"What bank building?"

"That's my story."

"And I trust the locality agreed with him."

"Extremely well," was Trotter's mild-toned reply. "In fact, it was essential for him to be side by side with that particular bank building, where he could quietly tunnel his way through its back wall and burrow under its floors and eat a pa.s.sage right through to its vaults."

The man at the desk sighed and looked at the obsessed youth with a smile too impersonal to be called pitying. "Vaults! That's a matter for the police. This is a newspaper office."

"But can't you see the story in it? Can't you see what it means when you're the only people who're in on it?"

"You'll have to show me your Eskimo!" remarked the unperturbed editor.

"That's what I'm here for!" cried the exasperated youth.

Still again the man at the desk eyed his visitor for a minute of silence. Then he reached for his telephone. "I want Kendrick and Gilman for some city work. Send 'em in to me. Yes, right away, please."

Pyott swung about to his visitor once more. "I'm giving you our two best men. They'll do what you tell them to do."

"But that'll make it THEIR story!" objected Trotter. "I want to land this myself. I want it to be mine."

"Then what am I to do?"

Trotter scarcely knew. But he had not forgotten the thing he had waited and hungered for this many a month. "Put me on your staff, first, so I can be acting for somebody."

Still again the editor smiled. "You're set on being one of us, aren't you?"

"I've got to have something behind me before I can tackle a job like this."

"All right," was the wearily indulgent answer, "call yourself one of us. Now what else do you want?"

"I guess you'd better give me one of your workmen for a lookout,"

suggested the narrow-chested youth.

"Why a workman? Why not Kendrick or Gilman?"

"All I want is a husky man to see I'm not interfered with from outside," replied the new and jealous G.o.d of the press world.

"Then I'll land the story myself."

The managing editor's finger end was once more on the buzzer.

"I'll give you Tiernan of the job room. He's Irish, and weighs two hundred. Is there anything else?"

"I s'pose I'll need a gun," ruminated the mild-eyed youth. "But I'm willing to buy that with my own money."

It was not the purchase of the gun that was troubling him. It was the thought that he had never in all his life so much as discharged a revolver. He would not even know how to load it. But then Tiernan would doubtless be able to show him.

A telephone bell was shrilling at the editor's elbow.

"Is that all?" demanded the impatient man of affairs as he turned to the 'phone. He called a cryptic sentence or two into the transmitter and slapped the receiver back on its hook.

"Yes, I guess that's all," answered the wide-eyed boy, with his hat in his hand.

"Then go and make good," said the man at the desk as Tiernan swung in through the office door. "Go and get your story!"

VII

In a newspaper office, where one impression so quickly and inevitably obliterates another, sensation is startling only in the fact of its ephemerality. For two busy hours wave after wave of the world's turbulence had beaten on the sh.o.r.eline of the Advance staff's attention. Every one knew, from Pyott down, that the day was a "big" one. And since it is seldom the ever-arriving guests of sensation which disturb a newspaper office but rather the secondary thought of bestowing them in their right chamber and bed and fitting them with their right "heading" night-caps, the ordeal of the Advance's day had reached its second and most exacting crisis. So when Pyott, the managing editor, was called up on the wire by Obed Tyrer, the President of the First National Trust, the call from that quarter carried with it no responsive curiosity.

"Can you come up here right away?" demanded the banker, in a voice of that coerced tranquillity into which the trained mind translates itself when face to face with undue excitement.

"No; I can't! "

"Why can't you?"

"Well, among other things, I've got the trifling matter of a paper to put to press. What's wrong?"

"You know what's wrong!"

"Do I?"

"And you and your men let this go through, two whole weeks of it, for the sake of your little yellow-journal scarehead!"

"Look here, Tyrer, I'm a busy man. Tell me what you're talking about, or ring off."

"I'm talking about the lunacy of a one-cent journalist who's willing to risk even his own funds for the sake of an afternoon beat! I tell you, Pyott, the whole story's got to be stopped!"

"What story?"

"The Advance story! I've got your man Trotter here now. He----"

"Ah, Trotter!" exclaimed Pyott. He was at last beginning to see light.

"I've got him and your job-room man named Tiernan up here, but I can't do anything with Trotter. He's mad, mad as a March hare.

Says he's got to get his story down to you for to-day's issue."

"So you've got Trotter there! What else have you got?"

"Will you hold things up till I run down and talk it over? Will you promise me that much?"

Pyott laughed. "Then young Trotter got his story, after all?"

"Got his story? Of course he got it. And in another four hours that safe-cracker would have drilled right into our vitals. I tell you we can't imperil our inst.i.tution this way. We can't let that stuff get out. We can't do it!"

"n.o.body's going to break your nice new bank, Obed! You run down here in a taxi and we'll try to straighten things out."

"But what'll I do with Trotter? How're we ever going to hold him in?"