“Horse heaver, is it? Take that, now!”
And Kallaher took it.
THE EGO OF THE METROPOLIS
By Thomas T. Hoyne
“You couldn’t get her picture?” sneered the city editor contemptuously. “Come, Johnson, get into the game. You’re not in Chicago or St. Louis now. This is New York.”
Johnson was eating his bread in the sweat of his brow, but he wanted to continue eating. Therefore he said nothing, but lounged off into the local room, empty during the dead afternoon hours.
He was lucky to be working at all. During the couple of weeks he had been wearing out shoe leather chasing pictures for the greatest of all metropolitan morning newspapers he had been told his good fortune a hundred times. He, a perfect stranger in New York, had walked right into a job.
The job should have been tempting only to the rawest cub, but Johnson, a crackerjack reporter, snapped at it. He knew that some of the best newspaper men in New York, crackerjack reporters, were carrying the banner along Park Row.
The afternoon newspapers were boiling over with editions, black type and red crying out that one hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars had disappeared from a vault of the soundest bank in Wall Street and that the cashier was missing. To be assigned to this bank story, to get the chance to show what he really could do, Johnson would have given a finger from his right hand.
He sat on a corner of a typewriter desk, swinging one leg, while he raged inwardly at the insolent city editor. Bread or no bread, he could not work himself into spasms of enthusiasm over a near society woman’s photograph for a cheap story. He was too old in the game for such child’s play.