Jimmy started to expostulate, but he stopped short when the office door slammed in his face. He stood irresolutely as the chug-chug of McClintock’s machine died away in the distance. Then he dropped into a chair, reached for a pack of cigarettes on the table, lit one and indulged himself in painful cogitation. Under ordinary circumstances he would have experienced profound physical discomfort from his water-soaked clothes and the general feeling of stickiness that enveloped him from head to feet, but physical feelings were matters of slight importance to him at the moment. The distress which was registered upon his face was purely mental in its origin, but it was intense and singularly disturbing. He felt that he was up against the hardest job of his life and he could see no way to hurdle what seemed to be the insurmountable barriers that confronted him.
In the language of journalism Jimmy “knew news.” He knew precisely what sort of an incident or happening or bit of romancing, for that matter, would appeal to the trained newspaper executive as worth playing up and precisely the sort of stuff that would be passed up. By all the tests he was familiar with, by all the general rules and regulations of the game, the story of the jamboree of the savage gentlemen from the far-flung isles of the Pacific, of their attempt to raid the park, of the battle between them and the guards and of their final defeat was one of the biggest bits of “feature news” that had transpired in or about New York that summer.
If it had “leaked” into any newspaper office he knew there was about as much chance of his keeping it out of print by making a personal plea, as there would be of suppressing the announcement of the engagement of a daughter of the president of the United States to the Prince of Wales. If it hadn’t “leaked”—and there was a fair chance that it hadn’t—because of the state of the weather—he was painfully aware of the fact that by calling on the city editors in person and asking them not to use it he would simply be handing them a tip on which they would base an investigation. The story was decidedly too good to be hushed up by any plaintive wail about “ruining our business.”
He would have mentioned all of these things to McClintock if the latter hadn’t made such an abrupt departure. He told himself now that even if he had been able to voice them the manager wouldn’t have comprehended the impossible nature of the task he had so casually mapped out. Folks who haven’t smelt the smell of the paste-pot and heard the presses roar usually have the weirdest sort of naive notions concerning just what and just what cannot be done in the way of either inserting news in the columns of a great metropolitan daily or keeping it out.
“The acid test”—Jimmy kept remembering these three words and the oftener they recurred to him the more distressed he became. He sat hunched up in his chair looking out into the pouring rain and consuming cigarettes at a most alarming rate. At about the middle of the sixth cigarette he straightened up; at the beginning of the seventh he arose and began to pace the floor while a new idea slowly unfolded in his active mind; when he was two puffs into the eighth he flung it into a corner with a resolute sweep of his arm, dived for the telephone, called up “Beekman 4,000,” and impatiently joggled the hook until a response came.
“Hello, World?” he said jerkily, “give me the city desk ... hello ... city desk?... Who is that? McCarthy?... Say, Mr. McCarthy, this is Martin of Jollyland—Martin—M-A-R-T-I-N—publicity director of Jollyland—raining here? You betcha—say, I’ve got something pretty good for you ... hot stuff.... Be on the lookout for it, will you?—Dope?—No, sir, this is the real goods. No fooling—on the level—you can expect it before midnight. Good-bye.”
In the next ten minutes Jimmy, in a frenzy of feverish haste, called up the city desks of all the other morning papers and repeated practically the same message to each. Then he ordered three messenger boys to report to him in half an hour, stuck six sheets of carbon between seven long sheets of copy paper, inserted the numerous layers in his typewriter and began to pound out, with ever increasing speed, a narrative that was to either make or break him.
It was nearly midnight when an office boy dropped a long manila envelope marked “NEWS—RUSH” on the desk in front of Larry McCarthy, night city editor of the World. The early mail edition had gone to press ten minutes before and McCarthy had just come up for air for a brief interval before plunging into the final activities of the night. The tension had relaxed and he was joking with the managing editor who had stopped to give a few parting instructions on his way home.
McCarthy tore the envelope open almost unconsciously as he went on talking and unfolded the four long sheets of paper which it contained, sheets covered with closely written typewritten matter. His gaze drifted carelessly to the top page where it lingered as something seemed immediately to interest him. A cynical smile began to play over his features as he read. Presently it broadened into something more mellow and human. Then he burst into hearty laughter.