"Listen. Perhaps you may know that I used to go some with little Jim Pettigrew more or less before you and I became such chums. Jim is considerably older than me, but his stature always made folks think he was a kid. Well, of course you also know Jim he's graduated into a regular cub reporter, as he's so fond of calling it, because that word cub is used so often in the movies, when they show up a big newspaper office in New York or Chicago, and the latest greenhorn on the staff is given an assignment that allows him to make the greatest news scoop ever heard of. Jim, to tell the truth, works on our local weekly here, the Scranton Courier. He rakes the entire country for news, writes things up that have never occurred, so as to fill space, and draw his weekly pay, attends weddings, funerals, and all sorts of events, not forgetting baseball games and such things.
"Well, Jim is still a good friend of mine, although he now feels himself so mighty important that even the mayor sends for him to communicate something he wants to appear in the next issue of the paper. The idea that flashed into my brain, you must know, Hugh, is to tell Jim of our great trouble with this pesky hobo, and enlist his aid in scaring Brother Lu off."
"Suppose now, in the issue of the Courier that is due tomorrow morning there appeared an interesting write-up about a certain Marshal Hastings who was visiting Scranton, having come all the way from Texas to find and take back a certain party who was badly wanted there for some serious offense; the story could give little hints that would point to Brother Lu as the man, without actually saying so. Hugh, tell me, what do you think of that for a scheme; and might it do the work, would you say?"
CHAPTER IX
SETTING THE MAN TRAP
Hugh jumped up from his chair and clapped a cap on his head.
"It's now about four o'clock of a Friday afternoon," he remarked, "and if we could only run across Jim Pettigrew, and he got interested in our story, why it might not be too late to get the little write-up arranged before they went to press tonight."
Thad was all animation.
"Fine! Let's rush around to the Courier office and see Jim!" he hastened to say. "I've an idea he's a sort of Jack-of-all-trades there, writing up news, setting type in an emergency, and even helping turn off the limited edition of about five hundred copies of the paper that are run every week. So, as Friday night is the climax to their week's work, we're likely to find Jim there with his coat off, and on the job."
They soon arrived at the small building on a side street where the local paper had its offices, and, indeed, every other thing connected with it, for that matter.