At noon the following day he was again at the Argus office, and this time was successful in meeting Mr. Blakeley. The city editor was a short, stockily built man, wearing eyeglasses and possessed of a quick, nervous manner. He looked Herbert over from head to foot as soon as he entered and gazed at him very earnestly during all the course of their brief conversation.
“Harkins,” he said, after the usual greeting, “I am going to put you on the Argus at a salary. This is somewhat unusual, because nearly all on our staff are space men. New men especially are put on space, which simply means that they are paid for what they write, in order to test their ability. But Mr. Anderson, who is an old friend of mine, has recommended you so highly that I am going to put you on the regular staff at once; and I will give you three weeks in which to demonstrate your ability to hold the place down permanently.”
“I thank you very much,” said Herbert, “I will try to prove myself worthy of the confidence you are placing in me.”
“That’s all right,” said the other skeptically, “I don’t want any promises; all I want is the performance.”
“All right, sir,” said Herbert; “I’ll not make any promises; but I can assure you that I will try to size up to the position.”
“That sounds business,” retorted the other in his quick, jerky style. Then looking up at the calendar, he said musingly: “It’s a little too late in the week for you to do anything now. You can report for duty at noon next Monday. Meantime I would advise you to become acquainted with the city and its institutions, and to book yourself up as speedily as possible on the men and things who go to make up life in this busy town.”
Herbert promised to do as he was advised, and then met the tall, spare man with whom he had held the conversation the day before. This was the assistant city editor, who took him in hand and introduced him to such other members of the Argus staff as were in the office at that time. They were all pleasant and affable, but Herbert took an immediate and special liking to Francis Tomlin, one of the reporters, who had greeted him in a very kindly spirit.
“Don’t permit the noise and bustle and confusion of this place to confuse you,” said Tomlin, “because it will not take you many days to know that that is merely the outer covering, or what we might call the atmosphere of the place. You will find that the work itself moves along in a precise and systematic manner. Come in to-night around the midnight hour and see the office going at full blast.”
Herbert accepted the invitation, and just before the clock towers were striking the mystic hour he entered the local room of the Argus. Tomlin had phrased it correctly. The office was in full blast. The news room immediately adjoined the city room, and between the two the noise and bustle and air of activity were confusing to one not accustomed to that sort of thing. Telegraph instruments in two corners of the room ticked away continuously. A man at the long distance telephone sat in front of a typewriter and transcribed a story that was being sent in over the wire from a little town fifteen miles away. The assistant city editor shouted through the speaking tube to the foreman of the composing room about every ten or fifteen minutes. Telegraph boys came in every few minutes, carrying little yellow envelopes bearing within their modest covers the news of the entire habitable globe. The news editors sitting at their big desks tore the wrappings off these silent messengers, and after editing them, put suggestive and snappy headlines over them for the benefit of their thousands of readers of the following morning. A dozen reporters sitting at their desks scratched away for dear life, or pounded the typewriters in their haste to put the words together which were to furnish the subscribers of the Argus with a comprehensive account of everything of interest that had happened in the great city during the previous twenty-four hours. Nothing was too small, nothing too great to be gathered in this enormous dragnet of publicity and furnished to eager men and women with their coffee and rolls on the following morning.
Herbert was entranced with the scene. He had already been fascinated by the smell of printers’ ink and had a very intelligent idea of the methods of modern journalism; but this scene wherein apparently hopeless confusion gradually worked itself out into perfect order and system, furnished the capstone to his already stimulated imagination. He longed to take an active part in it.