s."

"He gets the news," murmured Mallory, summing up in that phrase all the
encomiums which go to the perfect praise of the natural-born reporter.

"And he writes it," put in Van Cleve of The Courier. "Lord, how that boy
can write! Why, a Banneker two-sticks stands out as if it were printed
in black-face."

"I've never seen him around," remarked Glidden. "What does he do with
himself besides work?"

"Nothing, I imagine," answered Mallory. "One of the cubs reports finding
him at the Public Library, before ten o'clock in the morning, surrounded
by books on journalism. He's a serious young owl."

"It doesn't get into his copy, then," asserted "Parson" Gale, political
expert for The Ledger.

"Nor into his appearance. He certainly dresses like a flower of the
field. Even the wrinkles in his clothes have the touch of high-priced
Fifth Avenue."

"Must be rich," surmised Fowler. "Taxis for assignments and Fifth-Avenue
raiment sound like real money."

"Nobody knows where he got it, then," said Tommy Burt. "Used to be a
freight brakeman or something out in the wild-and-woolly. When he
arrived, he was dressed very proud and stiff like a Baptist elder going
to make a social call, all but the made-up bow tie and the oil on the
hair. Some change and sudden!"

"Got a touch of the swelled head, though, hasn't he?" asked Van Cleve.
"I hear he's beginning to pick his assignments already. Refuses to take
society stuff and that sort of thing."

"Oh," said Mallory, "I suppose that comes from his being assigned to a
tea given by the Thatcher Forbes for some foreign celebrity, and asking
to be let off because he'd already been invited there and declined."

"Hello!" exclaimed McHale. "Where does our young bird come in to fly as
high as the Thatcher Forbes? He may look like a million dollars, but is
he?"

"All I know," said Tommy Burt, "is that every Monday, which is his day
off, he dines at Sherry's, and goes in lonely glory to a first-night, if
there is one, afterward. It must have been costing him half of his
week's salary."

"Swelled head, sure," diagnosed Decker, the financial reporter of The
Ledger. "Well, watch the great Chinese joss, Greenough, pull the props
from under him when the time comes."

"As how?" inquired Glidden.

"By handing him a nawsty one out of the assignment book, just to show
him where his hat fits too tight."

"A run of four-line obits," suggested Van Cleve, who had passed a
painful apprenticesh