-rags and move to Birmingham and leave us desolate!"

"Where the iron would be nearer?" I asked, and he fairly beamed.

_"Sure!_ Say, if you know that much about the company's affairs, why don't you try for this a.s.signment yourself?"

But I shook my head.

"I've got relatives in Alabama--that's how I knew that iron grows on trees down there," I explained.

"Well--that's what the trouble is about! Oldburgh can't tell whether this fellow, Maitland Tait, is going to pack the 'whole blarsted thing, don't you know, into his portmanteau' and tote it off--or buy up more ground here and enlarge the plant so that the company's grandchildren will call this place home."

I turned away, feeling very indifferent. Oldburgh's problem was small compared with that letter in my hand-bag.

"And he won't tell?" I asked, crossing over to my own desk and fitting the key in a slipshod fashion.

"He seems to think that silence is the divine right of corporations.

n.o.body has been able to get a word out of him--nor even to see him."

"Then--they don't know whether he's a human being or a c.o.c.kney?"

He leaned across toward me, his elbow flattening two tiers of keys on his machine.

"Say, the society's column's having fever and ague, too," he whispered. "The tale records that two of our 'acknowledged leaders'

met him in Pittsburgh last winter--and they're at daggers' points now for the privilege of killing the fatted calf for him.--The one that does it first is IT, of course, and Jane La.s.siter's scared to death!

The calf is fat and the knife is sharp--but no report of the killing has come in."

I laughed. It always makes me laugh when I think how hard some people work to get rid of their fatted calves, and how much harder others have to labor to acquire a veal cutlet.

"Of course he was born in a cabin?" I turned back to the poet and asked, after a little while devoted to my own work, in which I learned that my mind wouldn't concentrate sufficiently for me to embroider my story of an embryo Michaelangelo the Carnegie Art Club had just discovered. "A cabin in the Cornish hills--don't you know?"

The sporting editor pulled himself viciously away from his typewriter.

"Ty Cobb--Dry sob--By mob--"

"Oh, I beg your pardon!"

"Can't you see when a poem is about to die a-borning?" he asked furiously.

"I am sorry--and perhaps I might help you a little," I suggested with becoming meekness. "How's this?--High job--Nigh rob--"

I paused and he began writing hurriedly. Looking up again he threw me a smile.

"Bully! Grace Christie, you're the light o' my life," he announced, "and--and of course that blamed Englishman was born in a cabin, if that's what you want to know."

"It's not that I care, but--they always are," I explained. "They're born in a cabin, come across in the steerage amid terrific storms--Why is it that everybody's story of steerage crossing is stormy?--It seems to me it would be bad enough without that--then he sold papers for two years beneath the cart-wheels around the Battery, and by sheer strength of brain and brawn, has elevated himself into the proud privilege of being able to die in a 'carstle' when it suits his convenience."

The sporting editor looked solicitous.

"And now, if I were you, to keep from wearing myself out with talking, I'd get on the car and ride out to Glendale Park," he advised.

But I shook my head.