"Sensation," repeated the other. "We've got the speed-up motto in industry. Our newspaper version of it is 'spice-up.' A conference that may change the map of Europe will be crowded off any front page any day by young Mrs. Poultney Masters making a speech in favor of giving girls night-keys, or of some empty-headed society dame being caught in a roadhouse with another lady's hubby. Spice: that's what we're looking for. Something to tickle their jaded palates. And they despise us when we break our necks or our hearts to get it for 'em."

"But if it's what they want, the fault lies with the public, not with us," argued Banneker.

"I used to know a white-stuff man--a cocaine-seller--who had the same argument down pat," retorted Edmonds quietly.

Banneker digested that for a time before continuing.

"Besides, you imply that because news is sensational, it must be unworthy. That isn't fair. Big news is always sensational. And of course the public wants sensation. After all, sensation of one sort or another is the proof of life."

"Hence the noble profession of the pander," observed Edmonds through a coil of minute and ascending smoke-rings. "He also serves the public."

"You're not drawing a parallel--"

"Oh, no! It isn't the same thing, quite. But it's the same public. Let me tell you something to remember, youngster. The men who go to the top in journalism, the big men of power and success and grasp, come through with a contempt for the public which they serve, compared to which the contempt of the public for the newspaper is as skim milk to corrosive sublimate."

"Perhaps that's what is wrong with the business, then."

"Have you any idea," inquired Edmonds softly, "what the philosophy of the Most Ancient Profession is?"

Banneker shook his head.

"I once heard a street-walker on the verge of D.T.'s--she was intelligent; most of 'em are fools--express her analytical opinion of the men who patronized her. The men who make our news system have much the same notion of their public. How much poison _they_ scatter abroad we won't know until a later diagnosis."

"Yet you advise me to stick in the business."

"You've got to. You are marked for it."

"And help scatter the poison!"

"God forbid! I've been pointing out the disease of the business. There's a lot of health in it yet. But it's got to have new blood. I'm too old to do more than help a little. Son, you've got the stuff in you to do the trick. Some one is going to make a newspaper here in this rotten, stink-breathing, sensation-sniffing town that'll be based on news.

Truth! There's your religion for you. Go to it."

"And serve a public that I'll despise as soon as I get strong enough to disregard it's contempt for me," smiled Banneker.

"You'll find a public that you can't afford to despise," retorted the veteran. "There is such a public. It's waiting."

"Well; I'll know in a couple of weeks," said Banneker. "But _I_ think I'm about through."

For Edmonds's bitter wisdom had gone far toward confirming his resolution to follow up his first incursion into the magazine field if it met with the success which he confidently expected of it.

As if to hold him to his first allegiance, the ruling spirits of The Ledger now began to make things easy for him. Fat assignments came his way again. Events which seemed almost made to order for his pen were turned over to him by the city desk. Even though he found little time for Sunday "specials," his space ran from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a day, and the "Eban" skits on the editorial page, now paid at double rates because of their popularity, added a pleasant surplus. To put a point to his mysteriously restored favor, Mr. Greenough called up one hot morning and asked Banneker to make what speed he could to Sippiac, New Jersey. Rioting had broken out between mill-guards and the strikers of the International Cloth Company factories, with a number of resulting fatalities. It was a "big story." That Banneker was specially fitted, through his familiarity with the ground, to handle it, the city editor was not, of course, aware.

At Sippiac, Banneker found the typical industrial tragedy of that time and condition, worked out to its logical conclusion. On the one side a small army of hired gun-men, assured of full protection and endorsement in whatever they might do: on the other a mob of assorted foreigners, ignorant, resentful of the law, which seemed only a huge mechanism of injustice manipulated by their oppressors, inflamed by the heavy potations of a festal night carried over into the next day, and, because of the criminally lax enforcement of the law, tacitly permitted to go armed. Who had started the clash was uncertain and, perhaps in essentials, immaterial; so perfectly and fatefully had the stage been set for mutual murder. At the close of the fray there were ten dead. One was a guard: the rest, strikers or their dependents, including a woman and a six-year-old child, both shot down while running away.

By five o'clock that afternoon Banneker was in the train returning to the city with a board across his knees, writing. Five hours later his account was finished. At the end of his work, he had one of those ideas for "pointing" a story, mere commonplaces of journalism nowadays, which later were to give him his editorial reputation. In the pride of his publicity-loving soul, Mr. Horace Vanney, chief owner of the International Cloth Mills, had given to Banneker a reprint of an address by himself, before some philosophical and inquiring society, wherein he had set forth some of his simpler economic theories. A quotation, admirably apropos to Banneker's present purposes, flashed forth clear and pregnant, to his journalistic memory. From the Ledger "morgue" he selected one of several cuts of Mr. Vanney, and turned it in to the night desk for publication, with this descriptive note:

Horace Vanney, Chairman of the Board of the International Cloth Company, Who declares that if working-women are paid more than a bare living wage, The surplus goes into finery and vanities which tempt them to ruin, Mr.

Vanney's mills pay girls four dollars a week.

Ravenously hungry, Banneker went out to order a long-delayed dinner at Katie's. Hardly had he swallowed his first mouthful of soup, when an office boy appeared.

"Mr. Gordon wants to know if you can come back to the office at once."

On the theory that two minutes, while important to his stomach, would not greatly matter to the managing editor, Banneker consumed the rest of his soup and returned. He found Mr. Gordon visibly disturbed.

"Sit down, Mr. Banneker," he said.

Banneker compiled.

"We can't use that Sippiac story."

Banneker sat silent and attentive.

"Why did you write it that way?"

"I wrote it as I got it."

"It is not a fair story."

"Every fact--"

"It is a most unfair story."

"Do you know Sippiac, Mr. Gordon?" inquired Banneker equably.

"I do not. Nor can I believe it possible that you could acquire the knowledge of it implied in your article, in a few hours."

"I spent some time investigating conditions there before I came on the paper."

Mr. Gordon was taken aback. Shifting his stylus to his left hand, he assailed severally the knuckles of his right therewith before he spoke.

"You know the principles of The Ledger, Mr. Banneker."

"To get the facts and print them, so I have understood."

"These are not facts." The managing editor rapped sharply upon the proof. "This is editorial matter, hardly disguised."

"Descriptive, I should call it," returned the writer amiably.

"Editorial. You have pictured Sippiac as a hell on earth."

"It is."

"Sentimentalism!" snapped the other. His heavy visage wore a disturbed and peevish expression that rendered it quite plaintive. "You have been with us long enough, Mr. Banneker, to know that we do not cater to the uplift-social trade, nor are we after the labor vote."

"Yes, sir. I understand that."

"Yet you present here, what is, in effect, a damning indictment of the Sippiac Mills."

"The facts do that; not I."