and philosophic calm.
Amidst a buzz of telephones and a mighty scurrying of messengers the
staff of the "Clarion" was gathered into the fold, on a
"drop-everything" emergency call, and instantly dispersed again to the
hospitals, the homes of the health officials, the undertakers'
establishments, the cemeteries, and all other possible sources of
information. The composing-room seethed and clanged. Copy-readers yelled
frantically through tubes, and received columns of proofs which, under
the ruthless slaughter of their blue pencils, returned as "stickfuls,"
that room might be made for the great story. Cable news was slashed
right and left. Telegraph "skeletons" waited in vain for their bones to
be clothed with the flesh of print. The Home Advice Department sank with
all on board, and the most popular sensational preacher in town, who had
that evening made a stirring anti-suffrage speech full of the most
unfailing jokes, fell out of the paper and broke his heart. The carnage
in news was general and frightful. Two pages plus of a story that
"breaks" after 10 P.M. calls for heroic measures.

At 10.53 Mr. Harrington Surtaine arrived, hardly less tempestuously than
his predecessor. He did not even greet Bim as he passed through the
gate, which was unusual; but went direct to Ellis.

"Can we do it, Mac?"

"The epidemic story? Yes. There was a proof saved."

"Good. Can you do the story of the meeting?"

Ellis hesitated. "All of it?"

"Every bit. Leave out nothing."

"Hadn't you better think it over?"

"I've thought."

"It'll hit the old--your father pretty hard."

"I can't help it."

A surge of human pity overswept Ellis's stimulated journalistic
keenness. "You don't _have_ to do this, Hal," he suggested. "No other
paper--"

"I do have to do it," retorted the other. "And worse."

Ellis stared.

"I've got to print the story of Milly's death: the facts just as they
happened. And I've got to write it myself."

The professional zest surged up again in McGuire Ellis. "My Lord!" he
exclaimed. "_What a paper to-morrow's 'Clarion' will be!_ But why? Why?
Why the Neal story--now?"

"Because I can't print the epidemic spread unless I print the other.
I've given my word. I told my father if ever I suppressed news for my
own protection, I'd give up the fight and play the game like all the
other papers. I've tried it. Mac, it isn't my game."

"No," replied his subordinate in a curious tone, "it isn't your game."

"Yo