"No; those meetings are rarely newsy enough to be worth while. I can't afford to take up the evening of a salaried reporter in that way. But Spencer generally drops around, at the time the Board is expected to adjourn, or else he telephones the clerk, from this office, and learns what has been done. It's mostly nothing, you know."
"Spencer wouldn't care if he didn't have to report the Board meetings at all?"
"Of course not. Len would be delighted at not having anything more to do."
"Then let me go and report the meetings for you, on space."
"My boy, a reporter would starve on that kind of space work.
Why, after you put in the whole evening there, you might come
to the office only to learn that we didn't consider any of the
Board's doings worth space to tell about them."
"Will you let me attend a few of the meetings, and take my chances on the amount of space I can get out of it?"
"Go ahead, Prescott, if you can afford to waste your time in that fashion," replied Mr. Pollock, almost pityingly.
"Thank you. That's what I wanted," acknowledged Dick, and went out very well contented.
When it lacked a few minutes of eight, that evening, all the members of the Board of Education had arrived. It was the same Board as in the year before. All the members had been re-elected at the last city election, though some of them by small majorities. Mr. Gadsby, one of the members who had won by only a slight margin over his opponent, stood with his back to a radiator, warming himself, when he saw the door open.
Mr. Gadsby nodded most genially to Mr. Cantwell, who entered. The principal came straight over to this member, and they shook hands cordially. Mr. Gadsby had been one of the members of the Board who had been most anxious about having Cantwell appointed principal; Cantwell was, in fact, a family connection of Mrs. Gadsby's.