CHAPTER XVII
With a disgusted grunt, McNew, editor and proprietor of the New York Gazette, flung himself back in his chair. He was impatient by nature, and since he had bought the Gazette and made it the most notorious if not the most famous paper in New York, he had stopped concealing the fact. It is a bad thing for some men to succeed too soon in life. If McNew could have put off his success for twenty years, it would probably not have done him half the harm it did when he was thirty-five.
McNew had succeeded, so he had no patience with failure, not even with the temporary failure that comes to all newspaper men at times. His idea was that all information naturally belonged to the Gazette. Sometimes it was wilfully kept from it by perverse persons, and anon it was maliciously stolen from it by rivals; in either case he held that the loss was due to the failure of the Gazette men. McNew never admitted the impossibility of getting a piece of news.
In the present case he took no pains to hide his disgust.
“So far as I can make out, Risdon,” he jeered. “Your trouble seems to lie in the depraved desire of certain people to keep their business to themselves instead of telling it to you. What I want to know is, why do you let them do it? What in hell’s bells do you think the Gazette brought you back from Germany and landed you in Washington for? What do you think it pays you for? To report pink teas?”
Risdon flushed, but not from embarrassment. Risdon had been a newspaper writer too long to be readily embarrassed, even by his employer. But he was very angry. He leaned forward and brought his fist down with a bang on the table. “See here, Mac,” he began, furiously. “If—”
McNew drew in his horns a little. He wanted to stir up Risdon, but he did not want to stir him too far. “Aw! don’t call me Mac,” he interrupted. “It’s too infernally formal. Call me Johnny.”
A reluctant smile curved the corners of Risdon’s mouth. He and McNew had known each other ever since they had been cub reporters on the Alta California twenty years ago, and they understood each other thoroughly. “All right, Johnny,” he answered, still a little huffily. “If you want my resignation, you can get it.”
“What would I do with it?” retorted the other. “I can get a better scoop without turning around. I don’t want resignations; I want news. I’m publishing a newspaper, and I want something to fill it. Particularly, I want to know what the German and Japanese ambassadors are discussing so often and so earnestly with the daughter of the governor of the most Germanic state of all the states of Brazil. I don’t want pipe dreams; I want facts, f-a-c-t-s, facts, and not a lot of rot like this;” McNew crumpled a dozen typewritten pages in his hand, and flung them contemptuously on the table. “You call yourself a newspaper man and can’t find out a little thing like that?” he finished scornfully.
“Little thing! Humph! It is all right to talk, and it’s easy enough to invent plots a la Oppenheim, but—”