The old lady on the bridge had called Jimmie a “poor dear.” She would not have called him that had she seen him streaking down the field for a touchdown last autumn. Jimmie had a small, almost childish face, but he was large, six feet in his stockings, 170 pounds, which is not bad for a 17-year-old high school boy.
But Jimmie was not all football. Truth is, he took football as a matter of duty. Loyalty to his school demanded it. Jimmie’s interest was centered on cameras. When eight years old he had been taken to the Press photograph department. There he had asked Scottie McFadden so many and such astounding questions that at first Scottie stood staring and at last drove him, in a good-natured manner, from the place, declaring he’d be fired for getting no work done.
Jimmie’s first hard-earned dollar had gone for a camera of a sort. For years after that all he could earn, beg or borrow went for cameras and equipment. His proudest hour came when, on his seventeenth birthday, his wealthy uncle Bob had presented him with a truly wonderful miniature camera.
“It’s a Gnome,” he confided to Scottie. “Takes twenty-four pictures in about as many seconds. Got a wide-angle lens that will almost take pictures in the dark. And fast! Say! There’s not a camera made that’s faster. It—it’s a real dwarf.”
“A Gnome, is it?” Scottie had drawled. “Well, you’ve got to show me, son. I don’t go in for these baby cameras that you can lose in your pocket. Give me a box with a strap that goes over your shoulder and a ground glass at least three inches across. Candid camera, is it? Well, my camera is candid, too. See those pictures I took of the baseball boys in action?”
“Yes,” said Jimmie. “They were great!”
“Sure they were,” Scottie agreed. “And why? Because they were taken with a real camera.”
Jimmie’s chance to show Scottie what his Gnome would do came sooner than he had expected. With his father’s aid he had secured a summer job with the Press as copy boy. The results had been surprising.
To many the job of copy boy would not prove exciting. To jump when someone in the large editorial room shouts, “Boy!”, to go racing away to Miss Peter’s desk on the third floor or Mr. Bill’s on the seventh and to keep this up for long hours is tiring to say the least. Yet, for Jimmie, every office, the composing room, the roaring press-room held a charm all its own.
It was, however, his little candid camera that brought his great opportunity. Perhaps it was because he always jumped promptly while other boys lagged that John Nightingale began to take an interest in him. More than once he paused to chat with the lad. Then, one day, right out of a clear sky he leaped up from answering a phone call to exclaim: