screen journalism, the long-haired poet with his flowing tie and neatly
ribboned manuscript. Even the office "boy," lethargic, neutrally polite,
busy writing on half-sheets of paper, was profoundly untrue to the
pictured type. Banneker wondered what the managing editor would be like;
would almost, in the wreckage of his preconceived notions, have accepted
a woman or a priest in that manifestation, when Mr. Gordon appeared and
was addressed by name by the hollow-chested Cerberus. Banneker at once
echoed the name, rising.

The managing editor, a tall, heavy man, whose smoothly fitting cutaway
coat seemed miraculously to have escaped the plague of dust, stared at
him above heavy glasses.

"You want to see me?"

"Yes. I sent in my name."

"Did you? When?"

"At two-forty-seven, thirty," replied the visitor with railroad
accuracy.

The look above the lowered glasses became slightly quizzical. "You're
exact, at least. Patient, too. Good qualities for a newspaper man.
That's what you are?"

"What I'm going to be," amended Banneker.

"There is no opening here at present."

"That's formula, isn't it?" asked the young man, smiling.

The other stared. "It is. But how do you know?"

"It's the tone, I suppose. I've had to use it a good deal myself, in
railroading."

"Observant, as well as exact and patient. Come in. I'm sorry I misplaced
your card. The name is--?"

"Banneker, E. Banneker."

Following the editor, he passed through a large, low-ceilinged room,
filled with desk-tables, each bearing a heavy crystal ink-well full of a
fluid of particularly virulent purple. A short figure, impassive as a
Mongol, sat at a corner desk, gazing out over City Hall Park with a rapt
gaze. Across from him a curiously trim and graceful man, with a strong
touch of the Hibernian in his elongated jaw and humorous gray eyes,
clipped the early evening editions with an effect of highly judicious
selection. Only one person sat in all the long files of the work-tables,
littered with copy-paper and disarranged newspapers; a dark young giant
with the discouraged and hurt look of a boy kept in after school. All
this Banneker took in while the managing editor was disposing, usually
with a single penciled word or number, of a sheaf of telegraphic
"queries" left upon his desk. Having finished, he swiveled in his chair,
to face Banneker, and, as he spoke, kept bouncing the thin point of a
letter-opener from the knuckles of his left hand. His