ld reportorial sins of omission,
commission and remission with a corrosive, speechless venom; and the
rest of us in the city room divided in our sympathies as between those
two. We sympathized with Devore for having to carry so woful an
incompetent upon his small and overworked crew; we sympathized with the
kindly, gentle, tiresome old major for his bungling, vain attempts to
creditably cover the small and piddling assignments that came his way.

I remember the date mighty well--the third of July. For three days now
the Democratic party, in national convention assembled at Chicago, had
been in the throes of labor. It had been expected--in fact had been as
good as promised--that by ten o'clock that evening the deadlock would
melt before a sweetly gushing freshet of party harmony and the head of
the presidential ticket would be named, wherefore in the Evening Press
shop a late shift had stayed on duty to get out an extra. Back in the
press-room the press was dressed. A front page form was made up and
ready, all but the space where the name of the nominee would be inserted
when the flash came; and in the alley outside a picked squad of
newsboys, renowned for speed of the leg and carrying quality of the
voice, awaited their wares, meanwhile skylarking under the eye of a
circulation manager.

Besides, there was no telling when an arrest might be made in the
Bullard murder case--that just by itself would provide ample excuse for
an extra. Two days had passed and two nights since the killing of
Attorney-at-Law Rodney G. Bullard, and still the killing, to quote a
favorite line of the local descriptive writers, "remained shrouded in
impenetrable mystery." If the police force, now busily engaged in
running clues into theories and theories into the ground, should by any
blind chance of fortune be lucky enough to ascertain the identity and
lay hands upon the person of Bullard's assassin, the whole town,
regardless of the hour, would rise up out of bed to read the news of it.
It was the biggest crime story that town had known for ten years; one of
the biggest crime stories it had ever known.

In the end our waiting all went for nothing. There were no developments
at Central Station or elsewhere in the Bullard case, and at Chicago
there was no nomination. At nine-thirty a bulletin came over our leased
wire saying that Tammany, having been beaten before the Resolutions
Committee, was still battling on the floor for its candidate; so