"'S Iverson," barked Nestor Hurd, over the low partition which divided his office from that of his staff, "c'm' here!"
I responded to his call with sympathetic haste. It had been a hard day for Mr. Hurd. Everything had gone wrong. Every reporter he had sent out seemed to be "falling down" on his assignment and telephoning in to explain why. Next to failures, our chief disliked explanations. "A dead man doesn't care a hang what killed him," was his terse summing up of their futility.
He was shouting an impassioned monologue into the telephone when I reached his side, and as a final exclamation-point he hurled the receiver down on his desk, upsetting a bottle of ink. I waited in silence while he exhausted the richest treasures of his vocabulary and soaked up the ink with blotters. It was a moment for feminine tact, and I exercised it, though I was no longer in awe of Mr. Hurd. I had been on the Searchlight a year, and the temperamental storms of my editors now disturbed me no more than the whirling and buzzing of mechanical tops. Even Mollie Merk had ceased to call me the "convent kid." I had made many friends, learned many lessons, suffered many disappointments, lost many illusions, and taken on some new ones. I had slowly developed a sense of humor—to my own abysmal surprise. The memory of my convent had become as the sound of a vesper-bell, heard occasionally above the bugle-calls of a strenuous life. Also, I had learned to avoid "fine writing," which is why my pen faltered just now over the "bugle-calls." I knew my men associates very well, and admired most of them, though they often filled me with a maternal desire to stand them in a corner with their faces to the wall. I frequently explained to them what their wives or sweethearts really meant by certain things they had said. I was the recognized office authority on good form, Catholicism, and feminine psychology. Therefore I presented to Mr. Hurd's embittered glance the serene brow of an equal—even on occasions such as this, when the peace of the office lay in fragments around us.
At last he ceased to address space, threw the blotters into his waste-paper basket, and turned resentful eyes on me.
"Gibson's fallen down on the Brandow case," he snapped.
I uttered a coo of sympathy.
"The woman won't talk," continued Hurd, gloomily. "Don't believe she'll talk to any one if she won't to Gibson. But we'll give her 'nother chance. Go 'n' see her."
I remained silent.
"You've followed the trial, haven't you?" Mr. Hurd demanded. "What d'you think of the case?"
I murmured apologetically that I thought Mrs. Brandow was innocent, and the remark produced exactly the effect I had expected. My chief gave me one look of unutterable scorn and settled back in his chair.