"Great!" quoth Harkins, including the cub, who felt his oats in consequence and began filling his pipe with due seriousness. "You will do," added the editor, turning to the new man. "Come on tomorrow afternoon."
The new man rose to leave but hesitated, crimsoning a little. Harkins eyed him inquiringly. The stranger grinned rather ruefully.
"Object to my sleeping on this table?" he asked. "The rate is cheaper. Besides, I'm hollower even than I was."
Harkins laughed, but it was a sympathetic laugh. "I had forgotten," said he. "You'll find a bed softer than the table, I imagine, and there is a filling restaurant in the next block." He proceeded to make an advance on the new man's salary. The latter thanked him and was off.
The boys crowded around, curious and interested. "He's no Albert Edward on wardrobe," commented the dramatic critic, "but he's a pippin just the same. Who is he, Harkins?"
"Hang it!" replied Harkins dubiously, "I forgot to ask him. What's his name, Mead?"
"Gee, I don't know," replied the cub, sucking contentedly at his pipe. "He didn't give me any time to ask."
CHAPTER III
MICKY
MICHAEL O'BYRN, picturesquely Irish, so his name appeared on the payroll, but from the cases to the press room they called him Micky. Mike would have been a misfit, for its tang suggests a burly, bull-necked son of Erin with fists like hams and a brogue of gravy-like thickness, a boisterous, beefy, big-hearted broth of a boy of blows and budge. Micky had the Irish heart, but he was short on fists and beef and possessed the mere ghost of a brogue. Besides, O'Byrn's pseudonym suggests juvenility, and Micky's four and twenty years, with their palpable vicissitudes, had not robbed him of that saving grace. Indeed, on meeting him, light-hearted and laughter-loving as he was in youth, your imagination would experience little effort in leaping a long leap into futurity to behold him a generation on, white-polled and with the olden freckles faded in his wrinkled face; still the laugh on his lips, the light of quizzical humor in his blue eyes. Glad he would always be, because there would always bubble in his heart the fountain of eternal youth.