CHAPTER II
LARRY SCENTS A MYSTERY
“Madame Androletti craves the indulgence of the audience for but a few moments. She is indisposed, but will resume her singing directly.”
Thus announced her manager, a few minutes after the fall of the curtain, when the orchestra had been quieted by his upraised hand. Applause followed his little address.
“Oh, I’m so glad it didn’t amount to anything,” said Miss Mason to Larry. “She is such a beautiful singer that I shouldn’t want to miss hearing her. And I might never get the opportunity again. Isn’t it nice that it isn’t really anything?”
“Yes,” assented Larry, but he was far from feeling that it amounted to nothing. The young reporter was doing some hard thinking.
“There may be a big thing back of this, and again it may amount to nothing,” he reasoned with himself. “I’m inclined to think, though, that there’s something doing. Now how am I to set about getting it?
“I guess I’ll sit tight for a while and see what develops. If I go to making inquiries now some of the other newspapermen will get ‘wise,’ and I’ll lose any chances of a ‘beat,’ if there’s one in it. I’ll saw wood for a while.”
The orchestra resumed the playing of a spirited air, and while the audience is waiting for the singer to recover, I will take this chance to tell you, my new readers, something more about Larry Dexter, the young reporter.
Larry had come to New York some years before, a farm boy, with an ambition to become a newspaper man. In the first book of this series, entitled “From Office Boy to Reporter; or, The First Step in Journalism,” I told how Larry accomplished this, but not without hard work, and he was in no little danger, because of the mean actions of Peter Manton, a rival copy boy on another paper, the Scorcher. But Larry won out.
In the second book, entitled “Larry Dexter, the Young Reporter,” an account is given of Larry’s “assignments,” or the particular pieces of newspaper work set aside for him. Some of them were very strange, and not a few of them dangerous. Larry had a number of startling adventures in getting big “beats,” or exclusive pieces of news.