“Yes, sir.”
“Wells will give you your equipment and tell you anything you want to know about the routine. You’ll work the day shift except on special assignment. When a big story breaks everyone is expected to be on call. You take orders from the city editor.”
Flash spent a half hour examining his camera equipment and learning the office routine. He liked Joe Wells and Blake Dowell, another photographer to whom he was introduced, but he could not rid himself of a feeling that Fred Orris had taken a deep dislike to him.
“Oh, Orris hates everyone, even himself,” Wells confided in the privacy of the darkroom. “Don’t worry about him. He’ll treat you right if you turn out good pictures.”
On his first assignment, a convention at the Hotel Brandale, Flash worked with Joe Wells, and everything went smoothly. His pictures, while not in any way spectacular, were clear and properly focused. Fred Orris merely nodded and offered no comment when he examined them.
In the afternoon Flash was called to Riley’s desk.
“Get down to the Y.W.C.A.,” the editor ordered. “They’re giving a water carnival. We want a snappy picture of some girls.”
Flash caught a street car farther downtown. He was nervous over the assignment, but he need not have been. Upon arriving at the Y.W.C.A. building everything was made easy for him. He merely said, “I’m Evans, from the Ledger,” and a kindly, white-haired lady who was the publicity director, took him in charge.
A dozen swimmers were waiting in the tank room. Flash had only to pose the girls on the diving board, set up his tripod and snap three flash-gun pictures.
Hurrying back to the newspaper office, he ran the films through the darkroom, and when the glossy prints were ready, offered them to Orris.