ns, routine jobs such as ship news, police
headquarters substitution, even the minor courts usually relegated to
the fifteen or twenty-dollar-a-week men. Or, worst and most grinding
ordeal of a reporter's life, he was kept idle at his desk, like a
misbehaving boy after school, when all the other men had been sent out.
One week his total space came to but twenty-eight dollars odd. What this
meant was plain enough; he was being disciplined for his part in the
investigation.

Out of the open West which, under the rigor of the game, keeps its
temper and its poise, Banneker had brought the knack of setting his
teeth and smiling so serenely that one never even perceived the teeth to
be set behind the smile. This ability stood him in good stead now. In
his time of enforced leisure he bethought himself of the sketches which
Miss Westlake had typed. With his just and keen perception, he judged
them not to be magazine matter. But they might do as "Sunday stuff." He
turned in half a dozen of them to Mr. Homans. When next he saw them they
were lying, in uncorrected proof, on the managing editor's desk while
Mr. Gordon gently rapped his knuckles over them.

"Where did you get the idea for these, Mr. Banneker?" he asked.

"I don't know. It came to me."

"Would you care to sign them?"

"Sign them?" repeated the reporter in surprise, for this was a
distinction afforded to only a choice few on the conservative Ledger.

"Yes. I'm going to run them on the editorial page. Do us some more and
keep them within the three-quarters. What's your full name?"

"I'd like to sign them 'Eban,'" answered the other, after some thought.
"And thank you."

Assignments or no assignments, thereafter Banneker was able to fill his
idle time. Made adventurous by the success of the "Vagrancies," he next
tried his hand at editorials on light or picturesque topics, and with
satisfying though not equal results, for here he occasionally stumbled
upon the hard-rooted prejudices of the Inside Office, and beheld his
efforts vanish into the irreclaimable limbo of the scrap-basket.
Nevertheless, at ten dollars per column for this kind of writing, he
continued to make a decent space bill, and clear himself of the doldrums
where the waning of the city desk's favor had left him. All that he
could now make he needed, for his change of domicile had brought about a
corresponding change of habit and expenditure into which he slipped
imperceptibly. To live on fifteen d