The noonday edition of the Chronicle carried, in the identical columns devoted in the Bulletin to a further attack on Stone, a lurid account of the big murder; and the Bulletin had not a line of it! A sharp call from Brown to Thomas, at central police, apprised the latter that he had been “scooped,” and brought out the facts in the case. Thomas hurried down-stairs and bitterly upbraided Lieutenant Casper.
“Look here, you Thomas,” snapped Casper; “you Bulletin guys have been too fresh around here for a long time.”
In Casper’s eyes—Casper with whom he had always been on cordial joking terms—he saw cruel implacability, and, furious, he knew himself to be “in” for that most wearing of all newspaper jobs—“doing police” for a paper that was “in bad” with the administration. He needed no one to tell him the cause. At three-thirty, Thomas, and Camden, who was doing the city hall, and Greenleaf Whittier Squiggs, who was subbing for the day on the courts, appeared before Jim Brown in an agonized body. Thomas had been scooped on the big murder, Camden and G. W. Squiggs had been scooped, at the city hall and the county building, on the only items worth while, and they were all at white heat; though it was a great consolation to Squiggs, after all, to find himself in such distinguished company.
Brown heard them in silence, and with great solemnity conducted them across the hall to Jolter, who also heard them in silence and conducted them into the adjoining room to Bobby. Here Jolter stood back and eyed young Mr. Burnit with great interest as his two experienced veterans and his ambitious youngster poured forth their several tales of woe. Bobby, as it became him to be, was much disturbed.
“How’s the circulation of the Bulletin?” he asked of Jolter.
“Five times what it ever was in its history,” responded Jolter.
“Do you suppose we can hold it?”
“Possibly.”
“How much does a scoop amount to?”
“Well,” confessed Jolter, with his eyes twinkling, “I hate to tell you before the boys, but my own opinion is that we know it and the Chronicle knows it and Stone knows it, but day after to-morrow the public couldn’t tell you on its sacred oath whether it read the first account of the murder in the Bulletin or in the Chronicle.”