VI
Trotter sat peering mildly about him as that Gargantuan organism known as a newspaper office labored and shrieked in the birth of an afternoon edition. Subterranean Hoe presses roared and hummed, telegraph keys clicked and cluttered, typewriters tapped and clattered like a dozen highholders on a hollow elm, telephone bells shrilled, shouting pressmen came and went, unkempt copy boys trailed back and forth with their festoons of limp galley proof, and Hubbart, with close-set eyes and a forehead like a bisected ostrich egg, sat at the City Desk, calmly presiding over an otherwise frenzied accouchement.
It interested Trotter. It interested him very much. But it no longer filled him with mingled fear and revolt. He was, indeed, no longer envious, just as he was no longer nervous. He was as calm as a Nihilist with a bomb in his pocket.
Looking up, he saw that the office boy was holding the rail gate open for him to enter. But he was conscious of no spirit of elation as he stepped through the gate and passed on into that glass-fronted cage where Pyott, the managing editor, sat like a switchman in his many-levered tower.
Trotter saw, seated at a desk before him, a thin-featured, thin-haired man of forty, with the crumpled-up eye-corners peculiar to the face that masks a circuitous and secretive mind. It was a face full of that weary concern, that alert indifferency, which is companion to the spirit of repeated compromise. It was far from an open face: it seemed to betray only two things, tiredness and satiric intelligence.
The man at the desk did not even look up. He merely flung a barbed "Well?" over his shoulder. It reminded Trotter of the preoccupied tail swish of a horse worried by a black-fly. The side flick of one casual monosyllable was plainly all he was worth. Trotter calmly sat down.
"I've been waiting for six months for a job on this paper," he began, quite seriously, quite deliberately. The man at the desk went on writing. The pen did not even stop.
"Yes?" This second monosyllable was neither an answer nor a question. It was merely an intimation that nothing of arresting moment had as yet been uttered.
"So I've come straight to you!"
"Yes!" This third exclamation was plainly a challenge to come to the issue in hand.
"I've been thrown down three——"
"Excuse me," the man at the desk had his hand on a desk 'phone standard, "but you'd better see our city editor."
Trotter laughed a little. "I've seen the city editor four times.
It's no use. He only throws me out."
For the first time Pyott, the managing editor, looked up. Then he swung about in his swivel chair and stared at the youth, the somewhat narrow-chested and calm-eyed youth who had the effrontery to sit down without being asked. The calm-eyed youth seemed in no way daunted by the ordeal.
"What do you want?" was Pyott's quick and curt demand.
"I want a job."
The editor's face darkened. Trotter could see that he had angered him. He could see a lean hand shoot out and a lean finger push down on the button that sounded a buzzer in the outer office.
"There's no use doing that till you've heard what I've got to say," announced Trotter.
"Why not?" snapped the man, with a finger still on the button.
"Because your man Hubbart out there told me not to stick my nose in here till I'd made good—till I'd got a big story. And now I've got it. And I'm going to give you the biggest scoop you've printed in five years."
"That's interesting!"
"I'd never have had the nerve to face you if it wasn't."
A boy appeared through the door. The editor swung back to his desk.
"Show this gentleman the way downstairs," he said, without anger, without resentment, without interest.
Trotter stood up and stared at him. "You mean you're not going to take this beat when I've got it right here to hand out to you?" he cried in his startled and high-pitched voice. "You're not going to give me my chance?"
"What chance? What beat are you talking about?"
"A beat that involves the theft of millions of dollars!"
"And what's going to happen to your millions of dollars?"
Trotter sat down in the chair again. "It's going to be stolen, every cent of it."
The man at the desk smiled. It was a very faint and mirthless smile. "You said that before, I think. But who's taking it?"
"One of the most accomplished crooks in all America."
"And from where?" was the next indulgent interrogation.
"From one of the richest banks in this city."
Trotter's calm and deliberate tones were beginning to nettle the other man a little.
"Then it hasn't actually been done?"
"No!"
"Yet you know it IS to be done?"
"Yes!"
Pyott was smiling by this time, quite broadly. "Would you kindly tell me just how you know all this? Just what first opened up the road to your somewhat startling knowledge?"
"Some turkey bones!"
"Ah, I see! Some turkey bones!" He nodded approvingly, indulgently. "And what were you doing with these particular turkey bones?"
"Putting them in a garbage can."
"Ah! You were putting some turkey bones in a garbage can. And as you were about to do this?"
"I caught sight of another man also trying to get rid of a parcel."
"Turkey bones, of course."
A butterball's bosom was no more impervious to slough water than the rapt-eyed youth to the older man's irony.
"When I opened his parcel I found it held mortar and stone and some steel cuttings."
"And this led you to infer?"
"This led me to follow him. He had a basement, I found, directly in the rear of a bank building."
"What bank building?"
"That's my story."
"And I trust the locality agreed with him."
"Extremely well," was Trotter's mild-toned reply. "In fact, it was essential for him to be side by side with that particular bank building, where he could quietly tunnel his way through its back wall and burrow under its floors and eat a passage right through to its vaults."
The man at the desk sighed and looked at the obsessed youth with a smile too impersonal to be called pitying. "Vaults! That's a matter for the police. This is a newspaper office."
"But can't you see the story in it? Can't you see what it means when you're the only people who're in on it?"
"You'll have to show me your Eskimo!" remarked the unperturbed editor.
"That's what I'm here for!" cried the exasperated youth.
Still again the man at the desk eyed his visitor for a minute of silence. Then he reached for his telephone. "I want Kendrick and Gilman for some city work. Send 'em in to me. Yes, right away, please."
Pyott swung about to his visitor once more. "I'm giving you our two best men. They'll do what you tell them to do."
"But that'll make it THEIR story!" objected Trotter. "I want to land this myself. I want it to be mine."
"Then what am I to do?"
Trotter scarcely knew. But he had not forgotten the thing he had waited and hungered for this many a month. "Put me on your staff, first, so I can be acting for somebody."
Still again the editor smiled. "You're set on being one of us, aren't you?"
"I've got to have something behind me before I can tackle a job like this."
"All right," was the wearily indulgent answer, "call yourself one of us. Now what else do you want?"
"I guess you'd better give me one of your workmen for a lookout," suggested the narrow-chested youth.
"Why a workman? Why not Kendrick or Gilman?"
"All I want is a husky man to see I'm not interfered with from outside," replied the new and jealous god of the press world. "Then I'll land the story myself."
The managing editor's finger end was once more on the buzzer. "I'll give you Tiernan of the job room. He's Irish, and weighs two hundred. Is there anything else?"
"I s'pose I'll need a gun," ruminated the mild-eyed youth. "But
I'm willing to buy that with my own money."
It was not the purchase of the gun that was troubling him. It was the thought that he had never in all his life so much as discharged a revolver. He would not even know how to load it. But then Tiernan would doubtless be able to show him.
A telephone bell was shrilling at the editor's elbow.
"Is that all?" demanded the impatient man of affairs as he turned to the 'phone. He called a cryptic sentence or two into the transmitter and slapped the receiver back on its hook.
"Yes, I guess that's all," answered the wide-eyed boy, with his hat in his hand.
"Then go and make good," said the man at the desk as Tiernan swung in through the office door. "Go and get your story!"