e," returned the dreamily smiling Mr. Burt. "Here it is, boiled down.
Guest on an anchored yacht returning late, sober, through the mist.
Wharf-gang shooting craps in a pier-shed. They size him up and go to it;
six of 'em. Knives and one gun: maybe more. The old game: one asks for
the time. Another sneaks up behind and gives the victim the
elbow-garrote. The rest rush him. Well, they got as far as the garrote.
Everything lovely and easy. Then Mr. Victim introduces a few
specialties. Picks a gun from somewhere around his shirt-front, shoots
the garroter over his shoulder; kills the man in front, who is at him
with a stiletto, ducks a couple of shots from the gang, and lays out two
more of 'em. The rest take to the briny. Tally: two dead, one dying, one
wounded, Mr. Guest walks to the shore end, meets two patrolmen, and
turns in his gun. 'I've done a job for you,' says he. So they pinch him.
He's in the police station, _incomunicado_."

Throughout the narrative, Mr. Greenough had thrown in little, purring
interjections of "Good! Good!"--"Yes."--"Ah! good!" At the conclusion
Mallory exclaimed!

"Moses! That is a story! You say it isn't yours? Why not?"

"Because it's Banneker's."

"Why?"

"He's the guest with the gun."

Mallory jumped in his chair. "Banneker!" he exclaimed. "Oh, hell!" he
added disconsolately.

"Takes the shine out of the story, doesn't it?" observed Burt with a
malicious smile.

One of the anomalous superstitions of newspaperdom is that nothing which
happens to a reporter in the line of his work is or can be "big news."
The mere fact that he is a reporter is enough to blight the story.

"What was Banneker doing down there?" queried Mr. Greenough.

"Visiting on a yacht."

"Is that so?" There was a ray of hope in the other's face. The glamour
of yachting association might be made to cast a radiance about the
event, in which the damnatory fact that the principal figure was a mere
reporter could be thrown into low relief. Such is the view which
journalistic snobbery takes of the general public's snobbery. "Whose
yacht?"

Again the spiteful little smile appealed on Burt's lips as he dashed the
rising hope. "Fentriss Smith's."

And again the expletive of disillusion burst from between Mallory's
teeth as he saw the front-page double-column spread, a type-specialty of
the usually conservative Ledger upon which it prided itself, dwindle to
a carefully handled inside-page three-quarter of a column.