"I'll bet it's the same chap. Haven't you seen this morning's Tribune? Well, there's an article in it, with the blackest kind of headlines, entitled, 'Mutiny in the Harbor. A Sailor prefers Death to a Voyage in the White Squall,' and so forth and so on, et cetera. One of our fellows wrote that up, and now you just watch me get the sequel. Hoop-la! My column's safe. How'll I know him—by his bunged-up eyes?"
"Look right through the door. That's him, with the blue uniform on and a paper in his hand. But hold on a minute," said the clerk, as the reporter turned away. "If you mean to get anything out of him you'll have to be sly about it, for he says he won't be pumped."
"Oh, won't he? We'll see about that."
Roy Sheldon, who was deeply interested in that article in the Tribune, and congratulating himself on the fact that his name was not mentioned in it, and that consequently his father and mother would never hear of his adventure until he was ready to tell them about it, did not so much as raise his eyes when the reporter came in and sat down near him. He went on with his reading until he heard a pleasant voice say:
"Good morning, Mr. Sheldon. You have had a pretty rough experience, have you not?"
If the chair in which he was sitting had suddenly given away and let him down on the floor, Roy would not have been half as much astonished as he was when he heard himself addressed in this way by a man whom he had never seen before. He looked at him over the top of his paper, and then drew his head down behind it; whereupon the reporter pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his face to conceal the smile that came to his lips.
"Of course you don't mind what those light-ship men said to me," he continued.
"Oh! did they tell you about it?" exclaimed Roy, and that was all the reporter wanted to show him that he was on the right track. Being shrewd and experienced in his profession, he had already made up his mind just what that 'sequel' was going to be. The sailor, who was seen by the captain of pilot-boat number twenty-nine to jump into the harbor, was not a seafaring man, but a wheelman. He had succeeded in reaching the light-ship, whose crew rescued him, brought him ashore in the morning, and here he was. Roy had told the clerk he would not be interviewed; but that did not worry the reporter.