“William says not,” replied Gerald.
“For the love of Mike, let me go!” pleaded Hickey. “This stuff has to be handled while it’s still sizzling! It’s the biggest story of the century! That boy’ll be here any minute.”
“Sorry,” regretfully observed Gerald; “but I shall be compelled to detain you until he arrives.”
“Can’t do it!” returned the desperate Hickey. “I have to go!” and he made a dash for the door.
Once more the ice tongs clutched him by the shoulder and sank into the flesh.
“If you try that again, young man, I shall be compelled to thrash you,” stated the host, again mildly.
Hickey looked at him, very thoroughly. Gerald was a slim waisted gentleman, but he had broad shoulders and a depressingly calm eye, and he probably exercised twenty minutes every morning by an open window, after his cold plunge, and took a horseback ride, and walked a lot, and played polo, and a few other effete things like that. Hickey sat down and waited, and, though the night was cold, he mopped his brow until the messenger came!
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHICKEN, OR STEAK?
On the outbreak of a bygone rudeness between the United States and Spain, one free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan paper, unable to adequately express its violent emotions on the subject, utilised its whole front page with the one word “War!” printed in red ink, and since this edition was jumped off the press as fast as that word could be matrixed and cast, there was not another line anywhere in the paper about the subject which was so prominently indexed, and the read-overs about the latest briberies and murders and scandals had no beginnings at all. But that was good journalism. The public had been expecting war for some days. They knew what it was all about, and here it was. They bought up that edition with avidity, and read the one word of news, which they had seen from afar, and threw down the paper, satisfied.
Now, however, the free and entirely uncurbed, having risen most gloriously in the past to every emergency, no matter how great, positively floundered in the very wealth of its opportunities. To begin with, the free and entirely uncurbed, usually a unit in what constituted the news of the day, found itself ignominiously scattered, foozled in its judgment, inadequate in its expression of anything; and one brilliant head writer, after trying in vain to combine the diverse elements of this uncomfortably huge sensation, landed on the single word “Yow!” and went out, in a daze, for a drink. One paper landed on the Franco-German War as the leading thrill in this overly rich combination of news, one took up the greed of Allison, one featured the world monopoly, one the assured downfall of England, and one, that represented by the squib, the general absorption of everything by the cereal trust.