“Oh, Pittsburgh originally,” he said, which same gave me a spiritual lift, “but I haven’t been in the game for several years. I’ve been doing press agent work for a road show, one of my own,” and he chuckled again. “I’m not a stranger to New York exactly, but I am to this paper and this game down here.”
I wanted to stay longer and talk to him, but I had to hurry on this my first assignment in New York. “Is this your desk?” I asked.
“No; they haven’t deigned to give me one yet,” and he chuckled again. “But I suppose I will get one eventually—if they don’t throw me out.”
“I hope I’ll see you when I get back.”
“Oh, I’ll be around here, if I’m not out in the snow. It’s tough, isn’t it?” and he turned to his work again. I bustled out through that same anteroom where I had been restrained, and observed to my pestiferous opponents: “Now just take notice, Eddie. I belong here, see? I work here. And I’ll be back in a little while.”
“Oh, dat’s all right,” he replied with a grin. “We gotta do dat. We gotta keep mosta dese hams outa here, dough. Dat’s de orders we got.”
“Hams?” I thought. “They let these little snips speak of strangers as hams! That’s New York for you!”
I made the short dreary commuters’ trip to Elizabeth. When I found my graveyard and the caretaker thereof, he said there was no truth in the story. No man by the name of the dead man mentioned had ever been buried there. No noises or appearances of any kind had been recorded. “They’re always publishing things like that about New Jersey,” he said. “I wish they’d quit it. Some newspaper fellow just wanted to earn a little money, that’s all.”
I tramped back, caught a train and reached the office at eight. Already most of the assignments had been given out. The office was comparatively empty. The city editor had gone to dinner. At a desk along a wall was a long, lean, dyspeptic-looking man, his eyes shaded by a green shield, whom I took to be the night editor, so large was the pile of “copy” beside him, but when I ventured to approach him he merely glared sourly. “The city desk’s not closed yet,” he growled. “Wait’ll they come back.”
I retired, rebuffed again.