“They say,” observed Fowler, the star man of The Patriot, “he covers his assignment in taxicabs.”
“He gets the news,” murmured Mallory, summing up in that phrase all the encomiums which go to the perfect praise of the natural-born reporter.
“And he writes it,” put in Van Cleve of The Courier. “Lord, how that boy can write! Why, a Banneker two-sticks stands out as if it were printed in black-face.”
“I’ve never seen him around,” remarked Glidden. “What does he do with himself besides work?”
“Nothing, I imagine,” answered Mallory. “One of the cubs reports finding him at the Public Library, before ten o’clock in the morning, surrounded by books on journalism. He’s a serious young owl.”
“It doesn’t get into his copy, then,” asserted “Parson” Gale, political expert for The Ledger.
“Nor into his appearance. He certainly dresses like a flower of the field. Even the wrinkles in his clothes have the touch of high-priced Fifth Avenue.”
“Must be rich,” surmised Fowler. “Taxis for assignments and Fifth-Avenue raiment sound like real money.”
“Nobody knows where he got it, then,” said Tommy Burt. “Used to be a freight brakeman or something out in the wild-and-woolly. When he arrived, he was dressed very proud and stiff like a Baptist elder going to make a social call, all but the made-up bow tie and the oil on the hair. Some change and sudden!”
“Got a touch of the swelled head, though, hasn’t he?” asked Van Cleve. “I hear he’s beginning to pick his assignments already. Refuses to take society stuff and that sort of thing.”