“Not for me, sonny, not for me! I know where there’s a safe place to work, and me for it!”
Johnny climbed the stairs with heavy steps, only to learn that his operator of the night before had also quit.
“Quit us cold,” was the way Bill Heyworth, the sturdy night manager and chief announcer, put it. Bill was thirty, or past. He was a broad shouldered Scotchman with a stubborn jaw. “Said he didn’t want to be shot at. Well,” he philosophized, “guess nobody does. But somebody has to carry on here. This thing is not going to stop because the gangs want it stopped. In time, of course, the city will have a station of its own. That will let us out. But until then the squad calls will go through if we have to call upon the State Militia to protect us. This city, officer and civilian, has set itself for a cleaning up. And a cleaning it shall be!
“What’s that?” he asked, as Johnny drew forth his six foot yew bow.
“A plaything, you might say,” Johnny smiled. “Then again you might say it has its practical side. I’ll demonstrate.”
Picking up a bundle of magazines, he set them on end atop a table against the wall. The outermost magazine had an oval in the center of its cover-jacket the size of a silver dollar.
Johnny drew back to the end of the room, then nocked an arrow and drove it through the very center of that spot.
Bill Heyworth whistled. He whistled again when Johnny showed him that four of the thick magazines had been pierced by the arrow’s steel point.
“Of course,” said Johnny, laughing low, “I don’t expect ever to use it here. But I’ll feel safer if you allow me to turn that chair about so I’ll be facing the entrance to this studio and have this ‘Silent Murder,’ as Drew Lane calls it, close at hand. Do I have your permission?”
“With all my heart, son. With all my heart. And you’ll stick?”