“Glad to know you, Miss Blair,” he said. “You did a nice piece of work on the storm.”
“Thank you, Mr. McClintock,” replied Helen. “But my brother, Tom, deserves all of the credit. He suggested calling the story to you.”
“Then I’ll thank Tom, too,” laughed the head of the Cranston bureau of the Associated Press.
“We’re here today on business for our paper,” explained Helen, “and with a few minutes to spare before train time hoped you wouldn’t mind if we came in and saw how the ‘wheels go round’ here.”
“I’ll be happy to show you the ‘works’,” replied Mr. McClintock, and he took them over to a battery of electric printers.
“These,” he explained, “bring us news from every part of the country, east, south and far west. In reality, they are electric typewriters controlled from the sending station in some other city. We take the news which comes in here, sift it out and decide what will interest people in our own state, and send it on to daily papers in our territory.”
“Do these electric printers run all day?” asked Tom.
“Some of them go day and night,” continued Mr. McClintock, “for the A.P. never sleeps. Whenever news breaks, we’ve got to be ready to cover it. That’s why we appreciated your calling us on the storm. We knew there was trouble in your part of the state but we didn’t have a correspondent at Rolfe. It was a mighty pleasant surprise when you phoned.”
They visited with the Associated Press man for another fifteen minutes and would have continued longer if Tom had not realized that they had less than twenty minutes to make their train. The last two blocks to the terminal were covered at a run and they raced through the train gates just before they clanged shut.
“Close call,” panted Tom as they swung onto the steps of the local and it slid out of the train shed.