neker.

"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 o